Have an old iPad lying around? You might be able to make it run Linux soon | Hacker News Reader

Have an old iPad lying around? You might be able to make it run Linux soon

arstechnica.com

351 pointstosh216 comments

We should be pushing some of the "repair" legislation to include clauses about, "If you're no longer going to provide OS updates for a device, you must provide a way to install alternate firmware on it." We'd either get continued updates for devices, or a way to install something else. Either way is a win.

This times 1 million

> you must provide a way to install alternate firmware on it.

Seems like a common sense measure that shouldn't be conditional on whether or not OS updates stop. PCs have worked this way for decades, and some phones and tablets, as well. It's a shame that competition is limited like this.

I would certainly prefer that this be the case, but I also don't think it's particularly likely to pass as legislation - because there are plenty of devices that are sold at a loss, expecting to make it up on other later software sales.

I believe almost all modern game consoles live in this space, I would expect Amazon's Kindle devices are in this category, etc. And while I don't like this model and won't participate in such ecosystems, neither can I deny that such things are fairly common and popular. Forcing open firmware on those would likely generate a much larger, and, frankly, better funded response to being able to maintain a locked down firmware for the useful life of the system.

Picking specifically on the "no longer receiving firmware updates" category makes it much harder for those companies to argue that having to do this will hurt their profits or hinder their ability to recover losses on subsidized hardware - they literally don't care enough to bother updating them at this point, so it would be much harder for them to make these claims. You abandon a device once you're done earning your money back on it. I doubt Sony, for instance, still expects much return on deployed Playstation 3s. And it's exceedingly hard for Apple to argue that they're making any money on an iPhone 3GS or something, because it doesn't even run modern app store packages.

So my logic here is that "you must unlock abandoned devices for those who care" is likely to be winnable, whereas "All devices must be unlockable from day 1" isn't.

Yeah I like the idea of if it’s no longer receiving firmware updates but I suspect the tech companies would get around that by releasing symbolic updates that just bump the version number.

I would prefer something like after 5 years they have to unlock the bootloader and allow people to install anything. So you have 5 years to make a profit and then you have to open up the device.

> I suspect the tech companies would get around that by releasing symbolic updates that just bump the version number.

Wouldn't that be invalidated by games no longer working? They were very eager to move to cloud gaming, always on networking style DRM but once the servers are down and the games become less and less functional or stop working altogether that excuse goes bye-bye, doesn't it?

Who cares what these companies want or what their business models are? Dumb business models are dumb and it’s not our job to consider their dumb business models when making legislation.

We wouldn’t even be having a discussion like this in a functioning democracy. But instead we’re discussing whether the big corporate bribery machine will get in the way of completely reasonable legislation.

>Who cares what these companies want or what their business models are?

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. You're not going to convince Congress critters to do something that can legitimately be argued to hurt businesses. So you tweak things to create a minmax situation where the businesses can not be said to be injured and we still gain access to abandoned hardware and are able to repurpose it.

The key is to go in with carefully charged words. Abandoned hardware is a good one. So is recycling electronics to extend their usefulness. How can companies argue they're being hurt by competition from abandoned hardware that is just e-waste unless it is allowed to be recycled?

I Too, chose this guy's dead legislation.

>How can companies argue they're being hurt by competition from abandoned hardware that is just e-waste unless it is allowed to be recycled?

By pointing out that the products they are currently selling could be replaced by the reanimated spirits of the products they sold last year. Labor performed without a transfer of money to go along with it is not counted in the GDP or taxed, in modern mercantilism it is better for $100 to circulate in a day to produce a little value than for $1 to circulate in a week to produce much more value.

> By pointing out that the products they are currently selling could be replaced by the reanimated spirits of the products they sold last year.

They can say that, but it makes them look like assholes. So it's not effective for them to do that.

> They can say that, but it makes them look like assholes. So it's not effective for them to do that

Unfortunately, there a lot of assholes that only act like assholes behind closed doors with other assholes that tolerate them being assholes because they spend money out the asshole.

But actually my point is that public PR team can't say that but Tim Cook giving Ted Cruz a quiet phone call can totally say that (off the record), probably followed up with "this would keep us from affording that new Texas factory/office/thing we were about to build with this money we make"

I don't disagree with the idea here, but this sort of decision has to have a public facing, somewhat valid reason for opposing legislation.

An example of this would be marijuana legislation and the idea that marijuana is a "gateway drug." This is a somewhat sensible view that a political party can latch onto and push without losing too much popular support.

I have to wonder if "new firmware on old devices" has a public-facing view that won't crater a politician's popularity. I'm sure there has to be one, but I don't know what it would be.

> I have to wonder if "new firmware on old devices" has a public-facing view that won't crater a politician's popularity. I'm sure there has to be one, but I don't know what it would be.

The lack of any large important group that cares about this enough to try and smear a politician against it is enough. No one outside of nerds cares because no one knows to care. Compare it to abortion or guns, lots of regular people care or could be corralled into caring.

If a politician is quizzed about their stance on end of life firmware, they can just say "I want to not end the life... of babies! The other guys want to abort your children" and then the whole topic is lost and they deflected successfully.

> Who cares what these companies want or what their business models are?

The people who bought and got value from systems that otherwise wouldn't have been developed?

I do. I enjoy being able to buy a cheap console and don't give a flying fuck if I can't install linux on it

Great. Have your cake and eat it, too. The market decides the price of goods, as always.

It already has, and companies have based business models on it, which has led to consoles being more affordable in exchange for restrictions on what you can do with it.

It's hard to rely on the argument that 'the market decides the price of goods' if you would like to restrict what companies are allowed to offer for purchase.

Because if the question is "Would I pay $200 more for an Xbox just to be able to install Linux on it", I think you will find the vast majority of consumers would respond with a resounding and an in-unison "hell no".

If the manufacturer is selling at a loss, with the intention of making that money back through software, and that subsidy is removed, the majority of customers will see this as a loss.

At least to me, starting out with the compromise is a great way to have effective policy neutered even further.

I believe almost all modern game consoles live in this space

Nintendo does not sell their consoles at a loss. They make a profit on every console sold. Their hardware is never bleeding edge but they make up for it on the strength of their first party franchises and their innovative controllers/input devices.

> while I don't like this model and won't participate in such ecosystems

I've tried to keep away from ecosystems like this, but the way is very much dark and full of terrors. As far as I can tell, a smartphone is a prerequisite for participation in much of society today. What phone do you use -- an unlocked Android model, I'd guess? Or something like the Fairphone that I can't get in the USA?

By accident, as IBM failed to prevent Compaq's reverse engineering in court.

They'll never legislate mandatory firmware open-source after X years

but mandatory bootloader unlock after 5, 10 years seems perfectly reasonable to empower consumers.

Could happen in the EU but will never ever happen in the USA

And it's not just phones and tablets, there are millions of smart-watches out there like from Garmin that become paperweights

Wouldn't this necessarily include "devices" like nuclear-reactor control systems? Because AFAICT there's no clear line where a "computer" stops and something like that starts.

I imagine there would need to be a special protections in the clause for "secure embedded industrial" devices like that — something like: "if opening your company's devices to free modification would create a national security risk, then your company is not allowed to go out of business in the first place; instead, bankruptcy of your company will lead to immediate nationalization of such assets as are required to keep your devices up-to-date with secure firmware in perpetuity."

(It's actually kind of weird that there isn't already anything like this on the books in America; so it was possible for the private sector to e.g. shut down all the 5.25"-floppy-disk factories, despite military missile control systems still actively depending on them. You'd think governments would wield at least contract law — if not legislation — more eagerly, to protect "critical logisticla dependencies" like these.)

I haven't figured out the exact wording or requirements - feedback welcome.

My goal is not to discourage "Fully Finished" sort of products - if you have some widget that does X, and you've optimized the firmware to do X, and it won't need to do anything else beyond X, then... OK, good job, please make more things.

