Building a Hackingtosh, good/bad idea?

As awesome as Linux is 3rd partie software support its still atrocious, GIMP isn't photoshop, there is nothing like AE and while there are great dev tools Windows and OSX still get some of the best.

But developing on windows was a pain, and X is still a .nix OS with a terminal and even if it sucks for gaming it still has better app support than even Ubuntu. I don't like apple's shitty overpriced hardware and thats a problem, so I'm thinking of building my own.

What do you guys think?

 

You need to buy specific hardware that's very close to what Apple uses for their computers or it will be funny quest to find the source of kernel panic. Usually various osx86 forums have some hardware compatibility lists.

But personally, except for Adobe stuff (some of which runs perfectly in wine/CrossOver in linux) there's nothing else you won't find in Ubuntu, hell, you'll get more software in repository alone than OS X got

And yeah, OS X sucks for gaming, except if you build a really powerful hackintosh with proper wine/CrossOver setup (many things will still be easier in linux). Not to mention native windows box, but any decent linux box will run a lot more games (natively or in wine) than any Mac. Many emulators that run flawlessly in windows or linux got serious issues in OS X. From my experience OS X is WAY more stable than any windows, but still it's not as rock solid as my linux box (i'm getting kernel panics only if i mess with some WIP modules or other experimental kernel space stuff , in OS X user space software can cause system to crash and it's usually much harder to kill remotely some program that blocked inputs or GUI, in linux it's easy as pie)
Back to hardware compatibility - don't expect to plug any USB device and get it working it a matter of seconds like it will be with windows or linux. For many devices except HID devices or mass storage devices there will be no drivers.
But if you want to try - build a cheapest fully compatible machine and try it. If it will be ok for you, then you can build a more powerful and expensive hackintosh.

 

Isn't there an USB plug that can turn most PC into Macintosh clone, allowing you to install MacOS and Macintosh software? Or do you need something a bit older, based on PowerPC CPU or 680x0 CPU?

 

I do remember having a Macintosh 128k emulator for my Amiga 3000. it was a parallel port device that you put the Mac roms into and it read the roms from the device. worked fine till I needed Mac 512k and higher support.

there are a few Mac emus for the PC and some of them seem pretty good for emus..

on emus, I have the latest versions os c64 forever and Amiga forever, I think these are some of the best emus around.

 

Honestly? It's probably cheaper and easier to buy a MacMini. Buy a used one, they can be a lot cheaper. If you buy a recent model, you will get the latest OS (Mountain Lion) and latest iLife included. I got the mid range model in 2011, core i5 with integrated Intel graphics, and it plays all the games I've ever needed (mostly stuff from various "bundles" with Steam keys, but I've got Bioshock 2 on it and that runs flawlessly), and it is guaranteed to work. I've connected it to my monitor via HDMI and have a second monitor on the Thunderbolt port (yes, it supports dual monitors out of the box!) If you upgrade the hard drive to a solid state, it runs like a speed demon, it you up the RAM to 8GB, it runs smooth like butter - but all of that can be incremental after purchase.

 

I've never had an issue with any USB hardware on a real Mac. I have some non HID based USB devices (e.g. Tascam audio input devices) and they work just as well in Mac OS X as they do in Windows. So long as is says it supports Mac, it works. Devices rarely say they are supported by Linux, so you'll instead need to trawl the internet for information.

The other thing to note is it depends what you want to use the computer for. I do a lot of music production in my "home studio" and the OS X audio subsystem is so low latency, one can use the on-board audio devices to record multitrack recordings, where as to achieve that in Windows you need a hacky ASIO driver work around, and in Linux you need to rebuild the kernel with realtime options on (or find a distro that someone else did that for, but then not be using something simple like Ubuntu.) Swings and roundabouts. I got a better audio device to allow simultanious multi track recording, but had I been recording a track at a time still, I could have stuck with the built in audio for a lot longer.

 

A common misconception. Once you factor in everything that a Mac includes (the OS, bundled software, after-sales service, don't have to build it, resale value retention, etc etc etc), they do work out to be competitive with the alternatives.

The hackintosh scene is pretty alive still, and as other have said, you'll have the most joy with a system that closely resembles an existing Mac model, since that's where the driver support is.

