Why “OSx86 Distros” are bad.
I see people on IRC asking “Where can I get an 0Sx86 10.6 distro?” on a fairly regular basis so I would like to take a moment to explain exactly why myself and others discourage their use.
#1 – Distros cause problems!
If you haven’t noticed most, if not all, distros apply more hacks than are required on the average system in an attempt to function on as many systems as possible. While this may seem like an OK thing to you while things are “working” you may not even notice diminished performance or realize that those bugs you are having are due to a particular hacked kernel extension somewhere that isn’t even required for your own hardware… Additionally if it has over-written “vanilla” kernel extensions on your system a software update could corrupt your install and leave you with an OS that will not boot. If this happens chances are since you used a distro, and didn’t learn for yourself what needed to be patched on your system and how to patch it – you probably won’t know how to fix it.
#2 – The OSx86 Community does not want to support distros!
If you can’t get support from the actual distro developer (most do not support their releases) you will be met with ridicule by others in the community. Why? Because the distro likely broke your install to begin with and because people who use distros generally are unable to articulate what patched kexts they are using or understand basic terminology like kext, permissions, mkext, or how to use basic terminal commands. We have a fairly good understanding of common errors with RETAIL installs but if we had to stop to try and fix every backwater distro out there – that has an error simply because it’s patching kexts incorrectly for a users system, well… We wouldn’t have time to work on anything else. We generally expect people who request support to have a decent level of self-competency so that it does not waste our time.
#3 – Distros encourage laziness!
Instead of learning how and why something works on your own system and improving your own understanding of OS X & PC hardware you want other people to do the work for you. With no profit or reward in it for them. If this sounds like you please do yourself a favor – GO BUY A MAC!
#4 – Distros are Piracy!
This is an obvious one, if you own a retail OS X DVD you wouldn’t need to download a distro anyway, unless you are exceptionally lazy which brings us back to #3. Please support apple! If you want to run Snow Leopard on your non-apple hardware the least you should do is purchase a legitimate copy!
#5 – Conclusion
If you want to run OS X on your own PC hardware, do it the right way and learn how to achieve a working retail install from scratch. Please don’t take “shortcuts” with these “distros” – in the long run they will actually cause you much more trouble than learning how to do it for yourself. It may sound like a daunting ordeal at first glance but with utilities like myHack available it has never been easier to run OS X on your own hardware.
Tags: Distro, Hackint0sh, OS X, OSx86
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at 13:51 by Conti and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I think that if you want to run MacOSX on a PC, you need to learn about the process of loading and setting up the BIOS for a properly running system.
I purchased Apple systems for nearly 15 years and I LOVE MacOS X. I just refuse to spend $4500 on an Apple system that cost about $1800 to build. That is just obscene profits. As it is Apple uses commodity components same as Dell or HP does, so why can they justify 2.5 times the cost of components to sell us a MAC?
We don’t do Windows! Malware-Spyware-all those things that can screw up your PC do not happen on the MAC. For those who understand; MacOS X is a marvelous piece of work done by Apple engineers. BSD is a UNIX that has a beautiful GUI on the screen. If Apple has done it, then Linux developers should have been able to do that by now.
Apple deserves to be paid for their operating system. An even though there comes a new one about every 18 months, it’s only $129.00; not the myriad of levels of users that you get from uSoft.
Building a hackintosh is getting to be tech mainstream. There are plenty of sites with information and lots of folks have been successful in loading MacOS X on a PC.
Conti,
With your new installer, i don’t see why anyone needs a distro anymore :) I have a bunch of Allianz commercial usb thumbdrives lying around and i use them to host my bootloader and kexts. I don’t even touch the drive at all. This would not at all be possible with a distro, unfortunately.
D.
I am no expert and still learning a lot on hackint0sh. I started out trying various distros (trust me, I tried them all). My reason was it would be easier to install and get going. Lo and behold, I spent numerous hours “guessing” and like many others I got it to work. Once I have it running, I found myself looking at things like kexthelper, osx86tools, efistudio and so on …. Again, I did not learn anything except knowing the tool name. I have no idea what those tools do. One day, I did an update thinking that I “know” the system now. Well… it broke afterward. No problem, I thought to myself, I can reinstall using distro because I did it before. Well … since I don’t remember or understand what I did the first time, I was unable to do it again.
