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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

But customers are going towards an entirely entirely closed everything. ios is apple languages, apple signature required to run code, apple processors. Desktop machines are the last bit of freedom in the apple ecosystem.

This isn't "sort-of-ok", it's "bad-for-customers" and "bad-for-developers".

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Why are you implying that they're going to lock down the Mac and make it some kind of iPad Pro? You'll still have complete control to run anything you want on the system. Running unsigned binaries is as simple as a right click on the app to open it on Mac. Or launch it from the command line with no prompt at all.

If you've ever tried to reinstall the OS on a machine with a T2 chip, I think you'd have a better idea how this is going.

Nit: you're not required to use "Apple languages" to develop for iOS.

It looks like from the freedom end of things, the only thing that changes with ARM Macs is they're requiring notarization for kexts, and the fact that other OSes won't boot on the hardware since they don't have support for it. Unless anything changed, the T2 chip already killed linux support before?

This is just my opinion but I think it's great for consumers and a good restriction for developers.

As a consumer you shouldn't be running unsigned software because you're putting not only your data at risk but any data you have access to.

And as a developer on mac you can still run anything reasonably well in a VM. If you're using node, you should be running that in a virtualized environment in the first place, albeit I'm too lazy myself to always set that all up.

Actually it's pretty amazing that now we'll be able to run an entire x86 OS environment on an ARM chip and get very usable performance too.

As someone on linux I've never run signed software ever in my life. Guess I've lost all my data and haven't even noticed!

Linux signs its software.

I mean signed by Apple or any big corporation.

Are you sure? Packages are signed for most of the mainstream distributions.

Headsuphigh, Debian at least has been signing packages since 2005

> If you're using node, you should be running that in a virtualized environment in the first place

Just curious: why should node be ran in a virtualised environment for development? Is it a security concern? Does that apply to languages like python too? Would you be happy running it in a Docker container from macOS?

Thanks!

How do we know it's "very useable" performance wise?

I'd say that we've moved away from virtualisation completely, we now use containers, so developers will expect native performance, as we get on other platforms.

docker on macOS runs in a VM.

If they're already on macOS, that's a thing.

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