My Life With a Hackintosh(fastcompany.com) |
My Life With a Hackintosh(fastcompany.com) |
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?
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.
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..
I have developed mostly on windows (in mobile, you almost have to, as a lot of emulators are windows only, except iphone), and at home I have windows XP.
I wanted to like linux, but I couldn't. Too many little things that were just not right, There is nothing like "major" that doesn't work, but it is more like death from 1000s cuts. Even repositioning the taskbar on the top, and making it the siz you want, and have the other menus down, was a pain. Ejecting a USB device, doesn't quite work. Tranfering files through usb is more like magic. There is a progress bar, but at some point it dissapears. You would thing that it is b/c the transfer is done, but no. It is just a bug. You disconnect your usb, and the file is not there.
The whole experience is a pain. Switched to mac as fast as I could.
My preference so far: Mac Os Windows XP Linux/ubuntu - Vista (draw)
If windows 7 was available, perhaps it would have been on pair with MacOs.
I understand that for server development, linux is great, but for mobile stuff, it is just not needed at all.
I'd rather have a system that just works.
It sounds like you have a major problem with your install. I use Ubuntu daily and never experienced anything close to it. My biggest problem is to remember what package to download to make my Atheros wireless work again.
And what's the pain in middle-button-dragging the bars to wherever you want them to be?
The main reason I build the hackintosh is the price. I built a computer for just over $1000 that is equivalent to a $2800 MacPro. My wife needs to use the computer. She is a photographer and thus needs Photoshop and printing. And please don't mention Gimp or printing on Linux. It doesn't cut it for professional photographers.
Even "Software Update" works.
It's also only $350 ($300 for the smaller SSD which would require greater install effort by removing enough to have enough free space).
For other hardware, however, I agree: it's not worth the bother.
I am seriously considering putting together a hackintosh before shelling out more to get my Air fixed.
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...
Is it enough to sport the word "Hack" in the title to get on Hacker News?
> 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.
right-ctrl-f is easy enough, but it doesn't change the monitor resolution as windows sees it. Unless you were already running vbox at native resolution (meaning much of the virtual screen was cut off) then you also have to increase the resolution in windows. It's like a 3 step processes, which is fine for me buy not for my wife. She'd just always stay in virtual box, so I do her one better and just boot Windows, which I don't like but she couldn't care less.