Building a Hackintosh - is it safe?

[Duffo]

Back in the Netbook days...there were a couple that were stupid-easy to convert to 10.5.5. I used a few Dell models with 8 inch screens for travel and they worked quite well. By accident, registered one during system installation and received an email from Apple thanking me for my purchase of the new Macbook Air.

The loophole at the time was that the OS had to be run on Apple BRANDED equipment, so I stuck an apple sticker over the dell logo and even used it in an Apple Store on their wifi.

[the86d]

Why?
Most Linux distros are completely free, and no worry like you are having about Hackintosh...

[vino68]

- More stable than Win
- Less crapware (yes, even compared to a vanilla Win install) True.
- Faster (my 5 year old mac beats my brand new win laptop)You must doing something wrong.
- Fewer viruses

Yes but no longer free of such vulnerabilities for the last 5-10 years.

[vino68]

FTW.

[ibanezfoo]

- More stable than Win
- Less crapware (yes, even compared to a vanilla Win install)
- Faster (my 5 year old mac beats my brand new win laptop)
- Fewer viruses

mmmmmmmmm I dunno about that......

[Dragunov]

- More stable than Win
- Less crapware (yes, even compared to a vanilla Win install)
- Faster (my 5 year old mac beats my brand new win laptop)
- Fewer viruses

1. Not if you know how to properly configure Windows
2. Depends on the version of Windows.
3. If Windows is configured properly, and optimized right, Nope!
4. Although I haven't had a virus since 1991, I'll give you that one.

The only real reason, is you like, and are used to the MacO/S, but can't stand the junk it comes on, it makes sense. I'd do it too.

[Robotron2k84]

One of the things I will let you in on...in a prior job, my group was tasked with making high-density Mac images available for the cloud platform we were supporting.

The small footprint images had no problem running on Mac Minis as they came with support and you could get an ungodly number of them to fit in a 42U rack. We actually ran out of power and cooling before we could fill up a rack, most times.

The problem was the higher-performance images and Apple’s unconventional design of the trashcan pro. It was a packaging disaster for data center deployment and although there were racks that could mount them on their sides, the density and cost were out of line.

I was tasked with figuring out how to get a middle-tier offering into the mix to where the trashcans could be deployed for the very-highest spec image and cover their costs.

What I did was to hack together a Linux image running KVM/QEMU that could host OSX as a VM guest. There were a few issues, but for the most part, no one knew that it wasn’t a Mac under the hood.

Now, that was many years ago, but KVM support is more mature now, so maybe that’s a route to go. And, once more powerful Minis came out, the Linux hosts were retired in favor of a hardware solution that satisfied Apple’s license. This was an internal cloud anyway, that wasn’t commercially accessible.

As the company I did this for was a top-tier software partner of Apple’s, I always wanted to ask their VP of sales to see about getting a license that covered VM deployments for cloud providers. Never did, though.

[sd_shooter]

About to give up for the following reasons:
- There are no truly 'current' install guides, all seem 1-2 years old
- The Clover bootloader has been updated but the relevant 'kexts' and installations support tools are not at their previous locations (shut down? deprecated? coder quit working on them?)
- Getting the initial boot USB to work seems like a PITA. I have the MacOS image on it and have Clover booting but it doesn't present the MacOS image yet

Ugh. I don't want to spend my life babysitting this thing. I already know installing Linux is a piece of cake compared to this.

May just do Win10 and Linux and skip the Mac...

[Dragunov]

About to give up for the following reasons:
- There are no truly 'current' install guides, all seem 1-2 years old
- The Clover bootloader has been updated but the relevant 'kexts' and installations support tools are not at their previous locations (shut down? deprecated? coder quit working on them?)
- Getting the initial boot USB to work seems like a PITA. I have the MacOS image on it and have Clover booting but it doesn't present the MacOS image yet

Ugh. I don't want to spend my life babysitting this thing. I already know installing Linux is a piece of cake compared to this.

May just do Win10 and Linux and skip the Mac...

I'd go with Linux Mint Cinnamon. Just a suggestion.

[KatMan53]

why... who really wants to run Mac OS....

ME!

[yellowsulphur]

For Linux, I've been happy with Pop!_OS from System76. It's based on Ubuntu 19.10/Gnome.

https://system76.com/pop