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by mort96 1417 days ago
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 laptops which feature Linux as an option. Most people who use Linux probably already use Linux on a computer without manufacturer support. If that's not for you though, that's totally fine.
2 comments
moonchrome 1417 days ago
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 ?
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zinekeller 1417 days ago
> PC component manufacturers offer Linux drivers for their hardware, sometimes it's binary blobs, etc. but at least there's some effort there.

I'm gonna say that it's a "generic" driver, which is totally fine on desktops but almost always (except for Thinkpads and Linux-focused laptop manufacturers) has a nasty edge case (modified chips or chip firmware) that just makes it incompatible. This isn't exclusive to Linux by the way, even Windows suffers from this exact problem (usually audio, fingerprint and touchpad).

Edit: for example, this is the FreeBSD code for HDA sound device (it's messy): https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/sys/dev/sou...

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mort96 1417 days ago
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.
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moonchrome 1417 days ago
>GPU that's the problem most of the time

Developing a GPU driver for a custom chip with no public reference or support from Apple isn't a problem ? I guess you're saying it's not a problem in other laptops - but for Apple Silicon it sounds like more fundamental than those issues you mentioned.

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mort96 1417 days ago
Yeah, I wash just countering the idea that "AMD and Intel make GPU drivers for Linux so drivers on PC hardware isn't a problem".

On Macs it's a big deal; about as big a deal as making open source AMD drivers was before they had official open source drivers. And people did that, and people are working open source GPU drivers for Apple's GPU now.

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deathhand 1417 days ago
Dell, one of the largest manufacturers of laptops supports Linux and OSS. It's not some red headed step child anymore.
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mort96 1417 days ago
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.
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