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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?

#381

Post by higerordermap »

simonh wrote: post #369
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…

Wow, thats some conspiracy theory. Only a teeny tiny fraction of hardware companies have any relationship with Apple whatsoever. For those that do yes their Apple work is lucrative, but for most of them like Sony or Samsung it's a minuscule fraction of their overall revenue, and even then is only for very specific components. Large swathes of their output has nothing to do with Apple. The supply chains of most PC man…

> industry leading device lifetimes

Like 5 years. Android equivalents have 3 years because Qualcomm is shit, it's not Android's fault.

> premium long lasting second hand market value

Because they are fashionable. Apple has capitalised on stupidity of people.

Most people owning MacBooks, for example, are better served with a chromebook.

Apple is a proprietary ecosystem. If Google are demonized for keeping data of users, apple should be given similar treatment, for promoting irrepairability and closed ecosystems.

Never forget the asshole called Steve Jobs was doing all kind of dirty politics to prevent engineers from changing companies.

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

#382

Post by mschuster91 »

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…

I agree with the majority of your post, but this part here is flat out wrong:

> 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.

Hardware is hard. Some Atmel or whatever low brain microcontroller can be had on a board with hand-painted selfmade-etched circuits or shoddy breadboard stuff, at the frequencies these things operate signal integrity doesn't really matter.

But anything with a brain powerful enough to run Linux? Then you're delving into differential signalling at extremely high frequencies - which means you have to precisely account for trace widths, trace thickness and trace length matching simply to ensure that the signal from your CPU arrives at your RAM chip intact. You'll ned an awful lot of awfully precise voltage levels other than 3v3/5v, with equally precise requirements on timing in getting them up. You also won't be able to get away with a two layer board, you'll need three or more layers and a lot of vias - and now, you can't manufacture your own prototypes any more but need to order at a PCB shop which means you either pay through your nose for speedy turnaround and low volume or wait for weeks for pool orders.

And once you have the PCB you'll need to populate and solder it - where you will run into such nasty things as minimum order quantities and the need for a pick-and-place machine if you don't want to go nuts. And if that's not enough, have fun with NDAs and no support for hobbyists by big SoC vendors due to small volumes (I have extensively written about that topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25208056).

The best solution if you needs smarts is to look into either adopting a Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module if you can get away with its performance, or look into COMexpress if you need serious, up to Intel Xeon scale levels performance - but be warned, designing for that ain't exactly easy either.

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

#383

Post by smspf »

freehunter wrote: post #168
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…

>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 You must be thinking of a different Open Source community than I am, because the Open Source community I know thrives off of providing community support for software on major vendor's hardware.

I submitted arm64 patches to OSS ranging from the kernel to the most obscure userspace applications.

All my contributions required some support or at least confirmation from the hardware vendor that my assumptions were correct - e.g. I submitted a patch for a GICv3 errata on a specific chipset; I had to confirm with the vendor that my findings were correct - sure, the patch "worked", but was it doing the right thing or just hiding the real issue? (e.g. why did writing zeros to some magic register fixed the problem we observed? was it a hardware issue or a software issue in the kernel? without feedback from the vendor, such things are a lot harder to isolate and fix properly).

I agree about OSS thriving on major vendor hardware, it's just that Apple is special in this case and intentionally makes it hard for the OSS community to provide support for their hardware.

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

#384

Post by sbuk »

cookiengineer wrote: post #316
freehunter wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 t…

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

Care to expand on that?

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

That's incorrect. They sued the company because they were supposed to take the devices apart and recycle/recover the parts. Not resell them as manufacturer refurbished.

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

Again, please expand on that.

> 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.

Arguably, for the 2 things you have mentioned, the Lightening port would be much better suited. They took out the headphone jack because wires are a pain in the ass and the state of the art for wireless headsets is good enough for the majority.

> 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.

So brief history of the defaults shells in macOS. First 3 releases it was tcsh (BSD - inherited from NeXTStep), then for a while, it was the GPLv2 version of bash (last version to be released under GPLv2 was 3.2), more recently they moved to zsh (MIT). The critical part to get here is licensing. The GPLv3, like it or not, is a controversial license. Apple have an issue with GPLv3, so they avoid software that uses it. Frankly, when bash transitioned to GPLv3 is when Apple should've made the change, but that is a different discussion.

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

#385

Post by simonh »

higerordermap wrote: post #381
simonh wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, thats some conspiracy theory. Only a teeny tiny fraction of hardware companies have any relationship with Apple whatsoever. For those that do yes their Apple work is lucrative, but for most of them like Sony or Samsung it's a minuscule fraction of their overall revenue, and even then is only for very specific components. Large swathes of their output has nothing to do with Apple. The supply chains of most PC man…

> industry leading device lifetimes Like 5 years. Android equivalents have 3 years because Qualcomm is shit, it's not Android's fault. > premium long lasting second hand market value Because they are fashionable. Apple has capitalised on stupidity of people. Most people owning MacBooks, for example, are better served with a chromebook. Apple is a proprietary ecosystem. If Google are demonized for keeping data of user…

Oh right, you know what these hundreds of millions people actually need better than they do themselves and they are all idiots, so none of the evidence counts. Discussion over. I'm done.

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

#386

Post by yellowapple »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #352
eyelidlessness wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, hopefully they haven't entirely sold their hardware-company soul, in which case Linux support would only help hardware sales, even if by a little bit. Apple certainly didn't do much to interfere with people porting Linux and BSDs to their PowerPC hardware back in the day (and indeed, the Powerbook G4 sitting on my bed right now is mostly-happily running OpenBSD).

However, considering Apple's behavior around iPhones and iPads, I don't expect those hopes to come to much fruition.

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

#387

Post by toyg »

robin_reala wrote: post #375
toyg wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You might be right. Still, it shows the Apple attitude at the time, and how the license helped changing their ways. Note how the post complains they are simply using OSX apis... without the modification-release clauses, webkit as a reusable library would never have happened.

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

#388

Post by smspf »

1337_d00dZ wrote: post #150
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…

It isn't UEFI-based, it uses iBoot. Proprietary up and down.

My bad, I didn't do proper research when writing that comment. Thank you for the correction.

And that's too bad, UEFI would have been easier to deal with imo.

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

#389

Post by mschuster91 »

endgame wrote: post #250
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you seriously trust that not to change? No, I don't. On the Mac platform, Apple has consistently elected to give users ultimate control. They could have a change of heart some day, but so could Intel, Microsoft, or any other vendor.

The same Apple that continually locks down / harder and harder with each OS release, and makes developers jump through more and more hoops?

As a power user, you can however still jump through all those hoops, even with custom kext's.

I agree that the situation sucks for us, but on the other side - you can give a piece of Apple hardware to a literal child and won't have to deal with either getting it running in the first place (as with anything Linux based) or a persistent rootkit or other malware (which is more common and easy than not on Windows).

Being easily open for power users, hard to exploit for malware and hard for incompetent people to mess up, unfortunately, is a Hard Thing.

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

#390

Post by amelius »

mschuster91 wrote: post #382
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…

I agree with the majority of your post, but this part here is flat out wrong: > 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. Hardware is hard . Some Atmel or whatever low brain microcontroller can be had on a board with hand-painted selfmade-etched circuits or shoddy breadboard stuff,…

You seem to be forgetting about the powerful EDA software that will help with the design and its verification.
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