tldr: My hackitnosh hangs, loses Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connection, is quite slow for my hardware (i7 CPU, 16 GB RAM, SSD, dGPU). Am I doing something wrong? What would your advice be?

Should I expect a better experience after:

• buying the Trackpad and Magic Keyboard?
• Apple Cinema Display?
• getting a Radeon (RX580 for me) GPU?
• getting a DJ’s haedphones?
• upgrading to Big Sur?
• going the KVM/QEMU way?

Hello folks,

That could be a bit existential topic to talk, but I would love some of you joining the discussion.

The Rant

I’m a hackintosh enthusiast since Feb 2014 and a Mac (-Book) user since Mar 2011. Back then I started as someone who doesn’t do well with computers (could barely construct one myself) to a person who does a tiny bit of DevOps magic these days. And enjoys (Arch) Linux, of course.

And it’s a bumpy road, I would say. At the very beginning I had euphoria I use a powerful machine with (the) great (-est) desktop OS ever. With some downsides of being terrified when something goes wrong. As I begin learning what my computer is, I got less terrified and more satisfied. But at some point things changed and I’m no longer that satisfied. So I want to talk about preciesly this.

First, and foremost, here’s the controversial point of view: I am getting less and less satisfied with what macOS is, its design (not meaning visual aesthetics, which I quite like, but meaning the architecture). It’s getting more and more bloat, forcing me into its way of doing things. But I’m not going there really. Just mentioning that, because I’m getting more and more frustrated from both the OS and how it works with my hardware.

Second, I don’t like how it works. Well, I should mention that I observed a few eras: Chimera, Clover, Open Core. These days I use Open Core, wrote a couple of silly guides on that, and enjoy that part more or so. But it’s all good when I have nothing to compare to. Yesterday I tried the default non-modified Ubuntu 21.04 on the very same machine: it loaded within 5 seconds (after the BIOS POST, or how it’s called, plus 20 sec on that part) vs 25 sec of macOS. It’s non-encrypted here and there. Ubuntu works much faster for basic tasks. And regardless of me doing some work on graphics, which needs Adobe CS, Sketch and similar software, most of the time it’s just the basic browsing and things in DE, which is not that bad in Linux, some are pretty great (if you like tiling WM).

I’m getting more and more calm about the future of all this (regarding M1 theme), but as I’m still on macOS, I’d like to do something to improve my user experience.

What Should I Do?

I have two simple questions here, regarding my software and hardware.

1. Is Big Sur better than Catalina and worth upgrading to?

Since my Haswell H‘ntosh (SMBIOS 14,2) is no longer supported I decided to wait for Big Sur to settle. Hence, I’m still on Catalina. I have a MacBook Pro w/ Retina (2014), which I barely use (as a typewriter) these days. And I wouldn’t say Big Sur is that much better, but I don’t really compare, as I use my laptop maybe an hour a week, or even less.

I see some of you guys trying the newest Monterey beta on your hacks. Is it worth it? I do understand that you cannot compare beta to a stable release, but I am just curious: did Apple fix all the bugs or just introduced many more?

1. Those of you who use macOS in virtual machine: was it a better experience?

Often I suspect my hardware works not that good as it should: my fans are louder, my CPU does something when it shouldn’t. Sometimes I think I’d be much better with running Linux as my host machine and macOS as a guest one, when I need it, a couple of hours a day, maybe.

My Wi-Fi loses connection sometimes. I believe I bought it as a native one, but now I think it’s not; I have a kext for that. Bluetooth works most of the time, but to type this post I was forced to connect a cable to my Magic Keyboard. I could reboot to fix that (why should I?) but now most of the time I cannot load my OS, it just hangs 5 out of 6 times: either while booting or after I logged into the system. After it’s not I can work without any issues. I thought that’s an SSD issue, but it’s quite good (it’s from 2012, SanDisk Extreme Pro) and the behaviour is still the same after I swapped it for Intel SSD 530 Series: it hanged and didn’t boot at all. Though the same disk works wonderfully with Ubuntu on the very same machine, loading the system from BIOS to desktop within 5 (five!) seconds.

Sometimes I think the Virtual Machine way could be better, even considering the penalty I’d have on virtualizing the whole thing.

Anything else I’ve missed? What would your advice be? More on my configuration in my GitHub.