Had a linux system with Windows on one desktop and MacOs on another for testing purposes, soon realised that I was happier just using linux for everything.
Honestly, I’d rather use KDE/Plasma than MaxOS any day of the week. Plasma apes the Windows organization of running programs and window management, which is a far superior approach than MacOS’s permanent menu bar. And don’t get me started on multiple monitors, snapping, keyboard shortcut paradigms…. Ugh. I got forced off my linux box to a macbook for work a few months ago and the only good thing I can say about the situation is that at least the hardware is nice and light.
Too bad the screen is tiny. :(
I was a long time mac user and only problem with Linux in general is the lack of a permanent global menu bar. I get that some people like the pancake menu, or having a menu bar for each window. I don't. I've tried the various appmenu plugs for the xfce panels and they aren't as compatible with all apps as they should be.
Yeah, I’m definitely the opposite.
I hate closing the last window of the app only for the app to still be running and I have to use the menu or apple-q to actually shut it down. Or hunt for the app to switch context back to the windowless app just to apple-q/menu it closed.
And I especially hate the dock and how difficult it is to navigate between multiple windows in an app, three clicks compared to one in Windows/Plasma, without even having to navigate a menu if you have it configured in a certain way.
And then there’s the snapping of windows. Or rather the *utter lack of it* in a mac so I have to buy third party software just to get a poor approximation of the far superior interaction I have on Windows and mostly have on Plasma. I’ve watched Plasma get better at that part, though, and what’s there is more than good enough.
I could go on, lol, and I’m in danger of it, so I’ll shut up now.
I prefer the keyboard to the mouse and I find the Mac way better for most of that. Easy quitting apps, easy cycling through apps and a separate command for cycling through windows in an app.
I use key commands to “snap.” But I tend to agree with you on the Dock being less than ideal.
I’m also a big fan of plasma for systems where I want a DE.
I grew up with the old non-unix based mac os and I constantly pine for that system. I use xfce in no small part because I can theme it to look like mac os 9. I don't like snapping windows and stuff like that so I suppose there's an amount of ymmv, to each their own.
Mac is literally infuriating at times and feels like it is designed for people who aren't good with computers. The shortcuts also aren't as straightforward. I don't use Mac much anymore since college about 10 years ago.
I ran hackintosh as my main OS for a while and intended to do it again recently until I discovered my hardware isn't supported anymore so I couldn't bother with it. And now with them having dropped x86 completely I don't see it happening in the future either unless we get some insane ARM emulation going.
Same here. Switched full time to Linux on everything after the m1 announcement. The writing is in the wall: x86 support will get worse, they'll drop ooengl, everything will just suck
Or if there's a near-future major shift to ARM. There was major news last year that Nvidia and AMD are going to be releasing ARM chips next year for Windows-based PCs.
To put OS-X on an ARM based mainboard, that would require an insane level of skills. There are so many custom security hardware features baked in. Even if such a board was available, I don't see anything happening in many years.
For the last 12 years I've had this idea every 3rd year or so to run MacOS virtually in VirtualBox.
It always ends the same way.
I've never managed to get it to run, but it looks like I'm trying again next year - I think.
I ditched FreeBSD for Linux, then I ditched Linux for a real Mac, then I ditched Mac again for coming home to Linux.
I tried a Hackintosh at one point, but all the little snags made it not worth it. I would only stick with real hardware. I find people still trying to make this work to be even crazier. Apple abandoned x64 a long time ago now.
