OpenBSD boots multi-user on Apple M1 hardware
marc.info
marc.info
On the other hand, virtualization _already_ lets you run whatever arm64 BSD, Linux, or Windows that you want. The trackpad and everything else will work flawlessly thanks to guest additions. Yes, you make some tradeoffs -- you sacrifice a core, a few GB of RAM, some disk space for an OS you don't _really_ want to be running. But I'm skeptical that these are not better tradeoffs than constantly using a hacked-together and half-broken OS.
To me the ideal solution is not that Corellium or Marcan or whoever reverse engineers the drivers to a sufficient degree. I'd rather see Apple (or the Hackintosh types) release a tiny variant of macOS that contains hardware drivers and Hypervisor.framework and not much else. It could be the next generation of Boot Camp and it would probably take less engineering effort for them to maintain while satisfying the small segment of customers interested in running other operating systems.
I agree with your sentiment, but that isn't as serious as you say on, say, M1 Minis used as servers and that's probably where OpenBSD would shine.
True in theory, but at least with Linux I've found that desktop environments exhibit a slight but maddening level of sluggishness in VMs, no matter if it's GNOME, KDE, XFCE, or MATE. If all you need is a commandline Linux VMs are great but I'd go insane trying to use one as a graphical desktop for an extended period.
You can get rid of the sluggishness with GPU passthrough... but then the guest OS would still need GPU drivers.
Only because of the seamlessness (within reason) of the experience.
Otherwise, there's nothing to switching to another OS for all or any part of it.
Many (most?) apps people use everyday are web- or Electron based, so they can switch to any other Windows or Linux with e.g. Chrome.
Their music is in some streaming service (Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, etc) all of which play on other OSes (and in any case, they can change subscription and they haven't lost anything). Or, for the fussier, it's mp3 or flac files, they can easily move. Even bought music (aac) from the iTunes Store is playable in other platform (since Apple has removed the DRM for a decade or so).
Ditto for movies. It's all streaming nowadays, and you can just switch to another streaming service (and all play everywhere anyway).
As for professional apps, most heavy ones (MS Office, Adobe Suite, Cubase, Live, Resolve, etc) run just fine in both OSX and Windows, and come with dual installers, so you can switch if you like (some even allow for multiple computers at the same time).
(If you're using Logic or FCPX, then sure, you'll need to find another program, and go through the pain of migrating your projects).
For mobile it's the same thing. E.g. you can sync just fine with an Android phone (you just don't get niceties like Handoff, Scan-to-Notes, etc).
So there's nothing special to "tie you to Apple products in perpetuity" except "I might lose the use of some apps that are Mac Only" (so same thing that would have tied you to Windows or Linux in perpetuity).
I'm glad the things I want to do on Linux are all terminal based. I used a tiling WM for years on Arch and don't miss it much with all the macOS WM extensions available now (Magnet, Rectangle, Moom, Hammerspoon, etc). Less themeable but perfectly functional.
With Big Sur, Apple now has paravirtualization support. It exposes Metal API to manipulate virtual display devices. See https://developer.apple.com/documentation/paravirtualizedgra...
I doubt Apple has any intention of publishing hardware documentation for someone to write a native driver, but there are behavioral reverse engineering efforts already underway.
It's not appealing to me now. In 9 or 10 years when Apple has stopped shipping new versions of MacOS for the platform, it will be much more interesting for me. Of course by then it's just a curiosity or fun project, not something I need for day to day. And by then, much of the wifi/ graphics/ audio issues will be solved.
(I can run OpenBSD on any modern piece of hardware, though; the novelty and nostalgia are in running Mac OS 9 on that.)
Also, the G4 iMac is a special piece of hardware in my book. I'd love to Frankenstein an M1 G4 iMac.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popek_and_Goldberg_virtualizat....
The iMac G4 didn't support virtualization,
These devices are mass produced, and have long lifespans.
It's a good target for development.
This statement is a bit presumptuous: "It's almost guaranteed you will never fully get Wi-Fi, audio, graphics acceleration, the trackpad, etc. working flawlessly."
