About a week ago, I set up a Hackintosh using OpenCore, that I am still using, but plan to switch back to Linux.
MacOS is a really smooth, responsive operating system. Even with my relatively low-spec hardware, it runs wonderfully. My ethernet works, my audio works; sleep does not work, but I do not use it because my desktop use does not ask for it. From this experience, macOS is intuitive and looks stunning. If you want to try it out yourself, your mileage may vary, my experience is only smooth-sailing because my hardware is well-supported.
While I like the “bold” font faces, they appear quite blurry on a low-DPI screen. The font rendering really shines on Retina Displays, but my resolution is not that high.
The apps developed for the operating system are all very performant, look consistent and are of very high quality — that sometimes correlates with a corresponding price tag.
What I do not enjoy about the operating system is the locked-in nature of it. You must register an Apple account to use the App Store. Fortunately, that is not a problem that troubles me much; developers tend to avoid the App Store as it is inconvenient, results in a big percentage of lost revenue, and slows down updates. Instead, they distribute their software through their own channels, like their websites. IOS developers publish apps on the App Store because they do not have any other choice.
Unfortunately, I do not think using a Hackintosh is feasible in the long-term. You are running an unsupported operating system. Things will most certainly break, with no clear reason why. The software is tailor-made for the hardware, and with the addition of Apple Silicon, Intel devices will slowly, but surely, lose their support from Apple.
With that in mind, communicating with anything out of Apple’s walled garden is simply a pain. The only filesystems that macOS can read are:
- HFS (for backwards compatibility)
- APFS (Proprietary, no specification)
- exFAT and FAT (for compatibility with Windows)
Everything else is out of question. FAT (specifically FAT32) has a max file size of 4 GB-1 and a volume size of 2 TB. This is archaic compared to modern file systems. Whereas exFAT has better sizes, it does not have journaling, just as FAT32, resulting in loss of data in the moment of a power outage or hardware malfunction.
From what I have read online, these two are the big reasons why Apple will not add support for other file systems:
- OS incompatibility (System calls)
- License incompatibility (Viral licenses like GPL)
In conclusion, it is quite a pleasant experience, but is hard to get right for your hardware, it will become unsupported once Apple drops support for Intel devices, and Apple makes it really hard for you to escape their walled garden.