Ask HN: Anyone here use a Hackintosh as one of their main machines? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone here use a Hackintosh as one of their main machines?

132 pointsperuvian146 comments

I'm not sure if this is allowed here as it's technically "not legal", but while I love my MacBook, nothing beats having a comfy desktop computer at home with a ton of storage. I know I'm in the minority, but I miss it.

Unfortunately I am very much used to OS X and highly productive in it and Apple's desktop offerings are pretty poor right now (correct me if I'm wrong), so unless I decide to go for Linux, I'll try a Hackintosh.

What I'm looking for are experiences with them for someone who just wants a computer to code, torrent, and watch movies from and doesn't care about iMessage working. I probably won't update my OS X much either.

I keep hearing widely different things about Hackintoshes so I thought I'd try HN.

Thanks!

View on HN

I've used a Hackintosh as a main development machine for a few years. I spent ~ $800 on parts, and an equivalent (top of the line) Mac would've cost about $4K, so the money savings were great.

However, it was a gigantic pain in the ass to maintain and I wouldn't recommend it. Updating the OS is a nightmare, resulting in me staying with 10.7 while everyone was on 10.9. Things that you would expect to work out of the box with a normal Mac do anything but - there's effort required to make anything perform as expected. And there are some things that just never work as intended - like the sleep mode that I was never able to figure out.

Troubleshooting issues is a nightmare - there's no support, and you have to spend tons of time browsing through threads looking for someone with a similar problem. Then if you get to a situation when you have to ask a question, you sit and pray for someone to answer, because if they don't you're stuck.

Eventually, I bought an iMac, and couldn't be happier.

In general, if you're the kind of a person that enjoys tinkering and troubleshooting, and have plenty of free time, then go for it. But if you want to spend your time on other things, and want your computer to just work, I would definitely not recommend it.

While I agree with you that years ago (>3) a Hackintosh wouldn't be a wise choice to go for a productive environment, a LOT has changed. I am running mine since 2 years now and am on the newest Mac OS version, most of the time the App Store updates work flawlessly (even though it's not recommended), alternatively you could just go for a small SSD, put everything else on another SSD and/or HDD and you can reinstall the SSD with the newest version which shouldn't take longer than 15-30 minutes. I am not doing that, I am just saying it would be a choice. I completely reinstalled my Hackintosh only once in those 2 years and that was from Yosemite to El Cap.

Sleep isn't a problem anymore if you buy the correct hardware, the question is also why you even would want to use sleep when it's booting within some seconds anyways...

In the beginning, like with the first setup, it probably takes some hours, you should probably even calculate a day to set it up like you want it. But in the end I probably saved 2k EUR going the Hackintosh route and don't regret it at all. I don't even notice it's a Hackintosh anymore...

> Sleep isn't a problem anymore if you buy the correct hardware, the question is also why you even would want to use sleep when it's booting within some seconds anyways...

To keep your open programs?

Well, isn't there an option to just do that also on reboot?

Sure, if you don't mind diligently saving all documents on shutdown, or your browser loading every single tab anew after starting, …

Applications are stateful. Sleeping keeps all that state.

Since 10.7, application state is automatically saved on log out. Some 3rd party software took longer to properly support it, but 5 years has gotten everything up to speed.

Can be disabled while logging out (untick the checkbox) or holding shift while logging in.

Mostly true, but not completely.

There are still important state details that aren't preserved, like how far down the page I've scrolled in an article I'm reading, a form in progress, or the text that I have highlighted in a tab. How about my active terminal sessions in iTerm? It would be a joy if that state preserved across restarts.

I think the latest version of iTerm2 (3+) supports this actually.

Kinda. I just tried it on 3.0.7.

For example, in tab #1, I cd and run a bash script to start a web server process. In tab #2, I split it into two panes, and in #1 run workon to start a virtual environment then start the Python REPL. In pane #2, I run top.

After quitting and restarting, tab #1 returns to the proper directory but with no output. Pane #1 shows previous output and returns the proper directory but without the virtual environment activated. Pane #2 does the same. History seems to be merged across the three which is a bit confusing as well.

I just want to take a moment here to applaud Sublime Text and its creator. I've kept unsaved documents in it for several days before, across app relaunch, system restart, etc, and even in the very rare times that it does crash, it has never lost any text for me. I wish all programs were built so well.

Have you ever used OS X? Application state can be preserved and restored across reboots. Most apps do this automatically. Actually I haven't encountered one that doesn't.

I run almost exactly three things on this MBP: screen (shells), emacs, and Chrome.

- My nested screen sessions with a ton of shells doing things all over the place don't get restored on reboot - My emacs state doesn't get restored on reboot - Chrome reloads all the pages from the network instead of just serializing its entire state and restoring it on reboot

(All of the above are true on linux too.)

I've heard it's possible to persist some of the state of shell sessions across reboot using tmux + the resurrect plugin.

You might check out the latest version of iTerm2. I think it supports saving sessions (including tmux?) over a reboot.

I use OSX and I'd much rather sleep than reboot. Lots of productivity programs will lose state - offhand the Adobe suite comes to mind, for instance. And if you have a bunch of tabs open in a web browser it takes forever for them to reload. If you use multiple desktops there's no guarantee of windows popping up on the same desktop after a reboot, even with Apple apps.

Waking the machine from sleep takes seconds; rebooting with stored state takes minutes.

Casual plug for the Pinboard tabs sets feature (https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/04/new_save_tabs_feature/) or OneTab (https://www.one-tab.com).

I do occasionally, I can't say I noticed it – but that's probably because I spend 99% of my time in a terminal.

iTerm2 keeps state in this way for all my open tabs, except that it does a new login shell, so my history doesn't stay consistent: they all get the same history after a restart.

Still, not having to open all the terminals I use for different things and resize and position them is a win. It's the small things. :)

Which shell are you using? With fish I find that it's history is somewhat context sensitive based on the present directory. Because of this I've found myself less frustrated when working with the history across multiple tabs.

iTerm2 v3 beta doesn't keep tab state across relaunch for me. The tabs come back but on a fresh command prompt without stdout from the previous session. For me it's no better than starting fresh.

I'm using 3.0.5. There's a preference "Use System Window Restoration Setting" which may be helpful.

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but this is my experience on 3.0.7 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12282280.

Most of my post-startup routine in Linux is doing things like re-seeding my development database after the ramdisk has been mounted, starting up screen with database clients, and booting up the local servers (the ones that make up our application) all connected to one another - a single script, but still takes a few seconds to get going and can only happen after the database on the ramdisk has been configured.

Application state for all three GUI apps I use is pretty much restored on every platform. Thing is, there are only three of them.

> Sleep isn't a problem anymore if you buy the correct hardware, the question is also why you even would want to use sleep when it's booting within some seconds anyways...

