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Comment by ogre_codes | Hacker News Reader

> Apple's walled garden

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.

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The parent was complaining about being forced to use OS X. So, the "walled garden" is intended for the underlying hardware.

> So, the "walled garden" is intended for the underlying hardware.

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.

I think they have been clear about boot camp not being supported, at least at present time. But they have also said that it is possible to run Windows, but that it will be up to Microsoft.

Linus has openly said he wants Linux running on one: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/11/24/2225209/linus-t...

> Linus has openly said he wants Linux running on one

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.

> There is nothing preventing Linux (or Windows) from booting on Mac M1 hardware.

Except the iOS-like secure boot verification and complete lack of any kind of documentation or drivers for the hardware. Details!

Apple Silicon supports local signing of whatever boot blob you like from in the recovery environment (in Permissive Security mode). This ensures the system boots the bits you yourself approved without applying any other requirements.

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.

People will reverse engineer them, given time. And the secure boot verification can be shut off.

> Except the iOS-like secure boot verification...

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.

... yet. They’re building the hardware infrastructure to change that.

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.

> My Mac? Almost nothing I run is from the App Store.

For now.

People have been making these comments for years. Every new macOS release.

Except here we are and things are the same. I run whatever I want.

Here’s to having this same silly “argument” in 2021.

Agreed. At this point the argument is nearing joke/meme level.

It's popular to hate on Apple right now. Seems even Hacker News isn't immune to this trend.

I just got a new MBP this summer from my workplace, running Catalina.

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.

What software are you having trouble getting installed?

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.

Yes, it's unsigned software.

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.

FWIW, wasn't trying to harpoon you there. I haven't done much Python dev in a while, but I can see this being an issue.

Its just that the frog is being boiled quite slowly. Apple every year is doing tiny little steps towards full control what customer can run on "their" computer and people instead of trying to stop them in their tracks, they defend them. It's bizarre and funny at the same time. Then if few years people will be crying they cannot publish software without being robbed and we will say "I told you so".

Seems like a giant processor architecture change with changes to driver models, app runtimes, and requiring translation to run any legacy software would have been a great time to do that if they ever planned to.

Customer shouldn't be required to mess up with the system files in order to gain full access to the product they paid for. Such restrictions should be illegal if they are not "opt in". Customers should have a right to install alternative app stores without the need of "hacking". We desperately need regulation to stop greedy, tax shy and privacy violating giants from exploiting the consumers.

> Customer shouldn't be required to mess up with the system files in order to gain full access to the product they paid for.

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?

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