Maybe I do not want all those things every time I boot. Apple used an "alternative OS" for their Airport routers: NetBSD. Kernel was around 6.x if I recall correctly. Seemed like Wi-Fi worked preety good, maybe even "flawlessly".
It's a computer. As the purchaser, I should get to decide how it is used. Using Apple software should be optional.
I don't know, like Tuxedo,
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Infos/News/OpenBSD-6-3-cu...
A) a hypothetical device, let's not call it a computer, but similar, exists that asks you politely by means of something like a license not to modify it even though it would be possible to do so pretty easily.
B) another device, this time a hypothetical CPU that is next to impossible to modify with any degree of ease since it requires nanoscale tools.
Why should there be a fundamental difference in a person's ability to modify one of the above, but not the other? Just because the laws of Physics don't allow mere mortals to so (not at least without a highly sophisticated nano fabrication lab) doesn't seem like a very convincing principled answer. Is there a stronger argument?
Because one could trivially modify the first, and people do all the time (and screw the law), whereas the second is, as you said, "next to impossible" to modify even if you want it.
>Just because the laws of Physics don't allow mere mortals to so (not at least without a highly sophisticated nano fabrication lab) doesn't seem like a very convincing principled answer
In what universe do "the laws of physics prevent this to be done easily without millions of dollars" is not a convincing answer?
It's not. Anyone who has followed the last 10 years of Apple devices knows what works and what doesn't.
There have been many Apple devices where all those mentioned things (if present) work under a non-Apple OS. So as usual the truth is somewhere in the middle. From my Linux experience there are a lot of well working MBP models from this time span. And Minis.
I agree.
The "alternative OS" is the OS that Apple used for its AirPort Extreme router, and which it borrows heavily from for the MacOs userland. Apple writes some software itself, but it also takes a significant amount of source code straight from "alternative OS" projects. To be clear, the OS projects I am referring to are not Linux nor is the computer that is the subject of this thread a "$2K laptop".
That’s a nice strawman you got here. AirPort routers shipped with NetBSD, and it was officially supported. But good luck getting macOS to run on that — macOS would count as the “alternative OS” for the AirPort.
If you are talking purely about desktop, I have to agree with you that the only real option is MacOS because of all the apple-only stuff (at least for now until drivers show up)
But there's more uses of hardware then desktops.
The OpenBSD kernel doesn't support loadable kernel modules, so virtual machine guest additions are not an option for a virtualized OpenBSD.
What I really would like to see is hardware manufacturers (Apple and anybody else) releasing the specs, so that people are free to do whatever they want with the metal they buy. I might event consider appropriate a legislative intervention in this field.
Mac users seem to live under a rock or something.
Got some weird idea that anything not a Mac must be windows like it's the 90s or something.
Both AMD and Intel hardware supports Linux and wouldn't ship without it. NVIDIA is really the only hold out I this space.
So just the most important graphics vendor huh?
This statement is rather miopic. I still recall when this very same argument was made regarding the idea of wanting to install Linux in computers which were bundled with Windows. I can tell you it made absolutely no difference to me a couple of decades ago when I installed Mandrake Linux on a Windows laptop, and it made no difference to me that I couldn't get hardware acceleration or the webcam to work, and that wifi only worked with ndiswrapper. I was able to run the software I wanted to use in the hardware I bought, and that's what matters.
M1 Mac minis are on the market for around 800$, which is an affordable price point, and their form factor and looks make them an interesting choice for a home server or workstation. It would be incomprehensible if we couldn't take advantage of that hardware by running our choice of software.
And yet people have done it with Linux just fine... Linus himself run a G5 as his desktop (circa 2003-2005) and later a Macbook Air as his daily driver laptop (circa 2011-2013...)
This was on an AMD64 system that was far less Apple-specific as far as I know.
As for desktop, I love cwm on my thinkpads, but macbook touchpads have won me over. That said, if arcan gets to a usable state on OpenBSD, I wouldn't mind sinking a few weekends (and/or crates of beer) into helping with improving touchpad/gesture support. X11 is just too daunting to have me bothered.