It's a nice feature that isn't worth giving up for me personally. Even on my few years old rMBP a cold boot to the desktop takes 2 minutes vs 2 seconds from sleep.

Is there a way to get a legal copy if you don't have access to a mac?

I've only been able to see a purchase option involving the mac app store.

IDK. I had a Hackintosh and a OS patch or update would kill my sound. I had to run the driver installer (thanks TonyMacOSX) and restart to get it working.

Kernel panics are a bigger issue. They happened to me once every 3 months.

Buy parts recommended on Tony Mac OSX parts guide. Don't deviate and your maintenance should be less than 30 mins per OS update. Should you choose to update.

I'm building another soon. Apple have taken the piss with a lack of update to their Macbook Pro line.

Totally agree. It's nice when things work, but a total pain to troubleshoot. I built my home desktop with recommended parts almost four years ago and installed 10.8.

Since upgrading to 10.9 about a year ago, the built-in audio stopped working. Researching fixes takes me to multiple baffling threads that span dozens of pages.

I recently installed Windows 10 as a dual boot on the system, largely to try the Windows subsystem for Linux. That wasn't a trouble-free process either, but in the end it recognizes all the hardware, including a card reader that I thought was broken.

Although I use an iMac at work, and will continue to look first at Mac laptops, I'll probably transition to Windows once 10.9 gets too old.

Isn't the Mini a much better alternative? You can replace the disc, and don't have to spend money on an expensive screen.

The Mini hasn't been updated in 2 years, and was already slow on release. For normal users it's the better option, but if you're a developer and need to actually get something done, a hackintosh is a very attractive alternative to $4k or more for a similarly beefy iMac / Mac Pro.

Sad that this is what Mac users have to resort to now.

So true.

I have a mini and after upgrading to an SSD (the HDD was a terrible terrible mistake) I'm happy with it. For just coding, torrenting, and movies, it's great. Picking my own monitor was a huge plus. I went with a 34" ultra wide screen, which is perfect for coding and movies look amazing since they fill the whole screen without any letter boxing. No problems with my current setup.

It always depends on what you do. If you do graphic/GPGPU intensive processing, the Mini just won't cut it, and my own Go projects would need over a minute for every compile pass.

A docked rMBP was the best compromise for me as of two years ago.

Personally I'm going to hold out for the new rMBP with the touch bar function keys.

It depends on what you need it for. For me, 5K screen and a very fast graphics card are important. Top of the line iMac is the only Mac that works with Oculus Rift.

But if you're only looking to do web development, for example, Mini should be fine.

For less than the price of a mini I got an old aluminum-tower 2010 Mac Pro on craigslist, swapped in a used hex core Xeon, 32GB of ECC, raided SSDs, and a GTX 750Ti. It does use kind of a lot of power, but watching node compile in a minute or two (about 4X faster than my iMac at work, sigh) is nice. It Geekbenches just below a 'bottom end' new Pro.

I would second zavulon ... the uncertainty n the time required to make it work again n again drove me to use Linux .. which is sufficient for some of the thing I m doing ...

My Hackintosh opened my eyes. It made me realize how sad it is that Apple doesn't offer sensible Mac Pros anymore.

Even most tech people think in terms like "do you NEED it?" and "a laptop should do it", etc., when the reality is still as simple as 4.4GHz > 2.5 GHz.

Of course a fast PCI-connected SSD is also very important. All new mainboards have an M.2 slot for this, it's just that most people completely underestimate how much you will feel this speed gain in everyday usage.

Anyways, money was also the main reason I built one. I absolutely don't regret it.

The quintessence is: don't get your teeth too deep into some problems that will arise. Onboard sound doesn't work? Buy a cheap USB-Dongle. iMessages doesn't work. Well, I ended up using iPhone for replying to these and if it's a longer conversation, I'll do it on the MacBook. Bluetooth is unreliable? Try another crappy dongle from Amazon and don't even bother about refunds. Sleep doesn't work? Well, see how little this thing draws in idle and postpone any action for some months.

You might be able to get rid of all the arising issues by fiddling enough, but in the end these are what make the experience unpleasant and the Hackintosh becomes a time-sink.

If you stick to the basics, you get a very fast machine.

>Try another crappy dongle from Amazon and don't even bother about refunds.

If you are willing to pay return shipping you will always get a refund if the product has no defect (within 30 days of purchase). It's automated. You don't need to explain how you tried to use the product with a Hackintosh.

I think the commenter meant that the usb Bluetooth dongles are so cheap it's barely worth even filing the return. I got mine two weeks ago for $7.50 and it's worked perfectly since. Not exactly a do-or-die investment.

After running a Hackintosh for about 6 months a few years ago I became convinced that they're not really for budget-minded Mac enthusiasts, but for people who enjoy maintenance and troubleshooting.

Unless you're on a tight budget and planning to use existing hardware, I strongly recommend going the way of a Mac Mini and spend the time you would have lost to building a Hackintosh on literally anything else.

That's exactly how I felt. Every update had a risk of being a maintenance nightmare. The machine was really fast, but now I ended up buying a top end iMac 5K and a MacBook Pro. I'll never go back to a hackintosh, but if I didn't do it originally I doubt I would have gone Mac full time. My old hackintosh is now relegated to Win7 for those game devs that are making games for Windows only.

This was my experience exactly. Seemed like a great idea at the time, but always required some sort of maintenance at various times that required researching solutions, posting on message boards, and trial-and-error. Basically, it's the same amount of effort required to run a linux based desktop.

I'd argue that it's more effort than running a popular distro like Ubuntu because the hackintosh knowledgebase is generally a lot smaller.

totally agree.

Without intentionally trying to turn this in to an OS War, at least on a linux box, there was source code. So if something bothered you enough you could go in and fix it yourself (which added to your skills as a coder).

These days, it feels like people enjoy digging around on their systems less and less, and they just want javascript to run in a browser.

Me too -- would add that despite the time I sunk into troubleshooting, I don't feel like I learned anything useful in the process.

Maintenance and troubleshooting with PCs was the reason I switch to Mac in the first place. To me at least, it's worth a few extra dollars if it means I never have to look inside of it (the hardware or the software).

I went down this route once. It's not worth it. You'll spend so. much. *time. troubleshooting the smallest of details at seemingly random intervals.

Frankly, if Linux is an option, try that first. It's less work and more fun (IMO). I've been strongly considering actually running Windows with the Linux subsystem turned on. If you think about it, that solves the same kinds of problems that a Mac does: you get nice Unix-y functionality, a wide variety of shells/cli utilities that just work, and you can run commercial applications (Photoshop and the like come to mind, but also games if you're into that). Of course, it's not a Mac and you get all of the nastiness that comes with Windows (viruses, having to reload every 6 months to keep things snappy, etc), but I'm beginning to see it as a more economical option than a Mac and potentially easier to deal with than Linux (as someone that has been using a Mac for a workstation for years + Linux on servers and other workstations).

