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Hackintosh is almost dead

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Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#331

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #281
dataflow wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think there's a difference with Linux, because it's something you own and control and can dive into and see every part of. I hate investing time in proprietary technologies, because I know I can be stopped or locked out. The problem with this approach is then you get a generation of engineers with tunnel vision thinking the One True Way to achieve your goal is the same way your GNU (or whatever) software did it.…

Frankly there is no value in learning user-hostile proprietary technologies in a way that the owner of said technologies actively wants to discourage and prevent. Like learn the proprietary tech in the environments it's intended to be used in but if you can't use it in that environment I personally wouldn't waste my time with it. With FOSS tech at least you can make the argument that you can learn stuff by maintainin…

Peeling all the way all the politics / idealism from your comment and the value proposition between these two options is basically the same, with the difference being that on a proprietary stack there’s a higher chance of things breaking in a way that you low/no likelihood of fixing. It’s all good and well that it seems like this makes you personally want to throw up in your mouth a bit or whatever, but you are claiming objectivity that clearly isn’t here.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#332

Post by edude03 »

asdff wrote: post #60
bsdpufferfish wrote: post #3

Additional reasons: - there is less alternative hardware I want to use. I want Apple Silicon processors, materials, and there just isn't much high quality competition. - Because of inflation the Apple premium isn't as high as it used to be. You get a Mac mini or MacBook Air at very competitive prices (RAM is still painful). - Linux Desktop software is more competitive and fills some of the roles that needed macOS bef…

Apple silicon is unfortunately still at a premium. I was shopping around for used M1 mac minis and a 16gb model (minimum acceptable imo) was like $500-600 second hand. You can get an 8th or 9th gen off lease computer for like $100-200 that is close enough to the m1, sometimes with 16gb already in there with the option to add in 128gb, multiple drive bays, pcie, etc.

9th gen intel? According to geekbench 6[0] the m1 is between 2x-5x faster with better battery life, so depending on your workload, it's quite possibly not close enough.

[0]: https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks/

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#333

Post by chasil »

afavour wrote: post #318
chasil wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have recently endured Windows Update for Patch Tuesday, you know that you are forced to reboot during this process. This activity will deny you "the five 9s," i.e., 99.999% availability in uptime. If you have recently performed the analog activity on a Linux distribution, which is likely either apt update/upgrade or yum update, you will notice that a reboot is not required. These update approaches cannot alter…

> This activity will deny you "the five 9s," i.e., 99.999% availability in uptime. Which is something 99% of personal computers don’t care about even slightly. These days restarting your machine is a very inconsequential event, your browser can effortlessly reopen all the tabs you had active, macOS will even reopen all the windows for your native apps. I don’t mean to defend Windows Update, I just think “you have to…

Windows update is agony compared to apt/yum.

A complete patch Tuesday session is twenty minutes of reduced performance, followed by a "don't reboot your computer" of unknown time both before and after the reboot.

Anything is better than that, especially when some updates either reboot immediately or kindly give you five minutes to close everything down (was tmux made precisely for Windows update?).

Exposure to apt/yum really makes Windows intolerable, just for this alone.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#334

Post by duskwuff »

greedo wrote: post #262
bluescrn wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Apple's entry-level Macbooks aren't intended to be bought. They have almost comically low amounts of storage and RAM for 2024 (8GB/256GB). It's all about the upsell on those non-upgradeable parts.

The M1 MBA being sold by Best Buy and Walmart are perfectly fine for 99% of the computing world. Maybe not for gamers (most laptops suck for this), or for someone needing to crunch large datasets, but when this first came out, tons of developers were perfectly happy using it, even with small storage. Hell, my iMac I used up until buying a Mac Studio only had 256GB.

Yep. 8 GB RAM isn't great, but for basic use -- web browsing, word processing, some light photo/video editing, etc -- it'll be perfectly adequate. Not everyone needs a supercomputer.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#335

Post by Aeolun »

rpdillon wrote: post #169
bruce511 wrote: post #13

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…

People have been making this argument to me about Linux for more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across was: > Linux is only free if your time is worthless! Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around yo…

At this point I feel like Linux may be more likely to just work than a windows machine. I just had the unfortunate experience of setting up windows 11, and the number of ‘please wait while we get things ready for you’ was truly astonishing.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#336

Post by Fnoord »

theodric wrote: post #321
matkoniecz wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> avoid things like Arch or Ubuntu which one you would recommend?

Well I'm just a rando, and you didn't ask me, but I agree with the sentiment, so: Fedora. Or openSUSE. I'd be more comfortable giving a newbie Fedora. I was a Debian devotee for nearly 25 years, but I've found it to be less foolproof and fault-free lately, and it has always lagged behind current package versions in Stable, forcing you to run Testing (or -backports) or even Unstable to get newer versions-- with corres…

Debian Stable was very out of date 25 years ago, but ever since mid '00s (after Ubuntu got popular) it improved by miles. Debian Stable is akin to Ubuntu Stable LTS. Ubuntu Stable non-LTS is a 6 month snapshot from Debian Testing, does not get supported for long. If you run Debian Unstable, you're probably running something akin to a rolling distribution. What is best all depends on your goal and purpose of the task. Personally, I very much like the Debian ecosystem and would prefer any Debian(-based) OS. However these days, Docker can trivialize a lot (and also mitigates your mentioned issue), ZFS and other filesystems allow to rollback in case of issues (useful on a rolling distribution, but also on Debian Unstable), and hypervisors allow snapshotting, multiple OSes, and all that, too.

