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Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

realworldtech.com

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Re: Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

#41

Post by actuator »

spijdar wrote: post #3

One thing I recall is Linus is really big on "absolutely no noise whatsoever". The passively cooled but still reasonably powerful Air seems like ideal hardware for his tastes, at least for a laptop.

Yeah, somehow I am surprised with his cooled down take on this.

With the exceptionally good ARM hardware coming in from Apple, I can't see mainstream future for other laptops which will allow OS freedom. As time goes on, Apple should be able to significantly reduce the price of entry level Macbooks. Look at iPad pricing, entry level laptops just for iPad level work on a laptop form factor don't have to cost a lot.

I always thought this will be Chromebooks, and hoped Google would be more friendly to other OSs because of their past, but it looks like it will be Macbooks that will fill that space.

Re: Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

#42

Post by shmerl »

jayflux wrote: post #32
awak3ning wrote: post #18

Honestly, I don't think anyone is holding their breath for the day that corporations like Apple and Microsoft give the world the Linux that they deserve. Imagine if these power brokers didn't exist and a whole generation of children grew up on Linux rather than Mac/PC. Huge opportunity cost for society in my opinion.

> Honestly, I don't think anyone is holding their breath for the day that corporations like Apple and Microsoft give the world the Linux that they deserve. I don’t understand this comment. What are you expecting Apple, Microsoft to do? They’re not charities, they make competing OS’s for profit. Why would anyone be waiting for them to bring Linux?

A lot of times they aren't competing but making competing hard with lock-in (that's anti-competitive).

Re: Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

#43

Post by stu2b50 »

IshKebab wrote: post #37
jayflux wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly, I don't think anyone is holding their breath for the day that corporations like Apple and Microsoft give the world the Linux that they deserve. I don’t understand this comment. What are you expecting Apple, Microsoft to do? They’re not charities, they make competing OS’s for profit. Why would anyone be waiting for them to bring Linux?

They don't need to do much - just document things, and make it possible to disable secure boot.

Apple does allow you to disable secure boot, yes even on the M1 Macs, and that's not even Microsoft's job.

Re: Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

#44

Post by bitwize »

stu2b50 wrote: post #26
tech5000 wrote: post #6

> I've been waiting for an ARM laptop that can run Linux for a long time. I wonder if the Pinebook Pro would suit some Linux laptop use cases? Its an ARM laptop for $200, no fan, that ships with Manjaro Linux installed.

The issue is that you really start feel the performance limitations of a cheap ARM SoC. Especially if you do a bunch of C compiling like Torvalds would.

C compiles in a flash on today's hardware. It's only when you have a BIG C codebase (the kernel counts as big), or a medium-sized C++ codebase, that things slow down.

Re: Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

#45

Post by supersour »

djhworld wrote: post #14

I'm really not holding out much hope that Linux will natively run on these M1s, even if we get it to boot there's all the driver issues for the integrated GPU, audio, wifi etc. I'd imagine there is a lot of power management stuff on there too.

Is anyone working on this right now? I would be interested to follow the development.

Re: Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

#48

Post by interestica »

jayflux wrote: post #32
awak3ning wrote: post #18

Honestly, I don't think anyone is holding their breath for the day that corporations like Apple and Microsoft give the world the Linux that they deserve. Imagine if these power brokers didn't exist and a whole generation of children grew up on Linux rather than Mac/PC. Huge opportunity cost for society in my opinion.

> Honestly, I don't think anyone is holding their breath for the day that corporations like Apple and Microsoft give the world the Linux that they deserve. I don’t understand this comment. What are you expecting Apple, Microsoft to do? They’re not charities, they make competing OS’s for profit. Why would anyone be waiting for them to bring Linux?

Well, exactly that. As soon as there is some sort of economic advantage, they do support alternatives. Economic advantage may not mean additional direct sales, but it may mean introducing a different customer base to their product or encouraging active development. I mean, MS has now released its second iteration of 'subsystem for linux' on Windows 10.

Re: Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

#49

Post by alexdowad »

zebus806 wrote: post #15

I don’t know why we keep caring what he thinks

Linus has incredible knowledge about the lower levels of the computing stack (CPU architectures, etc), and so I, for one, am very interested in knowing what he thinks about those things. But regarding his other opinions in general... yeah, I'm with you.

Re: Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

#50

Post by [deleted] »

raverbashing wrote: post #24

I wonder if we have confirmation from an M1 owner (that is familiar with Apple stuff) that there's no way of booting from external media from the "bios" Of course, then you would need to get on the whole trouble of initializing video/T2/etc but it could be doable

[deleted]
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