The target here is "consumer electronics" sort of devices - phones, speakers, fridges, washers, etc. And I don't think it has to be a "default unlocked" process, so much as "Some process to allow you to boot what you want." And if that's "I submit a blob upstream and they sign it so it can shim my kernel," well... not great, but OK.

However, the reality for something like your scenario, nuclear control systems, is that anyone who can get close enough (physically or digitally) to one for it to matter isn't going to be hindered by some pesky firmware lock.

> anyone who can get close enough (physically or digitally) to one for it to matter isn't going to be hindered by some pesky firmware lock.

I mean, being unable to modify secure embedded systems by getting close to them "digitally" is the whole positive point of the much-reviled-in-personal-computing Trusted Computing Base paradigm. If Intel CPUs can cryptographically verify that microcode updates come only from Intel, and that the bootloader ROM is signed by the manufacturer key stored in the CPU's own TPM, then the microcontrollers in critical systems like these should be doing no less. "Unlocking" such a system to free modification by the installation IT administrator really does lose you some quite-powerful security advantages vs. having an end-to-end-secure logistical pipeline for updates direct from the manufacturer to your microcontroller, that not even the site admin can tamper with.

Also, on a tangent — with really-critical embedded systems, there are ways to prevent physical proximity from giving someone the keys to the kingdom as well. For example: making the system a distributed-majority-consensus system run across several secure installations, where you'd need to physically penetrate several installations at once — hopefully all with independently-designed security policies — in order to get the system as a whole to do something else. Where any timing slip-ups would reveal one of the systems as faulty, and prompt an immediate [probably armed] investigation response.

> ...then the microcontrollers in critical systems like these should be doing no less.

Should be, I agree. Though I would doubt that they are. We've seen plenty of malware packages related to industrial control systems over the past decade or so, which mostly rely on "compromising the workstation that programs PLCs and fixes their behavior over the network to meet the attacker's desires."

My goal here certainly isn't to impact industrial control systems, but to generate less ewaste of "Well, we're bored with it, good luck!" end of life devices.

> Should be, I agree. Though I would doubt that they are.

I think that's mostly to do with the fact that many industrial control systems still in use predate TCB or anything like it. "Why change what works", etc. Contracts for new designs, meanwhile, tend to specify all the security they can think of.

Sounds sort of like Richard Stallman's boundary on what software is required to be free:

>The case of the toaster is very clear: we can't tell, except by taking it apart, whether it has a processor and software or a special-purpose chip. Since that we can't tell the difference, it makes no difference: therefore, a program that will never be changed is equivalent to a circuit. I don't care whether a toaster or microwave oven contains software.

https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/14/05/05/2012218/richa...

Thanks - I'd not seen that before, and I think it generally covers the principle well. I don't care if a fixed function device that does its job well can be updated, but I do care if something like a fridge that talks to Google Calendar ends up obsolete with nothing but a warning message on screen because it's out of date. Though why a fridge needs a screen anyway is beyond me...

My point wasn't so much about "fixed function" devices like toasters, but rather about higher-level industrial IoT devices like commercial security-monitoring control systems, or electricity meters (the kinds of things that have embedded 5G radios); and also about complex, flexible-purpose, networked "embedded" systems like SAN hardware appliances or network switches.

These types of devices do receive regular firmware updates. And (certain models of them) are required to operate in high-security environments, where the end-to-end logistical security of update delivery is part of what the customers of those systems are paying for by buying them. Also, in general, these systems have "no user-modifiable parts"; all the useful configuration for them is exposed on the outside, where nothing you'd want to do with them would require hacking them — because much of the point of these devices is to be a hermetic environment isolating the data they evaluate or carry from interference by third parties.

Maybe the best example in this category would be an Intrusion Detection System. It's definitely a full computer! But if you're the sort of company that needs one of those, then you certainly don't want the IDS itself to have any exploit surface whatsoever — including at the firmware level. And you'd rather lose out on ability to install custom firmware on your own IDS, if that means that an APT loses the ability to rootkit your IDS.

Hmm, I'm not sure what the answer is. One idea is to regular devices for consumers differently than devices for businesses. That's not a full solution though, because there's lots of news about farmers having to hack their tractors to get them to work, which is evidence that even businesses want to be able to modify their firmware sometimes.

Sold to consumers vs sold to a company would suffice as a distinction IMO.

> Wouldn't this necessarily include "devices" like nuclear-reactor control systems?

I don't really understand the example. Shouldn't a power plant get access to their own systems?

What if firmware or other updates have to be signed to be accepted? Who manages the private key(s) when a vendor goes under? How are they distributed and to whom? I'd worry less with nuclear plant owner/operators as they are used to safeguarding certain types of information, but let's imagine something like firmware for large transformers or other critical infrastructure where security postures vary across owner/operators.

Then you need to add a way for users to alter the trusted keys. Make it require physical access.

If someone has physical access they could always throw a wrench into it.

The whole idea of allowing alternate firmware is that it shouldn't need the original keys.

I'd support that as long as there are exemptions for those devices that aren't quite like a consumer iPad. For example, there are a range of devices where your primary threat actors already have physical access to the device in question and it's important to prevent tampering.

These can include electric, gas, and water meters on homes and businesses; computing devices in correctional settings; certain military systems; gaming (gambling) systems like slot machines; etc. They aren't the usual use case but they are real and they are out there in significant numbers.

Don't make an exception for almost any of those, add in functionality so the administrator can set a password and lock it. You still don't want the manufacturer to have ultimate power.

Maybe for a gambling machine you'd do it differently, but those are already very specially handled.

> (It's actually kind of weird that there isn't already anything like this on the books in America; so it was possible for the private sector to e.g. shut down all the 5.25"-floppy-disk factories, despite military missile control systems still actively depending on them. You'd think governments would wield at least contract law — if not legislation — more eagerly, to protect "critical logisticla dependencies" like these.)

1. The government can just say "we'll spend $10,000 per flop-disk reader" and some one will probably find a way to produce that profitably.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act_of_1950

They will just push updates the incrementally cripple the device. They are already doing it anyway.

I feel like this is especially important for game consoles. The 3DS store is on its way to being shut down and with it a set of digital-only games will be effectively unplayable for most people going forward. It feels correct to me that if the creator of the platform kills off the only way to pay the creators for the games you should be able to install alternate firmware and play them for free.

It will be interesting to see if there's legislation in the future to encourage companies to open up unsupported devices instead of relying on the efforts of enthusiasts to keep them out of e-waste streams.

Similarly, software should automatically be open-source after 30 years.

The more I grow old, the more I consider that OSS is the 8th marvel of the world. Millions of humans worked independently and created the hugest building of our civilization: Linux/Postgres/MySQL/Wordpress/Audacity/OBS/drivers/Nginx/Owasp/NPM/React/Angular, a stepping stone that powers everything and has even already taken off from Mars (Perseverance’s helicopter).

I'm now trying to imagine a Mars helicopter solution that encompassed all those technologies in the stack. I could imagine the company I work for coming up with such a solution.

Lisp, gcc, gdb, pearl, python, apache, mozilla, git, etc.

>Similarly, software should automatically be open-source after 30 years.

I'm not sure how well this might work. It's currently easier for me to resurrect an old Z80 ASM program than to get a node.js V6 program working. Our complicated dependency chains will make future-retro hard.

I had a similar experience trying to resurrect an old RoR project from the early 2010s. Maybe technically possible, but not the least bit practical… it’d be better to just start from scratch.

Meanwhile, I was able to get an early 2000s mac Cocoa project building and running again in just a few hours, with the bulk of the work going into fixing deprecations. The main difference between the two was the number of third party dependencies… the Cocoa app had almost none while the RoR project had several tens when counting sub-dependencies.

Absolutely. And yet the intellectual/philosophical underpinnings of that marvel are often demeaned, or neglected, even here on HN. The fact that the average person has no awareness that the software powering the vast majority of their technology was built for free and that they can own it is mind boggling. They're just told that the prisons they think are "computing" (Windows/Apple/Android) are the natural state of things.

Stallman is a (rightfully) controversial figure, but the Free Software movement is one of the most important movements of our age.

