Hackintosh

In my pursuit of becoming an IT Professional, I have realized that I need to be very well rounded and proficient in all of the major commonly used operating systems of today. I already had Microsoft Windows experience (3.1 all the way to 10, including NT 4), Arch and Debian based Linux distributions (Manjaro, Pop! OS, Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Zorin OS, Kali, Raspbian, Raspberry Pi OS, and many others), along with Mac OS experience in assisting family members with their Mac problems, administration, troubleshooting, and software installation, I decided that it was time to get access to my own Macintosh, or at least the Mac Operating System for my personal use, so I can dive deeper into the core functions of this operating system and become more proficient in its operations.

After debating whether or not to buy an actual Macintosh, I turned to the Hackintosh community for answers. I wanted to see if it would be possible for me to tap into my existing hardware to save physical desk space and to save myself the expense of buying an entire machine just for the purposes of experimenting with the operating system. That's when I found out about a snap package called Sosumi. This package allowed me to install a QEMU virtual machine on my existing Ubuntu 20.04 Installation on my Multiboot system and run Mac OS almost natively. There were several advantages to this approach. For one, I wouldn't have to worry about hardware conflict, since the Virtual Machine software automatically creates a compatibility layer between my hardware and the hardware that Mac OS expects Apple's devices to run. Another very substantial benefit to this approach is that this now allows me to do whatever I want to the operating system without worrying about breaking the installation and having to reinstall from the ground up or wait to restore a Time Machine backup. If something ever goes wrong, I simply have to back up the entire virtual hard drive to another folder and I can simply drag and drop the virtual hard disk file into my Hackintosh directory to replace the broken image with a copy of my backup and the system will work exactly the same way as before I touched it!

Overall, the performance of this Hackintosh is surprisingly quick. The only issue I've run into is the inability to update from Catalina to Big Sur (although, I'm sure there will be a workaround or an update soon enough to fix this), and the fact that my VM only recognizes 7 MB of dedicated video memory, which can lead to occasional performance issues and some items not fully appearing on screen in some more graphically demanding programs. I could set up a GPU passthrough, however, I would need a second GPU and currently, those are near impossible to find at regular retail price from a reputable retailer nowadays due to scalping and the pandemic. For my needs, however, this won't be an issue, as I'm more interested in learning the core functions of the operating system itself and the best practises for administering this system than I am about running 3D benchmarks and gaming.