Hackintosh is (almost) dead
Hackintosh is (almost) dead
Lemmy’s comment section for a hackintosh article, “you can install Linux on an old Mac.”
Total opposite point of a hackintosh.
Depends on the nomenclature - some people use OCLP to run new MacOS versions on older Macs and call those Hackintosh too.
100%. Although, that Linux comment thread I’m referring to seemed to be about ditching MacOS entirely, which was a weird thread to see in an Apple Enthusiast post about hackintoshes.
Saw a thread about this on Mastodon earlier, which made the entertaining point that the people who put so much effort into running macOS on non-Apple hardware are now putting as much effort into making Linux run on Apple Silicon. And I’m fine with that.
I have a 15” M2 Air, and it’s the best computer I’ve ever owned. It’s super-fast for my needs, can play most games I’ve thrown at it (at varying degrees of quality, to be fair), and the battery lasts a ridiculous amount of time. But I’m painfully aware that Apple want it to essentially be a big iPad, with their ability to EOL it the same they can an iPad.
Meanwhile, I have a 2014 Mac mini that I use at work and a 2011 13” Pro at home that are both running Sonoma just fine. Once Apple drops Intel support entirely, those two machines will be done with macOS. At that point, I’ll likely put Linux on them, and hopefully Asahi will be in a place that it’ll be great on my M2 Air.
An interesting and, sadly, accurate read. I will miss building my Hacks, but I knew as soon as Apple announced their switch to arm64 that the good times were over.
Maybe sometime in the future we’ll have a powerful and open arm64 system that we can somehow run Apple Silicon macOS on?
I suggest reading some of the Asahi Linux wiki to get a feel for the Apple Silicon architecture. There's a lot of tight integration there with many custom co-processors, that's going to make life difficult for the prospective hackintosh.
Yes, there absolutely is a lot of integrations and even if a consumer level SoC existed that could run arm64 macOS, it might not last long as all Apple would have to do is slightly change some aspect of their particular architecture and it would stop working. I don’t expect it to ever happen, but then again, I never expected macOS on x86 either.
Asahi, by the way, it’s astounding how far they’ve come with porting over to Apple Silicon. I haven’t had the itch strong enough yet to give it a go, but I will eventually.
I think the Apple silicon devices are going to have a pretty locked boot loader, like iOS. It’s probably no longer going to be possible to put anything other than macOS on it. Which sucks, because EOL Intel Macs make great Linux machines.
I think the Apple silicon devices are going to have a pretty locked boot loader
Couldn't be further from the truth. The OS is heavily locked down to prevent malware from modifying the kernel / boot process, however bypassing it is as simple as holding down the power button until you see an options screen (equivalent to BIOS on a PC) and one of the options is a tool to adjust boot security including the option to boot into an arbitrary third party kernel. As long as it's compiled for ARM64 (which is a decades old industry standard CPU architecture) it will boot.
The only real headaches are around drivers. For example Mac laptop trackpads don't have any buttons at all. Instead the trackpad is pressure sensitive and the software should detect pressure that looks like a press action, treat that as a click, and send haptic feedback (vibrating the trackpad). None of that is standard stuff and if you want a Mac laptop to work at all... you need to figure it out yourself.
Many will tell you that buying Intel-based hardware from Apple is buying obsolete models.
They have great hardware and will always run Linux. I have KDE Neon running on my 2013 MacBook Air, and it runs like a champ. It’s the perfect travel laptop.
Yes, but keeping the old Apple hardware alive was not the point of the article. The point was to try to run MacOS on non Apple hardware.
That line was in reference to how long Apple would be supporting MacOS on Intel, which for the Hackintosh community, also means how long they can continue to build Macs with off the shelf parts.
These people don’t care about the Apple hardware. They like MacOS and want hardware that they can upgrade and tweak.
Similar boat here with a Mid 2012 MBP. Build quality is amazing, Linux runs great, and the touchpad gestures work really well.
My only complaint is Broadcom's awful blob WLAN driver, the libre alternative driver is more stable but sadly 1/4 of the speed
My mid 2012 has been upgraded to the max. It's got the 2.9GHz dual core i7, 16 GB RAM, 4 tb of storage thanks to a data doubler, and is running MacOS 14.4. I've been getting kernel panics lately, and sometimes struggle getting it to turn on, I'm afraid it's getting time to retire it. It's unfortunate, but this has been an outstanding laptop for me. I dual boot windows and macos on it. Perhaps I'll put fedora on it shortly and see if it behaves any better.
Why are Messages and FaceTime dependent on WiFi drivers? This seems insane.
IIRC these services are tied to a specific MAC address (from real Macintosh hardware) that has to be whitelisted.
Edit: and it sounds like non-apple wifi cards may only be supported by older OS versions. Since Apple knows the exact configuration of every computer they sell, their OS only supports specific hardware configurations and doesn't have generic drivers. If Apple only sells macs which have a specific proprietary Wi-Fi card integrated on the motherboard than they'll just make it so only that Wi-Fi card is supported. This is similar to the fact that Apple stopped shipping hardware with Nvidia cards, so eventually Nvidia driver support just ceased to exist.
I retired mine a couple of years ago. A sad day, but the writing was on the wall. I love OSX but as a gamer, apple hardware just doesn't make a lot of sense for me.
I don't understand why you would want a hackintosh or a mackintosh for that matter. There's linux and openbsd. Sooo what's the advantage? Apple looking ui? Not being able to split screen without paying?
To compile stuff for macs without having to buy a mac
Oh ok yeah I guess Apple devs then. Nobody else would need that it's not that common.
I don't understand why you would want a hackintosh or a mackintosh for that matter. There's linux and openbsd. Sooo what's the advantage? Apple looking ui?
Commercial software on Unix system is appeal for many tech types that would dabble in hackintoshing. If you own some other Apple devices then integration becomes a big factor too. For me personally it's a taste of computing from the old days, I grew up in a world of C64s, Amigas, IBM compatibles. I used everything from FreeBSD, BeOS to hackintoshed MacOS and OpenIndiana as daily drivers. These days I use an M1 Air with MacOS since don't have that much free time.
Not being able to split screen without paying?
A great many people really like OSX; its been a long time since i've daily driven it but there's stuff about the way it works that feels more efficient than windows, and easier than linux. That's not something that appeals to everyone but its obviously worked for a lot of folks.
So back in the day it was about getting to use OSX (and in other cases apps that were OSX only, or just ran better in OSX) but not having to pay so much for the hardware. That's a calculation that to me really only made sense for desktops; as for quite a long time Apple's laptops weren't actually massively more expensive than a similarly spec'd windows laptop.*
Overtime i'd argue that linux desktops have caught up to a lot of what made OSX feel good; but they're not like for like even now. Though take that with a grain of salt as I spend more time in cli/tui nowadays across my macbook, work windows laptop and various linux boxes i've got running :)
*The thing was that the average windows laptop was under-spec compared to a Macbook Pro so the latter always looked way more pricey.
It usually just works. I’d rather not have to spend hours in config files to get my linux system setup the way I want. I run linux in a vm. But I say this for a legit mac. If I was going to go to the trouble of running a hackintosh, I probably would just go to linux at that point. But there is the case of mac software too if there is something there that is a must have