Now that I have more disposable cash, but waaay less time, I couldn't imagine "wasting my time" doing this sort of thing. These days I want to -use- the computer, not spend time trying to convince it to work.

Incidentally it's the exact same journey with my cars. 35 years ago I was fixing something on my car most weekends. Now I just want to turn the key and go somewhere.

Hackintosh served the purpose for its time. It'll be fondly remembered. But I think the next generation of tinkerers will find some other thing yo capture the imagination.

> Linux is only free if your time is worthless!

Something never quite sat right with me about this argument, and your comment finally made me understand what it is: the understanding you gain from tinkering is priceless, and it's exactly the experience that you use to help everyone around you: it turns you into an expert.

So yes, I may just want to turn the key and have my car work. But when it doesn't, I often wish I was that guy that had tinkered with my car, so I can better understand what was wrong, and whether I can fix it myself or if I needed a professional.

I run Linux on all my machines, and my family generally uses Mac (both sides), but all those years tinkering with Linux, they still come to me for help with their Mac machines that they insisted would Just Work.

All that out of the way, I agree with your fundamental premise: hackintosh is likely in the rear view mirror for the next generation of tinkerers.

Or not just an engineer

The problem with this approach is then you get a generation of engineers with tunnel vision thinking the One True Way to achieve your goal is the same way your GNU (or whatever) software did it.

Invest time in learning your technologies, whatever they are. There's valuable knowledge in proprietary stuff just as there is in OSS.

I honestly don't know how people use Windows machines as a dev environment 24/7. It would drive me mad. Everything's so wonky and weird. Everything from symlinks to file permissions is just backwards and fucky.

The reason I switched was because Windows didn't work. Win11's desktop makes early-2010s KDE look like a smooth, bug-free experience. My laptop (a 10th gen X1 thinkpad) was plagued with driver problems. At least twice a month, I'd have to reboot when I joined a meeting and discovered my mic wouldn't un-mute. Switching to Ububtu solved both of these problems, and I don't have to deal with an awkwardly bifurcated environment where a couple of my CLI tools run in WSL while everything else is native. Oh, and my Zephyr build times are a good 25% faster now.

As a power user, Linux is just so much nicer. I constantly get frustrated, especially with macOS, about stuff that I can’t easily. In Linux my stuff works and if it doesn’t it can be made to work (usually). In Windows/Mac it’ll often take considerable effort to make the system work the way I want, or it’s just not possible.

I think with proprietary software ‘it just works’ is only a thing if you’re happy with the basic experience that is tuned to the average person. If you have more complex needs, you should be using Linux (and if you know your stuff or use the right distro, things will likely also ‘just work’).

If you want a modern linux distro, try Fedora Cinnamon or something that isnt on Debian branch.

What is wrong with Debian?

Use a desktop-based distro.

If you ever want to know why people think Linux Desktop sucks, just ask them what their experience was. It will be 100% debian-family.

Like learn the proprietary tech in the environments it's intended to be used in but if you can't use it in that environment I personally wouldn't waste my time with it. With FOSS tech at least you can make the argument that you can learn stuff by maintaining it properly but with a proprietary stack in an unsupported and actively user hostile environment the best you are going to do is learn how to maintain a fragile truce with the software gods.

A funny thing about "never work for free" advice is that a lot of highly paid jobs (investment banking, high end escorts) are about doing tons of client work for free in a way that eventually gets them to pay you way too much when they do pay you.

In fact most of the essential skills for my job I've learnt in my own time, and continue to learn. I invest my own money in equipment and training courses. I love learning. But only when it's interesting to me, not because it'll make more money to somebody else. If it'll make you more money, pay me.

Security research. And, uh, applied security research.

Mucking about and tinkering with things while one has the time, desire, and stuff to learn is a young "man's" game. I did all of that and absolutely learned a helluva lot. It did everything I needed from it. I got cheaper/better computer than what I could afford. I learned a hell of a lot about not just the hardware pieces I chose, but also why/how certain things about the OS that I never would have.

But now, I too just don't care. It was interesting, but I'm not that interested about maintaining an OS or how it works. I just want it to work. So for all of those that are willing to do all of that today, I'm all for it.

your comment came across to me as just another one of those "if you don't feel the same way i do, you're wrong". that's not true. people can just be in different places in their life. been there, done that does not mean you can't go there and do it too. we're just focused on different things now

I parleyed my curiosity in hardware into my first job. (My car-fixing skills alas didn't take me anywhere.) Hardware was fun for the first 10 years of my career, but now, well, it's just not interesting.

I played with Linux as well along the way, but I confess that too has dulled. Building your first machine is fun, building your 10th is less so.

