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Comment by ddingus | Hacker News Reader

As spiffy as Apple mobile devices are, I never found the locked down environment worth it. Nice hardware, too bad about the OS/App model...

This new hardware is awesome!

I could care less overall though.

Frankly, open computing can be done fast enough to not be a worry. I will stick with all that and see where this new path leads.

And my mind is open. Who knows? Maybe it all ends up in a good place.

I am quite happy to run FOSS on the many devices that will do that reasonably for the foreseeable future.

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The Mac M1 platform is about as open as any other laptop platform. Your points are quite valid for the i-class devices, but there is nothing preventing anyone from installing linux on an M1 Mac once driver support arrives.

> once driver support arrives.

How will the GPU driver support arrive unless Apple opens up the specs to it? Either these open it up like AMD and the community writes a driver, or they keep it closed and people try to reverse engineer something that is a poor second best (hello Nouveau).

What do you realistically think will happen?

There's no OSS driver for Apple Silicon (x86 platforms has OSS driver for Linux maintained by platform company) and boot process is proprietary (x86 UEFI is open spec).

Driver support will never arrive. The reverse engineering effort without specs from apple would be gigantic. And during that period the floss software would be running much worse than the benchmarks we see and want right now. All that for a moving target that Apple can also lock down with a random update at any time.

It's just not worth it.

Do you seriously trust that not to change?

When is driver support coming?

When will audio on Mac's work on Linux?

When will the touchbar drivers be made available?

Apple doesn't give a shit about Linux, but they also don't make it easy to use their hardware.

And to answer the question posed, no, I would never give this company money.

Fwiw both times I dipped my toes into Linux on some old PC laptops (once mint once Ubuntu) I ran into audio, trackpad, and WiFi driver issues.

Which is exactly why these days I'm mindful to buy hardware from companies (and using components) that don't make it hard to run FLOSS. Neither actively by locking bootloader or such, nor passively by withholding documentation needed to write drivers.

There are options to buy from & support manufacturers who actively help this process. Why would I put my money towards making apples hardware more attractive, when their stance is at best "we don't care but we might change things any second and break this simply because we don't care."

I will probably look for laptops in the foreseeable future, or maybe a new desktop. I never had a laptop before[1]. Which brand or models do you recommend for Linux? And for desktop? Like for CPU is AMD good? What about motherboard? Asus, Gigabyte, MSI?

[1] OK, I do. I have a T-42 with an unknown supervisor password. :( I installed OpenBSD on it ages ago, but locked myself out.

Lenovo ThinkPad or dell for Linux is fine. Lenovo run their QA off of Ubuntu live USBs.

AMD is traditionally better for desktop GPU support but either is fine.

Particular hardware doesn't really matter these days, just check the manufacturer website / reviews. Level1 techs on YouTube cover Linux support well for various mobos.

> Do you seriously trust that not to change?

No, I don't. On the Mac platform, Apple has consistently elected to give users ultimate control. They could have a change of heart some day, but so could Intel, Microsoft, or any other vendor.

The same Apple that continually locks down / harder and harder with each OS release, and makes developers jump through more and more hoops?

As a power user, you can however still jump through all those hoops, even with custom kext's.

I agree that the situation sucks for us, but on the other side - you can give a piece of Apple hardware to a literal child and won't have to deal with either getting it running in the first place (as with anything Linux based) or a persistent rootkit or other malware (which is more common and easy than not on Windows).

Being easily open for power users, hard to exploit for malware and hard for incompetent people to mess up, unfortunately, is a Hard Thing.

This is mostly just Apple fixing the bonkers default security settings of a unix desktop. As devs we're used to the idea that, e.g., any app we run should be able to modify any files that belong to us, regardless of whether we asked it to. But that's actually an insanely lax security model.

It's honestly not hard to disable any security settings that are getting in the way. I run whatever software I like on my Mac, no problems.

People have been talking about how Apple were going to lock down Mac OS "real soon now" for at least a decade. There's no real indication that it's ever going to happen.

I don’t understand why people complain instead of taking FOSS they like, packaging it as an app, distributing it on the App Store & publishing the source. Does Apple prohibit that?

I remember the days of very little Apple compatible software on the shelf at retailers, and no games. I was probably one of the first students to use a MacBook with OSX for CSCI 101 because many classes required Windows. That was lack of freedom. The App Store has more software than any other distribution channel at any point in my life.

Edit: I also love freedom from malware, which I understand is probably a temporary situation. But it’s been a good run so far.

> I don’t understand why people complain instead of taking FOSS they like, packaging it as an app, distributing it on the App Store & publishing the source. Does Apple prohibit that?

Apple does not, but the GPL does.

If the source of the app is released by the author, what about GPL prohibits this?

Edit: I ask because I’m curious to learn and because many systems run apps that are GPL without the whole system being GPL. For example, I love using GIMP on Windows.

Section 6 of the GPLv2 states:

> You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.

This conflicts with the App Store's Terms of Service, particularly it's "Usage Rules". https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store...

This is of course different from merely running GPL software on a proprietary OS. In fact, iOS ships with GPL software on board.

That’s a helpful reference on GPL. I’ll save a link to it.

Not sure this Stack Overflow is current/correct, but it appears other FOSS licenses might be compatible with iOS App Store terms. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/459833/which-open-source...

Note that this applies only if you are using GPL software owned by other people.

If you write entirely your own code, and include only more freely licensed dependencies, you can release your own code under the GPL and still distribute it on the App Store.

Sure, but that's only because if it's your own code, you don't have to follow any rules at all. You can do whatever the heck you want, up to and including making the whole thing closed source.

Apple will remove software from the App Store if they get a whiff of it including GPL code.

It costs time and money to do that. Who is gonna port, pay, and gonna do it?

I understand it will take effort and don’t have answers for those questions.

This is all a lot cheaper on open systems. Just saying.

Eric Raymond explained why: use value. Open systems can be exploited easily and the people who use them get high use value because of all that.

Incentives to port and build on known open systems are stronger, barriers to access lower.

Result: more FOSS on said system

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