As a strong FOSS supporter, I'd like to disabuse you of the notion that it was built for free. It was not built for free. Saying that it was free cheapens the work of all the people involved in a project and gives the impression to end-users that open source is only a cheap knock-off of proprietary solutions.

Okay. So it was built freely, or given/contributed for free. I don’t share this notion that free equals cheap.

Sorry for bring pedantic, but it is still not the best way to frame it. I worked in open source projects for about half of my professional life, and I wouldn't be able to do so "for free". I also make a point of supporting FOSS development as much as possible, and I have not ever paid a dime for proprietary software.

Free software is amazing and infinitely more valuable than closed source solutions, and we should never take it for granted or think that we are entitled for the time and effort of FOSS developers.

> I have not ever paid a dime for proprietary software

Sorry for being pedantic, but this is quite literally impossible, unless you’ve never bought a single piece of electronics.

When one buys electronics, you are not paying for the software directly. Still, pedantry accepted. :)

Let me qualify the statement, then: I never paid for off-the-shelf software (or SaaS subscriptions) unless it was available under a F/OSS license.

A helpful analogy for me is how you can get penicillin free or cheap. It's extremely low priced but it's more valuable and should be treasured because of that low price not devalued.

I mean this is still so much bullshit. The period when Linux really started to mature (the early 00s) for instance is when IBM of all things were bankrolling the major contributors including Linus and GKH (nevermind all the other devs at Redhat at SUSE). The same goes for Gnome, gcc, clang, blender, Firefox (google!). The idea that most of this major open source stuff isn’t getting funded hugely by some of the most closed and traditional corporations around is a naïveté that I thought was abolished by now.

I know they said it, but I don't think OP meant it was built for free, I think they meant that it's available to users/consumers for free.

Nothing is free. All the FOSS I've built and give away "for free" cost me a lot of time, and time is my most valuable asset. So certainly it's not built for free, but it is given away for free (both as in freedom and in beer).

Also important to note, not all FOSS or "free software" is given away for free. All that is required is that the purchase comes with the code and that code can be freely modified by the user.

The air you breathe was not made for free, many trees and ocean algae worked very hard and used up a lot of solar energy to make that oxygen!

But Intel didn't pay billions in payroll for trees to photosynthesise.

Trees are just part of another country with a different currency. If you would convert it, I’m sure you would find that trees have spent more money than Intel.

If there is any point you are trying to make here, I am failing to get it. Can you please try again, preferably with a less sarcastic tone?

Certainly. Everything (oxygen, software) is produced by someone (trees, programmers) at great cost, for their own reasons. If they then make their products available for free to you, then those producs are free. It does not matter if the original production was costly. The producers presumably got their money’s worth already, since otherwise they would not have spent the cost and created the thing in the first place.

Your analogy is broken in many different ways:

- Trees produce O2 as a byproduct of the work they need to live, whether it is available for you or not is irrelevant to them. People working in Free Software are doing with the primary purpose of getting it available to people, and a secondary purpose of getting more people involved, collaborating, improving it, etc.

- Much like we need to keep the environment healthy and not just take the O2 produced by trees for granted, we need to foment an economy where developers can choose to develop Free Software without sacrificing themselves.

People working in F/OSS need to to have their livelihood secured somehow. This does not mean that all F/OSS developers need to turn it into a profession, but it does mean that we as consumers should understand that if we want to see an increased global output of FOSS, we need to contribute and support its economy.

- Software is never finished. I've been using Emacs for almost 25 years of my life, but do you think I'd still be using it if it got stuck on version 17?

The worst part though is this:

> The producers presumably got their money’s worth already

That is a terribly wrong assumption. Just like startups can go for a long time without being profitable, a lot of people working on F/OSS projects might be doing for the future expectation of turning it into a profitable venture. Personally speaking, if I were to bill for all the time that I've put into my own open source project [0] I'd would have stopped about two years ago, and if I stopped then it would never reach the stage that is reaching now where I can actually try to market it properly.

Mind you, this does not mean that people should be forced to pay, but it means that it would help a lot if more people started to realize that it could be economically interesting for them to pay for some F/OSS projects.

[0]: https://hub20.io

You seem to believe that it should be the normal and expected behavior of Free Software developers to overextend themselves, to go above and beyond their own needs for developing the software, and that society then ought to somehow repay these selfless acts of sacrifice. However, like the “thousand points of light” approach to social welfare, I don’t think this is ever sustainable, or even reasonable to expect. I do think it’s a worthy goal of having developers looking further than their own immediate goals, but our means of getting there differ. You seem to advocate some sort of outreach program with individuals getting recognition from companies (who make the actual money), and the companies for some reason investing that money in selected individuals. I instead want to improve society to the point that developers have enough spare time and resources to spend on improving the software enough that the software becomes valuable to society at large, merely for the miniscule rewards of minor recognition within their small community of developers and the self-satisfaction of knowing that their work is useful. This, I think, is the only sustainable and workable model to avoid developer burnout.

> You seem to believe that (...) Free Software developers to overextend themselves, (...) and that society then ought to somehow repay these selfless acts of sacrifice.

No, the exact opposite. I'd like to have a society that values sustainability and their civil liberties more than they value consumerism and short-term thinking based on immediate conveniences.

Software is increasingly a crucial part of everyone's lives and we can not just wait that others will make stuff for us out of goodness of their hearts. As consumers, we should be more selective about what kind of business we patronize and we should vote with our wallets to indicate what should be at premium.

If we wait for Companies to develop a conscience or "The Government" to fix these problems, it's never going to happen. But we can collective take action and start demanding F/OSS alternatives and software that does not lock us into any trap and we should be ready to pay for it.

> I instead want to improve society to the point that developers have enough spare time

This is the worldview that implies that F/OSS is something that should be only a hobby, and something to be practiced only by amateurs (in the good sense of the word). Apologies for the language, but fuck that worldview. I do not want to do FOSS in my spare time. I want to use my spare time with my family, pursuing other interests and hobbies, do something else besides writing software.

This is not to say that all software should be written only in a "professional" context. If there are people that want to write software for their own interests and self-expression, great. If they want to make that F/OSS, even better! But if the majority of software being written is meant to solve actual problems that people/business are willing to pay actual money for it, why can't that be F/OSS as well?

I think we are mostly talking past each other.

> But we can collective take action and start demanding F/OSS alternatives and software that does not lock us into any trap and we should be ready to pay for it.

A nice sentiment, but I don’t think this has any realistic chance of happening. Individuals boycotting something has, as far as I know, never worked to achieve anything, and that is, in effect, what it is that you are proposing – boycotting proprietary software in favor of paying for free software.

> This is the worldview that implies that F/OSS is something that should be only a hobby, and something to be practiced only by amateurs (in the good sense of the word).

Oh, no. Software will probably be written all over the place, both for pay and not, to solve people’s specific problems (either their own problems, or the problems of their immediate customers or associates). What does require spare time and effort, however, is generalizing this software to be useful for a wide class of people in general. Also general polish, manuals, error checking, etc. This work is what will never have an incentive to happen except the minor recognition and job satisfaction which I mentioned. And for people to spend the effort for this minor reward, they must have an abundance of effort and time to spare on it. And somehow supplying this to developers is, I believe, the only solution.

I don't see it as boycotting something, I see it as a creating a market segment. Like electric cars or organic food, we just need to find a way to spread the message that FOSS is better for people, even if (at first) is less convenient or more expensive.

I wish I could believe that, but, like worrying about “personal carbon footprint” is useless for solving the climate crisis, I think trying to get people en masse to care, personally, about this issue will never achieve anything.

You don't need to get people en masse to care, you need to get a niche.

This niche needs to be strict about upholding its values ("avoid unnecessary burning of fossil fuels!", "GMOs reduce biodiversity and introduce systemic risks in our food production chain!", "non-FOSS and the ad-subsidized Internet is destroying the civil discourse and leading to immense concentration of wealth") and it needs to foment the creation of alternatives. Even if the masses don't fully adopt the "better" alternative, the competition should be enough to force a change in behavior of the status quo.