Don't know where you heard that. Unless you have something super old or super obscure, it'll generally work just fine.

 

Pretty much disagree with everything you've said.

Making a Hackintosh out of anything is doable these days and there are so many handy tools (UniBeat/MultiBeast) to help you that it's hard not to succeed after a few tries.

Hardware compatibility can be an issue but there's always a work around somewhere as long as you stay clear of a few older graphics chipsets (Intel GMA Series for example). Wifi can also be a bit of an issue but worst case scenario buy a USB dongle that's Mac compatible.

30 minutes in a Hackintosh forum will lead you in the right direction.

Building your first Hackintosh is kinda like building a house of cards, you do a bit at a time and then stand back and make sure everything is stable before doing the next part, eventually you'll learn the ins and outs of your system and it's simple. (ok that was shit analogy but it's the best I could come up with at 2.30am).

My dad recently gave me an old beat up Advent laptop. It was co-branded by Dixons the defunct electronics chain. The specs weren't even on google. Anyway after 2 hours it was running Lion 10.7.5 and still is, I use it as a Macbook when I visit my girlfriend.

It's that easy.

Disclaimer - you will probably need a Mac to make a Hackintosh though...that is a pretty big caveat.

However to be honest it is probably best to buy a Mac Mini. Even an older one with a decent Core 2 Duo will be more than capable if you swap out the HDD for an SSD.

 

OP was talking about Adobe stuff, so MacMini with tiny SSD won't be the right choice.
And i don't say that building a hackintosh is something really hard. It's not, as long as you buy proper components. Of course you can run OS on pretty much every PC that got a CPU with SSE3, but i think it will be better to get it running as stable as it is on original Apple hardware.

 

When you take out "devices except HID devices or mass storage devices" then all you're left with is "super old or super obscure". I have a laptop with a parallel port that I use from time to time because of some super old or super obscure hardware.

 

I had a hackintosh partition on my i7 based laptop, worked very well short of the audio and wifi card which would've worked had I put in a bit of effort. Was a bog standard HP Pavilion DV7t-3300.

 

Not necessarily. I use various microcontroller programmers successfully on my MBP, as easily as one would on any Linux. There are lots of devices outside the HID and mass storage classes that work just fine on OSX.

 

Why wouldn't it be the right choice?

My primary iMac is a 3Ghz C2D with 4GB of Ram and "Adobe Stuff" works just fine.

Therefore I can't see how a basic i5 Mini wouldn't be capable enough.

 

I've got a hackintosh, I did have a VM which I used for iMessages but due to finding out that vmware esx actually EMULATES EFI and it isn't real EFI at all, the bootloader would cause the machine to just power off, so I deleted it.
Anyway, if you want to give a hackintosh a try, I suggest you try iaktos ml2, that's what I've got running on this PC at the moment, I switch between arch and mac on different SCSI drives.
In terms of compatibility, iaktos worked fine on this PC, until it entered sleep (forgot to turn it off) and then refused to return from sleep, it then refused to boot on that drive ever again, ever after a few reinstalls, got another drive and it seems stable with sleep completely disabled. Got a GeForce 9600 card, it works OK with QE, etc. but if you think flash is bad on linux, wow, you'll love mac, 3 tabs of youtube makes firefox grind to a halt. Minecraft runs like utter crap, as does terraria (using MacTerraria), I find it astonishing but macs are much worse than linux for gaming on the same hardware.
Support for USB equipment is a complete waste of time, got macam and have 2 USB webcams that are both on the macam supported list, 'usb communication error' using macam, nothing else even picks up that a camera is detected, it will sometimes change my second monitor's refresh rate and doesn't detect if you detach a monitor, and the software everyone recommends, switchresx, is so bad it's not even worth getting the trial. It doesn't work and gives you 'phantom' screens and you lose your mouse cursor on them.
I've never used photoshop 3D on windows, but have used after effects on windows with older ATI and nvidia GFX cards and it's ran smooth, photoshop 3D on mac on this though, W O W... It basically freezes if you drag to a different frame, even if nothing changes (and it's in the lowest quality) and it took about an HOUR to render a 10 second video of 2 boxes, one moving.
I used to do things with iOS 2.x back in the day, and remember the huge memory leaks the OFFICIAL apple libraries had, and it shocked me.

