This article was originally written October 2019 for my old blog on blogger but I edited it in 2023 for republishing to my higher quality project log. I was a freshman in high school who was using Ubuntu on my main computer when starting this project.
I spent a 3-day weekend installing 3 operating systems on my Dell Inspiron laptop.
I prepared 4 flash drives for this project. One carried my laptop's Windows Recovery image. The second contained the installer for my Linux distribution of choice, in this case that was Ubuntu because it was easy to set up, and I had gotten accustomed to the workflow around customizing Gnome 3.
For this project, I started by googling and checking if anybody else had already put the effort into making it work. It appears that two people had already gotten macOS running on the model of laptop I had, so I downloaded their config folders and used them as starting points.
Getting the macOS installer to successfully boot was a task in of itself. I Installed the macOS clover installer using the unibeast program from TonyMacx86 and put someone else's Kernel Extensions (kexts) and config to set up booting to macOS. Neither of the configs I downloaded actually worked, so I had to mix and match different components from their projects and bodge something that worked through hours of trial and error. After getting a bootable installer, I installed the actual operating system to experiment with on a USB flash drive. After being satisfied with the stability of my install, I opened up my laptop to change the SSD to one that had 500gb of storage so that I could have enough space for my operating systems.
I booted into the Windows recovery drive and reset the new SSD so that it was set to factory configuration. After setting up Windows and removing preinstalled bloat open up partition manager and cut the C drive down to a partition size of choice. In this case, I set it to 100gb. I allocated 200gb for macOS. My next problem was that I couldn't get disk utility to create a partition on unpartitioned space. I rebooted a few times to see what partition types are capable of being created by windows and recognized by macOS and ended up creating an ExFAT partition. In the disk utility app on my existing installation on a flash drive, I changed the format of that partition to macOS extended journaled, then erased the partition. I then booted to the original installer drive and installed macOS on the partition. During installation, I selected back up from another Mac and plugged in my configured installation. Because the other USB has everything set up, I can just restore from it and everything is copied over. After macOS was set up, I made sure it was stable. Before proceeding, I made a shared partition called "All Stuff". It was used as my Documents folder in case my macOS install dies from some update.
Next, I needed to install Linux to restore the backup I made of all my files before starting this process. Linux was relatively easy to install on my drive. I just booted up the installer from another flash drive then installed on the remaining partition space that I had left over, allocating about 100gb to it. I used Deja Dup to restore my Ubuntu configuration from my NAS after getting it set up. New problem, I found that Clover Bootloader didn't detect Linux partitions. To fix this, I booted to macOS and used a program called Clover Configurator to tell it to scan for Linux boot partitions as well. At this point, it was ready for general use.
Afterword as I'm updating this article
I used that computer with macOS as my daily driver computer for over a year, and it was a fun experiment, but I do not recommend for anybody to do this. That laptop would lose the ability to use trackpad gestures anytime a security patch rolled around. Then, they would just randomly reappear after a few days. I had issues with the trackpad, keyboard, or both not working sometimes after waking up from sleep. If this happened, my only solution was to reboot and then everything would magically work again. Issues were nearly impossible to diagnose because it was uncommon hardware and used weird configurations. I think my laptop only ended up working as well as it did because apple had released a MacBook Pro that used the same i7-something U series chip that my laptop at the time coincidentally had. The Mac lineup had the awful butterfly keyboard at the time and I think it was impossible to justify buying one at the time. Today, I do not want to be bothered by my operating system not properly working. I'm writing this afterword on an M1 MacBook Pro and will never go back.