Take IE6 and Firefox (pre-Chrome): the majority of people didn't care about the browser they were using, as long as they could go to the websites they wanted. At first, they'd use IE because that's what was there and the majority of sites worked with it. But when we got an intolerant minority [0] that upheld the idea that the web should be open and started adopting Firefox, it was enough to get a virtuous cycle of having less IE-only sites, more features on Firefox and more people simply following the recommendations of their tech-savvy friends to use Firefox. Even if Firefox never got to be the dominant browser, its mere existence and support was enough to put the incumbent in check.

[0]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

Maybe. You’d have to give it a name, though, to give regular people something to pin as the “reason” in their mind. I.e. if you have strange dietary preferences (not requirements, merely preferences), some people might try to accomodate, but most will think you’re weird and either ignore you or be annoyed and actively suppress you.

Call it “vegan”, “halal”, or “kosher”, though, and suddenly it’s a thing which people might grumble about, but many people will at least grudgingly respect. We’d need something like that for this. But I’ve never even seen it named, except when RMS jokingly called it being a “Saint in the Church of Emacs”, but that’s obviously a terrible name, and also just a joke.

I agree. The hard thing is that anything that involves "Freedom" gets mistaken as some crazy-libertarian ideology. OR worse, it gets derided as something from "freeze peach" incels.

> "They're just told that the prisons they think are "computing" (Windows/Apple/Android) are the natural state of things."

Step 1, use diminutive gatekeeping scare quotes to imply that Windows and Apple users are not doing /real/ computing.

Step 2, use flamebait language where a house you got without paying is "freedom" but a listed building you bought from someone else is "a prison".

Step 3, make up some fantasy about people being told "the natural state of things".

Step 4, make sure to look down on average people with their lacking awareness, compared to you, an intellectual with your posturing understanding of philosophical underpinnings.

> "often demeaned, or neglected, even here on HN"

"I'm the one being demeaned, you inferior clueless simpletons!"

A free house that I can use forever without restrictions sure sounds a lot more like freedom than buying a house with significant restrictions on how I can use it.

Most people seem to know that HOAs are troublesome and should be avoided, though.

HOA homes seem to sell fine.

average people don’t give a shit about this sort of thing.

No, almost every single person (8-10?) that I've talked to about buying a house in the past year mentioned HOAs, and almost exclusively negatively, too.

> every single person (8-10?)

...wow.

and yet, despite that, they're still selling.

How does that mean people don’t give a shit?

The more important point in the analogy is that people who buy houses aren't in prison. The other important point is that a house free house forever without restrictions doesn't exist - you're still beholden to zoning laws, fire safety laws, environmental regulations, you couldn't use the house as a meth lab or fly kites from it into restricted airspace, or broadcast from it into restricted radio bands, or a thousand other things. And for your own self-interest you want to keep it clear of insects, keep the roof waterproof, keep the floors from collapsing, etc.

Then it becomes a lot clearer that there are tradeoffs around amount of effort needed, amount of money spent, amounts of freedoms, with many reasonable choices for different people and use-cases, rather than the implied binary choice.

1. Well, this is the root of the conversation around free software, especially in the modern age. I think many people would argue that Windows/Apple/Android users are indeed computing, but they're doing so on the behalf of Microsoft/Apple/Google. When those companies back up your files to their first-party cloud systems, that's not your computation anymore. They have your data and can ostensibly do whatever they want with it. There may be quibbling to be had on this topic, but I think the original point still stands in context.

2. I wouldn't call it a prison, but it would be pretty disappointing to move into a listed building where the thermostat was locked behind an acrylic case. Simply put, it sucks when you pay for something and can't run arbitrary software on the hardware you own. I don't really think most people would disagree here: having options is better than having none.

3. Is it really a fantasy? I doubt the average PC owner even knows they have options other than Windows, much less free ones. Maybe this is the HN US-centric mindset taking over again, but nobody in America really knows or cares about this stuff, for better and worse.

4. Pretty much all of your refutations so far haven't actually debated their core point, so I don't think it's fair to start throwing stones. Given the average vitriol of HN, I would say that many different people are "often demeaned, or neglected, even here on HN", be it Free Software advocates or proud Macbook owners. It doesn't make them any more or less credible, but their original point still stands: people on this website love to quibble about how atrocious OSS is when compared to $GLORIOUS_SAAS, despite the fact that the iPhone/Windows/Android device they're writing on is more OSS than it is proprietary.

Whether it's Apple, Microsoft or Google, none of them deserve to inherit the future of computing. It's not a radical opinion, and I'd agree with the parent comment that it's pretty often overlooked on a forum about startup culture and business.

I too don't like the idea of being "demeaning" and whatnot, but this is all very simple.

Home Depot sells you a hammer, and also in some way (even in a legally enforceable way) tries to suggest you can only build chairs with it.

Anyone, ANYONE, who agrees that you're somehow wrong when you use it to build a table is a shill, a sucker, or an idiot. Full stop.

Well clearly you should just sign up to their hammer cloud pro service and then you'll get your chair hammer and even some more niche hammers like ones for constructing bird feeders and knocking bits of sheet metal into place.

When you pay your monthly fee, someone will come around to your house with this variety of hammers for different tasks and when you stop paying your monthly fee a different person may come around with just one hammer.

You want to build a chair. Home depot sells you a hammer which you can use to build chairs. Someone runs up to you in the car park and calls you and tells you that you are using toy tools and you have no real awareness of the world, and if only you give up a couple of weekends on some blacksmithing and woodworking you can make your own tools and build anything, what do you think?

You say you want to build a chair and this hammer is ready-made and convenient, and they tell you that you only think buying hammers is the natural state of things because you were told that. You try to walk away. They get in front of you and say that you don't understand the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of tools! You step to the side and push past, they call after you that you are in prison and don't even know it!

You get home and make a chair. It's a nice chair. You sit in it while telling the story about the crazy person you met earlier.

> "Anyone, ANYONE, who agrees that you're somehow wrong when you use it to build a table is a shill, a sucker, or an idiot. Full stop."

You buy arsenic, you can't put it in people's food. You buy a camera, you can't use it to sneakily record people using the toilet even in your own home. You buy a recorder, you can't use it to quietly record phonecalls in many states. You rent a film to watch at home, you can't show it to a large audience for profit. You buy a radio transmitter, you can't modify it to be more powerful or use different frequencies. You can't decorate your car to look like a police car, put a midnight klaxon on your house or an unsightly chimney overshadowing the neighbourhood. You can't lease a car and disassemble it to find out how it works. There are restrictions on all kinds of things in everyday life for all kinds of reasons. And you don't get a free pass to do any of these things with a computer just because you identify as a computer geek. The rhetoric that people who are agreeable or disinterested, must be "shill, sucker, idiot, full stop" is plainly incorrect and embarassingly simplistic, and just pointless insults. As you can see from the large number of people who use macOS to develop for Linux servers because it's got a nice GUI - people who definitely know about Linux, aren't shilling for anything. You calling them suckers and idiots is irrelevent when they get a better experience and trade away nothing which interests them. That's not stupid, that's a reasonable trade.

Ah. This is that thing called "tone-policing." I frankly have no idea if you believe the same fundamentals that I do; they generally fall under the ideas of "free software," and they are frequently abused by the large companies and I feel it is important to call such bad behavior out as what it is; especially when perhaps professionals may have been lulled into going along with it.

I'm fairly certain the "politeness" or whatever it is you're calling for here works against my goals here. I could be wrong about that, but either way I don't think what you're railing against is as near as important as the bigger idea I presented initially.

After I wrote three lengthy paragraphs explaining to them how the espoused philosophy makes no sense, I realised I could not conceive of a reality where these arguments were made in good faith. Perhaps it is better to just not engage with it.

It isn't tone policing to call out posts which are low-effort insults to millions of people, and not coherent arguments for or against anything.

