I’ve been wanting to try the Clover bootloader on my hackintosh for quite some time. I just didn’t have an impetus to bother with it. That is, until the issue with iMessage appeared in late December 2012 and the various Chameleon developers and their branches did nothing about it (including Chimera, which is what I was originally using before switching to Chameleon and now Clover).
Clover is working great for me, and I don’t see myself going back to Chameleon or a Chameleon derivative like Chimera. The reality is that development is MUCH more active on Clover, and given that it has much better support for UEFI (including a built-in EFI shell), it’s the right thing for me to use on future builds. Plus it already has the infrastructure to cope with issues like the iMessage snafu.
Since I consider this switch permanent, I spent a little time creating a Clover theme since I wanted an orange-colored theme. Here’s a screenshot from the theme package I uploaded to insanelymac.com:
Soapbox on…
I feel sorry for the many people on the tonymacx86 forum that don’t seem to realize that moving from Chimera to Clover is not terribly difficult. The bootloader is a tiny portion of what they’ve gotten from tonymacx86 and Chimera is not significantly different than a vanilla Chameleon build. In fact I had been using Chameleon for the last few months before I switched to Clover. The last time I diffed Chimera and Chameleon source tree trunks, the differences were purely cosmetic. I feel really sorry for the folks who gave money to tonymacx86 recently for the fixes for iMessage, given that the tonymacx86 team did NOTHING to resolve the issue. AS of today, that thread on tonymacx86 is 68 pages and growing, with almost 100,000 views. The fix is to use Clover, and the tips on getting that done were all provided by members, not the tonymacx86 team. I’m starting to understand why some other sites’ members despise the tonymacx86 site. You can’t blame the members of the tonymacx86 site, they’re completely innocent. And I guess I can’t blame the tonymacx86 team for the ignorance of some of the members that have given them money, but… it still feels underhanded to me. Especially given the fact that the tonymacx86 tools are primitive and somewhat braindead. MultiBeast might work for some users who really don’t know what they’re doing (and I was once one of those people), but at the same time, stomping on kernel extensions without showing the user what’s being done (and not providing a means for them to revert the changes) is downright user-unfriendly and amateurish from a software engineering perspective.