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Gandhi, the rebel
A True Superuser Never Misses "Quad-day"

An Overview of Quad-Booting Macs

Credit Where Credit is Due

Apple's a $1T Company for a Reason 

We realize quadruple-booting an old Mac may not seem that impressive, especially considering any standard UEFI/GPT configured computer can theoretically run 128 OS's.    But we're focused on the utility of multi-booting, not the gimmickry.    Multi-booting a Mac avoids "hackintoshing," resulting in a more stable system overall, at least, with the right model and configurations.    We're open to exploring any mobile device that can multi-boot, but Apple truly does make the best computer products on earth; plus, they won't allow macOS to run on anything else, so we can't possibly exclude them.

T2 Security Chips

When it comes to quad-booting, you'll get the most bang for your buck from the newer Intel-based Macs; however, Apple integrated their secuity "T-chips" into most of their Macs beginning in 2016.   It's not impossible to quad-boot these Macs, but they do involve a higher level of complexity to the process, particularly when it comes to installing Linux.    You'll want to get familiar with the info put together by the good folks over at t2linux.org, or at least thank them, since we've duplicated much of the guidance here on this website.

Flex versus Brunch

When Google says they "officially support" a competitor's device, they mean, they expect you to wipe the drive and only have chromeOS on it, because that's exactly what their chromeOS Flex installer will do  .    This is fine on Macs with removable HDs and/or SDXC slots, neither of which Macs after 2015 have.    Thanks to a coder named sebanc though, we can install regular chromeOS using an emulator he programmed called "Brunch."    ChromeOS being  what it is, ideally, either Flex or Brunch would be installed to removable media.

The Bootloaders

rEFInd at the Core

None of this would be possible without a powerfully flexible boot manager like rEFInd, which Rod Smith has ben developing and maintaining for over 15 years now.    It sits on the invisible EFI partition and looks for bootloaders in the same location.    Great thing about it is, if the bootloader for one of the OS's fails, perhaps due to an update, you can simply boot into a different OS from rEFInd and probably fix the issue.    Not only is it functionally amazing, but its form can also be customized to amaze.    We themed it with a minimalist look for the "Think quadratic." brand.