Noone is doing that with ARM MacBooks.

Yet. Plenty of people have with Intel ones - I’m one of them. My first experience with Linux was on a 2016 MBpro. And inevitably people will do the same with the silicon Macs, likely using Asahi it seems.

Why are some of y'all so hostile to this idea?

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bigyabai 11 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not inevitable. That's not what that word means.

Intel Macs supported Linux because they used Intel's Linux drivers and supported bog-standard UEFI. There are no preexisting drivers or DeviceTree files published by Apple for Linux. There is no UEFI implimentation, just a proprietary bootloader that can be updated post-hoc to deny booting into third-party OSes.

> Why are some of y'all so hostile to this idea?

I would love for Linux to support as many ARM devices as possible. Unfortunately, it requires continuous effort from the OEM to be viable. I've bought Qualcomm, Rockchip and Broadcom boards before, none of them have been supported for half as long as my x86 machines are. Nevermind how fast ARM architectures become obsolete.

It feels like Apple is really the only hostile party here, and they coincidentally decide whether or not you get to use third-party OSes.

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Forgeties79 11 hours ago | parent [-]

It is inevitable. I guarantee you there will be people who run Linux on their silicon Macs. I don’t know how you could possibly hold a stance that no one ever will.

Apple is very hostile to it. It won’t stop everyone though. It’ll continue to be niche but it’s happening.

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bigyabai 10 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not inevitable. It's fragile. Go boot up your old iPad; that should be well-studied, right? We ought to know how to boot into Linux on an ARM machine that old, it's only fair.

Except, you can't. The bootloader is the same iBoot process that your Apple Silicon machine uses, with mitigations to prevent unsigned OSes or persistent coldboot. All the Cydia exploits in the world won't put Linux back on the menu for iPhone or iPad users. And the same thing could happen to your Mac with an OTA update.

It is entirely possible for Apple to lock down the devices further. There's no guarantee they won't.

	▲	musictubes 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Sigh. Apple cannot lockdown the Mac. You can’t have a development machine that is incapable of running arbitrary code. Back when they still did WWDC live they said that software development was the biggest professional bloc of Mac users. I’m certain that these days development is the biggest driver of the expensive Macs. No one has ever made a decent argument as to why Apple would lock down the Mac that would also explain why they haven’t done it yet. Passivity isn’t hostility. There isn’t any evidence that Apple is considering locking down the Mac. They could have easily done that with the transition to their own silicon but they didn’t despite the endless conspiracy theories.
	▲	Forgeties79 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		We have been talking about laptops from the very beginning. I don’t know why you keep talking about iPads.