I'm really curious what you see to like in this setup.
Agree available drivers/applications might be less than a mainstream linux, but for what is there, things work completely solidly and require basically negative fiddling
These do not reliably work in OpenBSD and will hang if you try to use it as a NAS.
Basically, I'm not sure there's enough of a difference to warrant someone who can already do linux to use openbsd. Diminishing returns if you're interested in hosting a media server or NAS or whatever people wanna do with home servers.
That said, I highly recommend running either Open or NetBSD for a while just to get the experience. For me, running NetBSD as my only OS on my laptop through my late teens gave me a great foundation for my professional life up till now in my mid twenties. Really pleasant and simple OSes, great for learning OS problem solving too.
I've used Linux for the past 20 years. I recently tried OpenBSD because I never used a BSD, so I thought I wanted to have a look and had a pet project building a home router. My experience of OpenBSD as a headless server is it's been an absolute joy to use. Simple, well structured and strong consistency with config and where files are placed, great man pages etc. From no experience at all with OpenBSD I had a fully functioning router with PF, multiple vlans, cross vlan firewall roules, mdns repeating etc etc within a few hours. Regarding fiddling with things, for a headless server, it's been the easiest server I've set up to date.
The only negative experience I've had is when not shut down properly I've had a few issues starting it. I think I could solve that if I wanted to. Using it as a router I can set up a read-only filesystem etc. The other drawback is it's not Linux and I use Docker daily for development so would need to do what Docker on OSX does and run Docker in a Linux vm.
I got to say though: PF, multiple vlans, cross vlan firewall roules, mdns repeating do not sound like something a home user should be setting up. The only reason one would play with these things in a home environment is because they want to. Which is fine... but makes it a toy/pet project and not something to recommend to others. My home router is Ubiquiti and it "just works" zero fiddling required. I'm not sure why one would want anything more complex for a home environment.
I guess we all have different preferences where we like to spend our time. I fiddled with things for decades, now I only want to fiddle for something really worth it.
EdgeOS is proprietary and closed source, and not updated as frequently as OpenBSD.
The reference to the router was in regards I used OpenBSD and found OpenBSD a great server OS.
I have multiple vlan’s as have a guest wifi for visitors, all iot devices like tv, soundbars on a private vlan with restricted network access, dns ad blocking, dns over tls, wireguard for remote access etc. I use ubiquiti access points/switches but run my own router for learning purposes plus the flexibility. To be honest, since I’ve set it up I haven’t done any fiddling, it’s been rock solid. I’ve had more issues doing updates on the ubiquiti devices dropping the wireless uplink I have then having to power cycle them to come back up.
That does sound really nice. Once the price on SSDs comes down a bit I'd love to replace my Dell PowerEdge T20 Plex/Time Machine box with a Mac mini with stackable TB4 enclosure containing a few M.2 SSDs. It'd take a fraction of the space and power while being much more responsive.
Btw, Asahi has a Patreon page for anyone who wants to contribute. I’m tossing twelve bucks a month and recommend any Mac users with interest in booting alternative OSes support such projects.
Now I’m gonna see if there’s an option to throw money at this.
I for one am glad people are making progress.
In short, "But think of my Grandma" as opposed to think of the children.
nobody thinks apple is doing it because they're their friend. And they know apple is making money off it. Some people prefer having apps with limited, audited permissions over a more wild-west approach where you could install anything and apps could demand anything or prevent you from using the app.
(and if you don't that's fine, Android exists and no apple users mind that. Market choices are good, stop trying to shut down Apple's ability to provide a different experience.)
if you really really want to sideload an app on an apple phone, pay the $50 a year for a developer account and you can compile and sideload whatever you want. Same for xbox btw, you can run any UWP app on an Xbox if you have a developer account.
Most apple users have almost zero-information in an economic sense. Market choices are being made when consumers are being segmented into very rigid, hard to leave, cultures like Apple and Google - on top of that Apple and partly google own much of the stores, they do all the marketing, and can wield considerable basically unchecked power over their users.
