A Small Token of Freedom

A world constructed from the familiar is the world in which there’s nothing to learn.

– Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

For people who is in love of the simplicty of Unix philosophy but have to use Windows on a daily basis, every minute of it feels like grinding. The issue with Windows is not that it doesn’t work, it works, for the most part. But it doesn’t feel like a tool to help you get the job done, rather something you have to fight against to get what you want.

To borrow Steve Job’s metaphor about computer as “a bicycle for the mind”, I think Windows nowadays is more like a trolley with a crooked wheel. While you can certainly get where you want with it, the journey is bumpy and miserable.

My unhealthy relationship with Windows over the years have developed in me a stronge hostility toward everything Microsoft related. It starts to grow to the point that greatly hinders my ability to do any thing on it. So last week I finally made up my mind to wipe Windows from my life for good, by installing a … macOS on my PC.

At first I thought setting up a usable Hackintosh¹ required a lot of tinkering, but it turned out to be rather straightforward. All I need to do was to follow a tutorial² step by step and about less than an hour later, I got an Apple logo spinning on my monitor.

Although I managed to get it work, for the first few days I was very tentative. I was dreadful to do any critical work on it, because I was constantly worrying it would suddenly hang before I can save a few hours of work. I end up pushing my code to github every half an hour or so.

It finally proves that my lack of trust toward hackintosh was totally unnessary. The whole experience couldn’t have been more smooth. Not only is the freshly installed macOS perfect out of box, without any tinkering. It behaves just like a real apple device.

The only downside is that I can not use Nvidia graphics card now. Because there are no drivers for Nvidia cards and probably will never be in Apple ecosystem.

To witness the whole process of getting a pirated macOS running on an unsupported hardware, make you realise how deeply entrenched we are in our walled garden. Everywhere in tech, you can find all kinds of man made walls. On the lower stack, we have mac vs Windows, android against iPhone. On the software side, you have two groups of totally isolated wechat friends and whatsapp friends and no way to talk with each other. Even on the content level, you have one user’s tiktok feeds totally different from another one.

And the wall is getting higher. With Apple jumping off the X86 wagon and to embrace Arm architecture across macs and iPhones, the future of Hackintosh is grim. Just Look at the mobile ecosystem you will see how things will end up for the PC market: Since the first release of the iPhone, a decade has passed, but have you seen anyone even able to install iOS on an android device?

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and enjoy the moment while we can. With this weird mixed breed of a mac and a PC sitting on my desk, it is like I somehow managed to crack a small opening on the wall and caught a brief glimpse of the view outside of the walled garden.

There, you have it, a small token of freedom.