Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Well that world would suck immensely, with horrible integration between hardware and software like exists right now outside of the Apple world. Why? The hardware people at companies like NVIDIA or Apple already have to write detailed documentation for their stuff anyway so that the software people can do their side. Assuming they do a good enough job at writing documentation and testing their hardware, it should no…
1. Hardware companies need some software to test their product, so this will be wasting their effort. 2. Good documentation and testing is probably not as common as you think. 3. It takes a huge amount of effort to write high quality drivers by reverse engineering. The thing about Asahi Linux is that the hardware does not have many variants, but there are a lot more different hardware for PCs.
They can also open source their testing bench code. The only ones who have to be afraid are those who don't care about quality. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" also applies here - I'd really like to be able as a consumer to choose the product that demonstrates the better engineering!
> 2. Good documentation and testing is probably not as common as you think.
Oh, I'm aware of that, and the consequences of that are becoming more and more dire as electronic waste from defunct companies or unsupported and unsecure devices piles up, together with hacked IoT devices causing mayhem on the wide Internet in botnets.
It's high time for that to stop.
> 3. It takes a huge amount of effort to write high quality drivers by reverse engineering. The thing about Asahi Linux is that the hardware does not have many variants, but there are a lot more different hardware for PCs.
So what? Ordinary PC hardware at its core still conforms to decades old standards that can be used as a fallback. Given a sufficient supply of beers, coffee and pizza, every CS student worth their money can throw up a basic graphical OS that runs on any mainstream (i.e. non-embedded) x86 system. Input, output (video, serial, audio, keyboard, mice, accessories) and storage all have standardized interfaces - the only thing that does not is networking.
There is no reason at all to say that the ARM world can't standardize on basic components or at least interfaces. Apple can - their UART implementation, according to rumors, dates back to the early iPod/iPhone days, while Samsung has something like five or six completely different implementation, and Mediatek and all the other SoC vendors run their completely own stuff.