There are tons of reasons people make decisions about software - it's what they learned before and can setup quickest, it's the standard in their industry, it's what their boss demanded, it's used by a customer or supplier and they need to be compatible, it's approved by a third party organisation or certification program, it's the only one a vendor will support, or they've considered software freedom and come to different conclusions than you and don't value it at all. Why should a Disney animator care whether they have the source to PhotoShop? Why should a manufacturing company CEO care that their data in an Oracle database file can't be read by third party tools? Why should an ISP care that they are paying for PowerDNS instead of using BIND9? Why should an accountant care that TurboTax can't be extended by a consultant they hire? Why should a congressperson care that Adobe licensing isn't GPL?

Much easier not to discuss and instead say people "perhaps may have been lulled into going along with it". Which is empty low-effort "I'm smarter, more awake, less deceivable" tribal posturing and nothing else, and then when called out on it, try and sidestep into complaining about tone-policing instead.

I don't fundamentally disagree with any of the points you're making. I just think they are less important than the one I am making, so much so that I'm willing to risk "insulting a lot of people" as you say.

Yes, I'm being "loud and mean." I agree that normally, people shouldn't be loud and mean. But I also believe that sometimes it's approrpriate.

Right now, I'm reminded of when people here got panicky because youtube-dl was possibly being taken off of Github. I am not at all exaggerating when I say that the bulk of the commenters strongly appeared to have forgotten that you can just download the code yourself, perhaps host it somewhere else.

Yes, I'm sensing a slow descent into what an old-timer like me, who's used to "computers that you fully control, full stop" into what I can reasonably call stupidity.

Step 1: join a conversation about the importance of FOSS, and the dangers of decreased awareness about its importance in society

Step 2: re-frame it as the pro-FOSS side having bad manners

Step 3: ???

If I thought a cause was important, and I saw someone pretending to represent the cause but really berating and sneering at the people I was trying to reach out to and connect with, I'd be unhappy about that being the public face of the cause I valued.

Step 5, mention a creep.

> "I'm the one being demeaned, you inferior clueless simpletons!"

That’s true, though.

I agree with you that the free software movement is incredibly important, and that it's not talked about enough. I actually think it should be taught about in schools so that the average person has a background on why it's important, and why they have a political stake in defending it.

Um yeah, about that… most of this stuff wasn’t built for free.. it was either directly (think IBM and Oracle and Linux) or indirectly (the countless people including me that could contribute development time because of high compensation from 9-5 jobs) funded by major corporations.

Even gcc was a languishing mess until it got some real corporate backing into it. The Hurd never took off - the bulk of the real FSF successes had tremendous infusion of commercial support.

You're right about our existing OSS ecosystem being a marvel. I'm doubtful though about the merits of requiring software to be open-sourced after some timeframe though. IME, much proprietary software has very complex build and deployment pipelines and dependency chains and is very difficult to do anything with if you don't have a lot of specialized knowledge. I think it's rare for OSS projects to be successful without substantial effort spent on getting the dev and build systems to be workable for any random person on the internet. So who's gonna do the work to get these 30 year old projects usable?

> So who's gonna do the work to get these 30 year old projects usable?

The projects themselves don’t need to be usable for the source to be valuable. I could easily imagine the source code of say a defunct MMO server being a useful reference for enthusiasts re-implementing their own servers.

That would require people who in many cases don't care about the software to retain the source for thirty years, which would be burdensome.

And the GNU project. Let’s not forget their contribution to this story!

> Similarly, software should automatically be open-source after 30 years.

30 years seems a lot to me. I would rather force by law companies to open source every piece of firmware after some time (2-5 years?) it is declared obsolete or doesn't receive direct support anymore. The goal should be rather to prevent perfectly good hardware to become bricks and be thrown away than to help retrocomputing enthusiasts revive the few surviving devices decades later. I understand there would be huge legal implications but still...

> The more I grow old, the more I consider that OSS is the 8th marvel of the world.

In the far future, I would not at all be surprised that Open Source becomes the only way historians know in precise detail how software evolved in the past. There will only be vague descriptions of commercial software, possibly some names and near-apocryphal stories, but no source code so no way to know for sure.

> It will be interesting to see if there's legislation in the future to encourage companies to open up unsupported devices instead of relying on the efforts of enthusiasts to keep them out of e-waste streams.

Especially when paired with their refusal to do security updates in perpetuity.

If we want to be "green", you want people to re-use these devices a long time, especially since China has control of the rare earth mineral rights to make new ones.

I don’t see a world that maintaining everything forever is viable. Things should die, be it software, silicon, or flesh.

Ok. Then don't try to make someone die, via the courts, if they do what they want with their silicon. It WILL die, eventually, when the physical components fail.

Throwing away a perfectly good device just because they want to sell you a new one seems like such a waste to me.

My last iPhone was out of support and had the replacement battery going bad before I went to the trouble of getting a new one. The worst thing is it was perfectly functional (aside from the dodgy battery which could have been replaced again) and I would still be using it if there was an option to not become part of some random botnet.

All I really need is to make a phone call once in a while, check the emails and surf the interwebs — don’t need a whole lot of processing power to do that.

But now everyone and their dog makes you use their crappy app if you want to use their services and they only support “supported” devices (even though they could easily run on the older hardware) so you’re boned if you want some semblance of a modern life.

Don’t even get me started on how long I use laptops which can be upgraded virtually forever…

The problem here is that software years and silicon years are not equal but certain legal mandates believe them to be.

> The problem here is that software years and silicon years are not equal but certain legal mandates believe them to be.

Who cares? I see folks violate legal mandates all the time. I've had people on this site flip out when I point out that if they want to do felonies all day, folks might do felonies back.

It's a weird way of thinking, that only the laws that allow you to lock someone up for physically attacking you or stealing from you are valid, but you can electronically attack someone with pretty much near impunity apparently.

Seems the EU has made a surprising strait of pro-consumer laws in the past.

I'd love to see them carry on and add something like this.

> open up unsupported devices instead of relying on the efforts of enthusiasts to keep them out of e-waste streams

This article is about gaining the ability to run Linux on a 2014 iPad that is still receiving both OS updates and security updates.

Yes, but just barely. https://everyi.com/by-capability/maximum-supported-ios-versi...

I'm having trouble finding apples schedule for iOS updates for old devices, but in a year, this likely will be EOL.

By which you mean it will begin receiving only security updates, like a first party device from Google or Samsung that is way less than half as many years old?

If you buy the current 2021 Google Pixel 6, they will only guarantee that you will receive OS updates through October 2024, which is just ridiculous in comparison to a 2014 iPad that is still on the current OS.

Apple has gotten pretty good at protecting the idevice class from Linux. There are millions of these old devices sitting on shelves unused, still in working condition, and useless.

It should not take so much effort to make our devices useful after Apple has moved on from them. There are tons of uses for a capable device after the manufacturer has abandoned the customer.

We need Right to Repair now.

You may technically own Apple hardware, but its not yours in actuality. You have a "license" to use the software on it, bif of you can't change the software, you don't have control over it. It's not yours.

This is how Apple steals from us: They let you buy beautiful, high tech hardware that requires their software. Eventually, they stop supporting that software, so the hardware (mostly) stops working. This is theft. Sure, it may be legal, but morally, it is wrong. So many old iPhones and iPads are languishing, when they could be used as Raspberry Pis (or old laptops) are often used: home servers, learning tools, linux devices etc.

It depends on how you see those devices. On one hand it's a block of hardware (like an appliance) on the other hand it's a CPU and RAM and storage etc. This is a weird gradient where the same could be said for routers (and we kind-of do that), but also for Smart TV's (which are left out in the cold, generally), and other devices with smarts in them (or: a CPU, memory and storage).

The general problem lies with the utility for mass-market products, even if you re-purpose it, how widely spread can you do that? How feasible are most ideas on what to do with products that are end-of-life? A lot of existing things are just dumped and forgotten about like thin clients, settopboxes (same hardware as Raspberry Pis) and entertainment systems in cars.

We like to point at manufacturers and products from well known brands but in reality it applies on a much larger scale, yet the infeasibility scales with it all the same. Some of it might be due to legitimate PKI-based lockouts, while other reasons might simply be the lack of broad interest and governmental policy.