And also, your mum isn't going to be using third party app stores, that whole part of the argument is quite vacuous and is effectively a logical basis for Apple to have complete oversight of everything on the app. And if she did want to play fortnite, Apple obviously aren't doing this for the goodness of their customers because they only pulled the plug when fortnite did the payments itself - that's just rentseeking.
OK, let's talk Microsoft then.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/19/21296657/microsoft-apple-...
Microsoft is making exactly the same argument as Epic Games, in fact, but they're not racing to allow third-party app stores on the Xbox either. This is a one-way street, these companies want to sell locked-down hardware but be allowed onto their competitors' platforms.
Similarly Facebook runs similarly exclusive stores on their Oculus Quest platform, which they also argue they should not have to open up.
This is purely down to companies who themselves employ similarly locked-down stores, which they feel should not have to be similarly opened, wrapping themselves in the language of openness and using it to attack their competitors' business models while arguing they themselves should be excluded. They are not making a good-faith argument for openness, they are using the legal system to take down a competitor.
Frankly I have much less problem with Microsoft opening up, since we don't do day-to-day business on our game consoles. How about they go first, model for us how an ethical company is supposed to behave?
> And also, your mum isn't going to be using third party app stores,
Yeah, actually, she will, that is the point. If she wants to use Facebook, she will use a third-party app store (where the application is not subject to Apple's rules about permissions and datamining). This is an immediate race to the bottom, won't even be a year and the superior privacy of the Apple ecosystem will have been completely undermined.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-hits-back-facebook-revo...
Here's an example of Facebook encouraging people to sideload a developer-licensed application with enhanced permissions so they could bypass permissions and leech more data.
So this is not a theoretical problem, this is something that actually happens, and that Apple has had to push back on.
I'm personally interested in Linux on the Mac as a curiosity and as an alternative in case Apple ever screws up MacOS so much I feel desktop Linux is the least bad alternative.
There have been other times when I thought apple hardware was more interesting than macOS. I don't think macOS is bad per se. There are times when I find it pleasant and times when I would greatly prefer something else. The attitude we're describing -- why use Linux when there is macOS?? -- strikes me as a little odd, because there is a built in hostility and assumption that everyone shares the Mac fan's opinions and preferences, universally and in all circumstances.
As a Linux/ OpenBSD user, Mac hardware is suddenly a bit more appealing.
As a Mac user, the reverse it not true. OpenBSD or Linux are no more appealing than it was before the switch.
As for the rest of your post, I feel like the conversation is moving here under me. Use whatever OS you want. I don't see a ton of Mac people on here discouraging or disparaging any of this. I do see a a fair number of posts like the top one. "Running an alternative OS natively on a Mac doesn't seem very appealing to me." Which I don't see as the same as what you are suggesting.
I like those middle 2 lines; for a user of a free OS, Mac hardware is interesting, but the reverse is not true.
And sure, "use whatever OS you want" is kind of my point too. I have seen the Mac community at large seeming to not have that live and let live attitude. Not anyone on this thread, but I think it is a thing that happens.
> Running an alternative OS "natively" on a Mac doesn't seem very appealing to me.
Which is pretty much exactly the kind of comment that I said I've seen ("I'm not interested in running another OS on my Mac"). Again, not the same as "a free OS will never run on this bespoke Apple product, and shouldn't."
It's the difference between "I bought a Mac because I wanted to run macOS on it" and "I bought a Mac out of vanity and want to separate myself from the plebes." Or, to put it another way, the difference between actual Apple users and Artie MacStrawman.
I’m the person to whom you are responding. I’m very interested in the M1 and never saw such a post. I’ve literally never heard anyone express this view about a Mac.
Even if I were God I wouldn't stop anyone doing it, but does it not leave a bad taste in your mouth that Apple charge the best part of 2 thousand dollars for a laptop with a basically brand-new (so not rotted) stack but utterly refuse to document anything beyond the absolute basics - this is the world's largest tech company, from which I conclude that they have no interest in allowing users to control their own hardware since it's literally chump change for them to (say) publish some extremely basic info about the peripherals like even nvidia do now.
