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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

If a CPU doesn't run the OS and software I need to run, it might as well be a GPU or a Cray 9 or something dug out of the wreckage at Area 51. All of which are good descriptions of a CPU available only on the increasingly-proprietary Mac platform.

So this entire thread is kind of pointless with regard to many real-world use cases.

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Saying nothing in so many words.

> “If a CPU doesn't run the OS and software I need to run, it might as well be a GPU or …”

> So this entire thread is kind of pointless with regard to many real-world use cases.

Does this kind of reasoning apply to everything that doesn’t suit your unique personal needs?

Personally I think this is an interesting thread, but I don’t use the qualifier of “is it useful to me” to determine whether something is interesting.

I know you're getting downvoted but I feel more or less the same. That's why I am following the Asahi linux folks so closely. I really want them to succeed and for their work to make it possible for Fedora or Ubuntu to be a seamless experience on the M-* Apple hardware.

Alternatively, your OS of choice may as well be a Cray 9 OS if it doesn't run on modern high-end hardware.

Philosophical purity rarely provides top performance. And that's OK, slow and steady works for me, because I'm not doing max performance computing.

Came here to say the same. I don’t know of any computational heavy engineering software available for the Mac. Unfortunately I’m stuck on Windows for all my software.

Well, the Apple Silicon Macs just arrived. If they are a compelling architecture for engineering software, then sooner or later a company will support them. Also, most Unix-based software should be rather easy portable, especially programs for computations which do not depend on a GUI. There is a lot of engineering software which is only available on Unix and these days mostly on Linux, as it comes from times when Windows and PCs where not even remotely a consideration as a platform.

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