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Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

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Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#281

Post by dwighttk »

waheoo wrote: post #226
scoopertrooper wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mac M1 platform is about as open as any other laptop platform. Your points are quite valid for the i-class devices, but there is nothing preventing anyone from installing linux on an M1 Mac once driver support arrives.

Do you seriously trust that not to change? When is driver support coming? When will audio on Mac's work on Linux? When will the touchbar drivers be made available? Apple doesn't give a shit about Linux, but they also don't make it easy to use their hardware. And to answer the question posed, no, I would never give this company money.

Fwiw both times I dipped my toes into Linux on some old PC laptops (once mint once Ubuntu) I ran into audio, trackpad, and WiFi driver issues.

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#282

Post by amluto »

frankchn wrote: post #206
ampdepolymerase wrote: post #162

Most of the solutions in this thread are simply not viable. Stuff like the Pinebook and Raspberry Pi are several magnitudes away from Apple's M1 SoC. No amount of hackerish imitation will bridge that gap, the laws of physics are not kind to consumer product hardware hackers. It is very obvious that most of the people commenting here has never held a soldering iron, nor taken a single computer architecture class. The…

> Apple has already laid the architectural groundwork, a chip with similar performance numbers can probably be commissioned with ~50 million. I think you might be two orders of magnitude off here. A class leading general purpose compute chip on a cutting edge process? I don’t think $5 billion to produce working chips is unreasonable. If it were only $50M to produce A14/M1 level chips, Qualcomm would already have done…

Building a useful 8-wide decode block on x86 might be extremely expensive in terms of area and power.

For a long time, we’ve been told that the nasty x86 ISA is no big deal and that a good CPU can cache decoded instructions and play other tricks to make the ISA irrelevant. But x86 really does have fundamental problems. The length of an instruction can’t be determined until the instruction is almost fully decoded, which makes deciding in parallel quite nasty. And the x86 memory model is fundamentally more expensive than ARM’s.

M1 is the first serious attempt to make a competitive high-performance non-x86 CPU. Perhaps the real lesson from M1 will be that x86 can’t compete.

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#283

Post by [deleted] »

CharlesW wrote: post #182
eyelidlessness wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol they highlighted running Linux in the first announcement of the ISA switch , they see no threat in Linux at all. Their business model would need to change dramatically for that to happen. They’re a hardware company that makes the hardware more attractive with software, service and device integration. Their software restrictions are part of the value proposition, but anyone fully ejecting from that would be on the…

> Linux becoming attractive on their hardware would almost certainly be unsupported, but I seriously doubt it would be undermined. This. Apple doesn't even care about Hackintoshes, which are (theoretically) orders of magnitude more threatening to Apple's business model since they (theoretically) cannibalize Mac sales.

[deleted]

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#284

Post by dwighttk »

ineedasername wrote: post #249
dorfsmay wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will Apple sell M1s to other laptop manufacturers? I already pay for closed source Intel and AMD, I wouldn't mind being able to use M1s, but, I just don't like Apple laptop hardware.

Apple did not have a good experience the last time they rolled out licensing of that sort. Watered down the brand especially given some very crappy PowerPC clones.

And the ones that weren’t crappy were better than Apple’s

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#285

Post by AtlasBarfed »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #162

Most of the solutions in this thread are simply not viable. Stuff like the Pinebook and Raspberry Pi are several magnitudes away from Apple's M1 SoC. No amount of hackerish imitation will bridge that gap, the laws of physics are not kind to consumer product hardware hackers. It is very obvious that most of the people commenting here has never held a soldering iron, nor taken a single computer architecture class. The…

If the M1 is a close derivative architecture of high efficiency mobile scaled to desktop, would scaled up Android processors really be that far away from M1? I know Apple A-series had some edge over Snapdragons, but was the gap between Android processors that big?

There are many hundred billion dollar companies motivated to close the gap. It may not be this year.