To be honest I just ordered my first MacBook Pro as well, so I guess I’m part of the ,,problem’’
On the long term though they can get more App store / cloud revenue by making sure that Apple's apps are always ahead in hardware compatibility.
Computers are tools to get a job done. I buy a computer so I can write software on it. While I am happy that we can get Linux and OpenBSD on a Mac, it's not a deal breaker. Regardless of whether OpenBSD or Linux boots on it, I can get my job done quickly and effectively.
If they did something that got in the way of building the software I need to build? Then I'd punch out in a heartbeat.
Not everyone is interesting in fiddling with the internals of the tools they buy. Even if that tool is a computer.
Sadly I don't do it for a living, but the stuff I like to write is all tuned for performance, they don't tell me anything about the CPU, so even if I was in the market for one I still wouldn't buy one as I couldn't have any fun using it.
And Computers stopped being mere tools years ago - the phone has now supplanted the laptop and desktop in this regard, but it remains true that many people are in terms of knowledge and purchasing power completely at the whim of (in this case) Apple to go about their lives.
> And Computers stopped being mere tools years ago - the phone has now supplanted the laptop and desktop in this regard
Is just plainly inaccurate. The phone has nowhere near supplanted the desktop in multiple scenarios. Office work and programming [0] both come to mind.
[0] And this was the specific use-case brought up by the parent. Pretty obvious a phone is not a competitor for that.
I do apologize for how aggressively I came across as well, that was uncalled for.
No problem https://xkcd.com/386/ - you know the drill!
I don't follow your chain of though here at all. It is a thing I use to get a job done... that's pretty much the definition of what a tool is.
And I use Free Software operating systems to ensure that I can continue to do so.
> And I use Free Software operating systems to ensure that I can continue to do so.
The point of this discussion is your ability to run a free OS on an M1 Mac.
In the mean time, it's very fun seeing how quickly people are making progress on this.
Nvidia does so kicking and screaming, because 1) they have no choice but to abide by the GPL for things that use kernel internals, and 2) Since they make money from linux, at least in the HPC/ML space, they want users to at least be able to see the screen light up so that they can install the proprietary stack.
The lawnmover analogy is apt for most companies.
I don’t see how that’s any different from PC or ARM world, save for a couple of larger scale exceptions (Dell, Lenovo, Intel, AMD) and a bunch of insignificant players (Raspberry, System76 & al), and even then it’s a fairly recent development in PC history that these players document/support/contribute anything.
The fact that Linux pretty much works+ on any PC out there is mostly due to volunteers hacking stuff around on PCs that are getting increasingly normalised.
And even with the normalisation of hardware architecture, there are still a lot of either unspecified of spec violating special cases. If one is not convinced by that, I encourage one to lurk the Linux kernel tree for quirks, device trees, and other various DSDT hacks. The weird size of payloads for the T2 SSD controller that stumped everyone for some time is only one among many, many other quirks that exist overall.
After 10+ years, dust is only settling on the BIOS to EFI transition, and I’m not the least surprised that it takes a bit of time to adapt to the overall ARM Mac architecture.
+ by “works” I mean boots reasonably well to init 5+VESA, and most of the time something else than VESA. But taking random hardware and having a bulletproof system out of the box down to every nook and cranny is still a tall order. There are systems that fully work optimally out of the box, but they’re a very small minority.
Craig Federighi said this when talking to John Gruber:
"We're not direct booting an alternate operating system, it's... purely virtualization is the route. But these hypervisors can be very efficient, so the need to direct boot shouldn't be the concern."
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hfkdlg/craig_federig...
Apple documented how people could boot alternative operating systems.
I don't get the downvotes of the parent post, the interpretation is completely reasonable. The point is that Apple was very clear that they are only supporting macOS on their hardware.
Apple execs are infamously careful about how they word things. Federighi could have said they won't allow other operating systems, but he didn't because that's not what they did or were planning.
If they didn't intend for this to be possible, they wouldn't have shipped it this way and documented how to do it.