> Of course, it's not a Mac and you get all of the nastiness that comes with Windows (viruses, having to reload every 6 months to keep things snappy, etc), but I'm beginning to see it as a more economical option than a Mac and potentially easier to deal with than Linux

FWIW, I've found modern Linux to be very easy to deal with, with the exception of some one-time install issues. They are annoying, but nowhere near the annoyance of the ongoing issues one has with Windows or macOS.

> You'll spend so. much. *time. troubleshooting the smallest of details at seemingly random intervals.

> Frankly, if Linux is an option, try that first.

I don't doubt the time sink from hackintosh (I did it some 6-7 years ago and it worked 90% of the way but that was on hardware that I just had and didn't buy the recommendations). That said linux, for me at least, was a huge timesink as a desktop. I love it and will only use it for servers but for a desktop/laptop I'll probably not stray from Mac (or Hackintosh) and MacOS.

Edit: For those downvoting I am only talking about desktops. I work in an environment where nearly all the developers use linux as their desktop OS as it's that or windows (or BYOC) and anytime someone decides to update their distro or switch they will inevitably spend a day messing with graphics card drivers, odd errors/issues, or tweaking an ungodly number of low level configs to get it to work. After all of that they have a semi-stable desktop with a handful of annoyances "Oh it just does that and I haven't have to time to track down the cause". While you might deal with some of that on homebuilt computer with MacOS I'd pick a hackintosh any day of the week due to the higher quality apps.

I did just that.

Mac > Hackintosh > Linux. but....

In the end I found out it was far worse having to deal with the crappy alpha version apps for linux than fixing the hackintosh. If you are used to the quality of mac apps you will certainly miss them once on linux. I did.

This was until the day the Hackintosh died with an unknown freaky kernel issue and I made the best decision I ever made: bought a second-hand quad core mac mini.

I never want to hear about hackintoshes ever since.

For me, the amount of time I've spent troubleshooting/configuring/whatever linux has been directly proportionate to the amount of customization I attempt to do. The vast majority of my work is Docker, Vim, a web browser, and a handful of other CLI utilities.

Sure, I have a handful of shell aliases and the like, but I'm not going in and tweaking kernel-level stuff or messing with system services (for the most part). Use the stock config and only change things if you really, really need to. Just like you would on a server. Applying that same rule to desktop - for me at least - produces exactly the same stability on my desktop that I expect from my servers.

I've experimented with Hackintoshes a few times. All things considered, the OSx86 project delivers. I too am a Mac person and find OSX to be the most usable OS out there. I've switched to Linux (not too painful if you're willing to learn) but the thought of returning to Mac OS when I bought a new laptop was there.

As has been noted, Apple's current hardware lineup is unimpressive and even a little embarassing. Their 'Pro' level computers haven't been updated in years. Granted, the general performance improvement in that time hasn't been dramatic, but lower power consumption, faster graphics etc. are all factors that stop the current lineup being the cutting-edge it once was. You also run into the problem that none of Apple's current computers are (significantly) upgradeable - even MacBook Pros have soldered RAM and a proprietary SSD interface.

So with these factors in mind, I'd say go for it. I managed to get 10.9 installed and stable, even with the App Store and other features. You can find drivers for almost any hardware, especially when you factor that like Linux, plugging in a device almost always Just Works with Mac. The project has brought USB3.0 and other current-gen drivers to OSX. It's difficult to answer the legal aspect, but if you've legally purchased your copy of OSX, you should have a clean conscience.

In my mind, Apple have long neglected their professional market and arguably brought this upon themselves. There really ought to be a machine between the iMac and the Mac Pro, one close to a commodity PC that could be easily upgraded. However, Apple are aware that people gladly buy Macs just for the OS, and are more than happy to hold them over a barrel for it.

I built a Mini-ITX hackintosh with recommended hardware (Gigabyte mobo, half mini PCI express wifi/BT card, NVIDIA GTX 980, etc.) for mobile development (iPhone), and it is fantastic, with only a few quirks. It's running El Capitan (I actually started with Mavericks and upgraded it), but I haven't installed any of the minor version updates from the App Store (averting the imminent breakage disaster).

Xcode runs like shit on my Macbook Pro -- it's very laggy, but my hackintosh has "trashcan" Mac Pro spec'd hardware, Xcode runs like a dream, and it only cost me $600 in parts.

I did spend a good week setting it up and tweaking various Clover settings and kexts (I mistakenly copied them over manually instead of patching them in Clover so next time I upgrade, I'm going to have a fun time).

It took some work to get HDA and Bluetooth 4.0 to work, and the wifi doesn't work so well, but I use ethernet anyways. Finder also runs a little unstable, but I switched to using Pathfinder.

Overall, it's lightning fast, stable, and very responsive -- an equivalent Mac Pro would have been $4k.

Been running Hackintosh as my main development machine for over 5 years. Yes, it's been frustrating. But if you pick your parts right and are not too eager about installing updates it really can be a stable solution. Right now everything is working, from USB 3.0 to audio, to Bluetooth. Even iMessage and Hands-off work flawlessly. Although I'll admit that this has not always been the case, and I've spend many nights in frustration fiddling with obscure parameters and kexts. For me the main motivation is that I really like Unix-like systems, but I also need Adobe software. That means both Windows and Linux are out for the time being. I've tried various permutations of virtual machines, but they never seem to work (especially not on "retina" displays ...). I could buy a Mac Pro, but the hardware is just too overpriced, and since I've started doing some Deep Learning stuff I would really like an Nvidia card (which are oddly still supported, albeit unofficially, by Nvidia on Hackintosh).

I run several hackintoshes + real Macs as my primary work machines and personal use. Getting Facetime/iMessages to work is relatively straight forward and easy if you'd like them (even easier if you have a real Mac too).

Machines:

Dual Xeon | 64GB RAM | GTX960 | 4x4TB HDD, 3x5000GB SSD

(My oldest) Core i5 | 24GB RAM | GTX 680 | 3x4TB HDD, 150/250/500 SSDs

Intel Nuc i3

I'm happy to answer any questions!

Since you've built a few, you likely have a good idea of what hardware is compatible.

Most guides I've seen are very incomplete or don't list specific models of everything -- or if they do, it's only for a specific point release.

At a glance do you think this hardware would be good for now and future versions of El Cap + Sierra when it eventually ships?

I built this back in 2014:

MOBO: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157...

CPU: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JIJUBAS

RAM: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231...

GPU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487...

SSD: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KFAGCWK

HDD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236...

PSU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817207...

Microphone: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16836431...

