Liam on Linux

I can’t speak for anyone else but I can tell you why I did it.

I was broke, I know PCs and Macs and Mac OS X – I ran OS X 10.0, 10.1 and 10.2 on a PowerMac 7600 using XPostFacto.

I got the carcase of a Core 2 Extreme PC on my local Freecycle group in 2012.

https://twitter.com/lproven/status/257060672825851904

RAM, no hard disks, no graphics, but case/mobo/CPU/PSU etc.

I took the nVidia card and hard disks from my old Athlon XP. I got the machine running, and thought it was worth a try since it was mostly Intel: Intel chipset, Intel CPU, etc.

I joined some fora, did some reading, used Clover and some tools from TonyMacX86 and so on.

After two days’ work it booted. I got no sound from my SoundBlaster card, so I pulled it, turned the motherboard sound back on, and reinstalled.

It was a learning experience but it worked very well. I ran Snow Leopard on it, as it was old enough to get no new updates that would break my Hack, but new enough that all the modern browsers and things worked fine. (2012 was the year Mountain Lion came out, so I was 2 versions behind, which suited me fine – and it ran PowerPC apps, and I preferred the UI of the PowerPC version of MS Word, my only non-freeware app.)

I had 4 CPU cores, it was maxed out with 8GB RAM, and it was nice and quick. As it was a desktop, I disabled all support for sleep and hibernation: I turn my desktops off at night to save power. It drove a matched pair of 21” CRT monitors perfectly smoothly. I had an Apple Extended keyboard on an ADB-to-USB convertor since my PS/2 ports weren’t supported.

It wasn’t totally reliable – occasionally it failed to boot, but a power cycle usually brought it back. It was fast and pretty stable, it ran all the OS X FOSS apps I usually used, it was much quicker than my various elderly PowerMacs and the hardware cost was essentially £0.

It was more pleasant to use than Linux – my other machines back then ran the still-somewhat-new Ubuntu, using GNOME 2 because Unity hadn’t gone mainstream yet.

Summary: why not? It worked, it gave me a very nice and perfectly usable desktop PC for next to no cost except some time, it was quite educational, and the machine served me well for years. I still have it in a basement. Sadly its main HDD is not readable any more.

It was fun, interesting, and the end result was very usable. At that time there was no way I could have afforded to buy an Intel Mac, but a few years, one emigration and 2 new jobs later, I did so: a 2011 i5 Mac mini which is now my TV-streaming box, but which I used as my main machine until 2017 when I bought a 27” Retina iMac from a friend.

Cost, curiosity, learning. All good reasons in my book.

This year I Hacked an old Dell Latitude E7270, a Core i7 machine maxed out with 16GB RAM – with Big Sur because its Intel GPU isn’t supported in the Monterey I tried at first. It works, but its wifi doesn’t, and I needed to buy a USB wifi dongle. But performance wasn’t great, it took an age to boot with a lot of scary text going past, and it didn’t feel like a smooth machine. So, I pulled its SSD and put a smaller one in, put ChromeOS Flex on it, and it’s now my wife’s main computer. Fast, simple, totally reliable, and now I have spare Wifi dongle. :-/ I may try on one of my old Thinkpads next.

It is much easier to Hackintosh a PC today than it was 10-12 years ago, but Apple is making the experience less rewarding, as is their right. They are a hardware company.

(Repurposed from a Lobsters comment.)