They’re fantastic on desktop and have been for more than a decade, once you get past a setup process which can be quite painful (although isn’t always).

But laptops are a lot trickier. You need drivers (or patches) for a lot of extra hardware (your trackpad, your battery-level-reader, the screen brightness controller, etc); you need sleep and cpu power management to work; you usually can’t just swap out the wifi card with a Mac-compatible one, etc.

It can absolutely be done, but you need to do a lot of research on compatibility beforehand. And as a result, you may discover your options aren’t really all that much better than they were in Real Mac land.

I would go for it (ie start doing research) only if there’s something specific you really want in a laptop that Apple simply doesn’t offer. A touch screen, for instance.

It's not necessarily finding drivers that's the problem so much as correctly patching the ACPI tables so drivers can find stuff, especially on laptops, excluding some stuff like wireless cards which often have sketchy to no driver support. Options are certainly better than in real mac land, but be prepared to spend at least a week working through every device one-by-one. Once it's working, though, it's stable.

It's not just finding compatible wireless that's a problem! You can also mostly eliminate:

• Any laptop with an nVidia GPU

• Any laptop that uses switchable graphics (unless you're okay with terrible battery life from the GPU being always on)

• Any AMD laptop (because even with custom cpu patches, the integrated graphics won't work).

That's a lot of laptops, particularly in the type of segments people would likely be most interested in, since Apple doesn't make them. Combined with the aforementioned wifi compatibility problems, you really need to do your research first!

Apart from very useful, also very easy to setup

https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM

Genuinely really tempted to try this. Should fix any of the issues with AMD compatibilities as well...

I'm currently installing it and it really was as easy as running the two scripts. I haven't gotten to GPU passthrough yet, though.

Hmm, what's performance like on that? It feels like running under QEMU would be pretty slow.

It’a a type 1 hypervisor so not bad. But, I wouldn’t do it on a laptop. You need to pass through a gpu for it to work acceptably.

I'm going to try this on my Linux desktop right now. It might prove to be a good way to run Photoshop on Linux, though I'm not too hopeful...

Thanks for the tip!

If you just want to run Photoshop etc, you’ll have a much easier time with a Windows VM!

If you need to run, say, Sketch or Omnigraffle, then it would make more sense!

I tried a Windows VM but it was unworkably slow :/ I've been dual-booting.

Are you using KVM, and are you using GPU passthrough?

Those two things together are what's able to provide close-to-native performance.

I'm using VMware, I'm not sure if that uses KVM. It should have GPU passthrough though, yes.

Nope, VMWare is a type-2 hypervisor, not a type-1 like KVM. (Unless you're using ESXI, but you would know if you were.)

Mind, VMWare + GPU passthrough really should have more than acceptable performance, so I'm surprised.

It's not that it's abysmal, it's just annoying enough to prevent me from using it. I stopped using it a while ago, I possibly had issues with my Wacom tablet as well, but I don't really recall.

Do you know a type-1 hypervisor I could use on Linux? Will QEMU do? Thanks for the info!

On Ubuntu ish systems (not sure about base debians), you can get full KVM support in qemu by installing the "qemu-kvm" package right out the repos and then starting your VMs with the "-enable-kvm" switch. You may also need to get EFI working in qemu to support OSX EFI bootloader, which you can get by installing the "ovmf" package right out the repos, and then adding the "-bios OVMF.fd" switch to your qemu command (OVMF.fd being the firmware file used by qemu to do EFI, which the "ovmf" package seems to install near /usr/share/qemu/OVMF.fd). I'm not sure about GPU passthrough, but with full KVM support enabled, you will immediately notice a pretty huge difference in the performance of the VM.

Thanks, I think I did enable KVM in QEMU and OS X is pretty snappy. There's a bug where the mouse can't tell where the screen bounds are, and stops in the middle of the screen, but that's unrelated. Thanks for the tip!

Qemu can do it, but you explicitly need to configure it to use kvm. And then you need to set it up to use GPU passthrough.

It's a somewhat involved process, especially for GPU passthrough.

I'm not sure about on Linux, but the GPU passthrough on Macos (Fusion) is not like KVM passthrough. When I looked into it I found out it's for one specific use case. Won't increase performance for general apps like Photoshop.

Yeah, macOS doesn't really have GPU passthrough.

But on Linux, you can do GPU passthrough on Linux for macOS (and Windows) guests.

In particular, since no VM has graphics acceleration for macOS guests, and because macOS relies very heavily on graphics acceleration, GPU passthrough is basically the only way to comfortably use macOS inside of a VM.

They keep getting better, but you always have the fear of one software update bricking your device because some engineer at Apple woke up on the wrong side of the bed one day and put in something in the bootloader that only works on Apple hardware.

It would work if I kept this laptop as my backup (can't stop working for a day or two while I fix all that stuff).

I said this repeatedly in a Hackintosh thread on HN last week: I have never had a point release break Hackintosh. Especially these days with bootloader kext injection, it’s really quite rare. Whole version upgrades are another story, but you shouldn’t just install those on a whim anyway.

Also, if you’re on Hackintosh, Apple isn’t touching your bootloader!