Comment by todd3834
4 years ago
I was really hoping to see Apple acknowledging that they were helping rather than assuming based on code changes that make it seem like they are. However, happy to see the direction this is going. I’m grateful for the work of both sides.
A company saying they're helping has lots of side effects people don't think about:
- it means they've made a public commitment to a project, and suddenly will get bombarded by other projects, making them less willing to engage again
- any failure of the project to run well will also be a reflection of the company, even if it's outside their control.
- it can be seen as an endorsement of a single project, when multiple ones might benefit. Also if that one project becomes problematic it is hard to detangle.
- the commitment to it would make it difficult to move in a different, better direction if needed in the future
They don't need to endorse Asahi to endorse the use of alternative OS on ARM Macs, which wouldn't have any of those downsides. The first Intel Macs were great machines to run Linux on. Later machines had too many compatibility issues. From that experience I'll steer away from Macs as I have no interest in OSX and don't trust them to not break Linux. If they publicly commited to alternative OS friendliness that would go a very long way for me.
If the bar is just supporting the use of alternative OS's, they've already done that.
Craig Federighi (their SVP of software) mentioned that support for other OSs is an explicit goal of their boot setup in interviews.
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It's different with Apple Silicon because their hardware is more differentiated; meaning it might be more interesting for them to see non-macOS usage for it.
I would 10x rather see Apple helping than see Apple say they are helping.
Not saying anything and helping is much better than saying you're helping and doing nothing.
By not being official, they can probably do more internally.
>> By not being official, they can probably do more internally.
People don't often think about that, but in some cases it's very true.
Even it for $REASONS it has to be informal, seeing some active help from Apple is a sight for sore eyes. This is absolutely welcome news.
"Microsoft loves open source, so please ignore the way we are stripping hot reload out of .Net 6 to force you to buy Visual Studio instead" would be an improvement?
Deeds, not words.