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Comment by happosai | Hacker News Reader

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Unfortunately, the state of non-Apple hardware makes your parent’s comment a defensible position. Btw, using Linux in general means having “some unpaid volunteer do it for you”

I'm using Intel Thinkpad. And I'm pretty sure that Intel does a good amount of work upstreaming Intel support in Linux. So I'm not sure that using Linux in general means having some unpaid volunteer do it for you. In fact I believe that most Linux development nowadays is pretty far from unpaid volunteer work.

Regarding state of non-Apple hardware. Well, my laptop just works. Literally zero hardware or compatibility issues. Maybe Macbook is faster in artificial benchmarks, but in my day to day usage, Thinkpad is more than fast enough.

Intel Corporation is indeed the largest corporate contributor of commits to Linux Kernel (outside individual contributors).

> Btw, using Linux in general means having “some unpaid volunteer do it for you”

Maybe using Linux on a desktop, but using Linux in general is >80% paid developers [1]

[1]: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/hubfs/Reports/LinuxKernelRep...

No it doesn't. This reads like someone who hasn't touched a non-apple Laptop in 15-20 years.

I don't think it's possible to create a Linux machine with no volunteer-built software on it.

Unpaid volunteer? Hah! These people want to do it, for reasons unknown to me. They might enjoy it.

I'm not even sure about the unpaid part.

That's kind of how open source development works, right? We buy hardware and we use software people wrote for free. What am I missing?

A lot of hardware gets Linux support because the hardware manufacturer itself (Intel, AMD, Mediatek, NXP, Marvell, etc) takes responsibility for writing and upstreaming Linux drivers. This is how companies like Lenovo or Dell can offer systems with Linux preinstalled.

Sure.

When you make a big chunk of your revenue selling Enterprise Servers, you can no longer rely on drivers written by volunteer labor, as they did in the past.

You don't need to write performant 3D graphics drivers for servers. Intel, AMD, Nvidia does it anyway. Apple is the only Linux-hostile company.

> You don't need to write performant 3D graphics drivers for servers. Intel, AMD, Nvidia does it anyway. Apple is the only Linux-hostile company.

You can't think of an Enterprise use case for GPUs that has become popular of late?

If you're hinting to neural networks, it's not about providing drivers for 3D graphics. For Nvidia that's CUDA and it's basically different set of libraries. Also Intel is not in this business anyway.

My steelman read of that would be that there is a difference between paying Apple a premium to make installing Linux hard vs. paying, say, Framework a premium to make installing Linux easy.

Except the Asahi Linux team are pretty insistent that Apple isn't making it particularly hard. Yes the hardware is novel, but hardly any hardware vendors share low level details on the Intel side either, all that has to be reverse engineered anyway.

Intel themselves writes a ton of the software for their own hardware that makes in into the Linux kernel.

Intel is not the only hardware in an Intel CPU-based laptop.

They also famously manufacture the most stable and performant network cards, wifi card, thunderbolt controllers, etc. And provide drivers for Linux.

Plenty of components for quivalents of which Avahi struggles with on MacBooks.

Yeah, they insist on that and then write long blog posts on how they have to reverse engineer basic things which have been contributed by other manufacturers to linux kernel directly.

Hm? Should we ban volunteers? Doing unpaid work is sort of their thing.

"I paid thousands of dollars to apple who provided a great hw product with their own OS preinstalled and free".

"... so that I can never switch to anything ever due to vendor lock-in, which includes hard-to-transfer data, muscle memory and habit forming not applicable to other OSes, accounts bound to iCloud, voluntary surrender of privacy, acceptance of planned obsolescence and non-repairability, lack of support beyond 'try turning it off-on' or 'replace your device for half its price', etc., etc. But hey, the hw is great!"

Mindblowing to me that people continue to try and pin "planned obsolescence" on Apple, the manufacturer that makes infamously long lived products. You anti-Apple zealots get your talking points from 1996 Usenet posts.

>.. so that I can never switch to anything ever due to vendor lock-in,

What exactly prevents you? I use macOS, but have used Windows and still also use Linux, and can jump at a moment's notice if I wish. While keeping iPhone, or ditching that too for Android.

I'd lose the App Store bought apps, but I don't use that many of those, and the non-cross-platform apps would be an issue if I jumped away from any other OS too. The most expensive apps I use (Lightroom, Resolve, Photoshop), are available for Windows too, and some even for Linux.

Music and Movies are streaming, and I use Music, Spotify, Apple TV, Netflix and Prime (and increasingly less anyway). But if jumped, I'd hardly miss anything except Apple-exclusive TV shows and my playlists (which I'm sure are portable in some way, either some existing tool, or if I need some LLM to hack sqlite3 dbs).

Switching isn’t nearly as bad as some make it out to be. Much of iCloud is built with well-supported standards like IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV. Getting out of Google’s or Microsoft’s ecosystem, with how much both of those love their proprietary protocols and data formats, I would say is overall more messy.

As far as muscle memory and habits go, that almost makes it sound like it’s objectively wrong to build a desktop OS that doesn’t follow Windows-esque conventions, which I staunchly disagree with. Desktops are insanely personal and I cannot support the idea that things like keybindings and window chrome should only ever come in one shape.

I've got one - I bought a macbook from apple so I don't have to replace it for a decade. My 2014 one still works fine, aside from a distorted right speaker. And you know what? I'd do it again!

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