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by miki123211 54 days ago
Apple went out of its way to make Linux on Mac a reality. They did a lot to allow third-party OSes when Apple Silicon came out, it's up to the Linux community to do the rest.

There were a couple of people (the Asahi team) that made this work for M1, but as I understand it, the effort has stalled since. This just goes to show how few people truly care.
3 comments
apatheticonion 54 days ago
Apple helped by not locking the bootloader. I'd don't know if I'd call that going out of their way to make Linux a reality.

If they wanted to go out of their way, they could spend a weekend writing Linux drivers - Apple have written Windows drivers in the past, so it's not unprecedented.

I believe the real hurdle is that Linux doesn't do well with modular (closed source) drivers. Unlike Windows, drivers can't practically be added to a kernel, they must be compiled into it.

Apple would not want to make their drivers open source or so they would want to distribute their drivers as binary blobs.

That would necessitate either maintaining an Apple-fork of the Linux kernel with their drivers hidden within it, or contributing shims to upstream Linux + binary blob drivers.

If they wanted to help, the bare minimum would be to publish documentation on their hardware so drivers could be written without reverse engineering from schematics and microscope photos.

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MisterTea 54 days ago
> This just goes to show how few people truly care.

Most people just want to sit down and eat a nice meal. They don't want to go through all the difficult back breaking work of farming, animal husbandry or fishing/hunting to eat.

That is how I look at people writing OS drivers and core components. It's boring back breaking work no one wants to think about. People pine for it, even romanticize about it. But the fact is that it's dirty annoying work and I have never heard anyone thanking the farmer for the meal they just ate. Yet we still have farmers. Few, yet they exist.

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vablings 54 days ago
This is not true. Most of the efforts as of late have been code refactoring since there was a mad rush to show "it works!!"

Just because a few people stepped away from the project doesn't mean there are plenty of other developers working hard every day on this.

https://asahilinux.org/blog/

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