And that is exactly what they mean. They’re not going to help you with your port or field your questions when you ask for how things work. They are just going to leave the door open for you.
I suspect Federighi chose his words carefully and deliberately. The alternative is they changed their approach. Regardless, documentation and code don't lie, nor do they contradict him in any way.
Edit: The transcript at https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10686/ discusses reduced security, but doesn't say anything about booting arbitrary code.
Apple _is_ a walled garden ecosystem. That has many obvious advantages, things just work, etc.
Personally I happen to not like it, but it's a choice folks have to make by themselves.
I buy my H/W from vendors that actually support running Linux (in my case) like Dell, Lenovo, and others.
This is just false.
iOS is a walled garden. The Mac is not by anyone’s definition.
Seems to me like a whole lot of arguments about Apple involve changing accepted definitions of things or using different standards for Apple versus others.
Apple does enough things wrong and I'm perfectly willing to accept those things and understand when people are frustrated by those things. No need to invent whole new things or shift definitions just so you can complain about them.
Since I agree with you, I assume this is aimed at the comment I’m responding to it, and those like it, rather than me.
Totally understand why people might prefer Linux/ Windows/ Amiga/ whatever. People should just enjoy what they want.
It goes both ways. I'd add that atleast the "Apple-haters" have more of a standing in defending open computing standards and demanding Apple be open too.
Also - why does hating Apple give anyone any right to demand anything from them?
Why not demand more from people who are actually working on Open computing?
So you think ignoring facts and making nonsense gives you credibility so long as you hate the right people?
Maybe in your own head.
You are just trying to make a definition of walled garden that isn’t what people generally mean so you can include MacOS within it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26230338
Windows and MacOS have the same entries in the table which means it’s not a walled garden as defined in the piece.
You can run whatever you like on Mac Hardware.
You can run whatever software you like on Mac OS.
Installing MacOS on computers you haven’t licensed it for is just that.
It’s not free software. It is commercial software.
You are conflating the concept of commercial software with the concept of a walled garden.
Commercial software is the software for which developers get money. It can include free software, too. It has nothing to do with the license or the topic we are discussing. You are conflating the concepts here.
Walled garden in general is a convenient system, from which a user can hardly escape when the users wants to. This is exactly what Mac license does. Wikipedia has Mac OS as an example of a walled garden. I did not make it up myself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Walled_garden_(te...
The Wikipedia article does mention Mac OS, but does not, anywhere, use it as an example of a walled garden.
Here is the definition from the page you link:
“A closed platform, walled garden, or closed ecosystem[1][2] is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applicants or content. This is in contrast to an open platform, wherein consumers generally have unrestricted access to applications and content.“
This definition is simply not true of Mac OS.
A 2008 Harvard Business School working paper, entitled "Opening Platforms: How, When and Why?", differentiated a platform's openness/closedness by four aspects and gave example platforms.
Platform provider (hardware/operating system (OS) bundle), Mac OS: closed
Platform sponsor (design & intellectual property (IP) rights owner), Mac OS: closed
Tl;dr:
It's not a walled garden in all aspects, but it definitely restricts users in a significant way, depending on your use case.
Notably for some reason you chose not to include the part where they also say about Mac OS:
Demand-side use (end-user): open
Supply-side user (application developer): open
It is not a walled garden in any way that they define a walled garden.
Here is the definition from the page you link: “A closed platform, walled garden, or closed ecosystem[1][2] is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applicants or content. This is in contrast to an open platform, wherein consumers generally have unrestricted access to applications and content.“
It doesn’t apply to Mac OS.
Restricting installation of the operating system itself on other hardware just isn’t part of the definition.
No matter how much you selectively copy and paste from a Wikipedia page, it will not say what you claim it is saying.
Trying to say any restriction of use means a walled garden is akin to saying any software that isn’t completely free is a walled garden.
That just isn’t what the term means.
By the definition I quoted MacOS is an open platform. The provider of MacOS (Apple) doesn’t have control over access to applications and content.
It is not a walled garden in any aspect, even by the definition you yourself provided.
