Comment by kokonokko1337
9 hours ago
> "It also happens to be a Mac, with an operating system that looks nice and doesn’t suck"
Yes Apple has some of the best hardware out there, albeit overpriced. But the software is such a hindrance and I can't take anyone that states otherwise seriously. If only it had proper Linux support (and the Asahi people do an amazing job but you can reverse-engineer only so many stuff with limited funding, and then you have to do it again for new models). MacOS is good if you just want to have a standard experience, which to be fair is most people. It's good for just setting up an LLM server I guess since the hardware is a perfect fit. I wouldn't touch it otherwise.
The Asahi Linux group goal should have been organizing themselves by taking out a license on Arm processor (probably too late with the present owners) and building a new Linux Distro to go with it instead of being a parasite on someone else’s existing hardware, if the three ex-engineers from Apple could do something like that why couldn’t they aim higher?
Why waste time spending years reverse engineering. Wouldn’t it have been easier to raise money for such an endeavor? I hope someone will come along in the future in kindergarten, junior high or high school who doesn’t know any better will try something like this.
What exactly is missing from macOS that makes you feel the need for Linux?
I get it on Windows systems, at least when someone wants to use Linux-type tooling. But macOS already supports pretty much all of that natively?
Comparing to Linux is too general. You need to say what distro and what install level. I really only use headless Linux, but I've never logged into a fresh install and not had to do some sort of 'apt install devel-packages' equivalent for which ever distro being used. That's the same thing with macOS after choosing which package manager to use. I don't see how Linux vs macOS is very different
> What exactly is missing from macOS that makes you feel the need for Linux?
For starters, the source code.
And why would you need that to run LLMs?
Apart from that, for the UNIX part, the source is available for quite a few components:
https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions
notably also the kernel
https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu
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They say, not doing anything with Linux’s source code other than mentioning its existence.