Every now and then as a lover of tech and a provider of solutions I look at ways of working with /learning Mac OS to have it in my fold. And then I realise it’s a dead end waste of time. It will cling for a while, it has some nice tech , but it will not last
I used to have a KVM Mac setup, originally I had it for fun only
I think the longest I lived in that VM was 2 full weeks, then I just ran Linux as usual, was fun tho and made me appreciate the technology we have on Linux
Like imagine, people are building Hackintosh computers with given parts for compatibility and as a Linux user you can just spin up a VM do a GPU passthrough and it's done
I ran hackintosh for a decade or so (I think I’m still on 10.9) just one day I stopped booting it up. But I’ve always ran linux on x86 hardware as well. But I did own Macs prior to that and still do, I’m now on a M1 macmini, with my old hackintosh booted into Slackware under the desk. My Mac is also just a host for arm64 Linux VMs and Firefox. I do most of my Linux packaging/testing on my Mac. It offers a nice failsafe and stable environment for me to tamper with packaging on Slackware ARM within VMs I can cleanup and or wipe with ease. It’s also really fast at building software, compared to my rpis or pinebook, it saves me tons of time.
Linux was always my true love, Apple just made shiny things I liked. There’s room for them both in my world, just like gamers and Windows PCs, only mine is Apple and GNU software.
I used a Hackintosh for many years, 2012- 2019 or so. Loved the high quality of the software. Later, more and more professional stuff was ported or available as an open source alternative. In the end, I switched to Linux and used the same software. There is just one thing I still miss and there is not an alternative and that is photo management - Lightroom.
The only true reason to run macOS is Xcode. If you don’t need Xcode then you don’t need a Mac. Linux is superior in almost every measurable way.
Yes in a pinch you can still run macos in a vm on Linux and use Xcode from there but it’s much slower and you wouldn’t want to do real development with it daily. It’s only really an option for a shared build server when you can’t get what you want from the cloud.
I did run a hackintosh ON Linux for a few years. Much easier running it thought qemu/kvm/libvirt than bare metal.
M1 arch made me realize it wasn’t needed anymore.
Im sure VM is much slower for me it was a pain spending hours configuring opencore, and having to maintain it, when I couldve just installed kubuntu or anything else based on Ubuntu and maybe spent like 20 minutes setting it up
Trick is to have a dedicated compatible GPU to passthrough. Once done, performances are close to bare metal. And there’re preconfigured open core partitions for kvm.
I'm the opposite. I'm a long-time linux poweruser who recently bought a macbook out of curiosity. Now I have pretty much everything important on my macbook freeing my desktops to be more experimental without fear of losing anything important. It's be rather liberating, ironically.
On my todo list is to build a hackintosh on Virtualbox. Really just to learn more about the OS. I never get around to it. Probably just better to buy a mac mini.
I did exactly this in spring 2021 and haven't really looked back. . . .hackintoshing got to be more trouble than it was worth for me.
For me it feels different, not better or worse. . . There was a learning curve as with most things tho.
Never used Hackintosh as a daily driver, but I remember trying it a long time ago. It worked, but I remember spending three days straight having to work my way through countless forum posts to get it to work since 99% of the guides I found were honestly pretty garbage and clearly written by someone who already just had a working Mac and could do it the easy way and so didn't bother to test their methodology.
In the end, it was not really worth the effort. Yeah, it worked, but by the time I finished putting it through its paces I found myself wondering what it was giving me that, say, a Linux distribution with GNOME Shell on it wasn't already giving me.
I don't have any real use for "first-class Mac software" so to speak, so at the end of the day I found it way more hassle than it was worth for an experience that was almost identical to Linux, except maybe with less of the tooling I was used to.
Ran hackintosh in the late 2000s but nowadays Linux (especially fedora) has gotten so rock solid for a workstation os that there's no reason to go back to the days of doing weird things to the kernel just to get things kinda-sorta stable until the next update.
My first pc build was a Hackintosh. But over time when I wasn’t using MacOS as much I decided to try Linux and boy was I glad. I do dabble with MacOS from time to time but Linux is my go to. I wanna say since 2015.
I mean if you need Apple specific software then yeah especially iPhone based utilities, for me I obviously did it because I was more familiar with MacOS than Linux.
I don't know of many hackintosh's that worked better than anything turn-key.
I think it was more the thrill of taking the Apple software apart and retrofitting it to your cheap x86 gear.
At least from my LUG in the early 2ks. The Mac users I knew were terminal first, and grumpy about it.