(Mic and overall audio performance is very important to me due to recording courses, podcasts, etc.)

Should be fine, you may need to update the bios on your mobo, but other than that looks good

Thanks for the reply. How confident would you be in it?

For example, if this is your primary work station for completing somewhat time sensitive things (books, courses, weekly podcasts, etc.) would you feel comfy?

What type of worst case scenarios are we looking at if an update fails?

For a hackintosh, there's no such thing as comfy, only minimally scary. The worst case scenario is that your system becomes unbootable and/or data loss. Being able to live with these possibilities is a requirement for hackintosh ownership.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, just that there is no guaranteed safe path and you'll always be at risk for an update borking your system. The best you can do is make maximally informed decisions and prepare for the worst. And ideally have your hackintosh be a secondary machine that can die at any moment without screwing up your life.

It's a great hobby project but (like others have said here) it's something you do because it's a fun and interesting ongoing challenge. There's really no context for anyone in which building a hackintosh is a rational choice made for purely pragmatic reasons. FWIW, I wouldn't consider saving money a pragmatic reason- the ongoing time and risk involved will always exceed whatever money has been saved, unless your time has little value and you have nothing to lose (which admittedly is the case for some hobbyists or students, but good luck getting anyone to admit that :).

Unbootable without being able to revert it without formatting?

I put together the above for around $750 over 2 years ago. A somewhat equiv. MBP is like $2,750 (and would still be worse in nearly every aspect spec for spec).

I value my time and sanity but some of these stories make it seem like if you have a good combo of hardware it's an hour or 2 per year just to handle some updates and a bit of chaos. I think I'm willing to trade that to save nearly $3,000 since for me it would be buying a MBP vs hackintoshing my current machine.

The problem and cause of hesitation is due to it being my only machine capable of doing my primary work.

I've been using a Hackintosh as my main machine for more than 4 years. Mostly for Ruby on Rails and Mobile development.

The "secret" is to get a hardware that is supported ( http://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/july/2016 ) and wait a few months before upgrading when a new OS X versions comes out so that all upgrade bugs are fixed.

When I started I had a graphic card that didn't worked well. Every 5 or 6 days, the UI would freeze completely. I simply got a graphic card that is supported and the problem went away.

My current uptime is 183 days and I only had to reboot because I decided to add a new SSD. I also have a mac mini but almost never uses it as the Hackintosh hardware is far superior.

Proud owner of an Hackintosh here, I've been using one for quite some years now (6-7 years) back when installing it was a real pain in the ass and a real gamble, now with the right hardware, you can install OSX faster than installing Windows 10 or Ubuntu. Upgrading to a new version is a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes, but no more so than on linux most of the time.

I've tried multiple times to switch to Linux (multiple distros) and making it play happy with 24K monitors & 224" was never easy, Windows 7/10 lags when the 24" monitors are running, so I've to keep them off when using Windows (mostly for gaming), OSX has been running the show great and smooth.

I recommend you try it, although again, the secret here is in buying the right hardware, of which there're plenty of guides online.

Good luck.

Hi there,

Several years ago I built a hackinstosh workstation for a family member that is still going strong. Now that Macs are on Intel's architecture setting one up is a fairly straightforward process if you pick out the right hardware. This website single handedly assisted me in the creation of that hackinstosh.

http://www.tonymacx86.com

I must recommend against any use of Tonymac's tools.

https://tkware.info/2013/01/27/hypocrisy-thy-name-is-tonymac...

https://tkware.info/2013/01/29/honor-among-thieves-the-tonym...

(tl;dr: DRM in the installer, bogus legal threats when this was called out)

I appreciate your input. Those tools/site worked at the time. If I were to do another build, not sure I will any time soon, then I may look for other avenues.

Tony's site is the closest to legal this can get but since your install will be illegal anyways why not go with Niresh's Yosemite Zone?

Thank you for the suggestion as I am unfamiliar with Niresh's Yosemite Zone. I purchased both the OS and hardware. How is that illegal?

The OS X terms and conditions say you can't install it on non-Apple hardware :/

Let's be clear, it's not "illegal" so much as it is against the Terms & Conditions of OSX. Apple could sue you, but they can't put you in jail.

Now, there are some questions as it relates to the DMCA, but generally unless you are misusing the software for something illegal (ex hacking) then you're ok.

IANAL.

You mentioned having a MacBook. What's preventing you from just using that at home too? Just grab an external HD. It's like $60 for a 1TB drive.

You could always hook up a real mouse too and a bigger monitor if that's what you want.

Now all of your problems go away (you have something you can code on, it's OSX which is what you like and you don't have to mess around with a Hackintosh).

Monitor compatibility with MacBooks is an issue. I can't get native good-looking resolution when connecting to my Acer LCD.

Here's what I do to satisfy my cravings for Macs. I just buy used Macs from OWC/MacSales (www.macsales.com). The 2012 machines are pretty affordable and will give me years of service even if bought today.

I have outfitted all my family members with used Macbook Airs (average price $499) except for my son who is holding out because he believes he needs nothing but top end Graphics Cards to run games.

I know this doesn't directly address the Hackintosh question, but provides an affordable alternative to splurging on brand new latest and greatest Macs or hacking together an unsupported system.

I did this for a year or two.

Pros:

* It's a mac, with decent specs, on a budget. Considering I was running dual boot on a machine I already owned, it was free!

Really, that's the biggest and only one.

Cons:

* PITA to set up and make everything work, and this on a hardware configuration that is explicitly supported. In my case, to get everything working, I had to wipe my OS (since a GPT partition table is required), install, bail out and reinstall after finding the right combination of kernel flags, and then after I got it running, I had to hex edit my graphics driver (!!!) to get the second display to work.

* Updates are scary, and will ~%50 of the time lead to a broken system. Unbreaking it is easy (usually just updating and rerunning the prep tool), but still annoying.

* Never was able to get sleep mode to work. I had to disable it, since if I used it, my CMOS was wiped!

That sounds bad, but this was also years ago. The tools have gotten better, and I had a working system in an hour or two with a lot less screwing around just a month or so ago. Everything but sleep mode Just Worked too, though updates were still scary.

I have looked into them in the past, but I don't really feel like Linux is a huge learning curve coming from OSX, especially if you stick with one of the well-known distros.

Even if it is a learning curve, it's probably one that will be at least somehow useful professionally.

What if you stayed with Mac and invested in some goodies:

For storage: Why don't you get an external SSD with a fast connection (eg Thunderbolt)? Depending on your budget, data rates can be 450 MB/sec on up to 20GB/s if I recall correctly. I am running a Samsung SSD at 450, and it does fine (a bit laggy sometimes, but it was under $100).

For GPUs: You can buy an nvidia card and mount externally. Here is a good link (though I haven't gone that route yet) : http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-build-an-external...

