Prominent Linux hacker Hector Martin launched a Patreon page to bring Linux to Apple Silicon Macs. This is particularly interesting, because I do not remember any initiative this big to bring Linux support to Intel or PowerPC Macs before.
Looking at this guy’s background, I’m sure that we could expect a decent experience running Linux on Apple Silicon. This could easily increase the longevity of these machines by factors of 2, 3.
Also by the time this initiative gives its first fruits, I’m sure reusing these drivers for Haiku may become a possibility. This makes it even more exciting.
Unfortunately, Linux drivers are not the main basis for Haiku ones, so the Linux omnipresence does not help much. But usually FreeBSD support comes some time after Linux support. And after that Haiku manpower is necessary to actually bring Haiku drivers in existence.
Right. Apple provides sourcecode ( https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-6153.141.1/ ) not because they are forced legally to do so, but because thry try a little to be nice to other open source projects (even if they will keep their “secret sauce” ingredients to themselves).
In fact Apple never uses anything released under GPLv3 or later because their lawyer decided it was too restrictive for them (in particular, I guess, the parts about patents). And that’s the reason they worked a lot on improving llvm/clang until they could replace gcc with it, for example.
Right, but mostly with quirks. And modern Macs do have special hardware that needs special tweaks and drivers. Having someone working full time on Apple-brand hardware, it would give the possibility of, for instance, drivers for the fingerprint reader or macOS level smooth trackpad support, or much better battery life.
And we get to have this in a much reasonable time period, rather than in a span of multiple years with commits every now and then.
uhm, you know, it’s not. it’s laggy, GUI is sluggish, with a lot of artifacts - tearing, black rectangles, delays etc. it consumes a lot CPU (as always for linux), it causes a lot of overheating, often resulting in throttling (and pray for it being at least somehow implemented, otherwise magical smoke will appear and your board will melt down), funny, boards with meaty heatsinks and often with a small fan, running linux, overheat, whereas the same SoCs, packed tightly inside of tablets/phones and running android don’t. a “mystery”. linux is not the best for these ARM small devices, that would be offensive to the meaning of the adjective “the best”, it’s just the only one, currently available, from the set of general purpose desktop OSs (because android isn’t that and BSDs need to catch up yet a long way to be close to even cr4ppy linux capabilities and finally, MS and SoC vendors should care about Windows support). but android, which is no matter, that is based on linux, being much better polished and sauced by “evil corporations” always beats “pure” linux and makes it look like a crappy javascript web browser emulation of an OS. just watch any SBC review by ETA Prime, and first his words always are: I will use android, because with it, you can get best results, but in future, I’ll try linux blablabla - a polite way to admit, how “the best” linux is on these tiny, power efficient ARM devices.
seems like this forum site decided to join facebook/IG fall down.
If you admit that Windows was once ported to ARM and even was in market, if you admit that *BSD OSes are there and Linux is there, you should also admit that Linux on ARM runs better than Windows on ARM and better than *BSD on ARM. This is exactly the meaning of phrase “the best”. But even if you ignore Windows and *BSD and only consider Linux on ARM as if no other OS would be available on that platform, this also qualifies it as “the best” OS for ARM. I never said it is “perfect”, but only “the best”.
nobody should. because it would not be true. yet again - on cheap and not so cheap ARM SoCs, Android runs circles around Linux, the letter just looks like its logo - stoned. Windows, where support is present (snapdragon SoCs) runs better, than Linux. it’s because both linux is a mess and there is no serious support for it (nobody in this segment cares about anything else, than android). I don’t know how much of contribution to the linux mediocrity each of these factors add, but the fact is there - often linux as a desktop is not usable even on pretty powerful SBCs. this is anything, but “best”. And since I’ve tried it by myself, I leave the right to myself to decide whether I “should” admit it’s “the best” or absolutely opposite.
other, than that, I agree, that linux on “apple silicone” b00b5 isn’t going to have any help for alternative OSs like Haiku, ReactOS etc.
The broadcom chips used in rpi are not aimed at or good at portability or power efficiency, which accounts for the need for cooling. Even if you run android on a pi 4 you will need some form of cooling. Android essentially uses the Linux kernel, and most criticisms of the kernel will apply to both.
