Comment by Kina
1 day ago
Apple is on the record as being neutral at worst on the matter and at best weakly supportive. I think there was an article when the M1 came out where it was reported that the Asahi Linux folks met with some Apple developers where they were encouraged to explore the system and report bugs, but that Apple was not going to offer any support.
Apple has also done things such as adding a raw image mode to prevent macOS updates from breaking the boot process for third-party operating systems. Which is only useful for 3rd party operating system development.
Individual developers at apple may be weakly supportive (at best), but apple as a corporation has tended in the opposite direction, of locking down macOS and iOS more and more.
Sure, some developer may have added things like raw image mode, but if someone on high says "wait, people are buying macbooks and then not using the app store?" or as soon as someone's promo is tied to a security feature that breaks third-party OSes... well, don't be surprised when it vanishes. Running any OS but macOS is against ToS, and apple has already shown they are actively hostile to user freedom and choice (with the iOS app store debacle, the iMessage beeper mini mess, and so on). If you care about your freedom and ability to use Linux, you should not use anything Apple has any hand in ever.
Almost everyone buying MacBooks installs applications outside of the App Store, the process for which has never changed (e.g., download it and run the installer or unzip it, use the free open-source package manager of your choice, etc.). I also can't find anything anywhere that suggests there are "terms of service" for Apple's hardware that prohibit installing another operating system on it, and part of Apple being "weakly supportive" of Asahi Linux is making deliberate design decisions to supporting installing third-party OSes on Apple Silicon in the first place. To copy from the Asahi Linux blog,
> Apple formally allows booting third-party operating systems on Apple Silicon Macs. Shortly after the Asahi project started, Apple even added a raw image mode to prevent macOS updates from breaking the boot process for third-party operating systems. This provided no benefit to macOS whatsoever; it merely served to help third-party operating system development.
There are a lot of reasons to be annoyed with Apple, but we don't need to invent new ones, and there's an awful lot of misinformation out there about Macs that conflates how locked down iOS is with the Mac (combined with the insistence that Macs are going to be locked down just as much as iPhones within the next few years, which I have literally been hearing since the iPhone came out in 2007). There are some things that are more difficult to do on macOS Tahoe than they were on MacOS Leopard twenty years ago (like, apparently, resize windows), but there is nothing that is "locked down" in a way that makes something I remember doing then literally impossible to do now.