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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?

#351

Post by pmontra »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #292
pmontra wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't downvote you, because there are tradeoffs and they are very subjective.

BTW I do use Windows and MacOS a few times per month, via remote desktop to run two programs of a customer that only run there. Not a complete experience but add to it some continued (Windows) or sketchy (Mac) use of those OSes from their very first release (80s / 90s).

I'm trading those two nuisances, one very small, the other invisible, for other much larger problems

1. Not using Windows, which is a pretty much horrible experience. Good for gaming, which I don't care anymore on a PC, bad UX (and I don't mean only the GUI.) And I'm targeting Linux servers anyway.

2. MacOS and it's top bar and the menu at the top. It was OK on the very first Mac because the screen was so tiny that it actually saved space. It was perplexing or infuriating when the screens got larger. Unfortunately it stuck and it will be like this forever. And Macs don't have physical buttons on the touchpad.

So I'm happy with my Gnome desktop, configured with: the top bar at the bottom merged with a Windows like task bar, no dock, hotkeys to swap virtual desktop by customer project, no animations, visible permanent scrollbars (but I show only their outline on the background color of their window.)

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

#352

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #166
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…

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 see no threat in Linux at all

Yet.

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

#353

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #166
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…

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 see no threat in Linux at all

Imagine thinking macOS is threatened by Linux. Guys like this will never understand the appeal of the Apple ecosystem, it is beyond their comprehension. There are some good reasons to run Linux, but shouldn't you at least be capable of seeing why Apple makes the kind of money they do, beyond the "well those customers must obviously be stupid and less enlightened than myself, a true warrior of the Free Software tribe"? Why are people like this.

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

#354

Post by hehetrthrthrjn »

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…

I only really use macOS these days, so they've clearly improved or borrowed features since I last looked, but I guess the point is that those features were implemented long ago.

The ability to implement file access the way is obviously possible on any OS, but on the Mac it's consistently implemented that way in applications, except for a couple of bad actors. On other OSes it's much more mixed. The same can be said for many other small features. There's a just a lot better consistency overall on macOS.

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

#355

Post by pjmlp »

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…

> I suspect if Windows had been unix based like Mac OS, Linux would not have become quite so popular.

I fully agree with you. Microsoft's biggest mistake was not giving the POSIX subsystem the same level of relevance than Win32 and just carrying it around to fill check boxes.

Had they been serious about it, it would have been more than enough for UNIX like workflows.

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

#356

Post by fangorn »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #202
minot wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason to run hackintosh as far as I know is to write software for macOS or iOS. Apple won’t encourage corporations to build hackintoshes but as long as it isn’t too easy to install macOS anywhere I don’t see how — on net — it hurts apple.

> 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.

Won't Apple silicon eradicate hackintoshes eventually? I mean, you won't be able to just buy Apple's components and assemble a computer. If you were, it's really just a Mac, isn't it? I imagine they'll support x86_64 based systems for a few more years, but there won't be new drivers or support for new cpus, etc.

I wonder if it occurred to someone at Apple, if it's somewhat an added benefit to them.

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

#358

Post by pjmlp »

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.

It is the same experience as UNIX though, including the fact that each flavour has its own way of doing stuff.

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

#359

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Well, PC clones only happened thanks to Compaq.

Personally I would have been happier with Atari or Amiga instead, targeted mobile dev back in the J2ME/Symbian days, I did had access to console devkits for a while, so for what I care everything is good as it is.

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

#360

Post by pjmlp »

pengaru wrote: post #51

Most of what makes the M1 interesting is TSMC's 5nm process, why wouldn't we expect similar results from future x86 CPUs on 5nm or smaller. At least AMD is supporting upstream Linux development for GPU support, if you care about Free software and control over your computers, throw your money at companies better aligned with those goals. Don't reward Apple for being assholes. <=5nm AMD Zen SoCs will be fantastic as we…

My AMD APU begs to differ.
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