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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?

#291

Post by tmzt »

macintux wrote: post #42
izacus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, even for BootCamp, a marketed feature, they only dropped a halfarsed set of drivers which worked very poorly and were pretty never updated. We need to use hacked AMD drivers to get updates for the Radeons and the Macs still overheat and burn a lot energy due to lack of even basic power saving features. Heck, even the GPU switching isn't implemented. Why would there be expectation they'd do anything more for Lin…

> Why would there be expectation they'd do anything more for Linux? Linux is more complementary, compared to Windows which has been an existential threat to the Mac since the 90s. I agree with an earlier comment: I don't expect Apple will provide any assistance, but neither do I see it as entirely unlikely.

Windows in the Bootcamp role was also compliment ary, in that it enabled a company or individual worker to consider Ape hardware where Windows was a requirement or desired as a personal preference.

This also enabled those users to spend time in MacOS or switch to virtualizing Windows and may lead to one or more personal purchases for themselves or members of their household.

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

#292

Post by perryizgr8 »

pmontra wrote: post #116
m00x wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone has been following nvidia/linux story, this nails it on the head. Apple has never played well with FOSS and aren't going to start now. Apple's implementation will always be ahead, better, less bugs, and the linux port will always be a shitty experience that takes up several weeks to get working properly, and then it'll be slower than expected. Get yourself a laptop with an nvidia card and Ubuntu. Even today…

I own an Ubuntu laptop with an NVIDIA card since 2014 (HP ZBook 15 with Quadro K1100M). Not perfect but not garbage. Hours of debugging / workarounds cumulated in 6 years yes, days not. The remaining problems on Ubuntu 20.04: 1. The brightness control keys don't work. They generate the event they are supposed to generate then I see an error in syslog. Workaround: two hotkeys bound to windows+fn+brightness up/down to…

> not garbage

> The brightness control keys don't work.

> The screen works at 40 Hz

I think you need to use a laptop (with factory OS) produced within the last 2 decades, because your garbage detector seems to be broken.

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

#293

Post by Eric_WVGG »

thayne wrote: post #278
dev_tty01 wrote: post #224

No, because it is already a unix OS. I imagine this is unpopular in HN, but what matters to me is just running on a good solid unix. I don't really care if it is a unix or Linux. What I want is shell scripting, pipes, forks, make, python, awk, grep, find, du, df, etc... Most anything that doesn't come pre-installed can be built from source. This wasn't true in the early days of OS X, but now the only things I find th…

Whenever I use the CLI on a mac, I am frustrated by the absense of all the GNU extensions that aren't there when I use the core utilities, and that the version of bash is ancient . I mean I still prefer it over windows, but it is not the same experience as linux.

I’m not well-versed enough to know how well it measures up, but Mac switched to ZSH as default shell about a year ago.

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

#294

Post by IntelMiner »

thayne wrote: post #278
dev_tty01 wrote: post #224

No, because it is already a unix OS. I imagine this is unpopular in HN, but what matters to me is just running on a good solid unix. I don't really care if it is a unix or Linux. What I want is shell scripting, pipes, forks, make, python, awk, grep, find, du, df, etc... Most anything that doesn't come pre-installed can be built from source. This wasn't true in the early days of OS X, but now the only things I find th…

Whenever I use the CLI on a mac, I am frustrated by the absense of all the GNU extensions that aren't there when I use the core utilities, and that the version of bash is ancient . I mean I still prefer it over windows, but it is not the same experience as linux.

The last time I used a Mac I remember the absolute headfuck that was all the different ways to make it "more unixy"

"Oh just use Macports!"

"No macports is trash, use Homebrew!"

"Homebrew sucks, use Gentoo/kMacOSX!"

Of course none of them were particularly interoperable at the time and all had extremely arcane invocations and setups. It was very lipstick on a pig

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

#295

Post by eyelidlessness »

rileymat2 wrote: post #208
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…

They were a hardware company, but are moving into services for continued growth, which puts them at odds with an open platform. The business model is changing. https://www.statista.com/statistics/382136/quarterly-segment... You can see services revenue is up to 14 billion compared to iPhone's 26 billion.

Why would services put them at odds with an open platform? (I’m pretty sure they use that open platform for many of their services)

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

#296

Post by squarefoot »

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.

> Apple doesn't even care about Hackintoshes

That's because their numbers are so low that they don't represent a threat, but still contribute to keep users hooked to the Apple ecosystem, which is vital for them; of 10 people with a Hackintosh there may be no real Mac users, but many of them are likely to own an iPhone and use other Apple services; Apple need to keep those customers so they close both eyes on Hackintoshes. Also, since they offer no warranty for non original Apple hardware, it wouldn't impact much their corporate users base, which often are forced to use the real thing.

One side effect of making their own line of CPUs, and a system that as for now, runs only on them, however, could also be seen as a way to kill the Hackintoshes "competition", or it may be just a nice side effect for them. Time will tell.

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

#297

Post by black_puppydog »

dwighttk wrote: post #281
waheoo wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which is exactly why these days I'm mindful to buy hardware from companies (and using components) that don't make it hard to run FLOSS. Neither actively by locking bootloader or such, nor passively by withholding documentation needed to write drivers.

There are options to buy from & support manufacturers who actively help this process. Why would I put my money towards making apples hardware more attractive, when their stance is at best "we don't care but we might change things any second and break this simply because we don't care."

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

#298

Post by eyelidlessness »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #251
rileymat2 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were a hardware company, but are moving into services for continued growth, which puts them at odds with an open platform. The business model is changing. https://www.statista.com/statistics/382136/quarterly-segment... You can see services revenue is up to 14 billion compared to iPhone's 26 billion.

And that is revenue. Guess margins is the main question.

That’s pretty easy to ballpark. Everything Apple does targets a whole package 25-30% margin. If the services aren’t generating that margin, the hardware is making it up. Last I heard the iPhone is on that margin target, as are all or nearly all macs. So it’s pretty reasonable to assume the services are pretty close in line.

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

#299

Post by ampdepolymerase »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #285
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.

There is the Microsoft SQ2 and the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2.

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

#300

Post by frankchn »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #285
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.

The A14 is significantly faster than the Kirin 9000 (Cortex A77 on TSMC 5nm) on SPECint and SPECfp: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
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