In an ideal world the specifications on how the devices work and end-of-life disablement of lockouts would be a reasonable bar to set; it'd be hard to argue that it's bad for commerce, and implementation-wise even PKI-based systems have easy ways to facilitate this. The cost would be enablement from the manufacturer's side and for some brands the connection between their brand name and a device they cannot control the presentation of. I don't know how to solve that but it's definitely a much larger problem than people in tech might think of.

> ... for some brands the connection between their brand name and a device they cannot control the presentation of... larger problem.

They should not have this control. Lamborghini doesn't get to stop crypto kids from using non-Lamborghini paint to put anime girls on their cars. Apple shouldn't get to stop users from using non-Apple software to draw pixels on their screens. The "their" refers to the owner of the product, not the owner of the brand.

The equivalent here is if those crypto kids tried to flash the Lamborghini’s transmission or engine ECU firmware with pictures of anime girls. That would definitely merit much closer scrutiny since if the vehicle ever crashes, who is at fault? Who is liable if the tranmission suddenly seized up and the vehicle plows into a group of children at a crossing?

And if the ECU is destroyed during the crash wouldn’t determining faulty firmware be impossible so Lamborghini would get blamed regardless?

So then the only sensible course of action is to lock it down such that no one can ever change sensitive firmware without Lamborghini approval.

This isn’t limited to cars, a Linux iPad could suffer a catastrophic battery explosion on a flight which causes significant consequences, who is liable?

You can put stickers and background pictures all over your brand devices too, that's not really a problem. We're talking about circumventing secure enclaves, which I'm pretty sure Lamborghini will sue you (and win) for, same as Sony and Nintendo for example.

This may be true with iOS devices but it is less true with macOS devices. I regularly repurpose my macOS devices with a nix installation, and I have not yet seen any discouraging move from Apple against this. Indeed none other than Linus Torvalds (the man behind Linux) has been known to use a MacBook Air for nix just because of its superior hardware - https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/srq2g/linus_torvalds...

you've hit on why apple is spending all its time developing the ipad into a laptop replacement (despite relatively flat sales) rather than really improving macs/macOS. they keep saying they're not trying to do this, but it's been plain as day for a few years now (with the ipad pro).

there's no precedent for ipads to "upgrade" to another OS/firmware, unlike macs, so customers can't claim anything was taken away from them. plus, macs are considered essential for developing for iphones/ipads, so apple doesn't want to disenfranchise ecosystem developers too much by locking down macs, especially when laptops are a dwindling segment anyway.

Because the old Macs used standard PC hardware, but apple has since moved to M1. That is the (albeit unintentional) move against this.

I love M1 performance though.

Really they should release low level stuff for OS community to make linux for it, once the devices are past EOL. That would leave them an easy moral out, so I wonder why they don't do it. Maybe proprietary low level stuff that they don't want to share.

Ultimately I don't really care. I buy idevices not to "own" or tinker with them, but to get a job done or make my life easier. I own an iPad Pro purely as a drawing/pen input device, it does this extremely well. I don't care that I can't install a custom OS on it because I don't plan to. And history of owning idevices shows me that Apple supports these devices for around 7 years and they continue to work after support. This is good enough for me to be worth it. I see no theft here.

I am sympathetic to the environmental ewaste aspect of older devices, but on a purely value based judgement, the Apple devices are vastly superior to anything else on the market. An open source linux tablet would do the job I want done worse.

>Linux support could give some of these devices a second life as retro game consoles, simple home servers, or other things that low-power Arm hardware is good for.

An iPhone running Linux bare metal with (hopefully) working drivers for its i/o components would have so many possible uses it's not even funny. I guess "other things" is pretty comprehensive, but its using an Arm instruction set is very much besides the point.

its like a super raspberry pi, I would love to get 3 new pi's out of the blue, with camera, mic, accelerometer, etc...

Is there anything like this for 32-bit iPads?

(I've a pristine example, which has been reduced to an alarm clock, since most websites don't support its browser anymore. Most of the apps have also lost their backend. Certificates are also an issue. The battery is still fine and a charge lasts for more than a month, as it is decoupled from the Internet for the moment. Would be a pity to have to throw it away…)

I'm using my old iPad mini as an ebook reader for tech books. For fictional books, I'm still a happy Kindle user, but I never liked reading technical books esp. with tables or images. Before finding that usecase, it almost ended up as a digital picture frame, which feels like a waste.

In my "limited understanding " of "web tech"? I thought it may be possible to use some kind of manipulative? and/or filtering? proxy to allow old ipads to use modern websites. This proxy could be remote like on a amazon or some other server somewhere OR as a embedded device that just operated on wifi. My background is as a electronics engineer who worked in embedded software dev ( few years) and then as a software test analysist (many years) . I have several "old" ipads ...

You could use a squid proxy elsewhere to uplift the crypto/cipher/PKI, which would get you browsing the full web again- however, you'd potentially fall victim to an unpatched Safari based exploit.

http://www.squid-cache.org

This is basically what is done in the vintage computer world…

https://github.com/tenox7/wrp

You might have luck with Qmole. It works on 32 bit devices. https://github.com/chriskmanx/qmole I think theres a cydia repo somewhere.

Moxie’s sslstrip still works…

Looks great, I cannot wait for when they will have a working version at least basic so I can give life to a bunch of dead ipad that are otherwise perfectly functional if it wasn't for ios on it...

I wonder if we could also force the manufacturers of mixing boards and synthesizers to allow us to flash our own linux installations. I bought it but I want to use it for a different use case than what they design and support.

Once Linux is running on these, the BSDs won't be far behind.

While there are Linux projects for every conceivable device, they often lose momentum and die off. The BSDs, on the other hand, don't. A NetBSD port for an iPad will stay as up-to-date as for a Raspberry Pi 4, eventually 5, et cetera.

Can't wait! A portable ARM device with a good screen and excellent battery life will be quite useful.

You probably meant a portable ARM Linux device; I think it is just difficult to get a team of Linux developers committed to fine-tuning the battery efficiency of the Linux (maybe a specific distro) for the tablet, so I am not hopeful about having an excellent battery life, as much as I would want it to happen.

What makes the difference?

My guess is the approach to development: things that can be fixed get fixed, not replaced. In FreeBSD, for example, rather fundamental changes get introduced when necessary - compare FreeBSD devfs with a... somewhat 1970's approach used in Linux - but they don't happen "just because".

Original tweet:

https://mobile.twitter.com/konradybcio/status/15319631309343...

This is so good. I have a old iPad and a PS3, they work well but I cannot do anything on them. Companies should just let you install Linux on hardware they do not want to support.

You may recall, the original launch PS3's could run Linux natively.

Sony eventually disabled support for it.

> Sony eventually disabled support for it.

and got sued for it in the US. People not living in the US got screwed though. We paid for a feature that sony took back. Never bought a sony product since.

Ahh yeah, that's right. And I got ~$50 as part of the settlement.

I did run Linux on it, but was disappointed when OtherOS did not have access to the RSX chip.

My siblings and I used the PS3 to play old dos games on the TV via linux/dosbox. We used to play more or less daily until Sony took it away. I still remember my brother being very disappointed.

They should pass a law that you’re required to support an internet connected device for at least two years, then there’s a three year period where you don’t necessarily have to support the device, but if you don’t, you’re required to release a jailbreak for it. Then after the five years, if you haven’t released a jailbreak, you can’t still sue anyone else who does it.

I am not sure where the boundary is, but it should be required to not encryption lock your devices from custom firmware/data.

There is some user benefit to this. There is an old saying that when the attacker has physical access, its game over. But modern products are making that less true. Sure if the government has your device you might still be screwed, but the average person can't do anything with a locked iphone like they could a locked Win 7 era laptop.

It would be fair to have a locked / unmodifiable initial boot step which shows a visible "unsecured" indication on every boot. If you installed a custom OS you can ignore this, if you didn't, you can worry.

Apple is at least on the leading edge here by supporting their iPads for 7+ years.