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#286

Post by JumpCrisscross »

squarefoot wrote: post #94

No, I wouldn't, not even if I could print billions in a snap. I'd rather help funding the port to a 10 times slower but open platform, rather to a technically superior but proprietary close one whose owner would make it incompatible two seconds after they would smell competition from Linux in any of their core business fields. No thanks, I'll send my small quid to whomever appears to be really in favor of openness, n…

> I'd rather help funding the port to a 10 times slower but open platform

This is an idealism vs. pragmatism debate. Ideally, we’d have a solid hardware stack for Linux. Pragmatically, we have top-of-the-line metal for which there will or will not be Linux. I know which one I would fight for if I still believed in consumer-grade Linux.

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#287

Post by thayne »

freehunter wrote: post #165
squarefoot wrote: post #94

No, I wouldn't, not even if I could print billions in a snap. I'd rather help funding the port to a 10 times slower but open platform, rather to a technically superior but proprietary close one whose owner would make it incompatible two seconds after they would smell competition from Linux in any of their core business fields. No thanks, I'll send my small quid to whomever appears to be really in favor of openness, n…

>owner would make it incompatible two seconds after they would smell competition We're talking about Apple, right? The company that made an entire software platform called Bootcamp, specifically to enable a competitor's OS to run on their hardware? A company who custom-developed drivers specifically to be compatible with a competitor's OS on their own hardware? You're talking about that Apple? The one who said they w…

> The one who said they would be open to allowing Windows to run on M1 if Microsoft developed a compatible version of Windows?

How generous of them. And will they provide microsoft with the specs needed to do so?

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#288

Post by eyelidlessness »

ineedasername wrote: post #248
eyelidlessness wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they did all of that in response to community solutions that weren’t as solid as their first party support. They went out of their way to support and extend the viability of their users clear desire for dual booting, at that time of a much more formidable competitor than MS is today.

It wasn't altruism, they did it because it would help sell more hardware and bring more people into the Apple ecosystem. If they see a similar use for Linux support, they'll do the same. If they think it will hurt them in some way, they won't. But I think it's fair to at least consider the "undermine" possibility considering that on iPhones they've consistently blocked attempts to jailbreak or open that platform in t…

> It wasn't altruism, they did it because it would help sell more hardware and bring more people into the Apple ecosystem. > > If they see a similar use for Linux support, they'll do the same. If they think it will hurt them in some way, they won't.

I agree and said... pretty much the same thing. I just don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell Apple will see Linux as a threat.

> But I think it's fair to at least consider the "undermine" possibility considering that on iPhones they've consistently blocked attempts to jailbreak or open that platform in the way an alternate OS does on their Macs. We've already seen incremental moves to make MacOS app distribution more centrally controlled. So I honestly don't know where Apple believes their long-term interested to be on the topic of facilitating, or at least not actively blocking Linux.

Nope. Not likely, unless the mechanism for getting Linux on the M-series is software exploits of the macOS platform. They don’t do anything to undermine booting entirely other OSes on their hardware, even iDevices. But they do patch up their own stack.

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#289

Post by eyelidlessness »

fartcannon wrote: post #279
eyelidlessness wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol they highlighted running Linux in the first announcement of the ISA switch , they see no threat in Linux at all. Their business model would need to change dramatically for that to happen. They’re a hardware company that makes the hardware more attractive with software, service and device integration. Their software restrictions are part of the value proposition, but anyone fully ejecting from that would be on the…

The phrase 'I seriously doubt' should have to be backed up by money.

Okay. I’ll give you a dollar if I’m wrong

Re: Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

#290

Post by ddingus »

mch82 wrote: post #221
mixmastamyk wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs time and money to do that. Who is gonna port, pay, and gonna do it?

I understand it will take effort and don’t have answers for those questions.

This is all a lot cheaper on open systems. Just saying.

Eric Raymond explained why: use value. Open systems can be exploited easily and the people who use them get high use value because of all that.

Incentives to port and build on known open systems are stronger, barriers to access lower.

Result: more FOSS on said system

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