The past couple years I've gone down the solar energy rabbit hole, and I'd love a wind turbine (but I just can't make the economic argument for having one.) If I do end up getting one, it'll be to prove to myself that it was a dumb idea all along.

In some ways we never stop tinkering. But the focus moves on to the next challenge.

Building a Linux box led me back to Apple.

I had been using UNIX at home, school and work for several years, and decided it was time to build my 3rd Linux box. Went to CompUSA out of idle curiosity to see what equipment they had, and the only computer in the store with Internet access was a Mac.

I hadn't used a Mac since the SE/30 days, and I suddenly realized that the NeXT acquisition which I'd mostly ignored had changed everything. Why build a Linux box and be locked out of tools like Photoshop when I could have UNIX workstation that ran commercial software (for, admittedly, significantly more money).

Never looked back.

That's what VMs are for. You're never really locked out. It may not make sense to go that way if Photoshop is THE thing you work with of course.

> when I could have UNIX workstation that ran commercial software

Because for lots of software MacOS is a second class system. Partially because there's just no way to test things on it without investing lots of money in hardware, so many people don't.

If you're doing lots of sysadmin / software maintenance style work, MacOS just provides unnecessary pain.

Amazingly a significant amount of the software that you use on a daily basis, perhaps unwittingly, is developed and maintained with macOS and Windows!

Sometimes you can tell by the simple fact that the git repo contains files in one directory that conflict in naming. Linux has no issues with "Foo" and "foo" coexisting.

macOS uses case insensitive filesystem by default for backwards compatibility with HFS+.

You can turn case sensitive on HFS+ and APFS if so desired for the "Linux" experience, via Disk Utility or the equivalent CLI tool.

And if looking to have some fun on an ecosystem that doesn't expect it, you can equally turn it on on NTFS, via fsutil.

For me, the psychic angst of using Windows is much, much worse than any Mac-related inconvenience.

The Year of Linux Desktop is delivered on a desktop VM.

In a work context a shortage of time (more customers than you can handle) means you need to discriminate, which means you can't make everyone happy. Which usually means differentiating based on value. (Aka, you get more expensive. )

For personal time you also become more discerning. Spend time with spouse, or build another computer, or lie under a car etc. Life has more demands, so there are more choices.

Incidentally, one of those choices is to work less.

The tinkering never goes away, but I prefer to tinker in profitable areas now. (I get to tinker for work.)

Will it always be flawless? No. Will it always work perfectly out of the box? No. But it will work and generally you have a good chance of it working as you wish assuming you are fine with Windows and what MS does with it.

I bought an Asus Zephyrus G15 (2022) specifically because it was recommended to me because it is supposed to be great for Linux and it's probably the worst Linux experience I have ever had. As the first piece of hardware that I specifically picked for Linux support.

Because most DEs don't do fractional scaling but all high end laptops have too much DPI to not have fractional scaling.

Nvidia is still not providing proper Linux drivers.

Asus can't program to save their lives but the tools that replace the Asus stuff on Windows are still better than the stuff that is replacing the Asus stuff on Linux (asusctl/ supergfxctl vs G-Helper).

I once had a machine where the nvme drive was simply not working. That was when Kernel 5 came out. It broke on Fedora but worked in Mint until Mint got Kernel 5.

During my last Linux adventure, KDE just died when using WhatsApp as a PWA (where I live, WhatsApp is essential software to have a social life).

And even after years of Wayland being around, it's still impossible to have apps that aren't blurry in most DEs because X11 is still around.

You're complaining about software updates and user friendly loading screens. The issues that drive people away from Linux and to Windows are literally unfixable to 99% of the techies that try Linux. I'm not fixing an nvme driver in the Kernel. That's not my area of expertise. But I still need my machine to work and on Windows, it does.

Rufus let's you create an ISO that skips most of the windows 11 nonsense btw.

Today, it's even made worse by the fact that MS is intentionally driving Windows UX to the ground in exchange for short term profits. Installing Windows isn't "clicking a few things." It's going out of your way to disable piles upon piles of anti-features MS throws at you, whether it be spyware, bloatware, or the hyper-aggressive nags to get you work against your will. The length die-hard Windows users go to to "de-bloatify" their Windows installation these days is absurd.

It's true that Windows had a superior end user UX over Linux 2 decades ago. But that has changed with improvements on the Linux side and poor, poor decisions on behalf of MS.

You having that experience does not make it a basic fact.

I didn’t even have to do the actual installation, as it was a prebuild machine. The only thing I had to do was the ‘clicking a few things and typing out username and password’ part.

Comparing the two between Ubuntu and Windows, I’m forced to conclude that Ubuntu has the easier version, or at least faster. And windows has the advantage/disadvantage of needing my MS account to set up an operating system.

Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Elementary OS and I guess a few others will beg to differ. And it takes way less than 8 minutes.

It is that simple with Ubuntu and similar distros. It has been that simple for many years.

Am I missing something?

(And the same applies to UEFI capable Linux-distros)

This argument is quite out of date. You'll lose a whole lot more time on forced Windows 10/11 updates than you'd spend managing a reasonable Linux installation. ("Reasonable" meaning avoid things like Arch or Ubuntu, and pick decent, natively supported hardware.)

With Windows 10/11 I’ve never had any problems, either with pre-built computers or my home-built PC. Hell, running Ubuntu in WSL has been relatively smooth as well.

My experience with Linux as an OS has been fairly good for many years, regardless of the distro. It’s the applications that could be an issue. Feels like it’s only very recently (post Steam deck in particular) that gaming seems to be viable at all. And it’s hard to beat the MS Office package for work. I recently got the idea to have two user accounts on my home computer where I have an account dedicated to working from home, logged into my office 365 account from work.. and it was honestly amazing how suddenly everything was just perfectly synced between my work and home computer.

If you have recently performed the analog activity on a Linux distribution, which is likely either apt update/upgrade or yum update, you will notice that a reboot is not required. These update approaches cannot alter the running kernel, but ksplice and kernelcare offer either free or low-cost options to address that.

Windows update is enormously painful compared to Linux. There can be no argument of this fact.

Which is something 99% of personal computers don’t care about even slightly. These days restarting your machine is a very inconsequential event, your browser can effortlessly reopen all the tabs you had active, macOS will even reopen all the windows for your native apps.

I don’t mean to defend Windows Update, I just think “you have to restart your computer!” is not a particularly good reason to damn it.

to the point that I know people that still turn their computers off when they are not using them.

A complete patch Tuesday session is twenty minutes of reduced performance, followed by a "don't reboot your computer" of unknown time both before and after the reboot.

Anything is better than that, especially when some updates either reboot immediately or kindly give you five minutes to close everything down (was tmux made precisely for Windows update?).

Exposure to apt/yum really makes Windows intolerable, just for this alone.

I have been a Windows user since XP. Never, not even once did Windows decide to reboot without asking first. Never.

The only way this could've have happened is if Windows kept asking you over the span of a week or 2 to restart to apply the updates and you kept postponing it.

Either way, "Hot Patching" will soon be a thing on Windows so restart won't be required every month [1].

[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/micr...

But even then, Microsoft is testing "Hot Patching" windows installation so critical updates install without requiring a reboot [1].

When that comes out, I wonder where the goalposts will be?

[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/micr...

A laptop is even dumber to complain about, because they're (suppose to be) suspended every time you close them.

A bittorrent client without preauthorization with IT and security? It's basically asking to get fired.

My vacation photos on a company laptop? Tricky - not a huge deal but not recommended. Better upload them to your cloud backup quickly.

Interesting. How do your vacation pictures help you do your job?

However, many companies do support BYOD, especially on mobile where it's a pain to carry two phones around.

There is some support for this. For example, Apple supports dual Apple IDs and separate encrypted volumes for personal and corporate data. Microsoft apps (Outlook) also have some support for separating personal and corporate data.

The benefits of BYOD can include lower equipment costs, lower friction, and potentially higher employee happiness and productivity.

You buy preinstalled. Works for me.

Most of these things worked without any fuss in Windows and I can't think of any notable Windows issues I had to deal with on the laptop before I installed Fedora.

You have exclusively used Debian-family distros.

Try a desktop distro like Fedora. Debian-family is a server distro that got famous after Conical/Ubuntu did marketing really hard.

Ubuntu is the Apple of Linux, they are famous from marketing, not quality.

However, I rarely have issues on Linux anymore, mostly because of something is broken on Linux, I can fix it.

Frankly, I hate that I’m forced to use windows as work. I feel like I need to constantly deal with BS windows annoyances. When I go home and work on Linux it like breathing a sigh of relief. My desktop actually feels fast and efficient.

> I rarely have issues on Linux anymore, mostly because of something is broken on Linux, I can fix it.

Perhaps your Windows knowledge is not up to the level of your Linux knowledge? It might be that a Windows expert could fix every issue you’ve listed and more.

I've worked daily in Windows enterprise environment for 15+ year (which mean that when it won't work I usually "just have" to get help from a colleague.

I've been in charge of a debian/postgresql cluster for 10+ year which I managed to keep upgraded on a reasonable schedule.

But Yet, since for some utterly opaque random reasons Windows updates on my home gaming PC stoped working two months ago I feel totally clueless about how to even begin to debug this crap.