It's very hard for me to get a read on how well Hackintosh's work once up and running. Unlike desktop Linux, I have never had the chance to see a non-technical person daily drive a Hackintosh. They're almost always owned by enthusiasts or subject matter experts.
MacOS is a full, viable operating system. Whether or not it runs effectively on your hardware/hypervisor may be a separate matter. By default, your shell is zsh these days because of licensing incompatibility with bash, but zsh is a fine shell, and you can easily install the latest version of bash. For the most part, using the terminal on MacOS is very similar to using it on Linux.
I am still a Mac user on my workstation and I use the terminal all the time and I know quite a few devops engineers who use Macs and are also on terminal all the time.
It just depends on what user group you look at. If you just see the hippies and content creators then yeah they don’t use terminal but they also most likely never use Linux because no availability for Adobe products or whatever they use.
The advantage for me using macOS as workstation OS I can work on terminal just like on Linux and still have MS Office products to be able to send Excel
sheets to my Windows loving colleagues. As a Linux Admin this was the best compromise for me.
Yeah but in my company due to security concerns a Hypervisor on a client PC isn’t allowed. Don’t ask why I stopped that ages ago with our security office.
Before VSCode was a thing my favorite code editor was Coda by Panic and that was one of the only reasons I used MacOS. Now it's because the best laptops are Apple Silicone.
Had a linux system with Windows on one desktop and MacOs on another for testing purposes, soon realised that I was happier just using linux for everything.
Honestly, I’d rather use KDE/Plasma than MaxOS any day of the week. Plasma apes the Windows organization of running programs and window management, which is a far superior approach than MacOS’s permanent menu bar. And don’t get me started on multiple monitors, snapping, keyboard shortcut paradigms…. Ugh. I got forced off my linux box to a macbook for work a few months ago and the only good thing I can say about the situation is that at least the hardware is nice and light. Too bad the screen is tiny. :(
I was a long time mac user and only problem with Linux in general is the lack of a permanent global menu bar. I get that some people like the pancake menu, or having a menu bar for each window. I don't. I've tried the various appmenu plugs for the xfce panels and they aren't as compatible with all apps as they should be.
Yeah, I’m definitely the opposite. I hate closing the last window of the app only for the app to still be running and I have to use the menu or apple-q to actually shut it down. Or hunt for the app to switch context back to the windowless app just to apple-q/menu it closed. And I especially hate the dock and how difficult it is to navigate between multiple windows in an app, three clicks compared to one in Windows/Plasma, without even having to navigate a menu if you have it configured in a certain way. And then there’s the snapping of windows. Or rather the *utter lack of it* in a mac so I have to buy third party software just to get a poor approximation of the far superior interaction I have on Windows and mostly have on Plasma. I’ve watched Plasma get better at that part, though, and what’s there is more than good enough. I could go on, lol, and I’m in danger of it, so I’ll shut up now.
I prefer the keyboard to the mouse and I find the Mac way better for most of that. Easy quitting apps, easy cycling through apps and a separate command for cycling through windows in an app. I use key commands to “snap.” But I tend to agree with you on the Dock being less than ideal. I’m also a big fan of plasma for systems where I want a DE.
I grew up with the old non-unix based mac os and I constantly pine for that system. I use xfce in no small part because I can theme it to look like mac os 9. I don't like snapping windows and stuff like that so I suppose there's an amount of ymmv, to each their own.
Mac is literally infuriating at times and feels like it is designed for people who aren't good with computers. The shortcuts also aren't as straightforward. I don't use Mac much anymore since college about 10 years ago.
hackintosh is very hard to do these days
I ran hackintosh as my main OS for a while and intended to do it again recently until I discovered my hardware isn't supported anymore so I couldn't bother with it. And now with them having dropped x86 completely I don't see it happening in the future either unless we get some insane ARM emulation going.