"Step 3: Run Boot Camp." -- Why bother buying a mac, bootcamping it to Windows... just to use a better GPU? Why not just use a Windows machine to start with?

I ran a Hackintosh a few years ago on a Samsung laptop. Like Linux of yore, your key issue is hardware support. To have the best success with a Hackintosh you need to nail down exactly what hardware will work with it, and buy that hardware. Just trying to bung it on a spare box you have lying around is asking for trouble, a lost weekend, and a very cranky spouse.

Hunt around on the Hackintosh forums, find a hardware list that works, get the bootloaders or kexts you may need, and give it a go. I won't say it's not worth it, because I do know people who run Hackintoshes on a daily basis without issue. However, you will not be able to upgrade easily. Every major macOS upgrade will require a rebuild.

I've had good success running OS X El Capitan on an i3 Intel Nuc. It's my main music composition platform, mostly for Logic Pro. It's a cheaper Mac Mini in that you can get one with the required parts (SSD and laptop RAM) for under $400 USD.

As I own no other Apple products, it helps having an Mac in house to run the occasional Mac only software.

Here's a guide [1] with a matrix on how to install it on other NUC models.

[1] http://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/guide-el-capitan-on-the-in...

I have been using a Hackintosh for the last 2 years and I love it. I bought a Dell (http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-15-5000-series/pd) and had a friend set up the Mac VM; the only issue that I can recall is that I couldn't use Sound Cloud's API (I vaguely remember what the issue is).

I installed a SSD not too long ago and the computer runs both VM's, no problem. One of the best decisions I have ever made.

I don't know about desktop but running Hackintosh in VM oh man what a nightmare, i run different OSes in VMs (Linux, Windows in different versions) inside my OS for testing and i never had any problems but hackintosh works like trying to run windows 10 on pentium 2. It's slow as hell, i have problems with sound, rendering is awfully slow and is losing frames, it hangs without reason from time to time. This are my experiences with hackintosh inside VM, i don't know how it works as standalone OS.

i run them on KVM and have not much of an issue. But i do not use them for much really. However i was actually somewhat surprised that it runs as well as it does... I dont feel much of a difference to running windows on KVM except that RDP works much better than VNC...

Im running these on a Core2 Duo E8400...

see: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Hackintosh

FOR EXAMPLE :

"Building My $1,200 Hackintosh"

https://medium.com/swlh/building-my-1-200-hackintosh-49a1a18...

hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12024949

If all you are doing is coding, torrenting, and watching movies, what about a 'osx like' linux desktop? https://elementary.io/ comes to mind. I think there are others, as well. The amount of fiddling and maintenance required with a hackintosh is no different that running a linux box. In fact, your hardware options will be greater with linux (e.g. AMD cpus/gfx cards, wifi adapters).

I use a hackintosh as my main desktop at home for the reasons you describe, 32GB RAM, terabytes of storage, much cheaper than Apple's offerings. Here's the thing, it takes a time investment to update it, and updates can be unpredictable.

I spent several days playing with various settings to get everything working--would have been easier if I had chosen a motherboard that's mainstream in the hackintosh community--didn't buy the machine with this in mind. Once up and running I thought I was home free, then 10.10.2 came out, thought I'd just apply the update, took me 4 hours to get my machine back. Since I've learned more about it I can now update my machine in about 10 minutes but it's taken much trial and error to get here. I've had to read a lot of forums with conflicting advice and try to debug with endless reboots.

Since then most updates have gone smoothly, though rarely an update will bork the video drivers or the Ethernet due to changes on apple's side. I spent 2 hours one time getting sound to work. I'm glad for the learning experience but at this stage I often debate if I've spent more time on maintenance than the cost of just paying Apple their ransom for a nice machine.

If you're game for the time investment I'd say go for it. Definitely research which motherboard to use, I think that's been a big part of my struggles is having one nobody else uses I'm having to invest a lot of time in debugging my particular setup. The drivers have been the big deal, I've at various times had trouble with video, sound, Ethernet, and usb 3.0. Today I have everything but sleep working and am on the latest El Capitan release. YMMV.

So to get this working you need to have an image of your disk ready at all times, to be able to go back when you need it. I suppose you have your Users (home) folder on a different partition so you can just whipe the root partition.

I'm glad with my Macbook. It's expensive, but it works. I've thought about moving to Ubuntu, which I use at work since five years, but still lacks in some points compared to the Mac. And finding a modern laptop that just works with Ubuntu, while being significantly cheaper than the Macbook is not easy.

I'm the same way as you. There is something about having a desktop set up the way you like it, and having a Laptop set up the way you like it because my mobile work style and desktop work style are completely different.

So, back to your question. Yes. I tried it, and hated it. It was fun at first, but like everyone says, anytime there is a problem (And oh, there will be problems) You're sorta screwed. If it is a Hobbiest machine, and not a primary work machine, then sure give it a whirl.. Just don't over invest in hardware that you can't return or reuse on something else.

What I ultimately ended up going with was a MacMini. I got a late 2012 Core i7, which is one of the last Mini's that you can upgrade ram and HDD. Maxxed out the ram, and put in a speedy SSD and it ran me about $700. This lil guy is still a beast -- with it's biggest limitation is the shitty video card.

What sucks now, is this same Mac Mini setup will run you $1400. That is bonkers.

Honestly, If you can, try waiting to see what Apple releases in the next few months. The Mini is due to be refreshed or Killed. My guess is it'll be refreshed and be given beefier video options, especially if apple releases a new cinema display.

Good luck!

The main point of a Mac and why you are "highly productive" in it is because "things just work" with a nice Unix environment. When you go the Hackintosh route, things will no longer just work. Your life would be easier just going with Ubuntu or buying a Mac Mini.

This said, I still don't understand why Apple doesn't release a Mac Pro lite. A screenless laptop (Mac Mini) isn't good enough and a big screen with a laptop embedded doesn't cut it either. Personally I got a last gen Mac Pro on Ebay for a quarter of the price of a new Mac Pro. The problem is that now the upcoming MacOS update isn't compatible with it...

I've also gone the Ubuntu route and I've found that it's really only good for development and some Steam games; not to mention that with every small official update from Canonical, I'm wondering what part of my UI will break next?

Don't do it. Buy a refurb 2012 Mac Pro from OWC/MacOfAllTrades/wherever and upgrade the ram and SSD yourself.

This macs are unsupported by latest macOs

Incorrect. The minimum requirement is a Mac Pro 2010 or higher. I recommended buying a Mac Pro 2012.

- http://osxdaily.com/2016/06/14/macos-sierra-compatibility-li...

- http://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/mac-software/will-my-mac-r...

