Live data from Hacker News

Hackintosh is almost dead

aplus.rs

101–110 of 543 posts

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#101
post #8

I don't get why you would ever want to do a Hackintosh this way... Apple has great hardware but ABYSMAL software. I prefer Windows or any of the top 5 Linux distros on any day that ends with y. They are being carried hard by their top-tier CPUs right now. Something drastic needs to happen to the software side - as it is, it is almost an unusably bad experience to simply browse the web and move files around. Now if we…

I like MacOS.

I spend most of my time in a shell, so MacOS being POSIX compliant is a huge draw for me.

What difficulty do you have browsing the web? I just click Safari and it works. Though I usually have FireFox and un-Googled Chromium running as well... and they work just fine.

I generally use shell commands to manage files, but, dragging works just fine for copying and moving them. Certainly as well as it does in Windows.

Truly, I can't imagine what you experienced that was "unusably bad".

MacOS has some quirks for sure, it's far from perfect. And I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the changes they've made over the years. But I am a big fan of some of them.

On the other hand, despite massive improvements to Windows security and stability over the years, I do like using Windows. (And yes I realized things like WSL exist).

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 35 years ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends. Now I just want to turn the key and go somewhere. See, that 35 years for me didn't make me stop working on my cars, it just allowed me to have enough money to have a reliable car as well as "toy" cars that I can still tinker with. I drive the Audi, but I still wrench on the Triumph. I used to tinker with Hackintosh stuff as well, and I haven't stopped tin…

Either OP doesn't consider tinkering an enjoyable past-time activity or they've no free time to do something they enjoy. Both quite sad to be honest.

I wouldn’t go as far as “sad”. Free time is always a finite resource you have to prioritise. I used to tinker, these days I’d much rather spend time with my kids. I’m definitely not sad about it. I’ll have plenty of time for tinkering in the future.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#103
post #35

Does anybody know how/why FaceTime/iMessage are coupled so tightly to the Wifi drivers? I'm assuming this is for communication with local iPhones for handoff purposes but I'm still surprised this requires special interaction with the hardware and doesn't gracefully fall back to just talking to the backend if driver features are unavailable.

Custom drivers trip some security features and "taint" the kernel.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#104

I'd give Windows some credit - it is actually quite good and stable these days.

WSL still doesn't have the proper UNIX like experience of macOS. And there is no decent equivalent to homebrew.

I mean with Hyper-V why even WSL and just run VMs of whatever other OS'es you want? Tinkering with the OS these days is just so much different than it was in the past. Trying to dual boot Win/Linux back in the day was a interesting challenge that might leave your disk corrupt, now it's a question of why do that at all? Hacking smaller platforms like the pi that are cheap seems to get more attention than PCs these days.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#106
post #2

macOS supports running as a paravirtualised guest OS (officially, on an apple-hardware host also running macOS). If there is to be a "next gen" of hackintoshing, I think it'd be based on a cut-down linux host acting as a shim between the real hardware and the paravirt interface. See also: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230830161425.91946-1-graf@amaz... "This patch set introduces a new ARM and HVF specific machine type…

One thing I've been on the hunt for is a good server hypervisor solution for Apple Silicon. I would like to put an Apple Silicon Mac Mini in my rack, and it would be really nice to have a minimally bootstrapped host OS running a handful of macOS VMs for various purposes.

The best I'm aware of currently is UTM which has some scripting capabilities. But that is very far off from the experience with Proxmox.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious, why would OpenGL break VSTs? (And yes, I get that AU is the preferred way over VST2 or even VST3, which is why most modern plugins are available in AU as well. I just don't see how OpenGL plays into this.)

A lot of plugins use OpenGL, it's just that simple :)

Huh, TIL, I assumed they used standard OS controls, but looking at some of them that makes sense.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#108

Back in my youth, when I was time rich and cash poor, this kind of tinkering was fun and a good way to improve the machine I was using. Now that I have more disposable cash, but waaay less time, I couldn't imagine "wasting my time" doing this sort of thing. These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time trying to convince it to work. Incidentally it's the exact same journey with my cars. 35 years ago I was f…

This is the classic "money is time, time is money" conundrum. A teenager doesn't have the money to buy a fancy car or computer but they have the time to tweak and experiment to get the most out of it. Meanwhile an adult has the money but not the time, assuming they have a full time job, kids, etc. So they're willing to spend the money to get products that work and would rather spend their limited time with their family instead.

In my teens I had a group of friends who loved to tinker, from hackintoshes to custom ROMs to homelabbing to electronics repair. Now I'm like the only one left who does this stuff :(

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#109
post #34
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree re:Apple software. We must have drastically different usage scenarios, since I find it a pleasure. What software do you have issue with, and why?

Homebrew is a nightmare. Nearly every development tool on macOS requires some sort of workaround, usually found in the depths of forums or StackOverflow. Apple has also positioned macOS to be the absolute worst platform for graphics libraries. They only support Metal and an outdated version of OpenGL which they'll remove entirely at one point. Windows directly supports DirectX, Vulkan, and OpenGL. Go ahead and try to…

So what re: workarounds? It’s not Linux, it will never be Linux. Systems are allowed to be different and do different things.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost of ownership of an M3 MacBook Pro is like $300-400 a year. Even if you have the time, it's just not worth it anymore like it used to be.

It seems reasonable when you consider TCO, but you still have to pay 100% up front. Not everyone can drop $2k on a laptop, most people don’t need to.

They have lots of monthly payment plan options here in Canada, and probably in the US too. It even used to be zero interest. Not sure about the rest of the world.
Post reply on HN