I know that hackintoshes are usually considered to be geared towards high end productivity tasks, but I am desperately shopping around for an OS to revive some ancient hardware. I got a fat stack of am3 and lga 775 office PCs, and if at all possible I'd like to outfit them with barebones SSDs, and a super light, but user friendly, reliable, and approachable operating system, with a solid software ecosystem, and no hacking once installed. Something to get the really in need connected and doing basic computing for like 20 bucks cost to them at the absolute max, preferably less.
I started off considering chromeOS flex, but the lack of an appstore just absolutely nukes the usability. There are ways to hack full chromeOS onto an x86 system, but I worry about long term compatibility, same reason I'm not using the windows 11 hack. iOS is known to work on a LOT of systems, so hackintosh is my next prospect. We're looking at dual core systems, no hyperthreading, either 4 or 8 gigs of ram, already have a ton of low capacity dims so that's really no stress/cost to me if I go 4 or 8. I *could* upgrade to quad cores with bios updates, and luck. There are options for both platforms on ebay for like 5 bucks, before bulk discounts, and I have a quad core am3 CPU lying around already that I'm testing soon, but I am not holding my breath. These are dell and HP systems after all, from one of their worst generations for upgrade compatibility. Is there a version of iOS with app compatibility and basic security updates, that won't start pitching a fit about these old CPU instruction sets, and is light enough to run with only 2 cores? Normally I'd just bank on the quad cores and get windows 10, since 4 cores is enough for basic operation, but every dollar saved is a good thing here, and theres still no guarantee that the CPU upgrades will run with these locked down boards.
I am fully prepared to get about 100 people telling me that this is what linux is for, but we all know that chromeOS and iOS are a lot more approachable and compatible for people who aren't techies, and this is what these are for. If a light distro of mint all that will ultimately do the job, then it's all that will do the job, but I'll try anything mainstream first. If anyone knows a good iOS version, another OS for me to try, upgrade paths for these systems, or any other info related, I'd appreciate it very much.
Dell Poweredge SC430 (1x)
Dell Optiplex 380 (x6)
Hp Compaq 6005 (x8)
[link] [comments]
Post a Comment