Back in the P4-dev-machine Intel Mac days, I played my tiny part in getting OS X running on commodity hardware. It was such a vibrant, hacker-y community, and a real thrill to see OS X boot on a Dell. Long after my patches were superseded, I still told everyone I'd helped. Honestly, I was like that friend who wouldn't stop telling you about their trip to Bar-thel-ona.

Nowadays, every time I open my work Mac, the only thing I can muster is "at least it's not Windows." And the only reason I even use one for work is that the unified memory does come in handy for compute.

It's the point at which I honestly don't want any of the popular available OS/hardware for my own machine: windows is ad hell (and quality also), macos goes towards touch ui hell (and updates always break more than I would expect), linux update always break major features I use on my current laptop (sleep and hibernation), and the complexity of setting up hybrid gpu setup: i really DON'T want or need to use nvidia gpu for rendering my desktop! But there'll be no external display output without enabling nvidia gpu all-time. Sad state of the drivers quality from the top-10 tech company of today (nvidia) for the most popular professional OS (linux)! Battery life is 2h on linux (30% of the expected). Windows 10 works fine 6h on the same machine!

What to set up?

>What to set up?

A local business that interacts with real humans and serves a purpose in the community.

Not the answer you are looking for but this is perfectionism at play. Use anything you like well enough and seek out the task to solve instead. These are tools, you can sharpen them to work better but cutting is the task not just sharpening all the time.

Linux with AMD graphics is much more stable than with nvidia.

I have also counterintuitivly found Arch Linux (a rolling release distro) way more stable than Ubuntu LTS. Things like sleep works, and any bugs are small and fixed quickly, bug reports are followed up on within a couple of days. With Ubuntu bug reports go without any replies from the maintainers, and maybe it will be fixed by happenstance by the next release.

and also intel graphics.

Oh, i so want to ask work to upgrade my laptop with a strix halo ultrabook / 64 or -better- 96GB but i'm always longing for what they'll come up next. Something with faster RAM for sure. Let's see what will come out by next summer

If you want stability I don’t think you can beat Debian. If you want easy, compatible graphics go with integrated or AMD. If you want good battery life get a recent model with a modern CPU architecture. My thinkpad running Debian ticks all these boxes. It goes for 8+ hours and it isn’t even the model with the wattiest battery.

Have to admit I giggled a little. Macs had hardware issues for a while with not so great cpus and butterfly keyboards. Now that Apple has gotten so good at hardware their software is struggling a lot.

Anyone that knows Apple history, knows that they software was never that great, remember they almost went bankrupt while trying to write a new OS.

Anyone that knows Apple history knows that they were the de facto standard in most graphics, audio, and video industries for decades due to their rock solid OS and driver support by 3rd parties in those fields - Adobe, Quark, Cubase, MOTU, AVID, Shake etc... There's a reason you saw so many Macbook DJs and fully Mac OS post-production houses.

Only in US and a few other countries with similar salary levels, the rest of the world has mostly used Windows versions of the same applications.

Remember the 10% market share in the 1990s did not cover all the related jobs across the planet.

And now with the demise of the workstation market, some studios have switched to Windows based workstations for their audio, graphics and visual effects gear instead of dealing with thunderbolt spaghetti.

Well it kind of did tbh. Adobe Illustrator 1.0 (1987), QuarkXPress (1987), and Adobe Photoshop 1.0 (1990) all launched as Mac-only software.

In 1991 Apple then launched QuickTime and FireWire was codified as a standard by 1995. They literally defined the software and firmware which made digital editing possible on a workstation in the 90s.

Adobe Premiere was architected around Quicktime. Avid alone held an estimated 80%+ market share in the professional broadcast, TV, and film industry and was exclusively Apple until mid-95. That's not in the US, that's Globally.

Apple then launched Final Cut and ended up capturing 49% of the U.S. professional editing market by the mid-2000s.

Here's a fun read and personal chronology

https://www.cined.com/apple-at-50-the-company-that-made-me-a...

Those softwares also existed on Windows, and there were plenty of countries in the 1990s with zero Apple presence on their markets.

In Portugal, there was a single shop in Lisbon, Interlog, in the days before Internet, required driving down to Lisbon, or flying from the Islands into mainland, to get those computers, at double the price of getting PCs, Amiga or Atari instead.

This in Europe, in other continents with lower income levels, it was already good enough to get their hands on PC clones.

Poor fellows, did not had any multimedia productions. /s

macOS/OS X is pretty solid, yes. Mac OS "Classic" (Version <= 9), though, was not nearly as stable. Classic is where most of the big names in media software started, though.

I mean it was good enough for the Beach Boys to record the first full-length albums recorded and assembled entirely in-DAW.

Macintosh NuBus computers (the early PPC stuff running System 7.5 onwards) took over completely from TimeLine WaveFrame as Pro Tools established istself in film audio and foley work. Think Toy Story onwards, or anything in Skywalker Sound from the mid 90s.

Pixar was mostly UNIX workstations, and since owned by Steve Jobs, a couple of NeXTSTEP alongside SGI.

Snow Leopard was the pinnacle of operating systems, it was just the best

Absolutely, Linux is now far superior to other commercial OSes when it comes to power users.

