I have fond memories of my Hackintosh years. Over time the frustration of updating to the latest OS and having to deal with breaking changes just sucked all the joy from it. Especially when I really needed to use the computer for something.
I might tinker again some time soon. I had thought of building a Mac mini for a home theatre setup but then again Apple TV just works so well
if I were a bitcoin whale...
OpenBSD on the Desktop can be a thing if someone were just to make a good experience with it, from the ground up, like Steve Jobs did with NeXT. Just don't choose Objective-C.
The issue is money. Developers are expensive, AI isn't anywhere near ready for this task, and we have a lot of learnings from good UI design and developer patterns (both pro, and anti). ElementaryOS was supposed to be that thing but quickly devolved into yet another distro.
These older machines deserve some love too. Not everything needs to be <2 years old. Not everything needs to be shiny. This is why you're broke. Stop spending :D
I hackintoshed a few times over the years too. It could be frustrating at times, but when you had a solid setup that updated cleanly and everything it felt like a cheat code. Just as stable as a real Mac, but more capable, quiet, and expandable.
One of the laptops I hacked for a while had a 15.4” 1920x1200 screen panel (much nicer than on contemporary 15” MacBooks), 4 USB-A ports, FireWire, Ethernet, an eSATA port, a full size DisplayPort, EC and PCMCIA slots, and an SD card reader and could dock to more than double the number of ports, plus two hot swap drive bays, and it all worked as expected under hackintoshed Mavericks which was incredible. It was like having a portable Mac Pro.