The Dumbing Down of osx86

[Hagar]

Once upon a time, osx86 was born, of a few simple modifications to a single file which needed to be manually injected with some windows tools.. it wasn't hard, the hard work had been done by clever people who found out just what to patch in the relevant file. It was easy to understand, what was known was known (including the limited hardware support), the rest was virgin territory.

 

Fast forward 3 years, a whole point-release & more, through times when the osx86 was a mess of versions & patches to the situation today, where the clever stuff is done by people who make bootloaders, EFI value injectors and kexts, and we the users have an easier time than ever before.

 

But wait.. there is much confusion.. rumours & hearsay become "accepted fact", issues real & imagined and their fixes abound all over the place.. if so much progress has happened, why would this be?

 

Easy isn't easy enough for some, it seems. The expanded list of compatible hardware still attracts people whose equipment is marginal & so have trouble, but most of all it seems that people are trying to achieve success with no expenditure in effort to learn how to do even the simplest little things to their systems.

 

There are pre-patched releases, these are pretty simple, particularly if your hardware matches up to the DVD.. but some feel even this is too complicated, and want guides as to what they should click & select during install. For those with compatible hardware, the retail/boot-132 method reigns supreme, yet some people find this is also too complicated, and flock to gui tools & widgets and helpers that apparently "make it easier"

 

Did any of you get that lecture at school where they said that "if you cheat in an exam, you're only cheating yourself"? Well that is precisely what these people are doing..

 

I've seen people spend days on end trying to find a shortcut around a few simple terminal commands.. rather downloading & installing 6 different iso's looking for one where everything "just works" than following the established procedure of install, fix bootloader, fix drivers.

 

Then There are the pre-emptives.. take a look in "Buying Guides, Reviews & Recommendations" & you will find heaps of people asking "will this hardware work" or "what hardware should I get that works 100%" These are people who not only don't want to do the simple job of installation themselves, they won't even do their own forum & wiki searches to find out what hardware works. The information is out there.. asking for it again only clutters the forum.

 

The bottom line is that: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH

 

The knowledge and skill needed to install osx86 is not great, and all of it accessible with a little patience reading the forum & wiki. trying to make it easier only makes it harder in the long run, because when something goes wrong, you have no idea how to fix it, nor what caused it, because your system is full of other people's patches installed from point-&-click installers and you have no idea what they are. So we get "my system is b0rked I installed kalyatkoth v1.4p and L33tNik's nvidia installer what do I do?" posts.

 

if you take the shortcut, you're stuck asking for directions. If you learn the way, or better still, how to read a map, you can make it there unaided.

 

I tried making a n00bs guide once, I gave up. There is no way to proof a guide against every kind of idiot that may read it, but here's a potted version.

I began with:

"Know your hardware" which I still think is the first commandment. Unless you know down to the device & vendor ID exactly what every component in your machine is, you have no business posting in the technical threads. Once you have this, researching whether it will work is a pleasant afternoon's surfing.. then installing, making sure you've chosen a technique that suits your hardware, and once it's installed on the drive, and can boot, it's back to the results of your research to get as much of your hardware working as possible through the installation of kexts, the editing of plists & the generation & addition of EFI strings.

 

And finally: If you want a Mac, buy a Mac. a hackintosh is a PC no matter how you twist & turn it, and the installation of an unsupported OS is a hobby-task for those with an interest in such things. Those trying to get a "Mac for free" by this route are always disappointed.

[cringemaster]

amen

[aylamrin]

How true !!!

[Colonel]

Preach it, brotha! Shall we sing some hymns next?

[Suhail]

Well said Hagar, this is nothing but the simple truth.

[apowerr]

100% Agree. You're really missing out on the 'fun' of OSx86 by not learning it as well.

[realityiswhere]

Best explanation I've seen in a long time. Well written :glare:

[(MoC)]

I agree 100%. This is absolutely true, I'm left speechless.

 

~MoC

 

[That was directed at Hagar, not Kappy]

[Stravaganza]

Amen to that.

[mifki]

kappy, go {censored} yourself dude. no pain no gain. the only way to really get anything out of osx is to put in the extra effort and do some hard yards, not be spoon fed.

[Alessandro17]

And finally: If you want a Mac, buy a Mac. a hackintosh is a PC no matter how you twist & turn it, and the installation of an unsupported OS is a hobby-task for those with an interest in such things. Those trying to get a "Mac for free" by this route are always disappointed.

 

Exactly. I have said in the past that this is not a project for n00bs.

I have also said many times that if you are serious about it, you build a brand new computer with the most compatible parts (and don't start yet another thread asking for the most compatible motherboard).

But it has become a fashion. People come with their existing hardware, no matter how incompatible it is, and OS X must run on it.

