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Comment by thrwawy283 | Hacker News Reader

1) We are now 2 generations in without full Linux support for the hardware.

2) I used my Powerbook G4 for 12 years; this is mostly because I was a kid with no money. When I got something else, my sister used it for another 3 years. With thermals as they are in this device, instead of selling it after 4-5 years I'd rather keep it for one-off projects as a server like a Mac Mini. I know laptops aren't designed for server work, but I love that it's a server with a builtin terminal. Also a device I'd use for hiking, because I could charge it from backpack solar.

3) The worst experience I've had was telling my dad MacOS Catalina couldn't be installed on his $3.5k iMac.

As you said in your other comment, M3 will be 3nm TSMC? Maybe Linux will look good on Apple Silicon then.

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"2 generations" sounds a lot more dramatic than "2 years" (and it's not even 2 years yet, the first M1 Macs were released in November)

2 years is a big chunk of a lifetime in tech.

Plus there is no guarantee that Apple will ever allow Linux again.

You have pretty good support except for the GPU at this point (admittedly I'm waiting for this until I install it on my machine). They've had to write all the drivers from scratch, so it was bound to take a while. But on the plus side the hardware interfaces seem to be stable across generations. M2 parity with M1 was implemented in 48 hours! So I'm pretty confident it will mostly be case of linux support continuously improving rather than resetting with each new generation.

The GPU is important.. afaik the keyboard and trackpad aren't working yet in Asahi Linux.

I don't expect Apple to support the Linux community. It feels like this is trending in one direction. It felt like things stopped being "favorable" to us when they stopped supporting OpenGL and made no effort with Vulkan. The touchbar and some wifi chipsets were poorly supported for years before M1 debuted.

What has been implemented in Asahi is impressive, but it's not ready to be a daily driver. I hope this becomes my mobile device of choice someday. I'd use MacOS for work-work, and I would choose Linux every time for fun-work. So tired of everything having telemetry and vendor lock-in and basic pieces of software moving to subscription models.

Apple laptops became the dev machines of choice because they embraced the OSS community in pretty big ways. Right now the water feels tepid.

Hector has the keyboard working now https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1544408695295328256?s=21...

I might have missed a trackpad update but I don't think it will take them long.

> Apple laptops became the dev machines of choice because they embraced the OSS community in pretty big ways. Right now the water feels tepid.

You could triple boot Windows, MacOS and Linux with Intel Macs. A Mac was a great choice because you could develop for and support all 3 of those platforms (plus Android and iOS). Aside from having bad GPUs, expensive storage, and little modularity, they were great machines for development.

Now, with no Linux or Windows support, not so much (unless you don't need to use anything but MacOS.) Unfortunately, if you need to support MacOS or iOS, you don't have much of a choice. Just really unfortunate that what used to be possible with one machine may soon require two. So long as Apple supports any Intel Mac, many Macs will be able to get OS updates thanks to the OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1]. I'm not sure when Apple will drop Intel Macs though. The last Mac to use an Intel processor released in 2020, so there will hopefully still be quite a few years left of support for Intel Macs for the time being.

1. https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/START.htm...

Asahi Linux supports Apple M-series processors.

Windows and linux both work in VMs on Apple Silicon macs. I suspect the support for bare metal will come in time (definitely for linux, windows I guess we'll have to see, but I wouldn't be too surprised).

> The worst experience I've had was telling my dad MacOS Catalina couldn't be installed on his $3.5k iMac.

Just in case you'd be ok with unofficial way - there are patchers to enable macOS install on older machines:

https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/install-macos-catalina-unsu...

This is something I'd be comfortable with maintaining, but I couldn't leave with my dad. (I work on the road for months, and it's unpredictable when I come back. Longest I was out was 2 years..)

Isn’t that backwards? He wants to install Catalina on M1/M2 hardware. So do I :(

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