Comment by dagmx

4 years ago

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

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dagmx

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pedrocr  4 years ago

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.

  • dagmx  4 years ago

    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.

    • sigjuice  4 years ago

      Is there another interview that goes into the details of Apple's boot setup goals?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hg9F1Qjv3iU&t=3785s

      In this one, Craig Federighi says “We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system. Purely virtualization is the route. These hypervisors can be very efficient, so the need to direct boot shouldn’t really be the concern.”

    • pedrocr  4 years ago

      Allowing booting other OSs is different than actually supporting those efforts with documentation for example. The problem with Intel Macs is not being able to boot another kernel it's all the device support that's now gone.

      2 replies →

  • dochtman  4 years ago

    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.