There seems to be absolutely no clear working procedure out there to fix that, only people with the same problem shouting out to the void. All them poor souls trying byzantine procedures that have been duplicated ad nauseam from stack overflow to windows help forums through reddit and back.

The consensus seems to reinstall windows from scratch (by choosing amongst a handful of ways for which risks/benefice looks unclear).

That really piss me off and but I guess it's user fault because "my Windows knowledge is not up to the level..."

So in other words, it doesn't "just work."

So what exactly isn't working?

Change trackpad scrolling speed

Set up suspend-then-hibernate

GPU drivers (I have a box with an AMD APU and no idea how to actually utilize it)

Many games (Proton is amazing and a huge leap forward, but om average it's still more work than gaming on Windows. eg fiddling with different versions of Proton or finding out that a game's anti cheat will ban you for using Linux)

Higher res video streaming (I think this is usually a DRM issue?)

Full disclosure: I'm posting this list because I'm hoping that someone will tell me I'm wrong and that Gnome actually has an easy way to set the trackpad scroll speed

What does get annoying is when such an OS upgrade breaks the wifi drivers and I have to setup a bluetooth hotspot on my phone to access the github repo and fetch the latest driver version for the wifi dongle.

which one you would recommend?

I was a Debian devotee for nearly 25 years, but I've found it to be less foolproof and fault-free lately, and it has always lagged behind current package versions in Stable, forcing you to run Testing (or -backports) or even Unstable to get newer versions-- with corresponding potential for breakage.

For a server I'd recommend Proxmox (especially since ESXi is now only for enterprise). From there, have fun with different OSes.

Proxmox on a desktop is a bit meh, but possible. There's a lot of useful Linux desktop OSes out there. For example if you want to perform pentesting you can use Kali Linux. The one which interests me most from a security standpoint however, is Qubes OS (Fedora-based, sadly, but you can run anything on top of it). For gaming, SteamOS is neat (Arch-based, these days) and could even be fun to have a kid play around with Linux, too.

As for macOS, I played around with Hackintosh a couple of times in the past with success. But I never liked it much because you'd lag behind on security patches, and every new update would be praying it'd work. I did get it to work under Proxmox though, that was fun, but had to install a second (dedicated) GPU for that. I latest M-series ARM-based Macs work very well, only disadvantage is the fat price upgrade for RAM and SSD (often even soldered!). That part is terribly sad.

I have been running Ubuntu then Arch as my daily driver 2004-2017. As I started a consultant working for Western companies I thought they will care about me being clean copyright wise so I went 100% Linux. This was obviously not so but what did I know? I deeply regret doing this now. (I was dual booting before.)

With Ubuntu, upgrades every six month or so meant you were better off reinstalling and reconfiguring -- no matter which way you went, it was 2-3 days of work lost to tinkering the system. With Arch, the whole system doesn't shatter, it's just this and that doesn't work and it's frustrating. Bluetooth, multifunction scanner-printers being in the forefront. In fact, I needed to sell a perfectly working Samsung MFC at one point because Samsung ceased to make drivers, the old ones didn't work with newer Linux and while open source drivers surfaced that only happened years later. Let's not even talk multimedia. https://xkcd.com/619/ is ancient but the priorities are still the same.

Neither systems were great on connecting to weird enterprise networks, be it enterprise wifi or strange VPN. At one point I was running an older Firefox as root (!) to be able to connect to the F5 VPN of my client because the only thing supporting 2FA for that VPN was a classic extension -- and the binary helper disappeared in the mists of time. The only Linux related discussion was ... the IT head of my client asking how to connect Linux to his VPN now that he turned 2FA on and being told it doesn't work. https://community.f5.com/discussions/technicalforum/linux-ed... well I made it work but faugh.

I have been running Windows 10 + WSL since 2018 January and all is well. It reboots sometimes while I am asleep and that's about it. You need to run O&o shutup like once in a blue moon. Right now I am on Win 11 as my primary laptop is being repaired, you need to run ExplorerPatcher but that's it. It's been indeed six years and there was never an update where the OS just didn't start up or a hardware driver decided to call it quits after an upgrade.

Also, updates are not forced, I control my machine thanksmuch via Group Policy.

https://xkcd.com/619/ is ancient but the priorities are still the same.

Bluetooth mouse, keyboard, headphones, controller works. Intel iGPU works, including hardware accelerated video in browsers. VPN: Pritunl worked without issues, Perimiter 81 initially failed, works with update.

Wayland, Pipewire, Wine, Proton - Steam Deck is widely successful multimedia device. Priorities are same, NVK joined open source drivers.

Linux does not connect to "enterprise wifi or strange VPN" - ok.

Utter fantasy.

They complete whilst I sleep, taking zero of my time at all.