I won't even mention that such people can't google, can't ask a question, only rarely say "thank you", and on occasion they can be very rude and arrogant.

 

@Kappy

 

Nobody ever said that running OS X on beige hardware was a God granted right.

And Linux is not only for geeks. In fact it poses a lot fewer problems than OS X on a PC. It isn't for idiots either. Ask me what I have gone through with people who couldn't copy and paste a simple command.

[(MoC)]

I won't even mention that such people can't google, can't ask a question, only rarely say "thank you", and on occasion they can be very rude and arrogant.

 

Yeah, I mean, there's a nice HCL that they can look through, but no, we have to tell them to go RTFM or bleakly tell them that what they have works. I dunno, it's becoming sad, the "scene" died long ago, now it's just rotting on the proverbial ground. If it gets any worse I'm leaving, but, sadly, there's no place to go

[MacUser2525]

Actually I ran OS X starting with the original Beta version on a Beige G3. It was effort-free.

I've not found any effort required to run OS X on my Macs. I can't say the same for any Linux distro I've tried on a Mac or otherwise. Once beyond the LiveCD it's an effort. One of the most frustrating aspects of Linux for the non-geek is backup. There is no full-disk cloning (except for Clonezilla which doesn't work easily nor intuitively) that I found. There are file/folder backups and of course the ubiquitous rsync if you wish to become a script writer.

If someone can't figure out how to copy and paste, just how easy will Linux be for them? Not as easy as OS X, I can assure you. I advise thousands of Mac users every year but there are very very few who couldn't figure out how to copy and paste.

 

Gee, DUDE, aren't you clever. Is this really the best you can come up with? Someone should spoon feed you some intelligence. "No pain no gain" really? Are you shilling for Jack LaLanne?

In case you haven't noticed the millions of OS X users get plenty without having to become programming experts. And, in case you haven't noticed there are many more millions of Windows users who don't wish to become programmers either. These users don't want any pain, just something that works.

Next round try to come up with something useful.

 

To quote what was originally there before you edited. For those users then they have two choices the one they have already had namely call Apple to get their machine or hit up Pystar.

 

+1 Hagar couldn't have said it better.

[Hagar]

Kappy, please stop trolling this topic.

(and yes, I saw the previous version of your last post too)

[mifki]

wow, he knows how to use italics

[Kappy]

Kappy, please stop trolling this topic.

(and yes, I saw the previous version of your last post too)

 

Sorry, I did not realize disagreement constituted trolling. I apologize.

[makwanad]

Yay for the eMac being the one thing that changed my life forever.

[solaar]

Well written and expressed Hagar. Max respect!

 

I'd like to put my own spin on it and I know I'm not alone in this.

First off, I do own Apple hardware and spent quite a chunk of dough on it over a few years.

When I installed OSX 10.4.1 for the first time in early 2006 -the infamous deadmoo image - on an Acer laptop it was just out of curiosity and basically a fun experiment. People around me (especially Mac users) were in total disbelief when they saw OSX running on my laptop. That alone was worth the effort

 

Then it became some sort of addiction as OSX86 evolved, new release here, new hardware support there etc.... It became so addictive that I actually strained myself to get over my pathological command line phobia. I can say without pretension that I'm far from being an IT noob - first contact with a computer in 1977, on an IBM 370 - but dealing with text has never been my thing... (slightly dyslexic musician here, I'd rather write 10,000 notes than one word.) Anyway I got my way through the kext-riddled road that is OSX86 more or less successfully, also thanks to the immense help from this site btw. Apart from the fun it was a learning experience, how all the elements are tied together and how OSX basically ticks under the hood. BUT I've never lost my phobia of hacking arcane commands and hieroglyphs into system files, which can potentially hose your system if you just miss a tiny comma or a blank. That does not mean that I don't understand what needs to be done and what effect it will (should) have but practically speaking I simply know my luck. I type something somewhere and boom - reinstall required, unless you're a wizard on the terminal. (not too much different from Linux btw.) What can go wrong most likely will in my case and I'm certainly not alone with that.

 

I was educated in institutions where all we were allowed at exams was a pen, a sheet with the questions and sheets of blank paper... and your brain of course. We had to develop all our answers from scratch. That's an approach whose practical sense has been discussed for ages. Although I still not believe in multiple choice exams in education, it makes life so much easier in daily life practice. I reckon when you've basically 'proven' that you've understood enough details of what's required you really do appreciate when somebody who's 100 times more talented than you in hacking commands creates a nice GUI with check boxes for the dyslexic among us. I reckon it makes no sense to reinvent the screwdriver every time you need to fix something. I don't think it would be fair to deliberately want to 'exclude' people from this amazing project just because they are uncomfortable with unix commands and programming code. It can be done without, actually since quite soon after this whole OSX86 thing really took off.

