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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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