I have plenty of other things I’d rather tinker with and become an expert on, though. My computer is a tool to let me work with those things. It’s not fun when I have to debug and fix the tool for hours or days before I can even start working on the things I want to work on.

Windows at work, despite being maintained by professional helpdesk staff, or Macs my family have, with all the ease of use designed by Apple in California, are not like that.

Just the other day I tried to download an mkv file over https on a Mac and I couldn't get it to exceed 2.5 MB/s. Same network, same server, my laptop breezed at over 20 MB/s and Apple took out that walker for a stroll at a very leisurely pace. It didn't come with `wget` either.

I would never sit my 70 year old mother down in front of a Linux machine. We're not at "caring that video files download too slowly" - we're at "how do I put a file on a USB".

Same as on Windows and MacOS really. I don't dispute that Linux has rough edges, but putting files on a USB stick is not one of them tbh.

Really no issues with the OS.

I was using the very excellent 2015 Mac book pro before, but despite hardware that isn’t quite as nice (not bad though) that hardware I can’t go back to Mac OS. I know I pay a premium to get it pre installed over windows, but it’s not bad.

Part of this might be that making Hackintoshes is so much harder now, but part of it might also be that OOTB desktop Linux is luxuriously good these days compared to where it used to be. Ubuntu and Pop!_OS linux are absolutely on par with MacOS for a user who meets the (admittedly higher) entry requirements for using Linux.

> > Linux is only free if your time is worthless!

But it is exactly why I quit Linux and returned to macOS. I used to run Linux on cheap 2nd hand ThinkPads and for 3 years on Macbook as main system. But after another upgrade destroyed gain all network connectivity I have quit.

macOS isn't perfect but it works in most imposrtant areas and I can tinker with small stuff when I feel like it.

You pay with time. It's priceless, if you are a romantic or lack foresight (because what you did with your total will be way more important than what is left). Otherwise it will always be the most expensive thing you have (and we must still be able to spend it without care, because what would life be otherwise).

> But when it doesn't, I often wish I was that guy that had tinkered with my car

Don't. Instead build a network of experts you trust and make more money doing what you do best to pay them with. Trying to solve the world on your own is increasingly going to fail you. It's too complicated.

I just can't agree with this take. It sounds that simple, but it's not.

I happen to enjoy learning and fixing.

It would take me a long time to build that trust. Nobody cares about my things and my family's safety like I do.

Most people are a long way from making as much money as an expert would charge them.

In the last couple of years, I have had some terrible times when I call for help.

When the dealership is charging $200/hr to have a kid plug in the car and follow a flowchart, I'll just take a look myself.

Plus one time they left my fuel pump loose and I had to pay (in time and money) for an extra round trip with Uber, and the fuel it sprayed onto the road. They didn't fix the original problem, which cost me another round trip.

Another time, I had technicians (experts) out to look at my leaking hot water tank 4 times before they decided it was time to replace it. I wasted the time calling, babysitting, coordinating, figuring out how to shower without hot water, etc.

If this is the average "expert" count me out. I'll do it myself. Plus, throwing money at a problem isn't near as fun.

Regrets about not becoming more of investing the time to be an intuitive handy man is a very different category from "let's see if there's a video on yt to help me fix that in 5 minutes". My message is definitely not "don't get your hands dirty" but "be practical". Doing the yt/google/chatgpt thing to get an idea is mostly practical.

> If this is the average "expert" count me out.

You disclaimed, no problem — but I did write "build a network of experts you trust". Just calling someone and being annoyed that they are not good (and I agree, most of them are not) is not that. It's going to take time and money, but decidedly less so, because you get into the habit if doing it, you learn, you see red flags, network effects are real (people know people) and relationships on average last long enough. That is my experience, at least, but I have no reason to believe I would be special here.

> Plus, throwing money at a problem isn't near as fun.

That's true, in my case, only for very few problems. Most problems I would rather not solve myself.

I'll admit: All of this is a concession to reality, at least my perception of it. Learning is fun. I would really love to be good at a great many things. It's just increasingly unreasonable to invest the time necessary, because things get more complicated and change more quickly.

Staying good at a few things, learning whatever is most important next, and getting better at throwing money at the rest, will have to do.

Sticking to a network will limit the variety of people you get to meet, everything else the same. Local maxima.

It also isn't practical in some circumstances; if I travel for work or move cities every few years, the local network for mechanics gets lost. The cost of keeping the network would be staying in one place.

So, these are all options.

One man's bug is another man's feature:). You describe staying as a bug, I've lived in the same house for 24 years, and, for me, it's definitely a feature. I'd positively hate moving to another suburb, never mind city.

And yes, I've developed relationships with local service providers. My plumber, my electrician, my mechanic, all know me by name. I've found the people I can trust and they eliminate those hassles from my life.

