
My Life With a Hackintosh - auferstehung
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/138/tech-edge-my-life-with-a-hackintosh.html
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hotstyle765
I wonder how many of the Hackintosh people have tried Linux. I would say it is
much simpler to setup a nice Linux distro and make it look like a Mac... That
is if you are into that sort of thing.

All you would need is Gnome, an OS X theme and AWN. It is free and legal.

I ran a Macbook pro for a few years in college and I cant bring myself to
switch back from Linux. The only thing that might put me on Mac is developing
an iPhone/Touch app. I feel Linux is on par or somewhere not too far behind.
Am I wrong here?

~~~
tvon
I think most of the Hackintosh community has probably tried Linux, at least in
VMWware or Virtualbox. After all, it's much easier to install these days.

Setting up a Hackintosh now is kind of like installing Linux ~8 years ago.
That spare system you have might work (if it's semi recent hardware, in this
case), but you might never get the thing to boot. However, if you buy a system
with a Hackintosh in mind, if you read the forums and do the research, you
will in all likelihood not have any problems and be able to treat it as if it
were a real Mac.

> would say it is much simpler to setup a nice Linux distro and make it look
> like a Mac...

I'm sorry but this is a pet peeve of mine, or at least it touches on one.

I ran Linux for ~8 years as my primary desktop. For most of that time I did
not have a Windows machine. I used GNOME most of the time but also spent a lot
of time in KDE and Enlightenment. I switched to OSX in '06 but I still install
Linux every now and then to see where things are, and sometimes I pop by
gnome-look or gnome themes sites to see what's going on there.

Point being, I have a lot of experience using Linux.

That said, you can maybe, _maybe_ get Linux to the point where you can take a
screenshot and it would pass as OSX to a casual OSX user. You can never, ever
get Linux to the point where it would fool an OSX user for more than 2-3
seconds. Pretty much to the point where if they interact with the computer at
all they'll know.

It's like throwing a camo tent over a tank and saying "look, the tank is
invisible". It might not show up from 10k feet but anyone that gets near it is
going to know it's not OSX, or think it's a very, very broken OSX system.

I've seen the blog posts about making GNOME look like OSX and they're insane.
They put some crap ass GTK theme together, throw in cairo dock, tweak crap for
4 hours and say "look, it's just like OSX but Linux". No, it is not.

> I feel Linux is on par or somewhere not too far behind. Am I wrong here?

I don't think Linux can hold a candle to OSX, my opinion of course, except
that the one app I've always wished OSX had is Tomboy... best "sticky notes"
app ever.

~~~
mr_dbr
OS X looks good because it's visually consistent, something that cannot be
said for Linux..

Just in terms of frameworks, on Linux there is (in common use today) GTK+, Tk,
Qt, wx (and probably others). There's also different versions, and different
themes (and the themes aren't interoperable, so if you have use a specific GTK
theme, and start at a Tk application, they'll look completely different)

On OS X there is Cocoa, and that's about it. There is Carbon, but it's
deprecated and used by very few applications

The default Ubuntu install looks good (colour-scheme preferences aside). It
only looks bad when you start installing other applications - as soon as you
install, say, a KDE application it looks horrible.. Not because that
application necessarily looks bad, but because it's inconsistent..

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joshhart
Hackintosh's are pretty old news. I'd love to see an article detailing some of
the challenges in the actual hacking of it.

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jhancock
My MacBook Air went belly up two days ago. For that kind of money, I'd expect
better than 14 months of life and I've treated it like a museum piece. Our
little $200 lenovo netbook is durable, we caught my son jumping on it on the
bed yesterday. We scolded him but he did no damage to the laptop. My 6 year
old ThinkPad churns away and has been used and abused.

I am seriously considering putting together a hackintosh before shelling out
more to get my Air fixed.

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joezydeco
So I'd like to hear what people would actually DO with a mac tablet....

Are you going to use it like an oversized iPod? Type large documents with the
touchscreen? Watch movies? Read books?

I took Spindler's comments during the presentation as a thinly veiled message
of "look, the iPod touch/iPhone can do most of what you want here, so don't
hold your breath for a tablet".

Then again, that's usually a sign there's one around the corner...

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Tichy
Why did this get any votes? The information boils down to "you can install OS
X on a netbook with some effort", which surely is very old news?

Is it enough to sport the word "Hack" in the title to get on Hacker News?

~~~
mattyfo
I agree, this article hardly provided any useful information or anything
relatively new. It hardly even discussed the hack of it.

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pyre
> _Apple didn't make it. I did. The machine I'm using is known as a
> "Hackintosh" -- actually a 9-inch Dell netbook that I've hacked to run
> Apple's Macintosh operating system._

> _In the end, I had a crude version of the Mac tablet computer that the rumor
> mill always says is just around the corner._

When did Dell come out with a 9" TabletPC?

> _Turning a netbook into a Mac certainly isn't a task for technical naïfs
> [...]_

Oh... _that_ 'Tablet' PC.

~~~
fatdog789
A netbook is not a tablet pc; it's a mini-laptop. Nowhere does the author
refer to a tablet pc. Indeed, he specifically mentions the Dell Mini 9
netbook, which has been on sale for the past year.

~~~
pyre
Sarcasm... The 'Mac Tablet' that has been rumored forever is an Apple version
of the TabletPC. He claimed to have a 'crude version' of a the rumored 'Mac
tablet.' It's hard to have that when the _Mac tablet's_ main feature is a
touchscreen. I doubt the Dell netbook has a touchscreen. Ergo, he _does not_
have a 'crude version' of such a device unless your definition of 'crude'
includes 'missing the most important feature.'