Latest tablets rock some pretty spectacular hardware. It's so sad that the horrible OSes completely waste all that potential.

Why is it so much to ask for a tables with an open OS?

Get a Lenovo M10 X605 and enjoy accelerated video on Ubuntu touch:

https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/device/x605/

IMO the only tablet that works well on Linux.

That sound interesting. Seems quite low on memory and the 3rd generation is 3+128… is only 605 workable. I may give it a trial as it is very cheap experiment.

The article mentioned iSH. It is sad that iSH and a-shell both are working but cannot run sbcl … And ecl run but cannot load quicklisp. Hard to be used.

There is some YouTube video of X606F running on Ubuntu Touch as well but I can't tell what exactly works on that one.

I don't know if it's wasted. Depends on what you expect out of your computing device. My partner is very happy sketching in ProCreate every day, but she'd find a hackable Linux device much less useful. I'm pretty much the other way around.

> she'd find a hackable Linux device much less useful.

No she wouldn't. You're not forced to install linux on a linux-capable device.

I expect an actual computing device, not a locked up console, which is what these things are.

A device running on a real OS, in the sense of an actual operating system - the thing that just controls hardware and runs whatever you throw at it, will be found even more useful by your partner as it will stretch far beyond ProCreate.

Name a hardware+pen+OS+app combo that beats iPad + Apple Pencil + ProCreate.

Name it.

Oddly enough, that wasn't the problem framed.

I'm sorry, but what is the problem? We already own more general-purpose computers than we can carry, might be the problem.

sto_hristo's already replied here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31631979

For myself, based on over ten years' experience with Android, and quoting myself:

[T]he OSes themselves are BDSM nightmares. Because the apps aren’t trusted (very rightfully so), they can’t share storage, so there’s next to no interaction between applications. Coming from Unix, the land of pipes (literally streaming data between programs to do useful things) this is … staggering. Apps themselves are aimed at the minimum viable user, economics are painful, and the result is that a million minimally useful buggy pieces of shit bloom, with no way for users to assess which ones don’t actually suck manure through a straw. (Spoiler alert: they all do.) User is denied root. There’s little option for adblocking or firewalling on-device. ...

Touch: the fact that a click and a drag cannot be reliably distinguished … just fucking kills me. Android’s had ten motherfucking years to sort this, and hasn’t figured it out.

Hardware vendors are a fucking disaster. Everything I’ve ever had or used from Samsung has been a massive disappointment (from electronics to appliances), I consider the brand a warning label. Post-purchase OS upgrades from any vendor appear to be exceedingly rare if at all available.

Android has been a privacy disaster from day one. ...

https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/880e5c403edb013918e100...

Termux is the one Android app that does not specifically suck.

(Einkbro is rapidly approaching that status, credit where due.)

Tablets, preferably e-ink, are quite good for reading textual material, if the display is sufficiently large (8" is about the minimum, I prefer 10 -- 13").

For virtually any generative / productivity tasks, a laptop is preferred. Sketching is a possible exception, though desktop + Wacom tablet is probably better.

It's the OS and application ecosystem, plus the pervasive surveillance state, that have me utterly turned off tablets.

I don't think my views are widely held. I do think they're valid.

You're basically repeating what I said in my original post. Different people have different needs and expectations for their devices. sto_hristo is yet to explain what device they think would work better for an artist as a drawing tablet.

And answering someone who states that they have a specific set of interests and needs with ... a completely different use case ... is ignoring their argument.

sto_hristo didn't deny your use case.

You're denying sto_hristo's.

> And answering someone who states that they have a specific set of interests and needs with ... a completely different use case ... is ignoring their argument.

You're twisting the situation 180 degrees. I have specifically stated that different people have different computing needs, implying there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. sto_hristo is trying to convince me otherwise, apparently they know for a fact that my partner doesn't need an iPad. Why do I even bother replying to either of you?

I'm sorry, but I'd missed where sto_hristo made the case that there is a "one-size-fits-all solution".

Could you point that out to me?

Thanks.

You're missing the point. It's about what you can with that hardware. If the world was limited to ProCreate only, then we wouldn't be having this discussion. But there's much more to be done on that hardware and the only thing standing in the way is the artificially crippled OS that is really a platform for advertisements.

> You're missing the point. It's about what you can with that hardware.

So what does this hypothetical better-than-iPad general-purpose portable computing device do, that her laptop isn't doing already? I'm still waiting for *a* point.

> [...] a platform for advertisements.

Have you actually used an iPad?

I already explained it to you. Re-read the replies and try to comprehend them like the normal people did. You don't have to a software engineer to do so, as these things are pretty soft to assimilate.

> I already explained it to you. Re-read the replies and try to comprehend them like the normal people did.

You did not explain anything at all in your two most recent replies, and now you are trying to insult me.

All you've done is you're repeatedly making some extremely vague promises of "something even more useful", "so much more to do":

> [...] the thing that just controls hardware and runs whatever you throw at it, will be found even more useful [...]

> [...] there's much more to be done on that hardware [...]

I have already clarified that we also have several other devices (including laptops, desktops, servers) which are already running whatever we throw at them. How would adding (for example) a second laptop, or some other "more useful" (which?) device actually provide more value to someone, whose primary occupation is making art, often on the go - in the nature, in a cafe? Expecting a full day's charge, a very bright screen, first-class support for pencil input? Again, she already has a laptop that runs "whatever you throw at it".

Are you going to argue that I should carry a laptop to check the time, as opposed to a phone or a wristwatch?

Unlikely, if all they want to do is draw on a tablet.

For most people out there computers are the means and not the end. Any feature outside "helps me do X faster/easier/better" is irrelevant.

I only use my iPad for Procreate. Sure it would be nice to have the option to do anything, but I wouldn't use it or get any extra value out of it. It's like when iSH came out and you got a full linux shell on ios. Very cool, used it for a few minutes and then never used it again because I don't need anything extra on my iPad.

Note that this relies on the checkm8 bootrom vulnerabilities, which cannot be fixed on existing devices as the bootrom is physically read-only. AFAIK, there isn't currently an open source exploit for the vulnerabilities. The closest is checkra1n:

https://checkra.in/

The exploit is open source; the chain afterwards to patch iOS is not.

Do you need that chain in order to run Linux?

You are free to substitute your own chain that redirects control flow at boot :)

Would be cool if I could install some kind of linux on that old ipad 1 i still got laying around.

I had the same thought! I don’t know what I’d actually want to do with it, but the tablet form-factor is just begging for some creative attention.

It's always fun but then afterward I'm left with a nuked iPad running elinks.

The best use I could find for my iPad 1 is to use it as a clock. It’s a real shame I can’t use it for anything else.

Have a ipad 2 here not turned on in ~five years. It could no longer handle any websites, not enough RAM. Would be great to use it for something, but it has an A5, not A7 or 8, according to Wikipedia.

I don’t like saying this, but the way solutions like this are presented makes me really uneasy. I think it’s a laudable effort, and it’s noble that the authors want to reduce e-waste, but I feel like they should make really clear right at the outset that at least some of the features they take for granted are negated by this.

I’m thinking most specifically about the integrity and security guarantees around enclaves and official vendor patch support (i.e. the things most users wouldn’t realise were missing and could endanger them). I would assume once this ships it’ll be able to update same as any other linux device (with security and feature patches), but the average user may not realise how much those updates were protecting them.

There’s also likely to be a very vulnerable gap between Linux and the hardware elements that will need to remain open because that’s what the exploit relied on in the first place (in this case, checkra1n, if I’m reading it correctly).

Can you provide any case studies where enthusiast ports of embedded devices were exploited en masse in the way you seem concerned about?

I feel like this is a bad faith argument.

Enthusiast ports are already niche, and therefore not lucrative targets. This project has stated that a long term goal is keeping the many iPads that have fallen out of support in service.

If they’re successful in that goal, it’s no longer niche, and therefore is more worthy of a target for attacking.

Do you believe this would ever become mainstream enough for that to happen? Malware on macOS is fairly rare despite a significant market share.