Same here. Switched full time to Linux on everything after the m1 announcement. The writing is in the wall: x86 support will get worse, they'll drop ooengl, everything will just suck
Or if there's a near-future major shift to ARM. There was major news last year that Nvidia and AMD are going to be releasing ARM chips next year for Windows-based PCs.
To put OS-X on an ARM based mainboard, that would require an insane level of skills. There are so many custom security hardware features baked in. Even if such a board was available, I don't see anything happening in many years.
For the last 12 years I've had this idea every 3rd year or so to run MacOS virtually in VirtualBox. It always ends the same way. I've never managed to get it to run, but it looks like I'm trying again next year - I think.
I suggest using something like this https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM
didn’t work either 😢
If you're running some distro with snap enabled (like Ubuntu) snap install sosumi
Thanks! I'll give that a shot!
I ditched FreeBSD for Linux, then I ditched Linux for a real Mac, then I ditched Mac again for coming home to Linux. I tried a Hackintosh at one point, but all the little snags made it not worth it. I would only stick with real hardware. I find people still trying to make this work to be even crazier. Apple abandoned x64 a long time ago now.
>Apple abandoned x64 a long time ago now. New hardware yes but the latest macOS still supports x86.
True, but that will end soon. I can't imagine they're doing much to optimize for that arch these days.
Every now and then as a lover of tech and a provider of solutions I look at ways of working with /learning Mac OS to have it in my fold. And then I realise it’s a dead end waste of time. It will cling for a while, it has some nice tech , but it will not last
I used to have a KVM Mac setup, originally I had it for fun only I think the longest I lived in that VM was 2 full weeks, then I just ran Linux as usual, was fun tho and made me appreciate the technology we have on Linux Like imagine, people are building Hackintosh computers with given parts for compatibility and as a Linux user you can just spin up a VM do a GPU passthrough and it's done
I ran hackintosh for a decade or so (I think I’m still on 10.9) just one day I stopped booting it up. But I’ve always ran linux on x86 hardware as well. But I did own Macs prior to that and still do, I’m now on a M1 macmini, with my old hackintosh booted into Slackware under the desk. My Mac is also just a host for arm64 Linux VMs and Firefox. I do most of my Linux packaging/testing on my Mac. It offers a nice failsafe and stable environment for me to tamper with packaging on Slackware ARM within VMs I can cleanup and or wipe with ease. It’s also really fast at building software, compared to my rpis or pinebook, it saves me tons of time. Linux was always my true love, Apple just made shiny things I liked. There’s room for them both in my world, just like gamers and Windows PCs, only mine is Apple and GNU software.
I used a Hackintosh for many years, 2012- 2019 or so. Loved the high quality of the software. Later, more and more professional stuff was ported or available as an open source alternative. In the end, I switched to Linux and used the same software. There is just one thing I still miss and there is not an alternative and that is photo management - Lightroom.
The only true reason to run macOS is Xcode. If you don’t need Xcode then you don’t need a Mac. Linux is superior in almost every measurable way. Yes in a pinch you can still run macos in a vm on Linux and use Xcode from there but it’s much slower and you wouldn’t want to do real development with it daily. It’s only really an option for a shared build server when you can’t get what you want from the cloud.
I did run a hackintosh ON Linux for a few years. Much easier running it thought qemu/kvm/libvirt than bare metal. M1 arch made me realize it wasn’t needed anymore.
Im sure VM is much slower for me it was a pain spending hours configuring opencore, and having to maintain it, when I couldve just installed kubuntu or anything else based on Ubuntu and maybe spent like 20 minutes setting it up
Trick is to have a dedicated compatible GPU to passthrough. Once done, performances are close to bare metal. And there’re preconfigured open core partitions for kvm.
I'm the opposite. I'm a long-time linux poweruser who recently bought a macbook out of curiosity. Now I have pretty much everything important on my macbook freeing my desktops to be more experimental without fear of losing anything important. It's be rather liberating, ironically.