But, and this is my point, I'm not you. My context, my goals my desires, are all different to yours, and that's fine. We're all in different places, being different people, and that's OK. It doesn't have to be "us versus them". We might enjoy different thinks, and have different perspectives, but that's OK.

Linux just works now. You put in the Ubuntu/Debian/Arch/whatever USB, you install it, it just works.

I can't remember the last time anything broke on any of my desktop machines and it wasn't my fault for intentionally doing breaky things.

But sometimes the thing you’re trying to build is of central importance, and you want the machine to stay out of your way.Tinkering with the machine takes away time you could be exploring your ideas with a machine that’s already fully functional.

Tinkering can be fun. But these days I mostly want results, achievements etc. I want to tinker to a successful goal, not just tinker for tinkers sake.

For a layman who just needs to connect to WiFi, edit some documents and print them without having to update a kernel? No.

when it was needed to do it last time, in way more troublesome than Windows system updates?

Yeah, but an expert in what? There are only so many hours in a day. Like if you care about learning about some rando soy d driver, or why all you photos come out pink under Linux, but not Windows[], that’s great. Go knock yourself out.

But if you want to do something that’s not rando debugging, then maybe it’s not for you. Like, I like Unix. It’s lets me do my work with the least amount of effort. What I don’t like is being a sysadmin. Some folks do, and that’s awesome. But that’s the reason why I got rid of desktop Linux 20 years ago.

[] Both of these are actual lived experiences. I do not care about you chiming in about either of these.

I suspect it's the same for you, and it may be the lack of time, but not so much the access to money.

My financial circumstances have improved somewhat in the intervening years. Today, I own quite a bit of Apple hardware, most recently Vision purchase overton-shifted my definition of “disposable” into very unfamiliar territory. Even still, about once a year I ensure I can still triple-boot” - just now I do it with ProxMox and Virtual Passthrough. The first iMessage sent from my virtualized “iMac pro” at 2AM and was almost as gratifying as the first Apple Bootscreen on a a Sony Vaio.

May we never lose whatever that is.

Fast forward to today and I think Apple managed to pivot this almost to the complete opposite end. I think the hardware is incredible value (that's debatable for sure, but my M1 aluminum machined Macbook with Apple Silicon is blazing fast, completely silent, super sturdy and runs forever — I wouldn't trade it for any other laptop I could buy with money), while the Operating System has really taken a backseat, with hugely annoying bugs unfixed since 10 years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39367460

To me, in a world like that, Hackintosh simply doesn't make much sense anymore. Asahi Linux is really the star on the horizon, by doing exactly the opposite: Letting a free and better maintained operating systems run on strictly awesome hardware.

The Mac Pro was still the un-updated 2012 trash can, the 15” MBPs were too thin for the CPUs they housed (perhaps Intel’s fault for getting stuck on 14nm for so long, but still) and were hot with terrible battery life, and while the 27” iMacs weren’t terrible and probably the best of the lineup, they still weren’t cooled quite as well as they should’ve been. My 6700k + 980Ti tower in a Fractal Define case with a big quiet Noctua cooler was just flat better and made a far better Mac than anything Apple sold at the time.

That said, I did eventually grow tired of the tinkery-ness of it all and in 2020 picked up a refurbed base model iMac Pro, one of the few Macs in that timespan that wasn’t a mistake, for about half its MSRP. It was about as powerful as that tower, surprisingly even more quiet, and of course just worked without the tinkering.

This resonates with me as well. As a teenager with my first car I spent a lot of time tweaking its appearance, sound, performance, etc., buying what little I could from local auto parts stores. I couldn't wait to get older to have more money so I could do more mods and really make the vehicle how I wanted it.

In the back of my head I wondered why older folks didn't do this though. They have these nice vehicles but they're bone stock! Why not new wheels, tint, a tasteful lower, etc.?

Then I myself got older and found it just isn't as important as it used to be. I still have a slightly modified car, but I'm not rooting around inside the dash with a soldering iron like I once did, haha.

Then I quickly realized that its such a big hassle and also you almost instantly get used to things how they are.

In my teens I had a group of friends who loved to tinker, from hackintoshes to custom ROMs to homelabbing to electronics repair. Now I'm like the only one left who does this stuff :(

When you're an adult you have all the energy, all the money, but none of the time.

When you're a retiree you have all of the money, all of the time, but none of the energy.

A generalisation of course, but quite apt!

When work banned Linux machines and I had to transition to OS X, I had to do just as much, if not more, tinkering to make it work for me. Perhaps it does 'just works' for those who think exactly like Steve Jobs - but if you want it your way and on your terms, there'd be a lot of tinkering to do, from yabai configs to Karabiner json configs and custom plists, to replacing most of the gelded Apple apps.