I have not used a Hackintosh. But, I have a Mac Mini at home that I upgraded to max out the RAM and add a SSD. With the addition of an external drive for media storage, it ended up being perfect for the needs you describe. In addition to my home use, I take it to trade shows for work to run as a demo web server for our product.

Well that was exactly what OP was not looking for in an answer.

I have a 5-year old Hackintosh still going strong on El Capitan. I would say a few days each year of maintenance is a minimum to keep it running smoothly and updated.

I started off with free parts from friends and bought a semi-supported motherboard. Since then I've upgraded a GTX, added ram, switched PSU, added TB drives and bluetooth. My advice is to get supported parts as far as possible.

I get a huge productivity boost when I can use it because I can plug in several huge displays and my best keyboards/ mice. It's exactly like having a Mac Pro except slightly more fragile.

I can foresee still using my Hackintosh for the next few years because it's performance hasn't degraded. I will just keep swapping parts and upgrading as needed.

Plan for it to fail during crunchtime, and make sure you keep your Macbook handy. My Macbook Pro and Hackintosh work synergistically to repair and update each other :)

I spent $800 to build one circa 2011 and tried to use it full time. For that price you got great hardware relative to what Apple was putting in anything close to that price point.

There was one bug I couldn't get past... I don't remember exactly what it was now, but it had to do with audio out and the Sound preference pane forgetting about your speakers and having to be opened after every restart. Perhaps someone who's been working on them for a few years can describe it more precisely.

I also remember inexplicable kernel panics. And updating the OS was tricky.

I ended up using it just a few dozen times, then it mostly collected dust (I still have it today). A lot of that probably had to do with needing a portable computer every day. It was just more convenient to keep everything on a MacBook and dock it to a keyboard and monitor on my desk at home.

I just built one, my first, last month. Works just fine, including sleep / wake and upgrading a minor OS release and installing apps from the App Store.

I used the TonyMac recommended set up, of which there are a ton of permutations, picking the i5 6600K CPU and a fairly middling ASUS Z170 motherboard. The onboard graphics is a huge step up from my mid-2011 i7 Mac Mini Server. Popped in a 960 gb SSD and it runs like a charm. I also have a MacBook Pro in hand in case things go really bad but so far no issues at all. (Except Messages, but I didn't use that on the Mac Mini so no loss there.)

Can't recommend it enough. Great rig for about $600 including case and power supply, and when I'm ready to upgrade most of that investment will carry over (SSD, case, PSU, keyboard, monitor, etc). Far more sane and cost effective than the 5K iMac I was considering.

I had a beefy gaming pc, but the graphics card died. I didn't have the money to shell for a comparable one, and I had been using the machine for developing more than gaming. So I got a cheaper graphics card and a wifi card, and went through the set up.

I've been using it for 2 years and a half now. I was on mavericks for a while, skipped yosemite, and did the clover setup for El capitan. Now I have regular updates that don't break everything, and this works pretty much as well as my MBP. I'm on android, so I don't worry about iMessage, but everything else works just fine.

It might save you some bucks if you get some deals on parts, but I'd say it's almost as efficient to get a mac mini. I'd say that the only advantage, is that you can easily upgrade parts if you come across the money since you have your own case and build.

Not sure that it would be any better than Linux.

At one point i needed to port a game to iPhone, which, for context, requires MacOS and their whole stack of locked-up tools.

At first i tried to run MacOS in a VM (VmWare), which kinda worked, but moving files in and out of it caused all sorts of crashes (more like the files got stuck and couldn't be read or deleted, the system itself almost never crashed).

Then, i tried to install MacOS on a laptop (high-ish end Lenovo), with similar sort of success - it would just crash at random and WiFi wasn't working.

Finally, i went and bought a second-hand MacBook. Worked beautifully ever since.

Going back to the first sentence, i found MacOS barely usable compared to both Windows and Linux, so if all you want is to code (not for mac/iphone), torrent and watch movies, then Linux does all that with none of the Mac's problems.

I'm using it as a main development machine. Also, I'm using MacBookPro when traveling and for some sort of a backup if main machine fails.

So far (and I'm using it for a last two years) I'm very happy. Yosemite upgrades were somewhat painful as it took me couple of hours to upgrade each time but I couldn't be happier with El Capitan - since tonymacx86 switched over to Clover bootloader every update goes like this:

1. upgrade through AppStore to the latest OX X version

2. install new version of Nvidia drivers (OS X must be booted with disabled Nvidia GPU nv_disable=1)

I also had to apply fix for sound card but that was one-time endeavor.

So, excluding time needed for a regular OS X update, in a last year I spent maybe 3-4 hours extra on keeping Hackintosh in working state.

I ran one as my primary work machine about 5 years ago and then built a duplicate for home. Yes, it saved me money (I built the box for about $600 and it was hardware equivalent to probably a $2000 mac at the time) but you basically couldn't ever install any update (even security updates) unless you were mentally prepared to potentially lose half a day to troubleshooting. Usually they installed fine, but you could never be 100% sure in advance.

This meant putting off updates longer, which would lead to bigger updates, which only raised the chances of things going wrong. By the time OS X had gone up two major versions I just stopped using it and got a Mac mini and dumped more RAM in it instead.

I've used a hackintosh as my main dev machine for 4 years now. Got everything working, audio, webcam, usb3, even some additional SATA PCI-E controller. What I basically did was using one of the lists of "recommended" hardware from tonymac's site and bought the best of each component.

I've got some issues with updates as many other people commented, but having a HDD specifically for timemachine backups was key for not stressing too much about it. I can try updating and risk breaking everything, and I know my stuff is going to be there even if I roll back to a previous version.

I'd definitely recommend it, but it's not as easy as buying a MBP. But the results are really good.

If you haven't looked at windows lately, look at Windows 10. It's wonderful; I "switched back" from Mac, and so has everyone else at the office, except for ios development.

So you can get exactly the hardware you want and a stable experience.

I have a Hackintosh for web development. It's extremely stable - the only kernel panic I've had was due to Razor mouse drivers. I have hardware that is very hackintosh compatible however. Also, I ended up changing out my USB wireless adaptor for a PCI express one which is natively supported by OS X rather than mess about with drivers etc. Everything works - iMessage, Facetime etc. If you have compatible hardware and some free time I would recommend it, I would NOT recommend it if your hardware is atypical and requires bludgeoning to get Mac OSX onto it.

I should add that due to my experiences with OSX my next desktop purchase will definitely be a mac.

If you pick the right hardware things will be pretty smooth! But it is called Hackintosh for a reason. Things can get ugly, but if you backup your system you could be pretty safe. Go to tonymacx86, de facto best resource for Hackintosh builds. Process can be a bit nerve wrecking but I think it is rewarding thing. I learned a lot about macOS just through using Hackintosh for 3 years. But let me tell you, buy iMac/Macbook and Chromebook (for Linux). Hackintosh is great but you may spend a lot of time tinkering about some trivial thing (I'm bit of a OCD person).