 

Finally to the bright tech heads - never underestimate the 'creativity' of non-tech heads in finding bugs

 

:censored2:

[lord_muad_dib]

the worst problem is that people don't understand that mac os is always the same mac os in every iso you can download

i see tonz of threads asking for the usefulness of reinstalling the whole system with another iso just to have support for a crappy device

 

1 word: LAZY

having a functional installation takes time and will.

what's the point around having tonz of howtos if noone reads them?

 

noobiness is not bad, everyone has been noob once

what's wrong here is who doesn't want to learn what's needed

[aduffbrew]

And finally: If you want a Mac, buy a Mac. a hackintosh is a PC no matter how you twist & turn it, and the installation of an unsupported OS is a hobby-task for those with an interest in such things. Those trying to get a "Mac for free" by this route are always disappointed.

*laughing*

 

Hagar rocks!

 

I came on board during the deadmoo image days. I actually installed it on an HP E-PC 42, of all things. What a dog! I was doing some contract work for Microsoft at the time and when my main PC's hard drive failed, I actually finished up my project on the hackintosh because I couldn't bring myself to restore it to WindowsXP. I hadn't used a Mac since 1987! Even though it was slow and buggy, after about a week, I was hooked. I didn't make it to any subsequent releases of OSx86. I used the busted drive as a flimsy excuse to buy my one.

 

I stayed because I am fascinated by all the hard work you true OSx86 pioneers have put in. I have followed many of the threads closely... yet the installation of kexts, the editing of plists and the generation and addition of EFI strings all remain mostly theoretical to me. With exception of tweaking a couple of plist files, I've done none of it. Yet, with your inadvertent help, I gained a competent knowledge of terminal and the underpinnings of OS X.

 

By and large, I find this forum one of the most informed on the net.

 

Thanks for all you do!

 

Dave

[f41qu3]

I vote for Hagar.

[aylamrin]

Guys, I think its not a sin if somebody is uncomfortable with UNIX commands. Its perfectly OK. However there are many people who do not do enough homework before shooting a PM or putting another dumb topic. Nobody would scream at you if you say that I do not know how grep works or how to use sed to replace Dev IDS inside plist files. But it is encouraged that you spend a little more effort before shooting questions. In that way you can be more specific as what your problem is, and people may help you in a far efficient way. Also, please be absolutely sure that you have searched the forum exhaustively, (I know that the search does not work, however there is always Google). If the solution does not exist till date, (e.g support for a non supported hardware) you probably need to be more patient. There is no point in bugging others. You may also want to do some research yourself, if that suits you. If you can't spend time, spend some money instead, get a supported hardware (mobo, gfx card, LAN card whatever). And lastly, it had taken years to come together, to put it all together, nobody wants somebody to leave. Its a human nature that we would fight among ourselves, but tried not to hurt others.

[Alessandro17]

Exactly, nirmalya, and I want to stress this part of your post:

 

spend some money, get supported hardware (mobo, gfx card, LAN card whatever).

 

As I am saying in this thread:

 

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?sho...mp;#entry881272

 

But I am talking to the walls.

[bofors]

But wait.. there is much confusion.. rumours & hearsay become "accepted fact", issues real & imagined and their fixes abound all over the place.. if so much progress has happened, why would this be?

 

This has always been the case with OSx86.

 

Frankly, I think the issues you described have little to do with "simplification" or "dumbing down", but rather are do to the shear size of the OSx86 community.

 

This forum now has 247,774 registered users, plus there are an untold number of satellite forums, blogs and such, not to mention the commercialization of OSx86. This obviously means more choices for OSx86 distros, tools, kexts, kernels, etc... I am sure Linux went through the same natural, organic process.

 

Now regarding "simplification" or transitions in OSx86, what should be noted here is the "vanilla" revolution. Instead of jacking around with largely redundant torrents, one only needs to get the bare version of OS X and one can get it directly from Apple, likewise with updates.

 

Is "vanilla" a simplification? It certainly is for me, but some n00bs will certianly find a good distro to be simpler.

 

Does "vanilla" lead to "dumbing down"? No, users still need to find the right kexts needed for their specific hardware.

 

Finally, "dumbing down" and simplification is what Macintosh is supposed to be about. I don't run OS X because it is a complicated and difficult operating system. No, quite the opposite is true.

[Alessandro17]

This has always been the case with OSx86.

 

But would you agree with me that a couple of years ago it seemed to be clear to everybody that if you were serious about running OS X you'd buy supported hardware only?

That is what I did, I followed your tutorials and I build 3 perfectly working hackintoshes.

 

And BTW, I believe there is a need for an updated one , because after the Bad Axe 2 it isn't all that clear to new comers which motherboard to buy.