The secondary demographic of people interested in Hackintoshing are people who have an existing PC (or enough extra parts to build a second PC) and want to figure out how to "make something that can run macOS" out of it, while spending as little money replacing/upgrading parts as possible.

People who buy parts, to build machines from scratch, just to run macOS on them, are a very tiny fraction of the Hackintosh community. (Which is why you so rarely hear stories of Hackintosh builds working the first time with no added tinkering — they can, if you do this, but ~nobody does this.)

But these days you can spin up a qemu macos vm without too much effort and that's my virtual hackintosh.

No matter how much time I invested into building my desktop, it never "just worked". There were always inevitable problems with software updates, which often meant you had to re-image the system from scratch to install a new OS version. Which happened quite often, when you needed it to run the latest Xcode.

Then there were a lot of minor annoyances over the years, like crashes and graphical glitches with certain apps, like Photos or Preview, problems with monitor resolutions and refresh rates, and many, many others.

Ultimately, they were a useful tool for a time, but they suffered from death by a thousand cuts in terms of practical usability. So, I bought a basic Mac Mini as soon as I was able to, and never looked back.

Nothing since that one were quite as good. Had a Dell laptop for a while that was almost perfect, but would lock up and require a reboot once every couple of weeks. A tower I built in 2016 was also almost perfect, except I never could get USB working 100% right and later on the Nvidia drivers got flaky.

    $999.00
    or
    $83.25/mo.per month for 12 mo.

> Monthly pricing is available when you select Apple Card Monthly Installments (ACMI) as payment type at checkout at Apple, and is subject to credit approval and credit limit. Financing terms vary by product. Taxes and shipping are not included in ACMI and are subject to your card’s variable APR. See the Apple Card Customer Agreement for more information. ACMI is not available for purchases made online at special storefronts. The last month’s payment for each product will be the product’s purchase price, less all other payments at the monthly payment amount. ACMI financing is subject to change at any time for any reason, including but not limited to, installment term lengths and eligible products. See https://support.apple.com/kb/HT211204 for information about upcoming changes to ACMI financing.

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You do not have to drop $2000 on a new laptop up front.

Oh, wait... forgot that these are designed to be landfill fodder.

That's what most laptops used to cost back in the 1990s or so (after adjusting for inflation). If you look further back in time, hardware was even more expensive - and it couldn't even do 10% of what a modern MacBook does. Modern hardware is ridiculously cheap.

I studied computer science then and I knew 1 student out of 50 that had an actual laptop. Even at the uni we had to use their computer rooms full of desktops and X terminals.

It's all about the upsell on those non-upgradeable parts.

https://corporate.walmart.com/news/2024/03/15/walmart-brings...

As far as the processor goes, the M1 is in active production (e.g. for the iPad Air), and is still a very capable CPU. It may not be the fastest laptop CPU on the market anymore, but it's hardly slow.

TCOs are great calculations for companies but don't work for individuals.

Whether you take it is all about your risk tolerance and in no way impacts the usefulness of the machine.

I believe 14% is worth it.

Oh JFC. This canard has been floating around the about linux for 30 years, and it's always been a half truth at best.

Inevitably, it always comes down to "Cards with 2361YSE rev 5 chipset" or some other nonsense. Like that makes total sense for a kernel developer, but most people don't know what chipset they have in some peripheral.

So now you're left with assholes saying, "WeLL yOu ShOuLd gEt InFoRmEd. JuSt GoOgLe iT!", and it ain't that easy. If you can even find a brand name to chipset list, it's going to be out of date, or it's going to be something that says "2361Y" or "2361YSE rev 3" or something. Is that close enough to "2361YSE rev 5"? Who knows!

Then the best part? Even when you lookup the hardware with "full compatibility", you'll find that it actually isn't. Then when you ask about it, you'll get, "I just don't use that feature, and you shouldn't use it either."

But it sounds like you were tinkering because you had no other choice, not because you enjoyed it.

I was just done with faffing around with that kind of thing.

So I bought a (then fairly recently released) Mac Studio, just the plain jane base 32GB model, and couldn’t be happier. So nice to have something virtually silent and energy efficient, instead of jet turbine that drew about 300w at idle.

I 100% do not want a laptop for my primary personal machine, but the big workstation towers are too much.

The Studio is that wonderful Goldilocks zone - performant, bring-your-own input devices, but merely “a bit pricey” and not extravagantly so.

You know you’re alive when you log into iCloud from a hackintosh and then Apple notices, you get the ‘unauthorised hardware’ message (I can’t remember the exact phrasing) and your various iCloud services begin to cease functioning. It’s not often your OS is exciting.

