I often acquire quite old hardware either cheap 2nd-hand or rescue stuff dumped on curbs typically w/out drivers or s/w. Ultimately all h/w will eventually be used on linux. But linux is often not ideal for testing to quickly assess whether something functions well -- obviously because very little hardware is designed for linux.
So before investing time researching linux drivers and hacks for whatever obscure thing I am dealing with, I need to quickly test whether the thing works without searching forums for what complex installation procedure worked in Bob’s basement lab.
Apparently Windows is very dicey with both forwards and backwards compatibility. I thought win7 would be good for testing because it’s historically close enough to XP that things designed for XP might run on it, yet just barely new enough that hardware ~2—10+ yrs old might likely run on it.
But it seems to be more of a shit show than I expected. Some drivers demand a specific version of Winblows. Matching OS version is often not good enough either because they demand a particular service pack, or specific DirectX or “.Net” version (what a shitty name, btw), which cannot be too old OR too new (e.g. old TomToms are extremely fussy about .Net version IIRC). So even though some form of Windows has the best official support for any given piece of hardware which underwent the most rigorous of its testing on Windows, using Windows for testing hardware is a shitshow nonetheless. Plus I make it worse because I insist on Windows boxes being airgapped, which limits me to drivers I can get off the web and usb-side-load.
A virtualbox with a few different Windows VMs is not good either because virtualisation brings its own baggage of issues that blow the idea of quickly testing arbitrary hardware to confirm that it works.
Is hackintosh a better solution?
I will not be buying any recent Apple hardware. Fuck that.. the cost defeats the purpose. I can (reluctantly) get really old Apple machines cheaply, but I suspect those tend to be incapable of any somewhat reasonably recent MacOS version. So I am tempted to try the hackintosh route on an old PC. Is it safe to say that MacOS drivers are more flexible across various MacOS versions than windows?
It has been decades since I tinkered with hackintoshes.. is it still practical these days? I get the impression that it might still be good for my purposes (but perhaps not in ~5+ years from now considering this).