At this point, I decide that I am going to read some more. Spend endless hours reading and just following “conversations” on irc. I dare not to ask because I have no idea what to ask. Simply asking how do I install on my XYZ computer or what distro to use is just does not sound right.
Finally, I did my install using retail. It was much much simpler than distro and basically no guess work. Why, because you have to understand what is needed.
Since then, I have done numerous retail installs on various hardware (processors) just to gain a better understanding on various things (such as dsdt, efi, device-id, scripts , update, backup and etc…)
When SL came out, my first SL retail installation took 45 minutes and I was up and running (needed some tweaks but they weren’t major).
Speaking from my own experience, I encourage people to go retail. You will never look back, believe me. It may seem daunting at first but it is actually simple. Again, help yourself by doing a lot of reading and observing because at the end of the day, it’s your system.
In Soviet Russia… distro’s install YOU!
Well people that know me from irc know that i hate dirstros… Not for a lot of resons that people might think and i did also use them once. The reson i really dont like them are because people dont know what that did trigger the kernel panic in 99% of the times because they cant say if any of the hacked kexts that was on the distro from default all the suddon get problems with some kext you just install, or what kexts to restore after a update.
I have to say the distro is good for the first time user but honest installing is just as easy as using a distro. It do take the same knowing your hardware level to use distro as retail.
I mean the following:
Distros dont magic discover your graphics card, you have to pick the injector.
And retails need the same so you will need to know atleast nvidia or ati and pic-express or agp.
distros dont discover the audio chip and that is the same with retails. You will need to know the codec of the audio chip or try with voodoohda.
same with chipsets, etc etc… the diffrence is once is where you google to find lets say a nvidia “driver” for osx86, and if you just use logic it is just as easy to find them. else you can get even pointers to what to google or a link to the “driver” even tho i am sure if you google (And i havent tested this tho) nvidia driver osx86 you will find the names of some of the injectors, and someone talking about efi strings.. :D
Well what i mean is this:
when you go retail, you know what you change because you have to spend some time on finding the kexts, then installing them so you might pick up on what the issue is when you get a kernel panic when rebooting after installing the nvidia driver we talked about before, or a audio driver etc etc. abd that makes it more easy for us to help and for you to figure out.
I guess my point wasn’t clear enough. Granted piracy can’t possibly be “stopped” but if enough “distros” show up I could see apple deciding to take a tougher stance toward the entire hackint0sh scene and make it a lot more difficult for all of us – so far they have been extremely tolerant toward us!
It is $29 for a legitimate copy, if you can’t afford to spend even that much on an OS I suggest you try linux, you certainly won’t find windows for that price.
Shortcuts, fall into two categories for me, helping hands or hand outs. This site is all about the helping hands. We will attempt to show you the simplest and most effective methods for installing OS X on your PC, while also teaching you why it works so if you do run into problems later you are well equipped to handle it.
We will not give hand outs, if you want to have all the work done for you let me reiterate that the solution is quite simple: Buy a Mac. They work very well out of the box and need absolutely no “geeky” tech skills to use.
well it’s a matter of opinion remember that not all users are tech savvy but since almost everyone knows about the os running on x86 hardware almost all want to see it running. I don’t see the distro as a piracy but as a convenient way to introduce to you what this os is.While asking and begging to know how a problem can be solved on how to use a retail version the distro can be a useful thing knowing that you already have a few files and some instructions on how they do their job.
Furthermore I see no point in buying the os if you’re still going to use windows in the end.
but its not always about hackintosh. sometimes people simply want to run osx and arent necessarily computer geeks like the rest of us. even the computer illiterate should have that choice. AND if you pirate you pirate. nothing much can be done. and the few that actually buy an osx disc should still have the option of easily installing this on a non intel-mac. why not take shortcuts? man is and always will be lazy. thats just the way we’re created. if there is an easier way to do osx why do we have to bother with the learning all the command line and etc??? the hard works already done for us??
Agreed 100%.
If people contemplating using distro then hackint0sh is not for them.
Well said my dear friend. The problem with most people is that they are looking for short cuts. I mean , you’re already installing a hacked system. I do expect folks to read up & study a bit before installing.