I have a Windows machine that I use for gaming, and a MacBook Pro that I use for work. Both are connected to the same monitor, which can toggle between inputs. For storage, I have a Synology NAS, but an external USB3 hard drive would work just as well.

This isn't the most budget-conscious setup, but it's the best of both worlds. I looked at building a Hackintosh as a single machine solution before I built my Windows machine, but decided that it wasn't worth the hassle. As best as I can tell, it's a constant uphill battle of keeping things configured correctly.

when you toggle between inputs for the monitor, are you using the buttons or some software? Also how are you connecting the mouse/keyboard? I have 3 monitors, and would like to toggle all 3 from MBP and my desktop.. currently I just use one monitor for MBP and other 2 for desktop.

I use the monitor's toggle. For keyboard/mouse, I have a separate keyboard for the two computers, and my mouse (Logitech MX Master) has a toggle that lets it switch between computers. I'm not sure how you'd do this with a multi-monitor setup, but there's probably an intermediary DisplayPort controller that would let you do it.

VMware workstation can be modified using an enabler to allow support of Mac OS X within a virtual machine. The functionality is there already in Workstation but it's hidden away by default. El Capitan installs with no problems. It might work as an option for you if you're not overly dependant on the OS for native graphics. If you want Bluetooth/Wifi to work without any hassle, it's worth looking on eBay for native Mac components in USB or PCIE form (generally found by searching for hackintosh and the component)

I tried running it as my only os on my daily driver laptop a few years ago (mountain lion, I think), checked all the hardware before even thinking about installing it, everything was "fully compatible"... and it was pretty bad. The os itself kinda worked (except for audio dying after a while and standby not working), but the experience in general was horrible (laggy ui, things crashing everywhere, even a few kernel panics).

Keep in mind this was a few years ago, but I wouldn't recommend even trying wasting the time to try installing it.

I've used one for 2 years ... things worked and it was rather stable ... but stay away from updates. Later i bought a macbook and used it for a while , now days I run ubuntu , everything works well for software dev and all that ... but webex and other fancy webapps(flash or activex) are always a problem. My company uses lync , so i use a combination between bitlbee weechat and bitlbee-libpurple ... works but sharing desktops and voice calls obviously can't be done.

Good luck!

I thought about a Hackintosh as well, but I ultimately decided on just getting two monitors and keyboard/mouse and hooking up the MBP to the setup. Way better than the headache of dealing with a Hackintosh in my opinion. You also have the benefit of only having one computer to deal with, so no issues with syncing files and apps. It's also much cheaper than building a whole computer.

I built one back in 2011 for 25% of the price of an original mac. It was my main development machine.

Check out: http://www.tonymacx86.com - It is the one that I used and it was perfect.

It was super fun to build one. Buying the parts, assembling it, install the software was a little challenging but fun! Mine still works, I think about keeping it.

I have been using a Hackintosh for about a week to test drive OS X before buying a Mac. I don't recommend it, I spent 2 days trying to get it to work on AMD hardware, and in the end the results were poor. Ended up buying a MacBook Air and an Apple keyboard and mouse and a 2TB USB 3 HDD for storage. It's great for me, works flawlessly.

I have a powerful ROG Asus G750JX that I use as my main machine which has dual boot with OSX 10.9 and Windows 10. It was a bit of pain to set it up, haven't gotten the time to update it but it works mostly fine. Even the top end Macbook Pro is no match to the specs I have on this 2.5 year old ROG: 3.2Ghz i7, 32GB RAM, GTX 770M 3GB.

I've been using one for a little over a year with frequent OS updates and have had no problems so far. However, setting it up was stressful and each time I apply an OS update I image the drive prior, in case something does go wrong.

Once you have it setup, the biggest drag is that you have to be ready to fix the potential damage after each update.

When I set up my Deep Learning rig I intended to run Linux, but ended up installing OS X and have had a great experience. Really no other way I could get a Mac with these kinds of specs:

Titan X, 32GB Ram, 6-core i7-5820, hot-swap SATA bays, water-cooled CPU/GPU.

Would definitely build another in the future, especially given the status of Mac Pros.

It always was a fun idea for me to run that juicy Unix OS on my x86.

In my case - I tried a lot, albeit back in 2008 and 2009, but wasn't able to get it to work reliably on different machines. I ended up in a quagmire of undocumented problems and errors, forum-hunting, loading kernel modules by hand - kext hell. Do you really want to?

It's not unreasonable to think that a lot might have changed since 2008/9.

Sure

I've been waiting for the Mac Mini to get refreshed. It'll do everything that you want for $500-800 and you can always add a thunderbolt RAID if you need more storage.

I would like one that can support multiple 4k monitors, but we shall see. They are due for a refresh since the current offerings are a few years old.

I'm a big fan of mac minis but the RAM soldered on board is a "no go" for me and so also thinking of going hackintosh only for that reason.

> Apple's desktop offerings are pretty poor right now > What I'm looking for are experiences with them for someone who just wants a computer to code, torrent, and watch movies from

an iMac will do things fine, possibly with extra storage.

A hackintosh is cheaper and more flexible, but an iMac will do what you are describing.

I run a multiboot workstation with OS X, Linux, and Windows. My preferable for daily use and coding is my archlinux desktop but since I dabble with iOS dev every once in a while I'll use my hackintosh and end up using it for days.

So yes, it's totally stable and will work for you. Just be sure you get the right hardware.

What advantages you see of running archlinux vs Ubuntu? I wonder if I should change my default server distro...

i would not recommend archlinux as a server distro. Things break sometimes and typically in a server environment you care more about stability than about running on the bleeding edge. Its not unreasonable unstable though extra care is needed.

I would not call the 27" iMac "pretty poor".

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/11/mini-review-test-drivin...

I mostly meant the price:performance+storage ratio, but happy to be proven wrong.

Do you take maintenance time (is money) into the equation too?

That's what this thread was for :-) Looks like a good amount of day to day maintenance is still required.

I thought about it, considered, decided it's not worth it and bought a used macbook, either 2010 or 2011 with 8gb of ram for $200 from craigslist. I use PC keyboard, PC mouse and it drives a 2560x1920 monitor. I don't have to worry about an OSX update breaking the computer.

A friend of mine has a nice hackintosh running just fine, with some quirks like iMessage not working.

Going the Linux route would mean misssing out on a lot of nice software.

I personally think the IMacs have great value. Have a 2011 model, maxed out ram, running El capitan smooth as hell.

I used to complement my MacBook with a hackintosh. I now have a beefy xeon server running esxi. This lets me run windows/mac/and primarily linux.

