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Comment by kitsunesoba | Hacker News Reader

I doubt they’ll do anything to Asahi. They went out of their way to add third party OS support to M-series Macs after deriving them from the famously single-OS iPad architecture. They’ve also said that they’d welcome Microsoft porting Windows to M-series Macs and wouldn’t do anything to stop it.

They clearly see the Mac a bit differently than they do the other iDevices.

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You are getting me wrong. As soon as people start running games on Apple hardware outside of their software platform, they'll want to fix that. Asahi Linux is making rapid progress to enabling that. Hence the announcement of a porting toolkit. Imagine if they don't do that and then Steam suddenly announces rolling out proton to macs and the availability of their full catalog.

That's a scenario Apple would want to avoid. Hence the announcement of a porting kit.

Let's be real here, the vast, vast majority of Apple customers are never installing Asahi on their machine. Like, ever.

Again, you are misunderstanding me. Asahi Linux is doing a lot of hard work and open sourcing that. That in turn enables porting back some of that software to OSX. Steam on Mac so far runs without proton so it can't run a lot of things. The people developing Asahi Linux are doing a lot of hard work figuring out all the low level details of how the hardware platform works. The resulting software could be adapted to run inside of OS X. The hard part would be reverse engineering the hardware. Which is exactly what they are doing. And with the wide distribution of macs, it's obviously attractive for Valve and game studios to target that platform. Apple is responding to that threat by offering game studios an alternative.

Even if Asahi Linux is a big hit, it will be a minuscule drop in the ocean for Apple. Plus they make money from selling Macs.

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