My Life With a Hackintosh | Hacker News Reader

My Life With a Hackintosh

fastcompany.com

12 pointsauferstehung23 comments

I wonder how many of the Hackintosh people have tried Linux. I would say it is much simpler to setup a nice Linux distro and make it look like a Mac... That is if you are into that sort of thing.

All you would need is Gnome, an OS X theme and AWN. It is free and legal.

I ran a Macbook pro for a few years in college and I cant bring myself to switch back from Linux. The only thing that might put me on Mac is developing an iPhone/Touch app. I feel Linux is on par or somewhere not too far behind. Am I wrong here?

I think most of the Hackintosh community has probably tried Linux, at least in VMWware or Virtualbox. After all, it's much easier to install these days.

Setting up a Hackintosh now is kind of like installing Linux ~8 years ago. That spare system you have might work (if it's semi recent hardware, in this case), but you might never get the thing to boot. However, if you buy a system with a Hackintosh in mind, if you read the forums and do the research, you will in all likelihood not have any problems and be able to treat it as if it were a real Mac.

> would say it is much simpler to setup a nice Linux distro and make it look like a Mac...

I'm sorry but this is a pet peeve of mine, or at least it touches on one.

I ran Linux for ~8 years as my primary desktop. For most of that time I did not have a Windows machine. I used GNOME most of the time but also spent a lot of time in KDE and Enlightenment. I switched to OSX in '06 but I still install Linux every now and then to see where things are, and sometimes I pop by gnome-look or gnome themes sites to see what's going on there.

Point being, I have a lot of experience using Linux.

That said, you can maybe, maybe get Linux to the point where you can take a screenshot and it would pass as OSX to a casual OSX user. You can never, ever get Linux to the point where it would fool an OSX user for more than 2-3 seconds. Pretty much to the point where if they interact with the computer at all they'll know.

It's like throwing a camo tent over a tank and saying "look, the tank is invisible". It might not show up from 10k feet but anyone that gets near it is going to know it's not OSX, or think it's a very, very broken OSX system.

I've seen the blog posts about making GNOME look like OSX and they're insane. They put some crap ass GTK theme together, throw in cairo dock, tweak crap for 4 hours and say "look, it's just like OSX but Linux". No, it is not.

> I feel Linux is on par or somewhere not too far behind. Am I wrong here?

I don't think Linux can hold a candle to OSX, my opinion of course, except that the one app I've always wished OSX had is Tomboy... best "sticky notes" app ever.

OS X looks good because it's visually consistent, something that cannot be said for Linux..

Just in terms of frameworks, on Linux there is (in common use today) GTK+, Tk, Qt, wx (and probably others). There's also different versions, and different themes (and the themes aren't interoperable, so if you have use a specific GTK theme, and start at a Tk application, they'll look completely different)

On OS X there is Cocoa, and that's about it. There is Carbon, but it's deprecated and used by very few applications

The default Ubuntu install looks good (colour-scheme preferences aside). It only looks bad when you start installing other applications - as soon as you install, say, a KDE application it looks horrible.. Not because that application necessarily looks bad, but because it's inconsistent..

I felt the opposite. I started a new job, and have both a linux (ubuntu/kde 4.3) and a mac machine.

I have developed mostly on windows (in mobile, you almost have to, as a lot of emulators are windows only, except iphone), and at home I have windows XP.

I wanted to like linux, but I couldn't. Too many little things that were just not right, There is nothing like "major" that doesn't work, but it is more like death from 1000s cuts. Even repositioning the taskbar on the top, and making it the siz you want, and have the other menus down, was a pain. Ejecting a USB device, doesn't quite work. Tranfering files through usb is more like magic. There is a progress bar, but at some point it dissapears. You would thing that it is b/c the transfer is done, but no. It is just a bug. You disconnect your usb, and the file is not there.

The whole experience is a pain. Switched to mac as fast as I could.

My preference so far: Mac Os Windows XP Linux/ubuntu - Vista (draw)

If windows 7 was available, perhaps it would have been on pair with MacOs.

I understand that for server development, linux is great, but for mobile stuff, it is just not needed at all.

I'd rather have a system that just works.

"Tranfering files through usb is more like magic."

It sounds like you have a major problem with your install. I use Ubuntu daily and never experienced anything close to it. My biggest problem is to remember what package to download to make my Atheros wireless work again.

And what's the pain in middle-button-dragging the bars to wherever you want them to be?

