371–380 of 414 posts
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No, Apple actually supporting it (in the same way that Intel, AMD, ARM/Linaro et. al. staff resources to support their hardware on Linux) is the best way. But paying productive engineers via crowdfunding isn't an awful workaround.
We can't change what Apple does. Gnashing your teeth about that isn't going to help. What we can do is support this Patreon.
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You're totally correct, it is indeed just putting the drivers on the installation media and partitioning magic.
On 2017+ machines you don’t even need an external drive, during the partitioning setup it carves out a temporary partition to store the contents of the ISO + their drivers, windows installation customisation etc. And it’s all deleted after the installation of the drivers after windows is installed
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The original Apple Computer schematics were distributed by the company.
They were, and then there was NuBus, Apple's own floppy format, OS used a mix of Object Pascal and Assembly, Quickdraw, Quickdraw3D, NuBus, NetTalk,...
NuBus, being a standard predating it’s use in the Mac (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuBus) technically was more open than the ISA bus on the PC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture: “The ISA term was coined as a retronym by competing PC-clone manufacturers in the late 1980s or early 1990s as a reaction to IBM attempts to replace the AT-bus with its new and incompatible Micro Channel architecture”)
In 1984, floppy formats were still changing all the time, so Apple picking something non standard for hardware that wasn’t used much by anybody else wasn’t unheard of.
Writing an OS in assembly was normal, too. Shipping graphics libraries with it wasn’t, but you can’t blame them for writing their own. What should they have picked? X Windows is from June 1984.
Quickdraw 3D, one could argue, should have been based on OpenGL, I don’t think it was clear that would be a winner on the desktop in 1995. Also, they started with usability in mind, supporting easy copy-paste of models working, something OpenGL doesn’t aim for (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL%2B%2B did, but it started after QuickDraw 3D (and, like it, died))
AppleTalk, similarly, started with usability in mind, leading to the use of thinner cabling (at the time, ethernet cables had a diameter of almost 1 cm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5, required terminators, etc), easier configuration (plug in the cable, and you’re good) and also predates the realization that TCP/IP is the winner, networking wise.
I don’t think anybody could have picked the
Is anyone else ever saddened when they think about the man hours spent on projects like this (reversing software or hardware to accomplish what should be a simple goal) when all it would take is the teensiest bit of cooperation to not waste all those hours? I use waste in the sense of like trying to assemble something complicated with the instructions just out of arms reach, not in the sense of doing something pointl…
It's very hard work and I have immense respect for people who are able to reverse engineer entire systems. There would be no need for this activity if companies just played nice but since they don't I'm glad that there are people out there doing this work.
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Not sure what you are getting at here. Getting Linux to run on the M1 already works... it's ARM Linux. It already runs on a VM on the M1 unmodified. I suspect we'll see Linux booting on M1 hardware within 6 months, likely less. What is going to be a much bigger struggle is getting the drivers for all the various other bits of the architecture working properly. The GPU is the biggie, but networking drivers, power mana…
> it was a long time before we had good graphics support on Linux In practice we have _tolerable_ drivers (depending on any given year), typically with terrible power management... and it took 20 years - on a platform that was much more transparent than what Apple will ever provide, given half the chance. Doing it all again on an even-more-wilfully-opaque platform, built by a company that is GPL-hostile and does not…
I spent 15 years screwing around with X86Config files trying to get Nvidia support working. The idea that anyone could be less opaque than that seems unlikely. Well into the early 00s I had a laptop with a worthless internal wifi card and an expensive aftermarket card because the internal card had zero support.
I have no idea how transparent Apple is going to be regarding their technology, but it can't be any worse than what we dealt with with Nvidia prior to getting their binary blob solution out.
Apple is one brand, one stack. Even if Apple offers no support at all, that is going to be a hell of a lot easier than fighting hundreds of OEMs building one-off cards and onboard sound/ wifi/ video drivers with no interest in Linux.
I'm not talking up Apple here. But it really seems like people have forgotten what a shit-show driver support was on Linux for decades. And however uncooperative Apple is, just the fact that it's a single monolithic stack is going to make it massively easier.
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in this perspective, I'm saddened of all the electricity Bitcoin burns for futile intents. Imagine putting all these electricity for good purposes rather than making people rich.
Apple doesn't lose anything by opening up to other OSes (or they could single out free ones). The hardware has already been sold, nobody's returning OSX for a refund. If anything, they're missing out on sales to people that live by "Linux or bust" motto.
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My shop is also all x86 in the cloud... but I took the plunge anyway. I'm glad I did; Rosetta 2 works really well.
That's good to hear. The critical issue for me would be running an x86 (incldung AVX) Docker image on M1. Reasonably sure that's not going to happen in the near future.
Just a reminder, the Patreon is not fully funded. If people really want to see this happen, dropping a couple dollars a month to help support the project is the best way. https://www.patreon.com/marcan
Just a reminder, the Patreon is not fully funded. If people really want to see this happen, dropping a couple dollars a month to help support the project is the best way. https://www.patreon.com/marcan
Is this the same project?
Asahi Linux was founded by Hector Martin “marcan” after the launch of the first M1 devices.
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> teensiest bit of cooperation Apple did put in the effort to cooperate when they added support to boot other OSes. Apple hasn’t prevented anyone from running Linux, they simply haven’t written Linux drivers for their hardware or provided a manual to do so. Most of the effort in Asahi Linux is going to be writing drivers for hardware that hasn’t had Linux drivers written for it. It makes sense that a Linux driver doe…
Apple never added support to boot other OSes on arm macs.