Comment by IshKebab
10 months ago
Well written. I think the accusations of drama-hunting are unfounded. What else are you supposed to do in the face of persistent "non-technical nonsense"? Linus doesn't seem to care.
Definitely a shame. I wonder if it would be in Apple's interests to actively support Linux on Mac. It would make Macs more attractive as developer machines, and I don't see how it would disadvantage them.
That's not really Apple's game anymore. They don't really care about selling Macs, what they want to sell you is their ecosystem. So that way you'll get a Mac and an iWatch and an iPhone and whatever else they push out once they get their hooks and lock you in.
> I wonder if it would be in Apple's interests to actively support Linux on Mac
Trust me, we would know by now if it was. It's not.
Things don't happen instantly. You could have doubted it was in Microsoft's interest to support Linux within Windows for years... until they released WSL.
Windows machines already support Linux on the hardware level. Getting an Intel or AMD CPU to virtualize a Linux kernel is simple. Worst case scenario is an Nvidia GPU, but since you only need the compute drivers in WSL you avoid Nvidia's graphical issues. There isn't any work required since the OEMs already did it, the only thing required is Hyper-V.
Apple is selling a custom CPU core that has no driver support for anything but XNU with a BSD userland. It doesn't support UEFI, it depends on Devicetree bindings and would demand constant updating and support to render a "first class" Linux experience. Once again, anyone with a protracted interest in staying supported by upstream Linux should not be using a Mac and praying the community cares enough to make it good. Apple knows it's a novelty, and they're not going to take it seriously because that's just what they do. MacOS and the App Store is profitable, Linux is not.
> It would make Macs more attractive as developer machines, and I don't see how it would disadvantage them.
The only development they want is development inside XCode. Anything else is a hard no.
Are there a lot of dev tools that run on linux but not on Macs?
Mostly because of macos’s unix roots. And you need a third party package manager to boot.
glances at OpenCL, CUDA, Nvidia drivers, Vulkan, strace, gdb, Docker, DXVK and valgrind
Define "a lot" and we can get closer to a common understanding.