There is also commercial application compatibility. Windows is king, but OS X is still light years ahead of linux. Netflix and iTunes are two apps that come to mind. I want to use them, but not bad enough to boot Windows. Hacking OS X to work on my PC is probably easier than teaching my family how to make VirtualBox run at full screen.

Really? I use wine all the time with no problems, and vbox right-ctrl-f seems a pretty easy key combo!

If you use Wine with Silverlight 3 there are many Linux boards that would welcome your howto.

right-ctrl-f is easy enough, but it doesn't change the monitor resolution as windows sees it. Unless you were already running vbox at native resolution (meaning much of the virtual screen was cut off) then you also have to increase the resolution in windows. It's like a 3 step processes, which is fine for me buy not for my wife. She'd just always stay in virtual box, so I do her one better and just boot Windows, which I don't like but she couldn't care less.

I have have been using Linux for about 6-8 years. At work, I have used Gentoo, XP, Solaris, HPUX, and AIX. I know several people that have hackintoshs, myself included. All of them are very familiar with Linux, Unix, and Windows. It isn't about simple. It is partly about the challenge. Do you know why we do it? You may be able to make Gnome look like OSX, but not feel like OSX.

The main reason I build the hackintosh is the price. I built a computer for just over $1000 that is equivalent to a $2800 MacPro. My wife needs to use the computer. She is a photographer and thus needs Photoshop and printing. And please don't mention Gimp or printing on Linux. It doesn't cut it for professional photographers.

Maybe he's a huge fan of Garage Band? I would love to see something like that for Linux - and Rosegarden ain't it.

Or Adobe Creative Suite

Getting it to work could be a fun project, but I don't understand the desire beyond that. I thought the point of running OS X was that it "just worked"; if so a hackintosh makes absolutely no sense to me. Compound that with the licensing legality issues and I see no reason to actually bother.

Ah, but, see, after the initial effort, at least on the mini9, it does Just Work. The initial effort is also pretty modest, beyond the fact that it doesn't come pre-installed.

Even "Software Update" works.

It's also only $350 ($300 for the smaller SSD which would require greater install effort by removing enough to have enough free space).

For other hardware, however, I agree: it's not worth the bother.

I prefer Linux.

Hackintosh's are pretty old news. I'd love to see an article detailing some of the challenges in the actual hacking of it.

My MacBook Air went belly up two days ago. For that kind of money, I'd expect better than 14 months of life and I've treated it like a museum piece. Our little $200 lenovo netbook is durable, we caught my son jumping on it on the bed yesterday. We scolded him but he did no damage to the laptop. My 6 year old ThinkPad churns away and has been used and abused.

I am seriously considering putting together a hackintosh before shelling out more to get my Air fixed.

So I'd like to hear what people would actually DO with a mac tablet....

Are you going to use it like an oversized iPod? Type large documents with the touchscreen? Watch movies? Read books?

I took Spindler's comments during the presentation as a thinly veiled message of "look, the iPod touch/iPhone can do most of what you want here, so don't hold your breath for a tablet".

Then again, that's usually a sign there's one around the corner...

Why did this get any votes? The information boils down to "you can install OS X on a netbook with some effort", which surely is very old news?

Is it enough to sport the word "Hack" in the title to get on Hacker News?

I agree, this article hardly provided any useful information or anything relatively new. It hardly even discussed the hack of it.

> Apple didn't make it. I did. The machine I'm using is known as a "Hackintosh" -- actually a 9-inch Dell netbook that I've hacked to run Apple's Macintosh operating system.

> In the end, I had a crude version of the Mac tablet computer that the rumor mill always says is just around the corner.

When did Dell come out with a 9" TabletPC?

> Turning a netbook into a Mac certainly isn't a task for technical naïfs [...]

Oh... that 'Tablet' PC.

A netbook is not a tablet pc; it's a mini-laptop. Nowhere does the author refer to a tablet pc. Indeed, he specifically mentions the Dell Mini 9 netbook, which has been on sale for the past year.

Sarcasm... The 'Mac Tablet' that has been rumored forever is an Apple version of the TabletPC. He claimed to have a 'crude version' of a the rumored 'Mac tablet.' It's hard to have that when the Mac tablet's main feature is a touchscreen. I doubt the Dell netbook has a touchscreen. Ergo, he does not have a 'crude version' of such a device unless your definition of 'crude' includes 'missing the most important feature.'

"In the end, I had a crude version of the Mac tablet computer that the rumor mill always says is just around the corner."

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