Installing OS itself is restricted by commercial license. But the platform is open.
You are trying to make the definition fit, but it just doesn’t.
I cannot access my OS and all my applications after changing the hardware or using a VM. Do you call it “unrestricted access to applications”? How is this unrestricted if there are restrictions? This is not an open platform by the original Wikipedia definition, more so by my definition. One cannot escape from Mac OS after using it, because all apps will not work (without the legal OS). My SSD dies, I cannot event replace it. All I can do is to pay $$$ to Apple to help me.
No - why would you imagine that?
The article mentions MacOS and by it’s own definition the conclusion is that MacOS is not a walled garden.
It would be weird to think that merely mentioning an operating system in a discussion about walled gardens makes it into a walled garden.
> I cannot access my OS and all my applications after changing the hardware or using a VM.
This is obvious bullshit. Your application and OS still work just fine.
Nobody is telling you what you can and can’t run on the operating system, or on the hardware it is running on.
That’s what the Wikipedia article defines as a walled garden, and has nothing to do with the licensing conditions of the operating system itself.
As to needing to pay certain people for hardware repair, that is also simply not true, and is not relevant to the discussion about walled gardens.
There is nothing preventing you from having your SSD repaired or replaced by anyone with the capability to do it.
By your definition, Linux is a walled garden because you can only run Linux binaries on Linux.
See how this makes no sense?
There’s nothing wrong with you preferring GPL’d software. But that doesn’t mean that everything else is “walled garden”.
This is just bullshit (if one uses your wording). Every new Apple laptop comes with glued SSD.
> By your definition, Linux is a walled garden because you can only run Linux binaries on Linux.
This is absolutely not what I am saying. The problem is not in the compiled binaries. The problem comes when I want to escape the Mac OS walled garden. I can run Linux or Windows in a VM on any operating system and escape its ecosystem any moment in this way. All apps will work in the VM. Not so for Mac OS. I don't think you are even trying to understand my reasoning. Instead you are finding every possibility for a tangential reply having nothing to do with my point.
>It would be weird to think that merely mentioning an operating system in a discussion about walled gardens makes it into a walled garden.
Then please tell me what the example of Mac OS with word "closed" nearby is doing in that Wikipedia page? Does it indicate that Mac OS is an open ecosystem?
In the sentence “Mac OS is not a closed system”, the word ‘closed’ is near the words ‘Mac OS’.
I assume you don’t think that sentence means that Mac OS, is a closed system.
Generally, when words are ‘nearby’ other words you have to read the context to understand why they are there.
> Does it say that Mac OS is an open ecosystem?
Yes, it does say that it’s an open ecosystem.
In the parts of the table describing the ecosystem it has the word open in the rows for MacOS.
Obviously you can see that.
You are absolutely right. Let me quote it for you, so that you understand the context:
"Harvard Business School working paper... differentiated a platform's openness/closedness by four aspects and gave example platforms".
Then, in the table you can see that in 2 out of 4 aspects Mac OS is a closed ecosystem according to the published research. I am astonished by Apple fanboys who cannot accept flaws in Mac OS, even if it's clearly explained by respectful independent researchers.
>In the parts of the table describing the ecosystem it has the word open in the rows for MacOS.
All four points describe the ecosystem, not just those which you choose. Again, quote: "differentiated a platform's openness/closedness by four aspects".
The two on which Apple is rated as ‘open’ are the criteria which the article’s definition uses to determine whether a platform is a walled garden.
You are using a definition of walled garden to mean ‘any level of closedness’.
This is not what a walled garden means, and not what the article says.
If you want to use a private definition, by all means do so, but the article doesn’t have anything to do with your private definition.
For the third time - here is the definition from the article:
“A closed platform, walled garden, or closed ecosystem[1][2] is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media.”
The table shows that Mac OS is open when it comes to applications, content, and media.
The definition is clear, and Mac OS is not a walled garden by the definition. The table supports this conclusion.
Glued components are common and do not prevent repair - what has that got to go with anything?
