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Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

A company saying they're helping has lots of side effects people don't think about:

- it means they've made a public commitment to a project, and suddenly will get bombarded by other projects, making them less willing to engage again

- any failure of the project to run well will also be a reflection of the company, even if it's outside their control.

- it can be seen as an endorsement of a single project, when multiple ones might benefit. Also if that one project becomes problematic it is hard to detangle.

- the commitment to it would make it difficult to move in a different, better direction if needed in the future

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They don't need to endorse Asahi to endorse the use of alternative OS on ARM Macs, which wouldn't have any of those downsides. The first Intel Macs were great machines to run Linux on. Later machines had too many compatibility issues. From that experience I'll steer away from Macs as I have no interest in OSX and don't trust them to not break Linux. If they publicly commited to alternative OS friendliness that would go a very long way for me.

It's different with Apple Silicon because their hardware is more differentiated; meaning it might be more interesting for them to see non-macOS usage for it.

If the bar is just supporting the use of alternative OS's, they've already done that.

Craig Federighi (their SVP of software) mentioned that support for other OSs is an explicit goal of their boot setup in interviews.

Allowing booting other OSs is different than actually supporting those efforts with documentation for example. The problem with Intel Macs is not being able to boot another kernel it's all the device support that's now gone.

The fully documented BootPolicy system, all new to M1 Macs and not found on iOS devices, explicitly supports running your own kernel on these devices. It’s also supported by new tools for implementing boot code. Apple has clearly devoted a lot of resources to this, as the Asahi Linux team have repeatedly pointed out.

If your comparison is iOS devices then sure, being allowed to boot your own kernel is a sign of progress. It's a very low bar even when compared to Intel Macs though, not to mention competing laptops. But this is definitely going much better than I anticipated. They've gotten quite far in not too much time. I'm definitely hopeful Apple laptops will again become an interesting option.

Is there another interview that goes into the details of Apple's boot setup goals?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg9F1Qjv3iU&t=3785s

In this one, Craig Federighi says “We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system. Purely virtualization is the route. These hypervisors can be very efficient, so the need to direct boot shouldn’t really be the concern.”

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