I'm not into modding but I got SD because of it's openness and all sorts of things I can make with it (also to support gaming on Linux and kudos do Valve for the work on pushing it ;) )

For the device I'm pondering new OP which is more open than the rest but still, as you said - it's mostly the same OS and the changes are not that significant to spend all that time on flashing...

Now I have solved with PC desktop, MacBook Air, and Apple Display. PC also has usb-c display output so I can just switch which cable connects to the display.

Downside is still that M1 is not as fast, especially something that is GPU intensive as the PC I have.

I don't have the amount of time I used to to do that stuff either but the curiosity of it has never died and if I had more time I'd still do it.

If I ever lost that drive I think I'd rather be dead.

I say thus not to dampen your enthusiasm, but rather to encourage you to enjoy it to the maximum while it lasts.

Everything has a season and in that season it can seem terribly important. Perhaps an activity, or a favorite sports team, or a group of friends.

Some of that remains forever, some of it gets deferred as other things happen. It's part of life, we grow, we change, the world around us changes.

It's not that the drive is lost, it's just that it manifests in different ways, different activities, different challenges.

When you see a post like yours in 30 years time, remember this moment, and raise a glass :)

I wonder how many others had this exact same thought, before they lost their "hacker" drive while also preferring to continue living.

This may shock you, but people's interests and desires can evolve over time, even when those people don't expect them to evolve.

This is all good and natural, if it’s organic and not growing it’s probably not alive.

Ever since blogs have had comments sections, the set of people who are too lazy to make their own blogs, have been holding forth (writing, essentially, their own blog posts) in other people's blogs' comment sections.

Heck, I'm sure people were doing it on Usenet and all-subscribers-can-post mailing lists, too — using the "Reply" button on a message to mean "I want to create a new top-level discussion that quotes/references this existing discussion" rather than "I want to post something that the people already participating in this existing discussion will understand as contributing to that discussion."

In all these cases, the person doing this thinks that a comment/reply is better than a new top-level post, because the statement they're making requires context, and that context is only provided by reading the posts the statement is replying to / commenting on.

Of course, this being the internet, there is a thing called a hyperlink that could be used to add context just as well... but what there is not, is any kind of established etiquette that encourages people to do that. (Remember at some point in elementary school, learning the etiquette around writing a letter? Why don't schools teach the equivalent for writing a blog post/comment? It'd be far more relevant these days...)

Also, for some reason, social networks all have "reply" / "quote" actions (intended for engaging with the post/comment, and so showing up as "reactions" to the post/comment, or with your reply nested under the post/comment, etc); but no social network AFAIK has a "go off on a tangent" action (which would give you a message composer for a new top-level post, pre-filled with a cited quote of the post you were just looking at, but without your post being linked to that post on the response-tree level.) Instead, you always have to manually dig out the URL of the thing you want to cite, and manually cite it in your new post. I wonder why...

On Usenet, if you were altering the general SUBJECT of a post, you'd reply to a comment BY PREPENDING the NEW TITLE/SUMMARY of your post to the PREVIOUS TITLE of the post to indicate that you HAD changed the GENERAL SUBJECT of the post to something else AND end your NEW TITLE with "Was..." to prefix the previous title, e.g. "Hackintosh is Almost Dead" => "My Changing Hobby Habits Was: Hackintosh is Almost Dead"

I was merely saying that we shouldn't see this as bad, it is the natural way of things. Everything that has a beginning has an end. Raise a glass to remember hackintosh, but don't mourn it.

They are also, as you noted, expressing a very common opinion.

Now I’m off to spend my Saturday not tinkering, because there’s a bigger world out there and I’ve done my time.

Combine this with that a Mac mini that might be at the target for a hackintosh device is $600 USD ... and has the advantage that it isn't hacked together and so has better support.

The part of me that wanted to tinker with a hackintosh in my younger days is more satisfied by Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects. I've even got an Onion IO over there that could use some love.

Its not that people don't want to tinker, but rather the utility that one gets for hacking together a Mac (again, note the silicon transition) is less than one gets for hacking on single board computers.

Also, the MacOs desktop has pretty much stagnated and is behind the competition. What is strong is the seamless integration of the whole Apple ecosystem so it makes sense to run MacOs if you already own iOS devices. I doubt people using iphones and ipads are struggling to finance the purchase of a mac.

The idea of a hackintosh is obsolete because there are new worlds to conquer, the time of hackintoshes has come and gone. The new generation will find their own challenges, not re-hash challenges of the past.

I have said this same thing about Android vs iPhone. Also, if I cannot tinker with Android then I might as well have an iPhone.

It was my obsession with worthless endeavors that got me the kind of job that made my time valuable in the first place

This but with LLMs lol.