Comment by sneak
11 hours ago
Why wouldn’t bringing up an OS on new hardware be necessary? Apple has no obligation or incentive whatsoever to write Linux device drivers…
Do you think Apple should be funding this work out of revenue? What possible justification could they provide for such a waste of money? This will not sell any more laptops.
Even if Asahi didn’t do it, the work would still be necessary by someone inside Apple. Drivers don’t spontaneously appear from the ether.
Nobody is complaining about code not being provided. It’s more the schematics that are sitting in a drawer in Cupertino that would make the painstaking reverse engineering unnecessary. Someone at Apple would have a much easier time.
Well... every reverse engineering project is a schematic sitting in someone's drawer.
All of that IP stolen by OpenAI and they didn’t think to buy some goodwill lifting a copy of an engineer’s manual to their GPUs…
It would be nice if Apple provided documentation, not even code.
They could also hire somebody to sabotage this work in some ways if it helps with the bottom line. That's totally reasonable thing to do that I will defend in that case, because I would love to see the trillion dollar corporation become 10 trillion dollar corporation, because reasons.
Apple doesn’t need to hire anyone. It’s a complete waste of their time if three former Apple silicon-engineers can start their own company Nuvia which licensed, designed and engineered Arm chips, said company was later bought out by Qualcomm for 1.2 billion dollars, if they can do it, there are many other smart people in the world that can do the same after all, it has been about 35 years since the birth of Linux. Where are they?
Every time something new comes out hardware wise in the tech world , there’s this dying quail chorus of Linux geeks, who cry about it, not having Linux support.
The only long-term solution is for a group of smart talented people to get together and take out a license from Arm and proceed to design a chip with Linux support from ground zero however, such an endeavor probably would make everyone in the Linux world mad/unhappy because in order to do something well/professional said group would have to fork Linux in order for it and hardware to have the best chance at success selling to the general public you know the group that just wants to use a computer and not jump underneath the hood to tinker with every little thing to get it working.
Of course they do not have the obligation to do so. This is more about Apple doing a nice gesture to the "owners" of their devices
They could open source their software so others could utilise the code instead of needing reverse engineering
Darwin is open source has been for 25-26 years is it too much hard work?
https://github.com/PureDarwin/PureDarwin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
https://www.puredarwin.org/
They've done the userspace bringup for linux since apple silicon servers allegedly exist. The drivers exist already so just throwing the device tree over the wall can't be that hard. Nobody is asking for systemready/UEFI or mainline linux.
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200658399-0645/linux-ke...
I suspect that they might be changing their mind about upstreaming?
PureDarwin doesn't work on any of the M-series machines, and according to the Github commit log, hasn't been updated since 2024.
> Apple has no obligation or incentive whatsoever to write Linux device drivers…
In ideal world the society would make it an obligation for general computers to remain free (as in freedom) and accessible.
Nobody likes hearing the realpolitik of the Linux/Mac situation but you're not wrong.
Apple had no obligation to write Windows drivers for Boot Camp either but did for over a decade. They could do the same for Linux even if they never open sourced them.
There was a strong financial incentive to transition Windows users over to MacOS, by giving them a halfway point.
I remember overhearing an older person being explained Boot Camp while waiting for my iPhone to be repaired and it was very obviously a way for them to sell a Macbook so they could dual-use windows on it to run some windows apps. The ultimate pull would eventually be MacOS because it was easier (if you already had a macbook and iphone). Apple knew they'd get curious eventually and see how awful the Windows UX was.
The main argument for Linux on Macbooks would be developers but that doesn't mean there's a similar strong marketing/sales incentive to do so. Especially since there's no shortage of devs who default to mac (like legacy windows corporate users). Apple clearly doesn't see much money to be made by creating an olive branch offering to Linux users.