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Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

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21–30 of 82 posts

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#21
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who care about their life and getting things done just install WSL. You still get to run Windows as normal and have Linux running without messing around or playing with display servers, drivers and the like.

What display servers, drivers do you need to mess with? I have a modern Dell laptop and everything worked immediately. Display, WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, storage, sleep mode, good battery life, every port worked, the webcam worked. This was on Fedora. The case is the same for Debian on a different Lenovo laptop. I know Linux has this reputation for being difficult to use, no hardware support, etc and if this were 20…

> I have a modern Dell laptop

That's the problematic part to me personally. I want a HDPI convertible/tablet form factor, that means no DELL, and linux support is currently not an option.

I had high hopes for the 12" Framework, but again it's resolution is 1200p, which is so much less than a Surface Pro for instance.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#22
I ran a Hackintosh as my main machine for many years. I specced (using info found on tonymacx86[1]) and built it around 15 years ago to make it work well as a Hackintosh.

And work well it did. Incredibly well actually. But now the doors are closing. macOS will soon be ARM/Silicon only and that will be the end of a Hackintosh era. That's the reason I'm not willing to invest the time or energy to do the same again.

Hopefully sometime another era of Hackintoshers will find a way to make macOS run on non-Apple ARM hardware. Perhaps it's already happening? :)

After 20 years of Hackintosh and Apple hardware I eventually lost hope in Apple due to their unsustainable practices (mostly unserviceable and unupgradeable soldered memory and storage) and moved on to Linux (https://getaurora.dev/). Couldn't be happier with KDE Plasma.

[1] https://www.tonymacx86.com

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#24
I've also had a very "sustainable" 6800k machine with 32GB ram that was designated later for many other tasks.

But the title is more of a click bait rather than backing that claim.

The power source I guess is also a factor, since newer Macs are much more power efficient than Intel days.

Since 2016, Apple made their machines less "sustainable" in the sense of upgradability (my MacBook Air 2013 was borderline with 8GB of RAM and ended with 2TB hdd), I'm happy the new Mac minis are also going that "hackable" direction.

Anyway, Software wise, the "Hackintosh" scene is also valuable for true macOS users just as enabling Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, you can get up to Sequoia with running those custom EFIs.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What display servers, drivers do you need to mess with? I have a modern Dell laptop and everything worked immediately. Display, WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, storage, sleep mode, good battery life, every port worked, the webcam worked. This was on Fedora. The case is the same for Debian on a different Lenovo laptop. I know Linux has this reputation for being difficult to use, no hardware support, etc and if this were 20…

Bluetooth support is still a shit show if you don't buy a laptop that has been in some way developed for linux (if not for your current model, then for a model using similar components). Alternatively, buying a custom bluetooth usb adapter may work but only on a supported distro and only ever with an older bluetooth protocol. Same goes for WiFi. Good luck trying to get WiFi6 to work properly, ignoring the fact that y…

I don't think I've ever seen a device where Bluetooth works 100% of the time. I had issues on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#26
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who care about their life and getting things done just install WSL. You still get to run Windows as normal and have Linux running without messing around or playing with display servers, drivers and the like.

What display servers, drivers do you need to mess with? I have a modern Dell laptop and everything worked immediately. Display, WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, storage, sleep mode, good battery life, every port worked, the webcam worked. This was on Fedora. The case is the same for Debian on a different Lenovo laptop. I know Linux has this reputation for being difficult to use, no hardware support, etc and if this were 20…

I installed Kubuntu 24 on a generic laptop (Machreator N17) and it worked fine other than having to disable D3cold in the BIOS so Wi-Fi works when waking from sleep. I did spend hours before the BIOS setting trying alternate rtw_8821 drivers to no avail.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#27
post #22

I ran a Hackintosh as my main machine for many years. I specced (using info found on tonymacx86[1]) and built it around 15 years ago to make it work well as a Hackintosh. And work well it did. Incredibly well actually. But now the doors are closing. macOS will soon be ARM/Silicon only and that will be the end of a Hackintosh era. That's the reason I'm not willing to invest the time or energy to do the same again. Hop…

Funnily enough I hope for an exact opposite: the Apple hardware is IMHO the best and the most irreplaceable part of the whole Apple experience and I’d be a very happy man if there was a simple way of running not-macOS on e.g. the M3 MacBook Pro with full driver support.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#28
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who care about their life and getting things done just install WSL. You still get to run Windows as normal and have Linux running without messing around or playing with display servers, drivers and the like.

What display servers, drivers do you need to mess with? I have a modern Dell laptop and everything worked immediately. Display, WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, storage, sleep mode, good battery life, every port worked, the webcam worked. This was on Fedora. The case is the same for Debian on a different Lenovo laptop. I know Linux has this reputation for being difficult to use, no hardware support, etc and if this were 20…

I quickly threw Fedora on a 6-year-old Microsoft Surface Go LTE, and the only thing that didn't work work was the sim card. Everything else was perfect, including touchscreen.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#29
post #23

Seems AI-written. Doesn't give any justification for MacOS being better for older hardware than Linux or even Windows. You won't be getting updates for your Intel hardware on MacOS, so you're right back where you started with Windows 10 going EOL.

Too many typos to be AI written. I think the point was that if you are able to use the old hardware longer it is better for the environment - not the effectiveness of old hardware in general (Linux always wins this argument)

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#30
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who care about their life and getting things done just install WSL. You still get to run Windows as normal and have Linux running without messing around or playing with display servers, drivers and the like.

I tried WSL, but when WSL 1 was abandoned in favor of Hyper-V I was devastated because the new Hyper-V WSL is kind of shit in comparison. No longer are processes and files shared with the host system, you just get an opaque block of CPU and an opaque block of disk space being used. BTW, if at any time in the future you have to clear out part of that opaque block of disk space to make room - good luck shrinking it. I…

> because it doesn't have to use hacks like WSL in order to be like Linux, it just already is Unix.

If my knowledge is up to date, you still have to run a linux VM (hidden behind whatever tool you are using) to run linux containers right?

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