I wanted to give a huge thank-you to this community for promoting a really solid foundation for me into the world of hackintosh.
Background: I'm an extremely picky person, and an pickier computer user. I do software development in unix-based environments, and I really prefer macOS tooling/keyboard shortcuts, but I also play graphics intensive computer games.
- If I bought a windows PC for gaming, I wouldn't be able to develop comfortably in a mac environment. I could install linux on there, but I really find linux unusable for an everyday computer. Simple things like HBOgo failing on Chrome because who the heck uses linux for watching HBOgo.
- I could pay $4000+ dollars for a Mac Pro, then dual boot that with windows... but that doesn't seem worth it
- So a hackintosh based off $1500 of windows PC parts is really the perfect intersection of my venn diagram of needs.
I actually purchased this particular computer back in 2014 (with a GPU upgrade a few years later) with a hackintosh as my target. I did manage to get it "working" using a combination of tonymacx86's unibeast/multibeast and some other guides on insanelymac. It was really god-awful though. The installation was a giant gordian knot of steps, trial/error, and frustration. At the end, I never even got my native harddrive to boot off EFI, and I just had a USB stick plugged into the back of my computer forever. A few months in, a windows update somehow corrupted my mac's installation (even though it was on a totally separate SSD) and I rage-reformatted the whole mac drive.
Fast-forward 5 years, I've been getting by by hooking up a macbook13 to the monitor as my daily driver, and then using a USB hub to switch all my peripherals to my windows gaming PC when I game, but there have been a lot of frustrations there as well. The nails in the coffin were that even surfing the web on the macbook13 was getting too slow. I decided to do some research back into the hackintosh community, and it was only after finding this subreddit, specifically the FAQ and the vanilla guide, that I felt confident enough to embark on this adventure again, which previously caused me no end of frustration.
I totally agree with your philosophy around hackintoshes, forcing the new user to actually learn what's going on, because there will be issues, and the user him/herself is the only person who can fix them. Having gone through the vanilla guide, I realize that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing the last time around. It was just a series of clicks in wizards and shell commands and lots of hoping. This time around I actually learned what an EFI volume is, what clover does, how kexts and config.plist work, etc. And I got my hackintosh working like 1000% better than the first time around.
The few snags I ran into:
- I chose High Sierra because I have a GTX 1080, which only works with Sierra or High Sierra. And the version downloaded from the App Store is currently 17G66. Apparently it's a weird apple version, and there's no corresponding nvidia webdriver that works with it. What ended up working for me was [Benjamin-Dobell's nvidia-update](https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/nvidia-update). It just worked flawlessly when I ran his script.
- Wifi. My original hackintosh was when I was near an ethernet port, so I bought the H87N motherboard with no onboard wifi (and thus no mini PCI-e slot, and no m.2 slot, and it's a mini-ITX, so there's nothing else). I started looking into replacing the entire motherboard, which would be sorta expensive given that I'm buying a used/refurbished 5 year old part at basically the same price ($130+) as if it were new. And then I'd have to buy a mini PCI-e wifi card($30) or shell out even more($50+) for the better compatibility of an apple airport wifi card. I ended up taking a chance and ordered this $13 ebay USB wifi dongle. Hey, it does say it "supports macOS". I really had zero hopes for this, given all the caveats in the Wireless Buyer Guide. But... I just went to their website, installed the app, and it works (hopefully there's no malware!). Great connection, starts up flawlessly upon boot, stays connected, no USB/sleep issues. It also works on my windows 10 installation with no drivers at all. Of course I don't have airdrop/handoff, but I'm mainly iMessaging myself for airdrop.
- And that's it for caveats. Surprisingly iMessage just worked without any further mangling. I just signed into my apple account directly.
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