For a server I'd recommend Proxmox (especially since ESXi is now only for enterprise). From there, have fun with different OSes.

Proxmox on a desktop is a bit meh, but possible. There's a lot of useful Linux desktop OSes out there. For example if you want to perform pentesting you can use Kali Linux. The one which interests me most from a security standpoint however, is Qubes OS (Fedora-based, sadly, but you can run anything on top of it). For gaming, SteamOS is neat (Arch-based, these days) and could even be fun to have a kid play around with Linux, too.

As for macOS, I played around with Hackintosh a couple of times in the past with success. But I never liked it much because you'd lag behind on security patches, and every new update would be praying it'd work. I did get it to work under Proxmox though, that was fun, but had to install a second (dedicated) GPU for that. I latest M-series ARM-based Macs work very well, only disadvantage is the fat price upgrade for RAM and SSD (often even soldered!). That part is terribly sad.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#337

Post by i_am_a_peasant »

mandeepj wrote: post #316
i_am_a_peasant wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I mean, whoever made the original statement is just not an OS engineer.

> just not an OS engineer. Or not just an engineer

Nah I can believe they'd be a chemical engineer or even a software developer that writes iOS apps or something like that.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#338

Post by jonathankoren »

rpdillon wrote: post #169
bruce511 wrote: post #13

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…

People have been making this argument to me about Linux for more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across was: > Linux is only free if your time is worthless! Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around yo…

>Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around you: it turns you into an expert.

Yeah, but an expert in what? There are only so many hours in a day. Like if you care about learning about some rando soy d driver, or why all you photos come out pink under Linux, but not Windows[], that’s great. Go knock yourself out.

But if you want to do something that’s not rando debugging, then maybe it’s not for you. Like, I like Unix. It’s lets me do my work with the least amount of effort. What I don’t like is being a sysadmin. Some folks do, and that’s awesome. But that’s the reason why I got rid of desktop Linux 20 years ago.

[] Both of these are actual lived experiences. I do not care about you chiming in about either of these.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#339

Post by sweetjuly »

It'll be sad when it dies. I remember running Snow Leopard on my netbook and taking it to WWDC. It was sacrilegious but quite the conversation piece; I remember lots of Apple engineers being amazed it worked so well.

Re: Hackintosh is almost dead

#340

Post by _ugfj »

zozbot234 wrote: post #191
rpdillon wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been making this argument to me about Linux for more than 25 years. The most cutting version that I ran across was: > Linux is only free if your time is worthless! Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around yo…

> Linux is only free if your time is worthless! This argument is quite out of date. You'll lose a whole lot more time on forced Windows 10/11 updates than you'd spend managing a reasonable Linux installation. ("Reasonable" meaning avoid things like Arch or Ubuntu, and pick decent, natively supported hardware.)

This is 100% false.

I have been running Ubuntu then Arch as my daily driver 2004-2017. As I started a consultant working for Western companies I thought they will care about me being clean copyright wise so I went 100% Linux. This was obviously not so but what did I know? I deeply regret doing this now. (I was dual booting before.)

With Ubuntu, upgrades every six month or so meant you were better off reinstalling and reconfiguring -- no matter which way you went, it was 2-3 days of work lost to tinkering the system. With Arch, the whole system doesn't shatter, it's just this and that doesn't work and it's frustrating. Bluetooth, multifunction scanner-printers being in the forefront. In fact, I needed to sell a perfectly working Samsung MFC at one point because Samsung ceased to make drivers, the old ones didn't work with newer Linux and while open source drivers surfaced that only happened years later. Let's not even talk multimedia. https://xkcd.com/619/ is ancient but the priorities are still the same.

Neither systems were great on connecting to weird enterprise networks, be it enterprise wifi or strange VPN. At one point I was running an older Firefox as root (!) to be able to connect to the F5 VPN of my client because the only thing supporting 2FA for that VPN was a classic extension -- and the binary helper disappeared in the mists of time. The only Linux related discussion was ... the IT head of my client asking how to connect Linux to his VPN now that he turned 2FA on and being told it doesn't work. https://community.f5.com/discussions/technicalforum/linux-ed... well I made it work but faugh.

I have been running Windows 10 + WSL since 2018 January and all is well. It reboots sometimes while I am asleep and that's about it. You need to run O&o shutup like once in a blue moon. Right now I am on Win 11 as my primary laptop is being repaired, you need to run ExplorerPatcher but that's it. It's been indeed six years and there was never an update where the OS just didn't start up or a hardware driver decided to call it quits after an upgrade.

Also, updates are not forced, I control my machine thanksmuch via Group Policy.

https://xkcd.com/619/ is ancient but the priorities are still the same.

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