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Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
281–290 of 414 posts
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple sells hardware and now services. Software seems to be a cost center. So I doubt a third party OS like Linux will ever be a priority for them in their consumer products.
They don't necessarily need to _support_ it, but that doesn't preclude being open enough to let others do the work.
They could simply release the specification documents that they obviously already have.
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
is it? my 2016 macbook was the worst apple product i've ever owned...
Well All 2016 - 2019 MacBook are pretty much junk. As shown by their resale value. So it was probably one of the worst Apple product ever. But the Pre-2015 MacBook Pro and M1? They are great. ( Although M1 still have shitty keyboard )
> Although M1 still have shitty keyboard
On the contrary, much like the 16" 2020 MacBook Pro, this is probably among the best MacBook keyboards ever created. Apple definitely stepped it up when they finally responded to the criticism of the 2016-2019 MacBook keyboards.
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simply asserting this without evidence does not make it so. If Apple truly had this strategy they're doing a horrible job at it. Mostly since you are free to boot (or work on doing so at least) NetBSD and countless other things on practically every Mac they've ever released, including the latest ones. They're doing a horrible job at communicating this strategy too, because they're communicating the opposite. For this…
> Simply asserting this without evidence does not make it so. Goes in both directions. > Mostly since you are free to boot (or work on doing so at least) NetBSD and countless other things on practically every Mac they've ever released, including the latest ones. Gatekeeper wasn't a thing either, until it was, indeed, a thing. > They're doing a horrible job at communicating this strategy too, because they're communica…
> Surely that's the whole point of a trap?
I mean, this is exactly the bad faith argument I was talking about right here. If you want to view this as smoke and mirrors until they "trap" you by all means go ahead, but it does shut this conversation right down.
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple sells hardware and now services. Software seems to be a cost center. So I doubt a third party OS like Linux will ever be a priority for them in their consumer products.
Software is an essential supportive pillar which stands between its hardware and lucrative value-added services.
Otherwise you have a shiny brick
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#286It seems so amazing to me that Microsoft saw the ARM opportunity with Windows RT, released 8 years back but somehow managed to not succeed with a stellar ARM laptop story. Maybe Qualcomm is more to blame here for never progressing as well as Apple has done on chips but maybe the software experience was just not there. We would probably already have good ARM laptops running linux distros if Windows on ARM had taken of…
They failed to have good backwards compatibility.
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is no other laptop manufacturer besides Apple has the capital and resources to build their own chip.
Not just their own chip, arguable one of the highest performance ones. At Intel, the mobile division was simply trying to keep pace with Arm with Apple always a distant dream. Later at Arm, no one had any idea what the hell Apple was doing. They pay for the ISA and that is basically as far as I ever saw the collaboration going (besides poaching top engineers). Most interesting thing I ever saw was that they bought In…
Does anyone know if these EDA and other manufacturing tools are run internally on MacOS? I recall some comments when an Apple factory tour showed some tools running on Windows, on iMacs.
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#288Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a bad faith argument. The presupposition is that Apple is inherently motivated to actively lock things down, because that's what they do with the iPhone. This glosses over that Apple has no reason to actually do so, only has reasons not to do it on the Mac, and has gone on record saying they won't treat the Mac as the iPhone. It's based on the notion that Apple would be against free booting a priori for some rea…
> The presupposition is that Apple is inherently motivated to actively lock things down, because that's what they do with the iPhone. This glosses over that Apple has no reason to actually do so, only has reasons not to do it on the Mac, and has gone on record saying they won't treat the Mac as the iPhone. What is the difference between an iPad pro and a MacBook? If Apple can get away with a 30% tax on all commercial…
> If they still get people to buy and developers to develop?
Well they won't get away with that at all, especially not in the long run as people abandon ship to platforms that do allow free development and tinkering. Apple is still a hardware company with hardware sales making up the overwhelming majority of their profits (over 75%). It would be beyond stupid to risk that just so they can live out a control fantasy, especially because they don't need to live out that control fantasy to make good money from the Mac App Store.
Re: Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project
#290Is anyone else ever saddened when they think about the man hours spent on projects like this (reversing software or hardware to accomplish what should be a simple goal) when all it would take is the teensiest bit of cooperation to not waste all those hours? I use waste in the sense of like trying to assemble something complicated with the instructions just out of arms reach, not in the sense of doing something pointl…
It's cheaper to not make it work for anything else.
While this is commonly said about PC and Windows, Microsoft actually publishes pretty clear standards that Linux even reuses, because they do not control the hw vendors.
Apple has both hardware and software in one house. On one side, this means that they can escape the trap that cripples performance of competing mobile SoCs (as they don't have to deal with price competition for SoC itself), but it also means that they don't have to follow any form of standard with hw/sw interface.
Thus you have the reason for majority of hackintosh tricks, special cases in Linux for running on Macs, and Bootcamp. Because if it's quicker to "quirk it" in Mac OS X than fix it properly, it will be quirked. This goes all the way to simple things like putting HDA configuration data in wrong place in memory (so standard HDA driver is lost trying to init hw on mac, and macos is lost trying to init it on standard-compliant machine), to things like making such a hash out of boot process (in order to implement similar behaviour to old Macs) that in some models if you accidentally used standard boot interfaces you'd brick the laptop.
Similar issues are how ARM is still, effectively, not an usable open platform, especially open source boards, because making an SBSA-compliant machine that has properly done ACPI and UEFI is much harder than slapping minimal effort on top of uboot where the only reason you can run a kernel not specifically built for the device is that people complained about lack of upstream kernel, and kernel devs refused to add more machine defs. It's still a giant hack in the end.