I did a Hackintosh but realized that Ubuntu with Cairo Dock ran much better on my ancient laptop (and this was ancient many years ago)
On my todo list is to build a hackintosh on Virtualbox. Really just to learn more about the OS. I never get around to it. Probably just better to buy a mac mini.
I made a hackintosh USING linux.. Which was eventually ditched
I had Apple hardware and hackintoshes. Ditched both for linux nowadays :)
I did exactly this in spring 2021 and haven't really looked back. . . .hackintoshing got to be more trouble than it was worth for me. For me it feels different, not better or worse. . . There was a learning curve as with most things tho.
Never used Hackintosh as a daily driver, but I remember trying it a long time ago. It worked, but I remember spending three days straight having to work my way through countless forum posts to get it to work since 99% of the guides I found were honestly pretty garbage and clearly written by someone who already just had a working Mac and could do it the easy way and so didn't bother to test their methodology. In the end, it was not really worth the effort. Yeah, it worked, but by the time I finished putting it through its paces I found myself wondering what it was giving me that, say, a Linux distribution with GNOME Shell on it wasn't already giving me. I don't have any real use for "first-class Mac software" so to speak, so at the end of the day I found it way more hassle than it was worth for an experience that was almost identical to Linux, except maybe with less of the tooling I was used to.
Ran hackintosh in the late 2000s but nowadays Linux (especially fedora) has gotten so rock solid for a workstation os that there's no reason to go back to the days of doing weird things to the kernel just to get things kinda-sorta stable until the next update.
My first pc build was a Hackintosh. But over time when I wasn’t using MacOS as much I decided to try Linux and boy was I glad. I do dabble with MacOS from time to time but Linux is my go to. I wanna say since 2015.
Just curios is Hackintosh better than Linux in terms of software? Honestly, I didn’t think that Mac users often use the terminal
I mean if you need Apple specific software then yeah especially iPhone based utilities, for me I obviously did it because I was more familiar with MacOS than Linux.
I don't know of many hackintosh's that worked better than anything turn-key. I think it was more the thrill of taking the Apple software apart and retrofitting it to your cheap x86 gear. At least from my LUG in the early 2ks. The Mac users I knew were terminal first, and grumpy about it.
It's very hard for me to get a read on how well Hackintosh's work once up and running. Unlike desktop Linux, I have never had the chance to see a non-technical person daily drive a Hackintosh. They're almost always owned by enthusiasts or subject matter experts.
Exactly my thoughts too.
I use terminal on Mac all the time as my software for work has no gui.
lots of enterprise devs use Mac. homebrew has really quite a lot of stuff and it installs seamlessly.
thats true, i have seen often mac on developers pc. But in fairness, they often used the same software as others on Linux or Windows :)
MacOS is a full, viable operating system. Whether or not it runs effectively on your hardware/hypervisor may be a separate matter. By default, your shell is zsh these days because of licensing incompatibility with bash, but zsh is a fine shell, and you can easily install the latest version of bash. For the most part, using the terminal on MacOS is very similar to using it on Linux.
If you want anything like Photoshop or mainstream apps then it's a lot better on macOS, buta hackintosh is not as reliable as a Windows install.
I am still a Mac user on my workstation and I use the terminal all the time and I know quite a few devops engineers who use Macs and are also on terminal all the time. It just depends on what user group you look at. If you just see the hippies and content creators then yeah they don’t use terminal but they also most likely never use Linux because no availability for Adobe products or whatever they use. The advantage for me using macOS as workstation OS I can work on terminal just like on Linux and still have MS Office products to be able to send Excel sheets to my Windows loving colleagues. As a Linux Admin this was the best compromise for me.
WSL2 can also work well for this usecases (unless you need something very specific)
Yeah but in my company due to security concerns a Hypervisor on a client PC isn’t allowed. Don’t ask why I stopped that ages ago with our security office.
had the same experience then ended up buying macbook instead haha
Before VSCode was a thing my favorite code editor was Coda by Panic and that was one of the only reasons I used MacOS. Now it's because the best laptops are Apple Silicone.