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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?

#311

Post by rfoo »

marcan_42 wrote: post #105
oblio wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admire the work but you have to admit that even after all this time it's easier to install Ubuntu, say, on a random PC :-)

To be honest, the only problems on this iMac are audio (fair to say Apple's fault), the screen only running at 4K max (Apple custom stuff involved for 5K, but hey, not complaining about 4K, go find me an AiO PC with a 5K screem), the amdgpu issue (not really an Apple problem, it's just a rarer chip and probably a dumb bugfix and the older radeon driver works fine), and the Ethernet and SD card reader being problemati…

The Broadcom part is huge IMO. I try to avoid Broadcom as possible on every (programmable) thing I own, but that is not possible with Apple devices.

I mean, I'm sure we can make brcm* not suck on Linux (or it already works well now), but I don't want to support such a hostile vendor.

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

#312

Post by sarthakjshetty »

m00x wrote: post #64
devwastaken wrote: post #54

Apple won't support it, therefore support and maintenance will be working around apples proprietary hardware and special drivers. Linux is not meant to live in that environment, I'd argue bettering support for other OEM's is a more fruitfull goal.

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…

> Get yourself a laptop with an nvidia card and Ubuntu. Even today it's a garbage experience that takes up hours/days of debugging to get right, and then it's still way worse than the mac/windows experience.

This. Writing this from a laptop running Ubuntu with an nvidia card and I can feel my body tense up just reading it.

I remember several nights in college just struggling to get the drivers to work and finding the right cuda spec from the repository, after combing through multiple sources.

It's still a nightmare and I always dread that the StackOverflow and Ask Ubuntu posts in the bookmarks folder that I've reserved for this arduous process will be obsolete when the GPU card crashes again for the umteenth time.

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

#313

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#314

Post by egsmi »

jjoonathan wrote: post #234
someperson wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of that Bill Gates quote from 1998: > Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though," Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade. I am sur…

Did they ever start getting license revenue from China? I've had a few recent interactions with Chinese businesses that suggest piracy is still rampant and shameless.

http://www.chinagoabroad.com/en/article/microsoft-s-cloud-co...

"A survey conducted by Forrester Research earlier this month showed that Microsoft has already become the country’s second-biggest cloud services provider, with its Office 365 and Azure platforms."

Looks like the subscription model did the trick.

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

#316

Post by cookiengineer »

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…

Yes, we are talking about that Apple which integrated soft fuses that can be triggered remotely, and will brick your device physically.

We are talking about that Apple which sued a recycling vendor in Canada because they recycled devices instead of trashing them.

We are talking about that Apple which bribed judges in the US to deny its endusers the right to repair.

We are talking about that Apple which removed even the audio port of a device to prevent its competition to breakout of the locked hardware with their "upgrades" like better cameras, or even payment systems that wont be supported by Apple.

We are talking about that Apple which even changed their goddamn shell from the BSD fork because they didnt want to "open source" (Apple thinks this is zip file dumping) their own bash, which was the only reason bash was outdated for decades.

Yes, we are talking about that Apple.

Once anything is a competition, it will be extinguished by Apple. They only care about profits, and nothing else.

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

#317

Post by gsich »

rfoo wrote: post #309
hehetrthrthrjn wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally good design and user-centered design (but that's being eroded with every new release) along with attention to detail. Small examples: you can scroll a window without having to click on it to make it active, applications don't refer to files using paths but file ids instead so you can generally move files around a disk while they are open without things breaking.

> you can scroll a window without having to click on it to make it active This works on Windows, and most sane Linux DEs are either default to that or can be configured to do that. > applications don't refer to files using paths but file ids instead so you can generally move files around a disk while they are open without things breaking. Do you mean they hold an opening fd of the file, which is also not special at a…

Somewhat not consistent though. But I don't know if that is the fault of the application or Windows.

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

#318

Post by scns »

CountSessine wrote: post #133
smspf wrote: post #121

No. Because (in no particular order): - it shouldn't be the community's (or a crowd-funded dev's) responsibility to provide software support for hardware produced by one of the largest companies out there (bonus: with zero hardware specs); - Apple could make all this futile with a push of a button (SecureBoot can be disabled for now, but what guarantees are there this won't change?); - other arm64 machines will be av…

For the record, I disagree with some of your points, but the one point I agree with is really important. There's no clear guarantee that there will be other performance-competitive arm64 CPUs in laptops anytime soon. I don't think anyone has as much incentive as Apple does. Who else is as incentivized to make a laptop/desktop-class arm64 chip? Maybe ARM themselves ... but without a mainstream OS to run it on (with ma…

Amazon have their own ARM server chips out since some time. They are competitive: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...

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

#319

Post by skunkworker »

freehunter wrote: post #171

Question as long as we're on the subject... software companies can decompile competitor's software and figure out how they did something. Can Qualcomm or another chip maker "decompile" the M1 and figure out how Apple made it? Apple seems so far ahead of the other ARM chipmakers, can the other guys catch up by studying the M1 chip? Or is it too small/involved/etc to learn much from?

If Qualcomm and other ARM chip designers haven't been able to keep up to pace while the last 8 years of iPhone CPUs have been near the top of their game, I don't see that changing anytime soon, unless they hire the right people to be in charge and even still, chips like Apple's A series are hand laid out and very, very time consuming to create. They have the ability to use a scanning electron microscope to look at the design, but even if you can start to reproduce their design (very time consuming) you're taking away resources from designing other processors.

I asked a friend who used to work in chip design at IBM and was blown away by the design of the M1. according to my friend, the design is extremely custom and most likely hand laid out for their specific optimizations. Also they were stumped by how apple could be getting consistent timings between cores when the design isn't totally symmetric for a particular cluster.

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

#320

Post by marcan_42 »

lmm wrote: post #271
marcan_42 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would absolutely all be done with upstreamability in mind, and upstreamed as soon as is practical. All that horrible forked kernel stuff is the realm of companies with closed development teams who don't care and just want a product out the door. The PS4 Linux stuff I did was not upstreamed for lack of time/interest, but I absolutely considered it being decent enough to upstream when writing it. PS3 Linux running…

> All that horrible forked kernel stuff is the realm of companies with closed development teams who don't care and just want a product out the door. Or people who gave upstreaming an honest try but got fed up. It's not the easiest project to contribute to.

You do need to know what you're doing, meet quality standards, and do things in a way that fits existing architecture (unless you have a really good reason to revamp something). It's not beginner-friendly for sure, but I can tell you the vast majority of non-upstreamed vendor code is not upstreamed because it's terrible (which is also bad for users: things like blatant security problems are much more common in forks than upstream).
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