Linux is the new Hackintosh. Well, for many of us it was always the spiritual descendant of the old-school Macintosh, the thinker's toy from the land of Woz. The ultimate malleable computer system you can build at home, where all the building blocks are written in code you can read and understand, and change the enviroment how we want while we're using it.
Since when could you build a Mac at home ?
Apple ][ (+, e) were DIY/hacker-friendly. The //c more closed and first Mac moreso. The ][ product line more Woz and Mac was more Jobs. During those machines prime era it was clear that those with the hacker/DIY itch better served on the early IBM PC clone and MS-DOS machines. Apple lost a lot of nerds for a period and wasnt really til OS X it seems that they wanted us back.