Aren't security enclaves used mostly for things like banking apps, instead of the parts of security that actually matter to end users?

Not sure about you, but I'd say banking apps being more secure is a benefit to me. Its were stuff like the encryption keys for FaceID sit. It's pretty much the only reason that while plenty of iPhone low level exploits get found, none of them ever expose your encryption key.

One reason it's good for PostmarketOS to support lots of old models of devices well (rather than, say, just new Pine and maybe Purism) is that it avoids the risk of mobile open source Linux failing altogether, should 1-2 device vendors somehow drop the ball. This has happened multiple times before.

Ok, I'm feeling cynical here based on many complaints about support length.

People are asking for legislation to allow firmware replacement after X years

Why is no one asking for the more basic and obvious one, of just supporting the device for more than 12 months? Like you're never going to get anything meaningful from fly-by-night budget companies that don't even exist for a year, but I was just looking at the big non-apple tablet companies and they all seem to max out at like one year of major updates?

> The EU might require OEMs to provide 7 years of updates and spare parts for its phones

https://www.gsmarena.com/the_eu_might_require_oems_to_provid...

I feel like maybe there should be rule such as, either provide x years of software support, or open source it. The best of two worlds.

Because the iPad Air 2 is still getting updated and its almost 8 years old now. There is no need for ipads to be updated any longer than they already are. The non Apple market is just not worth buying. It's cheap junk.

Credit to Apple, their devices do seem to be supported for a long time (5--8 years).

Contrast Android, where all but one device I've ever owned was abandoned by the vendor from purchase.

The exception is the Onyx BOOX. I've had four updates to that in a year, including one addressing issues I'd reported personally. (Earlier devices were HTC and Samsung. HTC was annoying, Samsung are pathological, and I refuse to touch any of their products ever.)

Unfortunate that only 'old' iPads. I would like that fir my 2020 one. The OS is complete trash in my opinion and it is the first and last Apple device I have bought.

I have an old iPad 3 - first retina model - and although unsupported for many years, still works fine. It feels like such a waste to dispose of it, especially because of the screen.

But running Linux on it is not going to make it live longer, what kind of usability would we have?

What remains is repurposing it as some kind of monitor / Dashboard device maybe. Or just return it to apple for recycling.

This sounds very cool - I have three iPads with one not being used, would be very interested in doing something like this!

Not exactly related to Apple or iPads but this reminds me of running a webserver on an old Android phone of mine. Created a port forward on my modem and used Cloudflare to set a DNS, it wasn't the fastest thing but pretty cool weekend project.

Does anyone turn these old devices into a project and install cool software on it only to never use it again? I stop using multiple devices because having several iPads is as useful as having several phones. I install stuff to “give it a longer life” but without purpose I don’t actually use it.

A number of people in the Home Assistant community use cheap and/or older tablets as wall-mounted control panels. Android tablets are well-represented, including many Amazon Fire tablets, but there are iPads in the mix too.

I do suspect its much like Raspberry Pis where people buy them on the thought of doing something with but don't ever get around to it. Still very nice to have the option and if you do actually have a use, you can buy these devices very cheaply second hand. Much cheaper than a pi + touchscreen + battery would be.

The article suggests the Air 2 doesn’t receive updates. The Air 2 runs iPadOS 15 just fine.

I was just about to say that the Air 2 isn't all that old. According to Wikipedia, it's almost 8 years old.

There are two of these in my house. Both are still perfectly usable, the batteries are fine, and it still receives software updates.

Can’t wait. Seriously.

Now we need Tektronix, ReGIS, and Sixel graphics on the Linux graphical console.

Please ELI5 Why?

I love it that people have hobbies and interests to do stuff like this. As someone else here said: Apple is pretty good at supporting old hardware.

Off topic (sorry): my iPad Pro with the Apple case keyboard and SSH and Mosh clients makes a good enough client for running Linux VPSs. For someone who wants to program on the run with an iPad this solution might cause fewer frustrations.

LOL, my only tablet is an iPad Air 2 and still gets some updates, runs most apps and is in a very good condition. Battery isn’t what it used to be, but I can’t complain keeping in mind that my trusty iPad has served me well all this years and has paid off its investment. Nowadays Apple is not making hardware like it used to.

Apple is making better hardware than ever. Like your iPad, devices get at least 5 years of updates and will generally run faster every year. Like you said the biggest noticeable difference is in the battery, but this is obviously a much harder problem to solve.

There example hardware includes a 2014 era iPad 2 air which per wikipedia is still getting updates?

Honestly I find the Asahi linux folk much more interesting, although of course the hardware is actually explicitly open so step 1 for them isn't "get around the device security"

maybe my hoarding of old ipads will finally pay off? i have about 40 of them if anyone needs em

how the heck did you end up with that many

my guess is they make iPad apps

me too but four zero? imagine the rats nest of chargers lol

Not the same game, but I used to work as an Android dev for an imaging company. We had to physically test our apps in meatspace with the real device camera and we had to support hundreds of devices.

I had hundreds of Android devices hooked to a dozen or so dev machines in a test farm. A test script would run. The active device’s screen would turn green. Then a QA engineer would have to physically scan a bunch of different things. Then the next active device would turn green and they’d do it again. And again. And again. I probably could have automated more with a moving conveyor belt and a custom lighting system, but I would’ve put a lot of QA people out of work…

This was during the “bridge” period between android.hardware.camera and android.hardware.camera2, so I had to write a wrapper library bridging the two APIs. About half of our users were on the old API, half on the new. It was a mess. There was no CameraX provided by Google at the time.

Obviously Android has way more device diversity, but I can easily see 40 iPads getting accumulated by even a small iOS shop that’s taking their user experience seriously. The company that I worked for was actually quite small, yet we amassed dozens of iDevices and hundreds of Android devices. The CTO would require every camera crash to be fixed, even if it were on a random developing market junk phone. We had so many single-device workaround in the camera wrapper lib it was insane…

ewaste recycling

Not the PP, but for instance, I get everything from the people in my town; every laptop, phone, tablet that they bought a newer substitute for. I have a museum for 60-90’s systems and I never found modern (after 2000) that interesting, however, now I have 100s of those too including many iPads.

Are any of them still viable for iOS development?

No. Apps are limited to newer iOS versions, which are limited to newer hardware.

While most apps no longer work on the really really old iPads, e-mail still does!

I have an old launch day iPad (that makes it over 12 years old) that does just fine for checking e-mail on the couch.

Not an Apple person but would consider getting an old iDevice if Linux could run realibly.

I just installed an old clock app and use my ipad 4 as a wall clock!

Is this just a tech demo or can we download the code?

This is cool.

I heard that like 2 years ago. Still “soon”. Knowing linux community they will spend another 2 making different “organisations” and then claim “success linux run on ipad!” when it boots with zero devices supported and 90% loss of performance and battery life. Then it will die.

He's right you know; and it's true. This happened when checkra1n was out and we saw a tech demo with 'Linux' on an iPhone 7 [0]. Then we have it running a Ubuntu GUI on an iPhone 7 a year later. [1]

However, want to do this yourself? [2] Follow these straightforward and simple 'prerequisites': First get a cross-compiler, git clone, patch, patch, kernel setup, CONFIG_ABCD=XYZ, make build, DFU blah blah blah and after days of trying to duck tape everything, it still crashes as it only works on an iPhone 7.

Nothing has materialised in a straightforward 1 click multi-device install like checkra1n has but for 'Installing Linux' on it. Even 'checkra1n' was supposed to be 'open-source' and that still hasn't happened since. If anything goes wrong or a bug happens then restore everything and start all over again.

> Knowing linux community they will spend another 2 making different “organisations” and then claim “success linux run on ipad!” when it boots with zero devices supported and 90% loss of performance and battery life.

This is the likely case on what is going to happen. It is still "coMiNg vEry vErY SoOn".

[0] https://blog.project-insanity.org/2020/04/22/linux-with-wayl...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/kvmsfd/success_iphon...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/kux9xx/success_iphon...

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