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Linux 5.19

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Re: Linux 5.19

#61

Post by manholio »

Bud wrote: post #45
manholio wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MacBooks could easily end up becoming the laptop of choice for Linux developers That is, if they want to subsidize with their own wallets the dominance of consumer-hostile computing that open source was created to avert. Except for development such as this here, which aims at liberating users from a closed platform, I would have a philosophical problem to buy such hardware purely for my convenience. Let's not fool…

Can't you make your argument without the fallacious roping-in of Amazon? Apple isn't Amazon. Also, if Macs are actually as hostile to consumers and to open-source computing as you claim (and boy, is this ever an old and tired claim at this point), why is Linus still working so very hard and enthusiastically to support the platform in question?

In regard to proprietary hardware, it is my assertion that Apple and Amazon are essentially making the same move: throw money they obtained by dominating their respective markets into closed hardware development that will allow them to lock into their market dominance in the future by limiting consumer choice. You might disagree but there is nothing fallacious about this line of reasoning.

If you are looking for a fallacy take your argument from authority: if Linus does something then it cannot possibly be wrong. Which doesn't even get the point I'm making above, where I clearly contrast developing FOSS for the MacBook which is clearly a good thing (what Linus is doing), with buying a development MacBook for convenience, thereby putting your money to work against software liberty.

Re: Linux 5.19

#62

Post by moonchrome »

mort96 wrote: post #56
moonchrome wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm going to use a completely custom SoC + enthusiast driven driver support - with no support from manufacturer - to be my daily driver as a developer. Because I've got nothing better to do with my time than diagnose issues due to running a setup only 50 other people in the world use.

Most laptops don't use a completely custom SoC, but most of them have enthusiast driven driver support -- or worse, formerly-enthusiast driven driver support where nobody currently cares -- with no support from the manufacturer. And on less popular hardware; the most popular laptop models in the world are macs. If you want manufacturer support, you need to use macOS or Windows or one of the very limited selection of…

PC component manufacturers offer Linux drivers for their hardware, sometimes it's binary blobs, etc. but at least there's some effort there. And companies like Intel and AMD are paying engineers to maintain it. For example AMD and Intel both have open source Linux GPU drivers available. Does Apple even have specifications for their GPU available ?

Re: Linux 5.19

#63

Post by mort96 »

dcminter wrote: post #32
nicce wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we can conclude, that the the big star of open source is not enforcing the child of open source :( Ref SemVer: https://semver.org/

The unofficial motto of the Linux kernel is "Don't break userspace" so semver wouldn't be useful.

And what's more, the second unofficial motto of the Linux kernel is "break kernel space"; they don't make any attempt at keeping in-kernel APIs stable. So if they followed semver for userspace, they'd be on 1.9000.0, if they followed semver for kernel space they'd be on 9000.0.0.

Re: Linux 5.19

#64

Post by jillesvangurp »

nicoburns wrote: post #21

Somewhat surprisingly, Linux support for Apple Silicon MacBooks seems to be shaping up to be better than that for pretty much any other laptop. The Asahi team don’t have support for everything yet (notably no GPU) but what they do have support for seems to be high quality, well integrated with Linux’s conventions, and upstreamed into the mainline kernel! How much other hardware can claim that? The Asahi developers ha…

Apple doing some minimal work to support their own hardware with Linux might bring them some new business. And it sounds like it shouldn't even be that much work. Mainly just documenting their hardware would be good enough to bootstrap that.

For developers, macs are just really nice hardware and there are not a whole lot of similarly nice, Linux friendly laptops out there. Most of them seem to be compromises between being noisy, not having great screens, keyboards, and touchpads, mediocre performance, etc.

Typing this on a Samsung Galaxy Book with a meh screen, meh touch pad, alright keyboard, and unimpressive performance. It runs Manjaro. I do miss having a nice screen and input options. I'm actually using a wireless mouse for the first time in a decade plus. Never needed one with a mac.

Re: Linux 5.19

#65

Post by smallpipe »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #64
nicoburns wrote: post #21

Somewhat surprisingly, Linux support for Apple Silicon MacBooks seems to be shaping up to be better than that for pretty much any other laptop. The Asahi team don’t have support for everything yet (notably no GPU) but what they do have support for seems to be high quality, well integrated with Linux’s conventions, and upstreamed into the mainline kernel! How much other hardware can claim that? The Asahi developers ha…

Apple doing some minimal work to support their own hardware with Linux might bring them some new business. And it sounds like it shouldn't even be that much work. Mainly just documenting their hardware would be good enough to bootstrap that. For developers, macs are just really nice hardware and there are not a whole lot of similarly nice, Linux friendly laptops out there. Most of them seem to be compromises between…

You widely underestimate how much work goes into documenting hardware.

Re: Linux 5.19

#66

Post by Bud »

manholio wrote: post #61
Bud wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you make your argument without the fallacious roping-in of Amazon? Apple isn't Amazon. Also, if Macs are actually as hostile to consumers and to open-source computing as you claim (and boy, is this ever an old and tired claim at this point), why is Linus still working so very hard and enthusiastically to support the platform in question?

