Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

realworldtech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 128 posts

Re: Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

#81

Post by boudin »

new_realist wrote: post #61
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.

What advantages does Linux have for children over macOS? It’s UNIX, with the shell and all the OSS packages you could want. Very few children need to recompile the graphics stack, kernel, or drivers.

Very few Linux users too. The advantage is not locking them into a corporate environment that's getting more and more questionable and give them the oportunity to actually learn about computers.

Re: Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

#82

Post by yodon »

awak3ning wrote: post #54
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?

I am referring to the ability for consumers who purchase a hardware product with these Corporation's operating system installed to be able to dual boot, or replace the OS with a Linux distribution. I believe this is both in line with free-market enterprise as well as core values such as individual liberty and property ownership. Anti-competitive and predatory practices should not be justified by people such as yourse…

You can run and boot Linux on both macs[0] and pc's[1] and have been able to do so continuously for more than a decade.

[0]https://www.google.com/search?q=boot+mac+into+linux

[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=boot+pc+into+linux

Re: Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

#83

Post by atomi »

simonh wrote: post #79
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.

I don’t think that’s how benefiting users works. Simply removing the options people have historically found suited them better doesn’t by itself create a better world. There’s nothing whatsoever preventing the FOSS community coming up with better solutions, if they are capable of doing so, and taking away their main competitors doesn’t seem like a good way to incentivise competitive improvement. In fact we’ve been to…

There is something to be said here about greed and only appealing to the masses' basic instincts.

In a lot of cases it makes money and people prefer it, but that doesn't equate to being good or being good for society.

Re: Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

#86

Post by mbirth »

awak3ning wrote: post #54
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?

I am referring to the ability for consumers who purchase a hardware product with these Corporation's operating system installed to be able to dual boot, or replace the OS with a Linux distribution. I believe this is both in line with free-market enterprise as well as core values such as individual liberty and property ownership. Anti-competitive and predatory practices should not be justified by people such as yourse…

We had this with Netbooks - remember those? You could choose between a barely running Windows XP or a well running Linux back then. People mostly bought the Windows version because that's what they knew and where the illegal copy of software X from their neighbour ran.

A similar thing happened with the city of Munich trying to convert their systems to Linux. The workers complained that OpenOffice/LibreOffice didn't work like their (most probably illegal) copies of Word and Excel at home and thus they couldn't work with it. When that didn't help, they complained about "missing software" and other strange reasons about why they absolutely couldn't work with Linux. So they rolled back to Windows and Office and started sending our tax money to Microsoft again. [1] (Also Microsoft promised to move their German HQ to Munich to bring wealth into town. But that's toooootally unrelated.)

At least, they're trying again... [2]

Point is, as long as 90% of all jobs and schools have you work in Windows, why should people start buying Linux PCs for themselves?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-not-windows-why-munich-i...

Re: Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

#87

Post by viraptor »

yodon wrote: post #82
awak3ning wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am referring to the ability for consumers who purchase a hardware product with these Corporation's operating system installed to be able to dual boot, or replace the OS with a Linux distribution. I believe this is both in line with free-market enterprise as well as core values such as individual liberty and property ownership. Anti-competitive and predatory practices should not be justified by people such as yourse…

You can run and boot Linux on both macs[0] and pc's[1] and have been able to do so continuously for more than a decade. [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=boot+mac+into+linux [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=boot+pc+into+linux

Not really on macs. Sure, the system boots, but due to lack of documentation, hardware support has to be reverse engineered. For wifi, the recent Intel MBP boards have broken firmware which just does not work with Linux - it's officially a wont-fix upstream since Apple doesn't care.

Re: Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

#89

Post by simonh »

atomi wrote: post #83
simonh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think that’s how benefiting users works. Simply removing the options people have historically found suited them better doesn’t by itself create a better world. There’s nothing whatsoever preventing the FOSS community coming up with better solutions, if they are capable of doing so, and taking away their main competitors doesn’t seem like a good way to incentivise competitive improvement. In fact we’ve been to…

There is something to be said here about greed and only appealing to the masses' basic instincts. In a lot of cases it makes money and people prefer it, but that doesn't equate to being good or being good for society.

What matters is actually meeting people’s needs effectively and at high quality. That’s what’s good for society.

Re: Linus Torvalds on the new MacBook Air

#90

Post by wmf »

supersour wrote: post #45
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.

https://twitter.com/never_released
Post reply on HN