Overall, if you like mac, give iaktos/a real mac a try. You will have problems using a hackintosh, they might be minor or they might be major, you can live with or fix some of them, others you can't. If on the other hand you haven't used mac, I wouldn't bother with it, any operating system that lacks being able to cut a file shouldn't even be classed as an operating system. Give wine/crossover/games for linux a try, photoshop works fine in it as does microsoft office, or use a VM/RDP.

(But on the plus side, I've never seen an OS shut down so fast. Less than 3 seconds after clicking 'shutdown' the machine is off... I'm sure there's a use for that somewhere? Lol)

 

Try to open 2.5Gb file

 

Both of those games run fine on my MBP, which "only" has Intel HD3000 graphics. On the same system in Ubuntu and in Windows, performance is about equal.

Real Macs don't have this problem. That doesn't help with using a Hackintosh, but I'm saying this so y'all know it's not a fault in the OS, but rather in how it's fooled into running on a non-Mac video card.

Not sure what you mean by "cut a file", but dd is there and works as expected. As is ps, grep, ln, top, tail, cat, less, etc etc.

 

I think they mean as in "cut and paste". But, as the Mac UI was always about drag-and-drop, this is pretty much a usage issue, not an actual shortfall. It's a bit like how Windows deals with mounted drives when compared with the way many other OS mount drives on the desktop (Amiga did, BeOS did, Mac OS classic did, Mac OS X does.) I really prefer the way every other OS I've used for any length of time does it, but I don't claim Windows is lacking because it sees things differently. *shrugs*

 

iaktos is a hacked version of Mac OS X. You get what you pay for. Personally, I've had mixed experiences with Hackintosh. I have a U100 Netbook and that ran Leopard like a champ, but Snow Leopard was highly unstable. Then again, I have a Macbook (Black 2007, Santa Rosa C2D) and a Mac Mini (2011, i5) and both still run Lion like champs. The Macbook struggles with battery life when a lot of Flash is used, but the actual Laptop doesn't slow down or freeze at all. The Macbook has 4GB RAM and a 7200rmp hard drive now, but those are the only optimisations.

That is a common issue, to do with the underlying OS power management drivers/sunsystem not being compatible with your hardware. That happened on my Netbook too. Generally, the power management needs to be completely hacked to get it to work, because Mac OS X is targeted to specific hardware and not general purpose IA32 or X64.

My kids play Minecraft all the time on the Mini, they play a lot of flash games (Moviestar Planet, Disney stuff, Moshi Monsters, Binweevils) and youtube. The Mini doesn't struggle at all. The Macbook just burns through the battery a lot faster.

Any recent modern camera will work. Anything that required an exotic driver on Windows, wont.

This is not an issue on real Mac hardware. It's a symptom of a hacked driver that doesn't fully support your hardware.

This is *your* hardware's issue, no anything to do with the OS.

That's a bit too ranty for me. I switched to Mac full time outside of the day job (Windows programming) in 2007, and prior to that I've owned a bunch of other Macs. I've seen none of the issues you list on real Apple hardware. As I said in another response, Mac UI is based on drag and drop plus "duplicate". If you want to cut a file, you simply drag it to a new finder window. Basing your choice of OS primarily on such a trivial feature request is quite silly.

If you want to run Windows apps, Crossover works just fine on the Mac, and there are countless ways to create a VM on a Mac, not least VirtualBox, but also VMWare and Parallels. And, you know what - there's a native version of MS Office, which in many ways is actually nicer than the version on Windows.

 

Happens on the Mac Pro I am using right now, so I respectfully disagree.

[HR][/HR]
To the thread in general:

I am Apple certified and I don't like them much. They get some things right, fail miserably on others. "it just works" is a lie.

Swings and round abouts, if it works for you and what you do - great. If not, use something else.

OSes seem a lot like religion these days - too much preaching and trying to convert people for my liking. Use what works for you and be happy

 

Weird. I plug and un-plug monitors from my MBP about a dozen times a day, copes just fine. Same on my 2008 17" MBP when I had it.