I'd still consider my MacBook my main machine even though my storage and faster processing is remote.

I tried that about 5 years ago because I was temporarily broke, already owned a mostly compatible PC, and wanted to do iPhone dev. It was a nightmare. It took like a week to set up & managed to brick itself within a year. If you absolutely _need_ a mac then just buy a mac. I've even recommended that people who want to make an iPhone app buy a mac, make the app, and then sell the mac again when they're done, because the alternatives, like hackintosh, are such a pain. If you don't absolutely _need_ it to be a mac then just go linux and save yourself a ton of aggravation. Apple laptops are head and shoulders above the competition, but their OS kinda stinks compared to linux, especially for power users(this coming from someone who's used OSX about 5 times as much as linux). Oh and those trashcan mac pros are insanely powerful if you really _need_ OSX on beast mode.

I used one for about 8 months in 2012, had a good setup and no issues. Saved enough cash and bought a MacBook Air, now I own a MBP.

I was really happy with the outcome. Before I was a linux user for about 4 years so the transition was easy for me.

> while I love my MacBook, nothing beats having a comfy desktop computer at home with a ton of storage.

Maybe buying a whole PC of any kind is the wrong approach. Get a cooling tray, mouse, keyboard, monitor, and some USB3 storage.

Yeah I'm obsessed with my dual boot Windows 10 / Yosemite hackintosh. As others have said, it requires the right components and time, but the reward in the end pays off. I'd recommend it!

I used a Hackintosh for iOS development. If you buy parts that are generally well supported, you'll likely have minimal issues if any.

My brother has one and it's more or less impossible to keep it up to date. It's also somewhat less stable than a regular Mac.

I have been running one for over a year now no problems at all updated to el capitan no problem everything works great.

How I wish Adobe would release their CC suite for Linux. A blessed distro and custom Wine version.

Mac laptop, Linux desktop. Maybe someday.

This seems like something that would get a lot better if you developed a real community around it.

I used one every day for two years. I loved it. The only time it was unstable was when I did major OS upgrades.

Its a bit of a PITA, it kind of depends on the cost/benefit analysis as to if its worth it to you or not.

You should definitely look at if an upgraded MacPro with bumped up RAM and CPU would cut it for you. If you need an upgraded GPU or you want the latest CPU (i.e. you have workloads that you know are single-threaded on the CPU and just need the fastest single core possible and 3 year old cores won't cut it for you) then a hackintosh may make sense.

My experience is that roughly every three months you can expect to burn most of a day (call it 4 solid hours) yak shaving on something. This happened to me this week where my machine wouldn't boot and just black screened. I had to boot into safe mode with the graphics card disabled + yanked and apply the O/S upgrade. That got me far enough that after a very slow boot up I could start without safe mode, which let me reinstall the bootloader. I also upgraded the graphics driver and did a few other settings tweaks and now its back and happy again and the graphics card is back in it. But there was a lot of rebooting and using my laptop to surf the web to figure out possible solutions and trying multiple different dead ends before I started to make progress in making it more bootable.

I'm pretty comfortable messing around with this stuff having started my career as a PC tech 25 years ago, and first started building my own patched linux kernels sometime in the late 90s.

I've got a friend of mine that uses macs professionally to do video editing and if she had to go through this she'd be even more dead in the water than me and would probably take her longer to recover and my advice to her has been that I don't know how to build a hackintosh that she could rely on day-to-day without suffering interruptions like this.

I'm actually happy enough with it that I'm not going back to windows and not interested in buying a MacPro, but its not for everyone.

One thing that was a showstopper for me with my Linux desktop (and I do miss my il3 tiling window manager) is that when I bought a 4k display so that I had mixed 4k + 2x 2.7k displays xorg just became a total clusterfuck. They pin all the displays to 96dpi and you can't change it and have to set font-sizes per-application -- and then AFAIK nobody has any solution to having different resolution displays that you drag windows between. I found an open issue which just had some xorg dev explaining down to everyone how they didn't really need resolutions that small other than on phone screens. On the other hand Mac + Windows Just Works(tm) and I can setup the scaling and drag windows between monitors and they don't change size. Way easier to deal with Hackintosh occasionally acting up than wading into that nightmare...

I use a Hackintosh as my main. It works great except but I don't have a webcam, bluetooth, or wifi hardware in it.

I have a GTX 980 Ti OC hooked up to a Dell 5k monitor. Performance is great for general usage and gaming.

One annoyance, which I still have to deal with to this day, I can not boot the OS with the monitor on or the kernel will panic and reboot. I have to turn the computer on, wait for the boot loader, hit enter and quickly turn the monitor off, then after about 40 seconds I turn the monitor back on and OS X is working.

For some reason, when I full frame a video that is playing in the browser the frame rate drops to like 10 fps. It's kind of annoying. It has something to do with the type of video encoding. I suspect one of them is hardware decoded and other entirely in software. Not sure the specifics. When that happens I usually just zoom in (Ctrl + scroll wheel). If I download the video and then play it in VLC it plays full screen at the full frame rate no problem. Not sure what is going on.

Gaming was completely fluid. I was playing Heroes of the Storm and StarCraft 2 fine. There are some minor issues with the gamma and mouse not working right but there are easy workarounds. Problem was just limited to HoTS. I never saw the display / mouse problems in any other program.

One other thing that annoyed me was that FCP X and Adobe Premiere would not use the GPU for anything. My MacBook Pro is much faster for 4k video work than my super beefy Hackintosh. I think it has something to do with Intel QuickSync not being recognized on the Hackintosh even though my CPU supports it. Couldn't find a way to make it work. Supposedly very little of video encoding uses the GPU for some reason.

RAW photo converters like Capture One Pro takes advantage of the GPU just fine. Processing RAW photos is about 10x faster on my Hackintosh than my MBP.

Coding works great, torrents work fine, watching movies work perfectly fine with VLC. No issues whatsoever with those things.

I also had some issues with video conferencing solutions like WebEx and Blue Jeans. I had to use my MBP for those.

Be careful of updating on a Hackintosh. Wait for the community to vet an upgrade. Sometimes you need to reinstall things after an update. I had 3 days where my graphics driver didn't work after a security update. Luckily nVidia released a driver fairly quickly.

If Apple ever comes out with a MBP I'm going to switch to that for a desktop. I'm thinking I can use an external GPU enclosure over USB-C / Thunderbolt for when I need the extra power. The fan noise is pretty loud, it sucks up a lot of power, and creates a lot of heat. That's fine when I'm gaming, but it's an annoyance when I'm just in vim coding.

I do, but like with Linux, be prepared for constant troubleshooting after each update.

Also you'll probably get lower performance, especially from your GPU, and also from your CPU if your ACPI tables aren't properly configured.

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