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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?

#371

Post by ineedasername »

eyelidlessness wrote: post #288
ineedasername wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lea…

You can't "nope" your way around Apple putting up a few walls around the MacOS garden just because they've left a door in one of them. If they go no further, then it's fine. But "not likely" is a bit too soon to say until they've gone a while without further limitations. That is, unless you consider something like the Mac equivalent of Project Sandcastle running on outdated hardware to be an acceptable situation, which appears to require a jailbreak of their stack anyway. There's simply nothing stopping Apple from going that route, and some years of incremental changes to MacOS that have inched it closer. Again, I'll believe they won't do that when they stop taking those incremental steps. Until then, "nope" really just means "not yet".

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

#372

Post by romanoderoma »

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’re a hardware company that makes the hardware more attractive with software

They also make hardware that to take advantage of the new software features need to become obsolete

Linux extends the life of any hardware it runs on

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

#373

Post by voltagex_ »

The_Colonel wrote: post #365
voltagex_ wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder at what point they got rid of the Intel RAID/RST controller that'll never be supported in upstream Linux - it's in the non-"developer" 9350.

Coincidentally I have this exact model (9350 non-developer) and it runs (Ubuntu) Linux great. Laptop is completely silent, all the hardware runs flawlessly, battery life is after 5 years still pretty good, just overall great experience. I honestly don't remember if I had to at some point disable something in BIOS ...

I have it too. The battery is shot after 4 years (?) but lasts quite a bit longer in Ubuntu. It's had coil whine as long as I had it, the supplied Toshiba NVMe drive died and I've also replaced the Wi-fi card with a mostly sane Intel 9560.

If you're using a SATA drive with the default UEFI settings, Linux will see the drive. If you use a PCIe drive, it won't until you set it to AHCI mode.

Edit: oh and Windows frequently wouldn't recognise the USB-C port unless you had something plugged into it during boot.

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

#374

Post by herpderperator »

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.

This is really a non-issue and easy to get around. You can easily install the GNU utilities which take precedence in your PATH. I installed them all with Homebrew in a few minutes, including bash5. You can follow this guide[0] as a start.

[0] https://gist.github.com/skyzyx/3438280b18e4f7c490db8a2a2ca0b...

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

#375

Post by robin_reala »

toyg wrote: post #344
saagarjha wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KHTML is LGPL, isn’t it?

If i remember correctly KDE used to be GPL when webkit started, and was later relicensed. The difference is relatively irrelevant anyway, the way they used KHTML they would have had to release sources even under LGPL. Had KDE used BSD, MIT, or Apache, back then, we likely wouldn't have had webkit.

I’m trying to find a specific commit to disprove this, but that’s not my recollection. Certainly this blog post from 2005 indicates LGPL: https://web.archive.org/web/20050428230122/http://www.kdedev...

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

#376

Post by perryizgr8 »

pmontra wrote: post #351
perryizgr8 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You have your preferences about UI and GUI and that's ok. But 40Hz screen and non-working brightness controls are a non-starter for any but the most dedicated users. 144Hz is common on decent laptops nowadays, along with automatic brightness.

To me, this trade-off is very simple.

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

#377

Post by netsharc »

msie wrote: post #252
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company that forced me to buy a mac to develop for them?

How about Windows? Did someone force you to buy a computer to develop for it?

In theory one could do Windows dev on hard mode (on Linux/Mac): get one of the Windows virtual machines that Microsoft provides to test for old IE compatibility (https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...), install the freely available compilers (or even the open source Cygwin one), and code away!

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

#378

Post by zimpenfish »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #293
thayne wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think zsh might well be more powerful than bash but it's extremely opinionated about how it does stuff (unless you want to go down a configuration rabbit hole) - for me, coming off 20+ years of bash muscle memory, it was unusable and I switched back.

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

#379

Post by aruggirello »

msie wrote: post #252
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company that forced me to buy a mac to develop for them?

How about Windows? Did someone force you to buy a computer to develop for it?

You can pretty much develop software for Windows on other platforms too. Cross compilation is supported in several languages, and when you can't - you can usually compile stuff under Wine, or even ReactOS. So while obviously you need a computer, you don't strictly need Windows.

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

#380

Post by skinkestek »

pmontra wrote: post #351
perryizgr8 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Exactly this.

For many of us the disadvantages of using Linux are tiny compared to the advantages:

- from 30-50% faster compiles (vs Windows)

- instant git (vs Windows)

- choice of Desktop environment (vs both)

- choice of hardware (vs Mac)

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