Comment by conor_f
4 years ago
The bar is at the floor for "helps".
I understand this is very useful to the stability and future of the project, but we should expect more than the bare minimum from big companies in matters like this. Not being actively harmful != helping.
They literally added a feature which they don’t need, and which only seems useful to asahi.
The bare minimum would have been to not do that.
I agree, and that's exactly what they had done before now! I am glad they've done this and think it's a good thing all round, but it would be nice for the expectations to shift and the standards we hold companies to be higher where a situation where they allow you to install your own operating system without jumping through hoops is viewed as the norm as opposed to a benevolent action.
Not exactly, before now they added a feature to boot any arbitrary OS. Yes, it had to be a Mach-O, but they didn't need to add this AFAIU… See the kmutil doc: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1333126018068955136
https://keith.github.io/xcode-man-pages/kmutil.8.html
I recall an Apple developer saying that no one internally believed it would get any traction, but they did it anyway.
It's a feature they do need though...? They test their hardware on Linux, if it doesn't work properly then they can potentially lose money. This is a random internal change that just so happened to align with the Asahi project. If they were trying to help, they'd let us know. It strikes me as desperation to call this a tacitly helpful move on their behalf.
> It's a feature they do need though...?
That is an assertion with no evidence to support it, and lots to do the opposite (starting with the fact that this appeared a year after the initial M1 public avail).
> They test their hardware on Linux, if it doesn't work properly then they can potentially lose money.
That doesn't make any sense, apple does not support Linux on their machine (as demonstrated by Asahi having been working on that for more than a year now).
And even if they did "test their hardware on linux", that would have no relevance to the issue and change: Apple can build mach-o linux kernel files in whatever fashion they need, that is quite literally what Asahi did. TFA states that unambiguously and they're the Asahi project lead, they'd know.
I'm seriously admiring spirit of people working on Asahi Linux project. In my eyes Apple, it's hardware, software, whole ecosystem and philosophy is openly hostile towards any tinkering, customization, modifications - kind of antithesis of open source/linux. Yet another angle which would be a problem for me is about putting personal non-paid time towards increasing value of one of the wealthiest corporations on the globe.
Probably I'm too cynical (or maybe realistic?) because it's not hard to imagine situation in the future where thousands of work hours poured into project like this is easily and effortlessly decimated by corporation execs decision.
Check out https://libimobiledevice.org ; using it iOS will provide access to your Photos.app's SQLite database, including machine learning tags and other metadata[0].
Or the defaults(1) command, or how networking config works (it's just plain BSD configs with a GUI on top).
Apple isn't against tinkering or customization, they just don't document or guarantee it.
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[0] Simon Willison has neat demos with it https://simonwillison.net/2020/May/21/dogsheep-photos/
It sounds like they were doing more than just not being actively harmful. They were actively helpful but we can only speculate on their motive.
The Asahi Linux project is basically free labor that makes the M1 Macs more appealing to consumers. Perhaps this help is profitable to capture the Linux crowd?
Personally, I wouldn't consider buying a Macbook unless I knew I could run Linux on it after it EOL. My oldest laptop is 14+ years old and is still useful because I run Linux on it. A 2022 Macbook should make a very nice ssh Linux client in 2037.
> The Asahi Linux project is basically free labor that makes the M1 Macs more appealing to consumers.
Nope. The number of people who would buy an M1 Mac solely if they can run Linux on it is tiny. Incredibly so. Apple sells over 20 million of these things a year, they’re not looking at a few thousand people who want native asahi Linux as a product center.
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It's also one of the best high-performance ARM machines you can currently buy (unless you go for insanely expensive exotic servers). I consider buying one just to have a low power server.
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Asahi Linux is really interesting to me. A distro that only has to care about a very small number of hardware configurations could be great. I could see it becoming the number one desktop Linux very quickly if they succeed.
Engineering goodwill is probably limited by legal / marketing departments. To do more or provide documentation would probably amount to a potential liability with little added benefit to the bottom line.
The sad faсt is that given Apple' track record even not interfering might be considered by some as help, let alone adding specific features for people who reverse engineer their hardware.
Considering that it's very possible for the bar to go into the floor (Apple actively frustrating the project, as it may not be in their interest), this is pretty huge.
See: Nouveau and Nvidia.