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Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

opengears.medium.com

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Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#51

Post by LoganDark »

prmoustache wrote: post #30
LoganDark wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My point is that I don't need a linux container at all because all my tools run natively on macOS. Even (and especially) the ones that wouldn't run well on Windows.

For example: I can run valgrind on macOS. Good luck running valgrind on Windows.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#52

Post by mikae1 »

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.

Not saying it isn't good, it is. I still use Silicon Macs at work.

Just depends on your priorities and what you value I guess.

I'm not on board with the iOSification of macOS either. IMO, it's has gotten progressively worse with every version since Snow Leopard. Atomic Fedora distros and KDE Plasma has made me look forward to upgrades again (and yeah, they happen automatically in the background).

With macOS I just stuck around as long as I could knowing that there'd be no upsides to getting the next macOS release.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#53

Post by ch_123 »

There are at least two problems with this article:

1) If you can hack a current version of macOS to run on non Apple hardware, you can probably also hack a current version of macOS to run on older Apple hardware (see OpenCore Legacy Patcher). 2) Support for macOS on x86 hardware will be discontinued in the not so distant future, putting Hackintoshes into the same category as old x86 Apple hardware.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#54

Post by MonkeyClub »

exitb wrote: post #35
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.

> that’s 5km away

Which is about an hour's walk, or about twenty minutes cycling.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#55

Post by paulryanrogers »

opengears wrote: post #41
baq wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

To be fair - the reverse engineering has to be done for every of the M series, and the M1 is the best supported Apple SoC so far. I guess we should support the project if we want them to succeed (they live from donations).

We could also regulate that large hardware companies have to publicly document their systems. Otherwise the public pays with more ewaste.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#56

Post by sc68cal »

I recently purchased a new laptop battery and installed Ubuntu 24.04 on a Macbook Pro from 2009 that I had kept in storage. It is used for light note taking and e-mail, because I wanted to try and see how viable it was to try and stretch the hardware a bit longer instead of adding to the e-waste problem by buying something new.

It's worked well so far. I will keep using it, and then eventually perhaps pick up another refurbished machine when it finally comes time to replace it.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#57

Post by protimewaster »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #55
opengears wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair - the reverse engineering has to be done for every of the M series, and the M1 is the best supported Apple SoC so far. I guess we should support the project if we want them to succeed (they live from donations).

We could also regulate that large hardware companies have to publicly document their systems. Otherwise the public pays with more ewaste.

This is too sensible of an idea to ever happen, though. Nearly every time a discussion comes up about this, the companies essentially argue that their right to fill the world with ewaste trumps all.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#58

Post by Kon-Peki »

opengears wrote: post #37
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…

You can see it straight from the horse's mouth, too. On pages 13 and 14 [1], they estimate that between 9 and 23% of the total lifetime emissions for a Mac mini come from using it. The rest is manufacturing and distribution.

According to the fine print, the lifecycle of the computer is determined by some ISO standards and I spent a good 10 minutes searching the web to determine a ballpark figure for this (3 years? 5 years? 10 years?) and came up completely empty.

[1] https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/desktops/Mac_...

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#59

Post by cosmic_cheese »

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.

There’s really nothing comparable when it comes to real world battery life in the x86 world. Things there have improved with Lunar Lake and the last couple of gens of AMD mobile SoCs, but there’s still a pretty chunky delta. Most x86 laptops still require active cooling too, and unfortunately reducing fan noise or at least improving the profile of said noise is rarely a priority.

Re: Hackintoshing as a sustainable environmental practice

#60

Post by cosmic_cheese »

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.

There’s a big asterisk that should be added, though. Windows is not a productive desktop environment for me, primarily due to its poor implementation of virtual desktops and handling of multiple monitors that feels like a bad hack (to set different wallpapers per-display, you still need to combine the picture for each display into a single gigantic image which is ridiculous). I’m sure I’m not alone in these feelings.
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