An emulated VM obviously doesn’t allow a binary to escape the platform because of course you still need the platform, and the binary is still running on the platform so nothing has ‘escaped’.
As I say, your point is just about what hardware you want a license to run MacOS on, which is nothing to do with whether it is a walled garden.
iOS is a walled garden. (as are it's cousins for Apple TV, & HomePod.
MacOS is not.
If MacOS was a walled garden, I wouldn't be able to do my job with it.
Technically, that is true. But it is getting there. Apple makes more money, and importantly recurring revenue, from its services now than selling its hardware. The move to ARM processors is one of their strategic moves to further "close" their desktop platforms too. The only reason they don't do it outright right now is because they know people like you and me will immediately abandon the platform if we are stuck with only macOS and can only install everything from the App store. But we would be fools to ignore that the noose is tightening and, with M1 you are now stuck with macOS (unlike the older macs). The next iterations will close it down further ...
You can't sell $10,000 Mac Pros and $6,000 displays with a neutered operating system. Nobody is buying the 16" MacBook Pro if they can only buy apps in the App Store. Overnight they would lose pretty much every (non-iOS) developer, most video editors, every podcaster and audio engineer, most photographers, every single scientist, most engineers, mathematicians, and many artists...
That would be an absolutely fantastic pitch in a management meeting. Who is left, accountants... teachers? A few schools? Not only would this be a massive hit to the Mac... likely lethal, it would also be a massive blow to iOS. Because much like every other developer on the planet iOS developers lean heavily on tools which cannot ever be found in the App Store like git, Python, Ruby (required for CocoaPods), and a million other Unix tools.
This has to be one of the most bone-headed, yet commonly repeated bits of anti-Mac nonsense out there.
shrug
There is zero sense or logic in these assertions, business or otherwise. It’s baseless nonsense.
Yes, the line I've been hearing for the past 15 years or so.
Meanwhile Homebrew still works, I can still install non-App Store Apps, and Apple is publishing directions on how to install non-MacOS operating systems.
Literally the single difference their "Closing the platform" has made in my life has been getting prompted for permission to open various directories and services on the platform and much of that can be disabled.
> But we would be fools to ignore that the noose is tightening and, with M1 you are now stuck with macOS (unlike the older Macs).
Are we on the same conversation here? Did you read the article? Or the similar ones about people loading Linux on the M1? This is literally a thread about people who followed Apple's documentation on how to install a different OS on the M1 Macs.
Apple aren't preventing anything, they're just not helping us out either. Agree it would be nice for them to help out a little, but it's really not the same thing.
It's the same thing. (And the only reason they aren't yet outright preventing it is because it would be bad PR - nobody wants their desktop computer to be like the iPhone or iPad. But it will happen.)
You'd be surprised.
(Also, this exactly has been the proposition and allure of the Chromebooks - a computer that you can just wipe and restart again and it's like a phone or tablet device, and your data are synced in the cloud).
Apple has a computer which isn't locked down, it's the Mac. Apple maintains MacOS as a flexible/ pro platform because if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to sell $2000-8000 Macs to pro users who need that power and flexibility to do their jobs.
For Apple there is zero profit in neutering the Mac. Whatever profits you think Apple could make by forcing people to use the Mac App Store, would be dwarfed by the sales lost due to pro & power users leaving the system en-masse.
Linux users would buy M1, with the intention of running Linux, and if it doesn’t work, they can still run macOS.
I don’t see the risk to Apple, if they at least provided documentation for the M1.
They already describe how to do so, and the specification to merely boot is trivial anyway. Linux, OpenBSD (as in TFA), and others have booted already.
It's the details of the GPU and other such stuff that needs drivers (touchpad, etc) that are missing. And those are rarely well documented on the Intel side, by AMD and NVIDIA either, anyway.
A fully working setup of Linux on a Mac is the dream for me
It goes from "it boots as a toy" to "actually useful"
Still impressive, but installing on or booting off the internal storage will be a big milestone for an prospective OS.
This is interesting because (last I heard) Apple doesn't let M1 Macs boot macOS off an external drive.