Nvidia's Hackintosh Support Is an Insurgency Against Apple's Computers | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia's Hackintosh Support Is an Insurgency Against Apple's Computers

motherboard.vice.com

110 pointsptrptr43 comments

I used to work on a hackintosh, the support is impressive on tonymacx86. https://www.tonymacx86.com/

ReHabMan is just amazing. It's even easy to get started with all the tutorials. Indeed, the problem I was getting was with nvidia support, mini-display port, multi display in general, video drivers, hybrid video (integrated + discrete card), etc. Everything else was working a bit too well.

It's sad that this is not legit, the community is really awesome. At least this nvidia move with drivers is a good news for the users in general I suppose.

I personally worked on windows back in the days, discovered MacOS, moved to ubuntu, hated all the PPAs, missed the tools I had on mac so gave hackintosh a try, wasn't legit and had lots of troubles with nvidia, moved to arch linux, struggled with lack of nvidia support too (ironic isn't it?) but turned out to work a bit better on Fedora (maybe because I got better with X11, wayland and configs in general) Then someone left at the office and I got his macbook so I moved back to MacOS (my dotfiles are now compatible on all main os and I automated my setup...). I don't think I'll switch again for a while (time consuming, it's a long trip), but this news is really tempting to move back to hackintosh. I have to admit it though, I really enjoyed Fedora :P

I've just recently installed macOS Sierra on my ASUS laptop thanks to ReHabMans tutorials, some things took me days to fix like the audio, but you always end up finding the solution in a thread made by that talented guy. The only problem I had was high RAM usage and some other things that need tweaking. edit: mic and cam don't work, this way nobody can spy on me ;)

Can highly recommend Little Snitch as well, if you're not already using it, it's a two-way-per-app-firewall that is user friendly.

You can even block Apples telemetry (Except for information sent before loading the OS).

Does Xcode and/or the iPhone simulator work?

Yes for both.

It IS nice having Photoshop working in a real UNIX like environment.

If Intuit, Sage, and Adobe got together they could just go ahead and pick a winner among Linux distros on the desktop. The main complaint is always that there are too many to support. Put those three on one, maybe get Activision and EA on board, and whatever they chose would be the defacto standard on the desktop.

Steam does a good job of covering all of the Linux distros, even if you're on your own for things like Arch Linux (the community maintains a great Wiki).

The only thing they need to do is fix high-DPI display support (it's broken even on Windows and there is a HUGE issue on GitHub that has been around for years now without any action being taken to resolve it, a little frustrating):

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3492

They do. I agree. It's not going to help someone who needs QuickBooks, Peachtree, After Effects, Photoshop, and other apps to work as well as on Windows. WINE is neat, but it's not a solution for SMEs to run their businesses.

What I'm saying is that if Steam can support many distros easily, then it is certainly possible for Intuit/Sage/Adobe to as well without that much extra work than just focusing on one distro. It really comes down to just providing packages for each package manager (Deb, RPM, etc.). Linux environments aren't all THAT different at the end of the day.

Doesn't make sense from a business perspective. It's not like a Linux desktop is some new bet -- marketshare is small. Intuit barely supports the mac and even that is relatively new. Adobe has a disproportionate number of mac users for a variety of reasons, but that isn't the norm. With android and iOS already being 2 new platforms with little code shared, adding another platform that has little growth potential isn't cost effective.

It's a bit of chicken and egg. Marketshare is small in part because there's not a clear winner (or even two clear major leaders). People don't invest because there's no consensus on which to support. Because there's no consensus, there's no impetus to invest. Because there's no support for these apps that are Windows only or Windows and Mac only, the users aren't there to demand the support.

If a coalition (or cabal if you'd like to phrase it that way) of software vendors formed to select, build, or define a distro for the business desktop it'd become a more viable option.

If it was installed broadly at work, many people in turn would look for it for home use. It's how MS-DOS and then MS Windows became the de facto standard in a time of CP/M, Unix, Apple DOS, Atari DOS, GEOS, Amiga Workspace, OS/2, and MacOS. Having a single majority OS didn't happen because it was superior. It happened because of network effects.

ReHabMan is a legend. Together with the guy that debugs and fixes Intel CPU powersaving issues.

This is great. The usual emphatic declarations of listening and caring about customers rings more hollow with every Apple press event that I watch.

Things are messed up when they let a product cycle lapse for 4 years (i.e. Mac Pro) while leaving everyone in the dark the entire time.

Nvidia has supported installing their latest cards into old Mac Pros for years now with their web driver. Nothing new. They still have no support for Apple EFI in these cards (meaning the cards have no video output during boot and install of OS updates, making them incredibly inconvenient to use in day to day work).

They work just fine for OS updates, I just installed one on mine. The only thing you lose is an Apple boot logo.

