PSA: however impressive the M1 hardware is, you're still going to be stuck using OSX, playing in Apple's walled garden and being subjected to their awful policies.
I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it.
I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it.
Apparently over the years the definition of "Walled Garden" has drifted a lot. The iPhone has a "Walled Garden", unless you jailbreak, it's very difficult to run anything outside the App Store.
My Mac? Almost nothing I run is from the App Store. Nothing needs to be from the App Store. Most of what I run doesn't even go through Gatekeeper and it certainly never touches software I build or compile myself.
If a "Walled Garden" can be disabled by bypassed by a single entry in your hosts file, by running from the command line, or any other number of ways, it's a damned short wall around that garden.
Lots of valid criticisms of MacOS, but it's nowhere in the ballpark of a walled garden.
I don't think that is what he was saying at all.
Regardless.
There is nothing preventing Linux (or Windows) from booting on Mac M1 hardware. People almost certainly will have Linux running on Mac hardware before too long. It's just a slog getting it working well.
Not a walled garden in any traditional sense, just difficult to implement.
Linus has been lusting after Apple hardware for a long time. He's also been exceedingly frustrated by the lack of drivers for most of that time.
8 years ago in an interview with Tech Crunch, he waxes poetic about the MacBook Air:
> "That said, I’m have to admit being a bit baffled by how nobody else seems to have done what Apple did with the Macbook Air – even several years after the first release, the other notebook vendors continue to push those ugly and clunky things. Yes, there are vendors that have tried to emulate it, but usually pretty badly. I don’t think I’m unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light."
https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-milleniu...
I don't see his criticism of Apple drivers in this article, but he was pretty frustrated even back then.
Except the iOS-like secure boot verification and complete lack of any kind of documentation or drivers for the hardware. Details!
The other policies available are a) verify at install time the boot kernel is signed by Apple and is the most currently available version (default) or b) to verify at install time the boot kernel is signed by Apple without doing an online check (allows downgrades).
In all cases it's the same underlying mechanism that records what the system should be allowed to boot (according to whatever policy is in effect) and verifies at boot time it hasn't been tampered with. Big Sur takes that further and cryptographically verifies the entire system volume hasn't been tampered with (even offline).
You are correct that Apple does not provide drivers for other operating systems for M1 Macs.
Which Apple has documented how to work around.
> ... or drivers for the hardware.
Which is why I said it was going to be difficult to implement.
> ... Details!
Were apparently ignored.
For now.
Except here we are and things are the same. I run whatever I want.
Here’s to having this same silly “argument” in 2021.
Getting it to run software not approved by Apple is a pain.
They may always leave a door open somewhere, but I wouldn't want to count on that.
I've never had issues with getting things from inside or outside the App Store working. Usually it's just dragging the App into the Applications folder and answering a prompt. Sometimes there is an installer. (or I use Home-brew)
Maybe you are trying to install something from a developer who doesn't sign their code or doesn't have an Apple Developer ID? I'm curious what that might be.
Several of my virtualenvs are broken on Catalina - apparently the binaries installed by my requirements.txt are not signed for use in Catalina. I had to accept an amount number of dialog boxes by hand to make that work.
There have been others, too, beyond the virtualenvs, which I do not remember offhand.
This comment is quite removed from the reality of using a Mac. I've never even considered bypassing Gatekeeper because it's never been in my way. But bypassing these Gatekeeper checks is comparable in difficulty to adding a second repo to Debian to install apps outside Debian's repo. Are you suggesting Debian is guilty of this too?
I mean, I get it, it’s fast. That’s good. But it’s so obvious people worry about the trend, not the exact current state.
There's still the issue with the keyboard having 7 fewer keys than a modern ThinkPad, and compared to the classic 7-row ThinkPad keyboard, 15 physical keys are missing. That's a considerable disadvantage. Mac laptops have superior displays, but we're using keyboard just as often.
That has a correct keyboard.
I really wish Apple-detractors would find something true to complain about instead of spreading this misinformation.
So yeah, misinformation.
It's easy to disable the check and a lot of software never gets checked for other reasons.
One folk's bug is another folk's feature
Historically people bought Macs because they run MacOS instead of Windows.
It's funny how quickly the debate changes once the bang-for-the-buck went completely upside-down.
I mean, one folk's bug is another folk's feature, right?
Relevant exchange: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25164195
If I were to rearrange your response to fit the above exchange, it would be in the form of: "Learn to use MacOS instead. It's faster than using Linux and makes it much less important.". Couldn't I reply with "Why do you not want people to use MacOS?"
Oh, god. Stuck is not even close to define the joy of OSX. I've been "stuck" with OSX for 10 years and every time I tried the waters of windows or ubuntu again I came home crying.
Not perfect since Sierra? Yes. Windows and Ubuntu not even close? Yes. Personal opinion? Yes. Hardware was crap for last 2 years and make me consider moving back to windows? F* yes!
But now with those M1 chips I'm already saving money for an Air (very very expensive in Brazil).
Is there any hope that this will happen in a reasonable timeframe?
I'm very happy running Linux on my (rather old) MacBook Air, which is hardware-wise the best (not in performance but in comfort, durability, design) laptop I've used yet. I want to change because it's starting to show its limits now, but I haven't found yet something to replace it.
You might have to wait forever.
But that's the reality we live in.
If it's just a matter of one engineer taking a couple weekends to change the situation, that's surely worth interrogating.
Linux rarely runs as well as Windows on hardware that doesn't go out of its way to keep it out, just ignores it. Let alone on a platform so hostile to external modifications.
In that vein I agree with your original point, though: I suspect we'll probably never see Linux on the M1 in anything but the most superficial form that lacks all the really good stuff. You might get the 8 core CPU, SSD/RAM, some peripherials. But no Neural Engine, no GPU, video decoders or image processors, power management, security features in the T2 like attested boot or encrypted key storage, etc. The only way that'll ever change is if Apple makes it happen.
[1] For reference, the open source Nouveau driver for Fermi cards, nvc0, is the 4th most well supported Mesa driver in terms of features implemented (almost 90% of all features, surpassed only by radeonsi and i915). So it's not like there's no interest in FOSS Nvidia drivers... https://mesamatrix.net/
Which is obviously what developers have done, I haven't yet met someone running Linux directly on a Mac.
At the end of the day, if you don't have a datasheet and the vendor gives you the finger, you're always going to be running a rat race against them, struggling to support 10 year old hardware with free alternatives, and they'll always win because they control the playing field. Further analysis of this phenomena ("what is the root cause of this attitude, and why does our society allow it?") would require actually criticizing and analyzing software development in the grander context of workforce politics over the past, say, 40 to 50 years. Spoiler alert: doing this will probably make you depressed.
No, you also have to understand it.
For a very simple example, suppose that, on initialization, the driver always sends 01 02 03 04 88 99 00 to the hardware, which then replies with 05 06 AA BB 01, and then the driver sends 07 08 11 22 05. What is the meaning of each of these bytes? What should the driver do if the hardware instead replied with 05 06 CC DD 07? Is the AA BB always the same for every device, or is it a calibration constant which it got from somewhere else? Is the last byte some kind of checksum, and if so, how to calculate it? And so on. Even for very simple hardware, reverse engineering the IO can be a lot of guesswork.
On Nvidia, I literally just had to install one package and I never had to think about video decode acceleration again.
I still congratulate the team of Apple Silicone. Hope it will force Intel to create something similar.
"If you see this warning, it means that the app was not notarized, and Apple could not scan the app for known malicious software.
You may want to look for an updated version of the app in the App Store or look for an alternative app."