Linux is the new Hackintosh. Well, for many of us it was always the spiritual descendant of the old-school Macintosh, the thinker's toy, the ultimate malleable computer system you can build at home, where all the building blocks are written in code you can read and understand, and change the enviroment how we want while we're using it.

Apple ][ (+, e) were DIY/hacker-friendly. The //c more closed and first Mac moreso. During those machines prime era it was clear that those with the hacker/DIY itch better served on the early IBM PC clone and MS-DOS machines. Apple lost a lot of nerds for a period and wasnt really til OS X it seems that they wanted us back.

[delayed]

MacOS is ok, but I'm also probably going to switch as soon as the Linux supports gets to M5 (Omarchy now runs on M1,M2,M3). One thing that surprised me recently on MacOS is that it's actually quite simple to vibecode applications you want (it just produces standard apps in swift) and it becomes also very malleable this way.

Can't you vibecode apps for other platforms too?

you can vibecode even multiplatform apps!

Gravity runs in M4, Asahi has run on M1 and M2 for a while.

What is Gravity? This? https://soloist.ai/gravity

Gravity Linux. It’s a focused on Linux on M4 and M5.

Came here to say this. If this thing ran Windows, it'd be a dream computer!

I'm kidding of course. Really looking forward to the days of the liberated mac hardware though!

I just get a graphics workstation/gamers quality laptops and place Linux/Windows on them.

Not only they are more powerful than comparable Apple hardware at the same hardware price point[0], they have more ports without funny dongles, and I get to use the winning combo of server and desktop OSes in market share, and industry APIs.

Yes there are more powerful Apple laptops available when money is no question, but I don't live in that world, nor am I getting into debt unless there is no way around it.

I live in a country where there is no market for a decent business laptop with good support (like a P1) and everything is plasticy or RGB-laden tat.

I was kind of forced onto a mac as it was the only thing that had decent-enough support or I could buy an identical new one and restore a backup on, without having to use something grey market

That doesn't seem to be a common situation though, having access to premium Apple hardware, and not business laptops.

Same here, as well. To be able to configure and buy a nice business laptop, I need to talk with specialized dealers, and these doesn't come cheap because they're one-offs (CTO or otherwise). Mac is much more obtainable.

Unless it's a very specific hardware, most Linux distros will boot up fine from the same disk image on different machines or even inside a VM.

> Not only they are more powerful than comparable Apple hardware at the same hardware price point[0]

Allow me to doubt. Results vary between specific scenarios (gaming or other GPU intensive tasks being an obvious example), but the raw performance of Apple silicon for the price is unmatched.

Someone failed to read my last paragraph only to leave a comment.

I don't understand why you would say that. Your last sentence doubles down on how the bang-for-the-bucks is worse with Apple and I disagree with this. You'd have to spend more money on a x86 CPU to have the same power.

Only if one ignores the whole package, between CPU, GPU, number of available ports without having to carry falling dongles, external screen connections, industry standard graphics and gaming APIs.

Your power comes with a one or two ports, maybe a memory card reader or not, a GPU API that is only relevant thanks to iOS games, a broken keyboard that took six years to fix, an OS that even hardcore podcasts like ATP routinely complain about.

I just want a Snow Leopard port to my Macbook Pro M4

The trick is to stay on 10.15, modern macOS is rubbish.

Snow Leopard, 10.6.8 was the last Mac OS version I truly liked --- I haven't even been able to keep track of version ordering for a long while.

10.15 is rubbish as well, they've broken hibernation and never fixed it.

Thinking the exact same, would have bought Mac hardware long ago if Linux was supported (or even running!) on the latest gen. It's all down to the need for local llm capability!

100% this.

I did run a Hackintosh back in 2015. I bought all the 100% compatible hardware, ran all the updates and firmwares from tonymacx86, etc. And even went through a couple painful upgrade cycles, until the M-chips came out....

Now, I just want a Arch-based custom dev machine, and in the era of vibe-coding self-indulgent vanity software, I can more than make up for the flows and tools I had on my mac that won't work on Linux, which isn't much.

At least it's not Windows. MacOS is still pretty decent compared to that.

> Now I want anything but macOS on mac hardware.

But... why?

Like, Windows is a pile of dung, Windows 11 follows the general consumer Windows trend of "decent, braindead, decent, braindead" that we saw ever since Windows 98 (decent), ME (braindead), XP (decent), Vista (braindead), 7 (decent), 8 (braindead), 10 (decent), 11 (goddamn fucking braindead). And this time unfortunately I do not see Microsoft ever backing down.

Mainstream Linux, hardware compatibility questions aside, is nowhere near macOS in terms of functionality and usability, and completely off the charts in terms of UI polish.

"Linux on mainstream desktops" will only be a thing when someone shows up and invests like half a billion euros into UI and UX designers into the most common pieces of software - and yeets GNOME in the dustbin.

yes of course. where's the ai with getting linux to boot on a modern apple laptop?

I wonder if we can use AI to deshittify macOS then. Or just ask an AI to copy what we like from macOS onto a Linux (or GNU/Hurd) kernel.