Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

opengears.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 82 posts

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#31

Post by prmoustache »

rvz wrote: post #8
justahuman74 wrote: post #5

Just install linux and move on with life

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.

> without messing around or playing with display servers, drivers and the like.

Who does that? Not Linux users at least as all drivers are usually shipped by the distro. If my memory is correct, this is on an OS built at Redmond that devices used to come shipped with a cdrom full of drivers because the OS didn't care providing them.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#32

Post by opengears »

aspenmayer wrote: post #18

Hackintoshes make for good troubleshooting devices when working with Mac formatted drives and images.

This is what I use them for exactly. The HFSPlus driver is three years old now, and seems to not get updated anymore. Does anyone know if it is the same one as in Linux kernel? https://github.com/acidanthera/OcBinaryData/blob/master/Driv...

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#33

Post by opengears »

baq wrote: post #27
mikae1 wrote: 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.

Luckily we have Asahi Linux. https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#34

Post by tonyedgecombe »

hot_gril wrote: post #19
wilg wrote: post #10

For calibrating your understanding of greenhouse gas emissions producing, packaging, shipping, using, and recovering materials from a 14-inch MacBook Pro in 2023 emits about 243 kg of carbon [1], which is equivalent to using 27 gallons of gasoline. [2] For some people, this may math out. But it's probably easier to worry less about buying a new laptop every once in a while, and more about driving a bit less or gettin…

We really need rules of thumb like this physically posted in more places. I grew up seeing "be green" signs in school that didn't really tell you how.

A reasonable rule of thumb is how much money you spend on something. Even if you buy something that is ostensively green your money is still flowing into an economy which isn’t.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#35

Post by exitb »

wilg wrote: post #10

For calibrating your understanding of greenhouse gas emissions producing, packaging, shipping, using, and recovering materials from a 14-inch MacBook Pro in 2023 emits about 243 kg of carbon [1], which is equivalent to using 27 gallons of gasoline. [2] For some people, this may math out. But it's probably easier to worry less about buying a new laptop every once in a while, and more about driving a bit less or gettin…

…which is about as much as commuting to work that’s 5km away for 6 months. Given a ~3 year lifespan of such device, it isn’t such a low amount. And when you decide to get a new, more efficient car, it will have a its own carbon footprint too.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#36

Post by baq »

opengears wrote: post #33
baq wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Luckily we have Asahi Linux. https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/

…with barely supported M1 and LKML drama. I would love for it to be an option, but it just isn’t.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#37

Post by opengears »

rock_artist wrote: post #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…

The power savings of new computers are not relevant if compared with the energy that is needed to build them. University of Edinburgh (2016) found that by extending the lifetime of a single computer and monitor from four years to six years, approximately 190 kgCO2e of carbon emissions are avoided (I doubt anyone is using their devices even 4 years nowadays). Report is here: https://edwebcontent.ed.ac.uk/sites/default/files/atoms/file...

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#38

Post by amatecha »

userbinator wrote: post #3

The only reaction I can think of to this massive non-sequitur of an article is "WTF?" If you really care about forced obsolescence, refuse to upgrade and push back strongly whenever you can against the wildly wasteful web and its effective browser monopoly. Write and prefer native code. Add drivers for hardware that's "no longer supported". What does this have to do with Hackintoshing? No idea.

> push back strongly whenever you can against the wildly wasteful web and its effective browser monopoly

What does that mean (like what should one do to actually follow what you're saying?) I hate how the web is progressing, but there's nothing I can do to stop it. I use the free-est browser I can use while still being able to access most stuff (Firefox), I use old computers (my newest machine is from 2018 which I just bought second-hand a few months ago), and I use open source OSes (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux).

Anyway, that person has already directly "refused to upgrade" by using existing hardware, so I'm not sure what you're actually criticizing. Hackintoshing happens to be the way they reached this goal, and they made a blog post about it. Nothing wrong with that.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#39

Post by salviati »

rock_artist wrote: post #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…

[Edit] Ok, I should have read better. i7-6800k is from intel and not from the stone age.

---

Are you sure your 68000 machine had 32Gb of ram? If memory serves me well it was most likely 32 Mb.

68020 has a 32 bit address space, so the maximum RAM it can handle is 4Gb

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#40

Post by Reason077 »

mikae1 wrote: 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…

Presumably ARM hackintoshes are, or will be, possible too? Recent ARM processors (eg: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X) have performance comparable to Apple’s M-series, and are even finding their way into desktops. So there shouldn’t be a shortage of candidate hardware in the coming years!
Post reply on HN