In regard to proprietary hardware, it is my assertion that Apple and Amazon are essentially making the same move: throw money they obtained by dominating their respective markets into closed hardware development that will allow them to lock into their market dominance in the future by limiting consumer choice. You might disagree but there is nothing fallacious about this line of reasoning. If you are looking for a fa…

Except we clearly see that Linus has bought Macs over and over again. Presumably because they're the best tool for the job and he likes them. And you still have failed (like everyone else) to make any real argument that Apple is somehow warring against "software liberty". Promoting your own platform doesn't amount to doing so, certainly.

Re: Linux 5.19

#67

Post by mort96 »

deathhand wrote: post #59
mort96 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most laptops don't use a completely custom SoC, but most of them have enthusiast driven driver support -- or worse, formerly-enthusiast driven driver support where nobody currently cares -- with no support from the manufacturer. And on less popular hardware; the most popular laptop models in the world are macs. If you want manufacturer support, you need to use macOS or Windows or one of the very limited selection of…

Dell, one of the largest manufacturers of laptops supports Linux and OSS. It's not some red headed step child anymore.

Dell laptops support Linux for a select few models. You can't just get any Dell and expect manufacturer support. I think "laptops from a few tiny Linux-focused companies, plus a few Linux models from dell" counts as a "very limited selection", even though it's better than it used to be.

Re: Linux 5.19

#68

Post by avar »

vbernat wrote: post #44
nicoburns wrote: post #21

Somewhat surprisingly, Linux support for Apple Silicon MacBooks seems to be shaping up to be better than that for pretty much any other laptop. The Asahi team don’t have support for everything yet (notably no GPU) but what they do have support for seems to be high quality, well integrated with Linux’s conventions, and upstreamed into the mainline kernel! How much other hardware can claim that? The Asahi developers ha…

If you take a regular Lenovo laptop, everything likely works out of the box with an upstream kernel. This quite not the case yet with Asahi Linux which does not support power management, no USB, no sound. There was a time where Apple laptops came with very good Linux support. It was the time were every bit of hardware support was present in Darwin (a 12" iBook G3 was working flawlessly with Linux for example). I thin…

I used an iBook G3/G4 for years as a primary development laptop running Linux, and I think your recollection here is a bit off. The state of it was that:

- There were numerous laptops with near-full Linux support, the Apple hardware wasn't categorically better when it came to that.

- The power usage of x86 CPUs was atrocious at the time compared to PPC. Now history is repeating with Apple's M[12] line. Therefore people put up with a lot to get 2-3x longer battery life. As I recall I got 3-4 hours of active use out of my iBook, but (going to conferences) it felt like people's x86s almost always had to be plugged in.

- The Linux support for software suspend/hibernation was really flaky at the time, but it worked perfectly on Apple hardware, because all Linux had to do was to tell the hardware "do the suspend thing now" (IIRC by tweaking a file in /proc). The hardware did a slow "heartbeat" with a front LED hidden behind the plastic frame when suspended (a nice effect). When running Linux it would do the the exact same, as it was all done in hardware.

- There were still edge cases in hardware support, just as with any other laptop vendor, it all came down to what individual components happened to have Linux drivers. Some of this was better on Apple's hardware, some of it was worse.

Re: Linux 5.19

#69

Post by mort96 »

moonchrome wrote: post #62
mort96 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most laptops don't use a completely custom SoC, but most of them have enthusiast driven driver support -- or worse, formerly-enthusiast driven driver support where nobody currently cares -- with no support from the manufacturer. And on less popular hardware; the most popular laptop models in the world are macs. If you want manufacturer support, you need to use macOS or Windows or one of the very limited selection of…

PC component manufacturers offer Linux drivers for their hardware, sometimes it's binary blobs, etc. but at least there's some effort there. And companies like Intel and AMD are paying engineers to maintain it. For example AMD and Intel both have open source Linux GPU drivers available. Does Apple even have specifications for their GPU available ?

It's not the big components like the CPU and the GPU that's the problem most of the time, it's the wifi/bluetooth chip, the sound chip, the LAN controller, the USB controller, the trackpad, the power management stuff, display backlight, etc etc.

Re: Linux 5.19

#70

Post by fariszr »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #64
nicoburns wrote: post #21

Somewhat surprisingly, Linux support for Apple Silicon MacBooks seems to be shaping up to be better than that for pretty much any other laptop. The Asahi team don’t have support for everything yet (notably no GPU) but what they do have support for seems to be high quality, well integrated with Linux’s conventions, and upstreamed into the mainline kernel! How much other hardware can claim that? The Asahi developers ha…

Apple doing some minimal work to support their own hardware with Linux might bring them some new business. And it sounds like it shouldn't even be that much work. Mainly just documenting their hardware would be good enough to bootstrap that. For developers, macs are just really nice hardware and there are not a whole lot of similarly nice, Linux friendly laptops out there. Most of them seem to be compromises between…

Check out system76, they seem to be making really good laptops. Also Framework laptops support Linux fully too.
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