New School, New OS
Posted: September 21, 2024
Hello there, my dear readers! It has certainly (once again) been a hot minute since I've written anything here. I'll probably stop starting these posts with a paragraph like this if I'm only going to post irregularly and infrequently.
In the time that I've last written here, a lot has happened in my life, and while I won't be going into all of it, I will be talking about some of the more interesting parts of it.
First of all, I began my freshman year of college about a month ago. I'm currently taking all of my classes online through the local community college, but I plan on transferring to Virginia Commonwealth University once obtaining my associate's degree in Computer Science (said choice of major should surprise exactly 0 people).
I've struggled a lot in the past with online education, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, and I've noticed that I'm still having trouble with some of the same things now, particularly managing my time effectively, keeping track of all of my assignments, and generally just staying on task. In a classroom this wasn't a problem, as I was in a dedicated place for learning things, and I think this physical separation of home and school was helpful in making sure that I get done what I need to. At home, it's far too easy to go do something else and end up being left with all of the work to do over the weekend, as it has been for pretty much my entire time here thusfar.
I think things will get easier with time–they already have been–but I still want to try and get myself into some in-person classes at the community college next semester, but the lack of a car and the lack of a driver's license are keeping me from doing so at this moment.
In somewhat related news, ALVR is finally in a place where I can stream VR games from my Linux PC to my Quest 2! VR has long been the one thing keeping me from wiping windows from my spare SSD, so I was eager to do that, but there is now another thing that forces me to dual boot: Respondus.
Respondus is a custom web browser meant for taking monitored tests over the internet. It's super invasive, monitoring every aspect of my machine while I test, but I have no choice in whether or not I'd like to use it, but by far, its most annoying quality is that it only supports Windows and macOS. My plans of ditching Windows for good have been foiled–or so I thought. Emboldened by my realization and armed with my curiosity and my strong desire to avoid Windows like the plague, I embarked on a journey to transform my reluctantly Microsoft-infested spare SSD into the home for my first Hackintosh in a while.
For this, I followed Dortania's OpenCore Install Guide, which I highly recommend you do as well if you'd like to follow in my beautiful, four-toed footsteps. Along the way, I learned a lot about what goes into making macOS work on hardware it was never meant for, and I got a crash-course in the workings of ACPI tables, even compiling my own using CorpNewt's SSDTTime. It's stated in the install guide that there tend to be some issues with getting AMD processors working since Macs have never used them, but getting this set up was actually much easier than it was on my Intel-based T440p.
As you can see, I'm running macOS 15 Sequoia, a version that (as of writing) has only been out for 5 days. I began this install with version 14 (Sonoma) but decided to bite the bullet and hope OpenCore and all the Kexts I Installed would still work. Thankfully, they did! I'm guessing the reason it worked out so well is that besides the CPU, everything else in my machine is either directly compatible or close enough to something that is compatible with the machine I'm spoofing, the 2019 Mac Pro.
That's about all I have to say for now, thanks for reading. I'll try and post here more often now since I have more going on in my life that I can talk about, but in the meantime, have an ospsome day! :>