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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?

#331

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

You know, Apple runs a lot of servers too. Those servers run Linux. Why wouldn't Apple want to run Linux on their own chips? The power savings would be enormous.

Apple could port Linux without much trouble. It's just Linux drivers -- they are very capable of the work.

Something like a less beautiful Mac Mini M1 would probably suit their server needs decently.

I wish they would sell the chips and boards as XServe again though, and perhaps offer some cloud computing too. I don't see it happening though -- they are going all in on the consumer market.

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

#332

Post by flyinglizard »

ashneo76 wrote: post #263
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…

No.No.no.no.no.no.no.no. A million thousand times no. As some one else said, every spare dollar I have is going to fund a company that values open source hardware, open source software, right to repair and own. A company that doesn't purposefully force manufactured obsolescence as a business model, privacy intrusions, lip service to OSS, bullying right to repair in courts, tax evasions doesn't deserve any free work f…

> As some one else said, every spare dollar I have is going to fund a company that values open source hardware, open source software, right to repair and own.

What is this whimsical company, and how exactly does it make money?

> You know why open source hardware is expensive for lower quality? Because Apple pays the premium on the premium quality stuff. But I'm that process they also drive up the prices.

Apple is not even in contention over the same stuff. Nothing open sourced can fund the development process of a 5nm IC, as the tooling alone would be tens of millions if not more. The total cost of an IC would be in the hundreds of millions (making something of the M1 class is billions).

Open source is lower quality unless there is a commercial sponsor. This is almost universally true for software and hardware. This is because people, naturally, have less resources to invest in something with zero to no financial return.

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

#333

Post by gorgoiler »

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…

The value of great looking hardware and a great looking OS is strong.

The value of being able to open the lid on a brand new machine and just run a terminal is significant. It’s compelling.

It sounds so silly but it’s the same silly that makes us buy the same beer and the same coffee and shop in the same stores all the time.

I migrated off macOS for good during the pandemic though. I yearned for rc.local and xinitrc too much. I live a somewhat (ahem) humbler life now with i3, Firefox, python, vim, and Notable: they were all I really needed, but I miss the shiny.

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

#335

Post by bschwindHN »

fomine3 wrote: post #198
ralph84 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5nm certainly helped, but what really made M1 is the team Apple has assembled. Apple’s fat margins allowed them to attract and retain the best engineers with top of market total comp. Meanwhile Intel viewed engineering as a cost center to be optimized. So here we are.

Comparing Apple A13 and Snapdragon 865 (both TSMC 7nm) would be good to know how Apple's chip design team does things well. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15603/the-samsung-galaxy-s20-...

Those are some of the worst colors ever chosen for a bar chart. Topped off with "Chart series order in same order as legend order" while having the bars vertically stacked, and the legend with two columns.

I don't know how some of these tech writers made it out of 6th grade science class with those charting skills.

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

#336

Post by physicsguy »

thayne wrote: post #253
nordsieck wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Server chips, maybe - but we can already see with Azure that competitive x86 chips from AMD have killed Microsoft's plans to deploy arm64 on their cloud service. I have heard a theory that ARM Servers have a difficult time because there aren't really many developer machines that run ARM. With Apple changing that, there is a chance that the next round of ARM server chips will have better success.

I think this a contributing factor, but not the whole story. Another part is in order to switch to arm64, your entire software stack needs to support that architecture. If you are using linux and open source software, you'll be fine for most, maybe all of that stack, especially if you are willing to compile things yourself. But it just takes one component to block the transition.

I see it as being a bit like the move from Python 2 to Python 3, but easier.

Most software that can run on x86_64 can run on ARM after recompilation. Some software does require changes (anything using vector intrinsics for e.g.). But in general, the biggest barrier is the dependencies.

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

#337

Post by rowanG077 »

tengbretson wrote: post #223
rowanG077 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I wouldn't pay for it if I could print billions in a snap because then I would start my own company that creates open RISC-V laptops and pcs. But in the current market I will because there's simply no alternative.

Did you not own a computer prior to this month?

Of course I do. But there is no 13 inch laptop that fullfills my nerds.

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

#338

Post by wizzwizz4 »

flyinglizard wrote: post #332
ashneo76 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No.No.no.no.no.no.no.no. A million thousand times no. As some one else said, every spare dollar I have is going to fund a company that values open source hardware, open source software, right to repair and own. A company that doesn't purposefully force manufactured obsolescence as a business model, privacy intrusions, lip service to OSS, bullying right to repair in courts, tax evasions doesn't deserve any free work f…

> As some one else said, every spare dollar I have is going to fund a company that values open source hardware, open source software, right to repair and own. What is this whimsical company, and how exactly does it make money? > You know why open source hardware is expensive for lower quality? Because Apple pays the premium on the premium quality stuff. But I'm that process they also drive up the prices. Apple is not…

> What is this whimsical company, and how exactly does it make money?

I mean, Olimex isn't exactly poor. https://www.olimex.com/

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

#339

Post by wizzwizz4 »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #295
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.

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)

Making it harder not to use their services permits them to profit thereby (e.g. via the Apple tax).

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

#340

Post by andreareina »

woahAcademia wrote: post #262
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The main reason to run hackintosh as far as I know is to write software for macOS or iOS. I suspect a lot of Hackintoshes users do so because they like using macOS day-to-day, but don't see anything appealing in Apple's hardware lineup. I'm one of them.

What makes MacOS good?

Reason I bought a Mac way back when is that I wasn't going to go back to Windows if I could avoid it, and I needed to run Photoshop.
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