3 ms·
I ran a hackintosh setup for most of my university days. I loved OS X on my MacBook but I wanted more power and a larger screen, and I couldn't afford a Mac Pr
by Zarel 7y ago
I ran a hackintosh setup for most of my university days.
I loved OS X on my MacBook but I wanted more power and a larger screen, and I couldn't afford a Mac Pro.
Compared to both Windows and Linux, I preferred OS X's behavior in:
- the systemwide emacs keybindings in every textbox
- the consistent keyboard shortcuts (Cmd+C was always Copy, Ctrl+C was always Interrupt)
- the dedicated keyboard key (Option) for typing non-ASCII characters
- the general higher quality of apps that were available (Transmit was a better FTP client, TotalTerminal a better terminal, Preview a better PDF viewer, iBooks a better ebook reader, MplayerX a better video player, iTunes a better music player, Adium a better chat app, Transmission a better torrent app, Parallels a better VM, than anything for Windows or Linux)
- the consistent look-and-feel of apps
- the centralized notification system, Growl (before any OS had built-in notification support, the third-party Growl library was the de-facto standard on Mac, at a time when in other OSes, every app used their own notifications that constantly got in each other's way)
- QuickLook
Compared to Windows, I liked:
- the presence of a bash terminal underlying everything
- multiple desktops (Windows has this now, but didn't back then)
- Exposé (the thing that showed all open windows so you could click the one you wanted to easily switch to it)
Compared to Linux, I liked:
- Homebrew, a package manager which actually installed up-to-date packages instead of years-old packages (this was before Linuxbrew)
- official support for various paid apps like Photoshop and MS Word
- the ability to do many important things in a GUI (and therefore, the ability to do new things without needing to Google them)
Aside from the complications updates posed, I ran into no major problems with the hackintosh setup, other than I think the microphone didn't work? Everything else worked fine. I had overall much fewer problems than I have with Linux.
- JoelTheSuperior 7y agoWhat made you stop using one?
- Zarel 7y agoThis is one of my favorite stories. When I updated to OS X 10.7 Lion on my Hackintosh, I got a weird issue where the hard drive would wipe itself every few days – like, I would turn on the computer, and it would tell me the hard drive was blank and had no operating system on it, and I had to reinstall everything all over again. (To be clear, this was the first issue of any kind my Hackintosh had ever gotten.) At that point, my business had gotten successful, so I could afford to buy a 2013 Mac Pro and stop worrying about what went wrong. So I bought the Mac Pro... and its SSD still wiped itself after a few days. Turns out, the problem was in Lion's exFAT driver. I'd partitioned it into HFS+ for Mac, NTFS for Windows, and a shared exFAT partition, like on my Hackintosh, and Lion just couldn't handle that. I gave up on having an exFAT partition after that, but kept the Mac Pro because it was so nice (it was also much quieter and smaller, which let me put it in my backpack for hackathons).
- oauea 7y agoDid you apply security updates when they came out? If not, how did you justify connecting such an outdated machine to the internet?