[jillesvangurp]

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.

[smallpipe]

You widely underestimate how much work goes into documenting hardware.

[sumtechguy]

It is a lot of work. But having not really done it myself would they not already have most of this? At least one would hope they would?

[ryukafalz]

They need to have that sort of documentation internally anyway for their macOS devs to work on it, right?

[ChuckNorris89]

And good luck convincing the team of lawyers to groom tens of thousands of pages of internal confidential documentation and source code and prune what can be release to the public and what stays classified as a competitive advantage.

As lawyers usually play it safe (they're paid to defend the company) they'll tell you to keep everything internal internal, since Apple makes money selling finished products and services, not selling discreet chips to OEMs who's functionality needs to be explained to third parties.

[q3k]

Yeah, in the form of “here’s some excel spreadsheets from the hardware team and half-generated C sources from the validation team, just ask them for more info”.

[tekknik]

> For developers, macs are just really nice hardware

eh, not quite. for me the OS is the most important part, with great hardware being icing on the cake. I’m not knocking linux, but it’s not for everyone.

[fariszr]

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