If Apple now respond with locking out Hackintosh users in any upcoming MacOS update...

Then they'll probably do Microsoft a huge favour in persuading a lot of MacOS users to finally go Windows.

I'd expect my current Hackintosh would last me 3-4 years now that it runs with a 1080 Ti.

You could also try giving Linux Mint a shot, too. Unlike Ubuntu and Windows 10, you don't deal with copious ads in your file manager and launcher and things like that.

Only caveat there is to make sure you're ISO's are hacked.

Unfortunately i use After Effects too often.

I'm planning to run Linux, but also run OS X and Windows 10 at the same time using KVM and dedicate a GPU (Via passthrough) for each of these. This way i get the added benefit of not having to reboot to enter Windows, plus i can make snapshots of the entire VM whenever i desire and thus do A/B tests in a "native" environment.

OS X works very well with KVM, so it is certainly doable.

I've seen exactly one ad (for Onedrive) in Win10 after daily use since it came out. It actually runs stuff too, which is a nice perk to tout over Linux.

But what's the point of owning a "Hackintosh" if you're just going to run Windows on it, that's usually known as a "PC"

Once the Pascal drivers come out, no spec upgrade from Apple to the Mac Pro lineup will pull people back from making their own Hackintoshes with 1060/80(Ti) & going nuts with rendering or machine learning applications!

Cheaper hardware with top of the line specs, upgradeability & compatibility with Windoze, *NIX & macOS.

Might not pull people back but this could be a clear indication that the next Mac Pro will have user changeable hardware which is a step back in the right direction.

> Once the Pascal drivers come out

It was released last week, though still considered a beta.

I've had no issues at all with my 1080 Ti, running 3x screens at 1440P and CUDA with latest version works perfectly stable.

Or they might switch to Linux where that all 'just works'.

For those who think this is sarcasm, the last update to the nVidia drivers fixed most of my issues on Ubuntu. I only have a 980 and not doing machine learning professionally, but this thing handles any game I throw at it.

> I only have a 980

It's such a tribute to the modern semi conductor industry that you can write that so casually, and yet, we're talking about an approximately 5 TFLOPS co-processor here.

Not all that long ago that would have been a rack full of very expensive hardware and not all that long before that half a floor in a DC.

Welcome to the future.

And you're right, definitely not sarcastic.

For gaming or home use its a big deal, for professionals, why waste time with as single 2 year old card.

A card like that is still more than powerful enough to learn with. That's technically still 'home' use but as a professional entering a field you could get a lot of mileage out of it, especially if you already have it.

I wouldn't buy one new or second hand to study with today.

Yeah that's fine too. But for those with development work that entails Xcode usage, constant OS switching & time spent managing files & using (some great) apps is better served with macOS.

I think this is an overly optimistic view. While the new nVidia drivers might support newer cards, they don't update the severely outdated OpenGL 4.1 stack, fix any of the bugs in the OpenGL stack, or provide Vulkan support.

In short, it's difficult for me to be excited about this given you'll effectively be using your 2017 nVidia card with 2010 limitations.

Perhaps the story is different for CUDA support, and maybe Metal somewhat makes up for the lack of modern OpenGL support, but this feels more like a pyrrhic victory.

CUDA works just fine. The lack of up-to-date OGL support is a non-issue for most professional applications.

NVIDIA has been "casually" helping out Hackintosh users with driver updates for their cards that aren't realistically used anywhere else for a while now (nobody has that pre-"trashcan" Mac Pro with the swappable PCI Express GPU slot anymore).

Couldn't this just be aimed for GPU Docks (mainly for laptops)?

Or Apple doesn't support such devices?

Edit: Well it seems that's not straight forward... but maybe NVIDIA is playing ahead of the curve with TB3 on MBPro 2016 : http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/12/01/the-thunderbolt-3-...

I'm still not sure whether this is Nvidia "playing ball" with Apple, or whether this is Nvidia saying to Apple customers "Hey Apple guys, we love you now! Please don't go with AMD!"

I found myself asking the same question. Either way, this is great. Going to pick up a 1070 for my hackintosh.

Anyone has any tutorials on how to build your own hackintosh with Ryzen+1080?

That would be a time saver. Thanks

The common wisdom is that support for AMD chips / MBs is sufficiently poor in MacOS that it's probably not a good idea. Check out https://www.tonymacx86.com/

While it's relatively easy to build an Intel based hackintosh, building an AMD based one is a rare occasion, and it's certainly not recommended if one's goal is a stable, production setup. It's always better to buy a Mac or go the Intel route and build one based on tested/community-approved components: https://www.tonymacx86.com/buyersguide/april/2017

Good luck!

It's not worth the hassle to try Hackintoshing with an AMD CPU

The one-word answer would be "don't."

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