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Comment by taway2012 | Hacker News Reader

taway2012

Sort of off-topic question. :)

Is it still the case that updates from Apple will randomly break a Hackintosh? It used to be the case a few years ago. Has it gotten easier to update a Hackintosh these days?

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No, you still have to refuse all OS updates. The OS update process costs you a few hours, spent carefully reading whatever the OSX hackers have to say about it.

Depending on your hardware there could be a standard process, but it almost always requires a bit of command line work, clicking cancel at the right time, and withstanding the temptation of clicking reboot when the installer asks you to.

That said, I've used OSX on non-Apple hardware for two years as my main development/entertainment machine. Upgrading wasn't desireable anyway because newer versions of OSX stopped supporting multi-monitors after 10.6.7 I believe. It really was great to be able to use OSX on my desktop.

Finally when staying on 10.6.7 really started to give problems, I decided to try Ubuntu again. I was pleasantly surprised that Ubuntu now actually is very usable as a workstation for development. It's got all window manager features 10.6.7 had, good terminal emulators, editors, and the important browsers, what more do you need? (don't say photoshop :@)

10.9 has pretty good multi-monitor support.

> what more do you need? (don't say photoshop :@)

In my case it's Lightroom. :)

Longtime Ubuntu user here. Bought a Mac mini as my desktop replacement on the off-chance that I might write an iOS app.

I'm actually running Ubuntu inside Mac as my development environment. Ubuntu also nicely solves the "blurry text" problem [flame away! :)]

There's no blurry text problem -- Mac has a "respect the font design" look, Windows has a "crude text" problem, and Linux is somewhere in between.

That said, a retina display totally changes everything. No "blurry" and no-crude. Just as reading a finely printed book. You wont want to go back to a low DPI monitor after a week of using a retina.

As for using Ubuntu for development inside OS X, that's actually the best of both worlds. You have a stable desktop system, and you can have arbitrary development environments for every job (assuming you use a VM), that are just like the target environment (assuming you deploy on Linux).

I'd also suggest trying Vagrant, if you don't use it already.

Yep, I know the Mac's text looks blurrier:

Link for anybody else interested: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/font-rendering-resp... (linked articles are good too)

OK, I see why a downvoter downvoted it. I meant to write:

"Yep, I know why the Mac's text looks blurrier" i.e., I meant to agree with 'coldtea' and add to the discussion.

The way I've written it now makes it sound like I'm disagreeing. Anyway, the link above should be useful to future readers.

>Finally when staying on 10.6.7 really started to give problems, I decided to try Ubuntu again. I was pleasantly surprised that Ubuntu now actually is very usable as a workstation for development. It's got all window manager features 10.6.7 had, good terminal emulators, editors, and the important browsers, what more do you need? (don't say photoshop :@)

Photoshop, Office, proper multimedia capabilities (DAWs, NLEs), full support for all my laptops features, and never ever having to tinker to get some basic device working.

"newer versions of OSX stopped supporting multi-monitors after 10.6.7 I believe."

My two displays on 10.9 say you "believe" wrong.

Mine that I am typing on right now can be updated through the app store. Sound breaks but that is a two minute fix.

Z68MA-D2H-B3 2500K OD'ed to 4.5GHZ 650TI Boost 2Gig

It is actually easier to install OS X on this then it is Windows.

Major updates 10.8 -> 10.9 do require booting from a USB stick made with Unibeast. But 10.9 -> 10.9.1 works just fine.

This. I've been lurking on the hackintosh forums[1] and it really isn't very hard. I'm about to jump into the hack world. The decision process was pretty difficult, but I think I've crossed all the t's and dotted all the i's. I recorded the hardest decisions in my blog[2]. Since I needed RAID 5, it took a while to feel comfortable, but now I do and I'm about to purchase the hardware.

[1] http://www.tonymacx86.com/forum.php

[2] http://envoy510.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/new-mac-pro-or-hack...

You can't use Software Update to install OS updates (you can update everything else through there though). It's fairly easy to install the updates via USB as long as you have your configuration and drivers backed up though.

I have updated all of my hakintoshes via software update with no issues. Just keep a recovery USB stick handy if one of the updates goes bad.

That's good to know, might have to give that a shot next time. I've actively avoided doing it that way up until now since it's the standard recommendation not to. I just upgraded mine to 10.9.1 today from 10.8.5, by booting from a Unibeast USB stick - worked flawlessly.

Randomly, but seldomly. I use a hackintosh for my day-to-day work, and so far I only had one update where I needed to roll back until new patches were available. 10.9.0 to 10.9.1 went completely smooth for example.

FWIW, I haven't had any update issues for years. If you have hardware setup that was easy to install on, then you'll have a hardware setup that is easy to update. If you had to do anything special after the basic install, you'll probably have to do the same thing after each update.

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