I wonder if the driver could be ported to Mac OS?
1. I try not to tell people what to do with their free time. While you may think it's "bizarre", this use of their time has value to them, not only in the hopeful end result (fully-functional Linux on ARM Macs), but also in the satisfaction of the technical challenge, bragging rights, and general reputation. I'm sure there are some people who might look at what you do with your spare time and think you're "wasting" it sometimes. But that's in the eye of the beholder, and at any rate, that's your prerogative, as this is theirs.
2. I used to run Linux on Mac laptops (gave up around 2016 or so, tried again in 2018, gave up again shortly after), and I get the appeal: the hardware is really nice. And by all accounts, the ARM Macs are even nicer than the Intel Macs. Sure, they're not perfect (lack of upgradeability/repairability, etc.), but running Linux on them can be great, if the hardware support is there. "I like this hardware and I want to run Linux on/with it, so I'll figure it out myself" seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Many of the drivers in the Linux kernel for various bits of hardware only exist because someone adopted this attitude.
I also just think your premise is a bit flawed:
> open source developers go so far to contribute to a closed source proprietary ecosystem
This is a little bit of a weird statement, because these developers aren't doing that. The "closed source proprietary ecosystem" is macOS and its app store. The hardware itself is more or less just as open (or closed) as most non-Apple hardware. I mean, I can't rewrite the BIOS in my Framework Laptop, nor can I make heads or tails of any of the binary firmware blobs Linux loads into the WiFi chipset, graphics chipset, etc. Apple's hardware is undocumented, certainly, but that's pretty common when it comes to Linux hardware support.
> but they at times actually intentionally impede their work
Do they, though? From what I've read of the Asahi project's progress, they didn't run into cases where Apple intentionally tried to make things harder on them. Sure, some things were harder, but I don't think we can ascribe a malicious motive to Apple. The most likely explanation is that they just decided to design things in a particular way because they felt it would be best for their own purposes, and didn't really care to think about anything else.
They could have decided to actively cryptographically lock down the boot process to prohibit other OSes from running, but they didn't do that.
> That is a lot of time and effort of someone doing something for free that the manufacturer should be paying them to do and assist with.
Why "should" they? All hardware manufacturers decide what software to write, and what platforms to support. If they don't think the cost of writing and supporting drivers for Linux is worth what they'll get in return, they'll make the logical choice to just... not do that. We've seen plenty of vendors over the 30-odd-year lifetime of Linux do that math and decide Linux support wasn't worth it to them. It's a shame, but I don't think it's fair to come down on them hard for that. Certainly some vendors (nvidia comes to mind) have been actively hostile toward the Linux community at times, but I don't think we can say the same of Apple.
I don’t see people making the same statements about work on the nouveau driver or on the Broadcom opensource wifi drivers. But somehow because the hardware was built by apple folks seem to think it’s more proprietary than anything else linux has run on.
Didn't they make an undocumented change to the boot loader that serves literally no purpose other than to give Asahi a somewhat stable target than what they were using before?
No, a person who used to work on the bootloader at Apple said on Twitter they did it because they wanted to enable different OSes. That's not an "Apple confirmed", that's "employee X said".
A lot of peoples careers start this way. A lot of the hacking and the cracking scene was born this way. There is a certain kind of pleasure and satisfaction involved when you get a device that was previously not designed to do a certain thing behave in that way.
Off-topic: FreeBSD had an early version of Grand Central Dispatch ported to it, I wonder if Linux could benefit from that maybe with some io-uring goodness.
The sorry state of Apple's OpenGL drivers is a part of their strategy. They're choosing to not invest in OpenGL, and have even officially deprecated it. They want you to use Metal instead.
But macOS is not the go-to platform for this sort of thing, especially when it comes to games. This does seem like a strategic mistake. Maybe they just don't care, for whatever reason. I mean, it doesn't seem like Metal has been catastrophic for Apple, has it?
Then again, OpenGL is probably still good enough on macOS for most 3D apps, deprecated or not. And if Apple does decide to actually remove it, I believe there are projects that implement the OpenGL API on top of Metal (certainly with performance impact). And third-party developers certainly have the option to wait to write a Metal backend only after Apple announces OpenGL is being dropped completely.
Maybe that's the whole strategy? To provide an API which exposes what's easy to do in a well-performing way on their hardware, and let the community worry about getting the standards to work? It certainly seems to be working, and it probably means they need to spend less resources on driver development than if they tried to stay current on OpenGL and Vulkan.
All major AAA engines support Metal, even if the main target for them is iOS.
OpenGL is old, crufty and for modern standards sucks no matter how grate it once was. Most new 3D software doesn't use OpenGL, a lot of new software which does use OpenGL limits itself to OpenGL ES (which is roughly a subset of OpenGL).
Apple always had issues with a "Not Invented Here" syndrome and an obsession to control every little bit. Apple always pushed that software should be explicitly written for Apple, or if not at least with an Apple focus. New GUIs "should" be written with SwiftUI, etc.
For apple having a different API means they don't have spent time with standards outside of things they want to pus beyond their ecosystem, this means they can just further develop Metal however they want, ignoring inputs from everyone else. This can remove friction, but also will remove valuable feedback and profiting from other peoples innovation.
Lastly Vulcan, DirectX12 and Metal aren't too different hence why thinks like MoltenVK (Vulkan API/emulation on top of Metal) or VKD3D (DirectX12 API/emulation on top of Vulcan) exists. (Through no surprise all three have their own edge cases which does make such cross libraries non trivial, still they are quite viable and most important performant as they don't have to do much emulation and mostly can just map functionality.)
It isn't.
Vulkan as an idea appeared a year after Metal was released.
And even today:
- Windows first-party support is DirectX
- Xbox is DirectX
- Playstation is whatever Playstation uses
- Switch has nominal Vulkan support, but you're better off using their non-Vulkan SDKs
- MacOS and iOS are Metal
- Android support Vulkan. Some versions of it, depends on phone, version, and manufacturer.
- WebGL is browser-only... and on its way to be replaced by WebGPU
Yeah. Great cross-platform story
MacOS is a joke for gaming. iOS though of course is all metal. If you wanna target that platform then that’s all you got. But translating or porting to other platforms DX12 on Windows Vulkan is the answer.
They literally just ported the whole platform to ARM which has had some great benefits for the whole OS + UX of using laptops.