Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon? • Hacker News Board

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

#521

Post by heavyset_go » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

aspyct wrote: post #402

aruggirello wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes you do need Windows. Wine is great, but there's no way I'll publicly release a windows application that hasn't been tested on an actual windows install.

You can cross-compile from other OSes using MinGW and test via the free Windows VMs that Microsoft distributes. You can also download the free Windows development VMs and develop from them exclusively.

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

#522

Post by heavyset_go » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:35 PM UTC

netsharc wrote: post #377

msie wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Microsoft distributes free Windows VMs with developer tools installed for the explicit purpose of developing on Windows, there's no need to use their IE images.

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

#523

Post by heavyset_go » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:41 PM UTC

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…

It's an old, crufty Unix that had various components replaced with proprietary Apple software. Take a look at how a modern Unix does networking, versus how Apple is forcing the market to use their proprietary network APIs.

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

#524

Post by CountSessine » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:52 PM UTC

nordsieck wrote: post #167

CountSessine wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, I disagree with some of your points, but the one point I agree with is really important. There's no clear guarantee that there will be other performance-competitive arm64 CPUs in laptops anytime soon. I don't think anyone has as much incentive as Apple does. Who else is as incentivized to make a laptop/desktop-class arm64 chip? Maybe ARM themselves ... but without a mainstream OS to run it on (with ma…

> Server chips, maybe - but we can already see with Azure that competitive x86 chips from AMD have killed Microsoft's plans to deploy arm64 on their cloud service. I have heard a theory that ARM Servers have a difficult time because there aren't really many developer machines that run ARM. With Apple changing that, there is a chance that the next round of ARM server chips will have better success.

I agree. Cross-compiling is just awful in general, unless someone works really hard to put together a really high-quality cross-compilation toolchain which includes compiling, deployment, and remote debugging. That's what you get with the iOS and Android toolchains. But it just isn't there with Linux (or Windows) in general. There's a whole lot of work that's gone into the iOS and Android toolchains. It's easy to overlook that.

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

#525

Post by Dylan16807 » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

eyelidlessness wrote: post #492

Dylan16807 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whole package margin > If the services aren’t generating that margin, the hardware is making it up. I really don't like that way of looking at profits. Going by that standard, if you sell a thousand dollar device with $260 in margin and no software, everything is great. But then if you add on $600 in software to increase your margin to $330, that's bad somehow?

Huh? I wasn’t making a value judgment at all, just observing Apple’s historical behavior. That is how they look at profit. And they move all sorts of revenue around to make certain price points more appealing. Mac mini gets cheaper at entry level, macOS is free. To the extent those are lower margin, they make it up in services or other hardware lines.

Huh? I wasn't judging you at all, just insulting Apple's historical behavior, how they look at profit.

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

#526

Post by deergomoo » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

woahAcademia wrote: post #502

deergomoo wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nice, I hope you enjoy your setup.

Really makes you wonder how many people are just buying because of marketing and psychology tricks.

Or perhaps they just value different things than you? Assuming that the only reason someone might enjoy a product is because of marketing trickery is pretty elitist.

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

#527

Post by intpx » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

krageon wrote: post #500

robenkleene wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the remaining 1% is stuff that you should migrate away from I'm not following. Compiling and media editing depend on a fast platform, are you really suggesting people should avoid doing those tasks?

Photoshop (i.e. "image editing") and video editing software have existed for a long time. They have not become better, just heavier. There are still alternatives for those applications that run just as well on slower hardware, though obviously your movie edits might have to render overnight instead of in three hours. Nobody will die if that happens. Edit: You mentioned compiling, which is not an incredibly salient po…

what on earth are you talking about? time is made up of seconds, minutes, hours... etc. reducing wait time increases productivity. The larger and more complex a project becomes, the more these delays compound. A sub $1k laptop with the the computational power of a workstation that costs many times that, and isn't portable is an absolute game changer in many areas. If I worked for National Geographic or the New York times as a photographer and needed to preprocess several thousand images or 4/8k footage from the field so I could make print deadlines, 3 hours vs overnight means everthing.And more importantly, the amount of power consumed by the cycles is far from trivial. An x86 mobile workstation can't even complete certain render tasks on a single charge that the macbook air can do on less than a quarter of a battery charge.

As for compile times, believe it or not, lots of projects are written in something other than highly optimized C code and compile time is a real pain point. You don't always have a choice of what language or dependencies you work with.

Just because there is an alternative way to do something, or a way that takes longer doesn't mean its viable. Performance improvements matter, a lot. Power consumption improvements matter, a lot.

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

#528

Post by m463 » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

rkeene2 wrote: post #173

Linux has never worked well on Apple hardware. At one of my previous jobs I had the choice between a very high end "MacBook Pro" (1TB SSD, 16GiB RAM, etc) and a lower-end PC. Since my job was developing a Linux distribution from scratch, I was going to be running Linux on whatever I got. I (naively) assumed that since I saw a lot of MacBook Pro's at open source conferences and other places where open source software…

I've actually had no problems - older macbook pro (2012?) only issue was the retina console fonts were really tiny. I used ubuntu and arch.

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

#529

Post by yellowapple » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 7:29 PM UTC

cies wrote: post #434

yellowapple wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

If you use Linux on an Apple laptop, you are less likely to use their software stores, mobile phones, tablets, headphones, etc. The integratedness of Apple's offerings depend on the control they have on both software and hardware. I think it's the integratedness that sells Apple's product.

Right, but at least before iOS those software offerings were specifically to make the hardware more attractive. Being able to install Linux or Windows or what have you doesn't really impact that much, since the option to reinstall macOS and return to that "integratedness" always exists, and since there's nobody holding a gun to "normal" users' heads saying "you must install an entirely different operating system" (and indeed, Apple taking a stance of "we don't officially support this, and strongly suggest you stick with macOS, but if you really know what you're doing we won't get in your way" would be perfectly reasonable).

Nowadays, especially on iOS, it seems like the software is the focus. I'd argue that's a mistake that will sooner rather than later bite Apple in the ass. Hopefully the switch to M1 is a sign that Apple realizes this and wants to move back toward making top-notch hardware instead of coasting on App Store rent-seeking and planned obsolescence.

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

#530

Post by hvis » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 8:09 PM UTC

voltagex_ wrote: post #205

hvis wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You turn it off in the BIOS before installing your system, and that's it.

Which is what I've done when installing Linux. Am I losing performance? Power efficiency? Features? It also makes dual booting trickier if you don't plan it beforehand. It frustrates me that there's not that many reviews that cover this kind of stuff, so it's hard to avoid silliness like this when making a substantial purchase like a laptop.

> Which is what I've done when installing Linux. Am I losing performance? Power efficiency? Features?

From what I read a year ago before doing this, you don't lose much, and software-based RAID (if you go for that sort of thing) in GNU/Linux is just as efficient/reliable, and maybe more so. And anyway, if you only have one HDD/SSD, there is no point in RAID.

> It also makes dual booting trickier if you don't plan it beforehand.

I don't think so: installing Windows will work just the same with Intel's RAID turned off.