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Apart from being wrong, that narrative doesn't even make sense as an intro to this article: the criticism was directed at the new MBP hardware – so why would th

Apart from being wrong, that narrative doesn't even make sense as an intro to this article: the criticism was directed at the new MBP hardware – so why would these super-professional uber-users buy it and then replace the OS? (Not to mention that, if I understood it correctly, Linux currently doesn't even support the keyboard, and is otherwise probably in its usual desktop mode of "WLAN, Sound, or functioning sleep – choose any two".

prodigal_erik 10y ago
The article talked about how Linux supports several models, not just the latest one. If I owned an older Macbook but now regarded the product line to be doomed, I'd want to know how painful it would be to start migrating to a different platform on my current hardware.
WWLink 10y ago
I wouldn't necessarily blame the "WLAN, sound, or sleep" thing on linux. I'd blame that on cheap parts manufacturers that refuse to distribute open source drivers for fear of releasing company secrets and lack of profit margins to operate on.
- DasIch 10y ago
  Or it could be that Apple just really doesn't care and most Apple customers don't either.
- dispose13432 10y ago
  >I wouldn't necessarily blame the "WLAN, sound, or sleep" thing on linux. I'd blame that on cheap parts manufacturers that refuse to distribute open source drivers for fear of releasing company secrets and lack of profit margins to operate on. I don't understand why would anyone not open-source their drivers? What's NVIDIA's secret sauce? Being able to build great silicon. What's Intel's secret sauce? Being able to build great silicon. What's Samsung's secret sauce? Being able to put together great silicon. So let's say tomorrow Nvidia open-sources all their drivers? So now you know that which registers do you use to shade what. So now what's AMD going to do? Copy the interface? It's already copied. Most users use standard OpenGL/DirectX to communicate with their board. I mean look at Intel. You practically know what's what there. You can make an OS on (at least older) Intel chips without drivers. Did it help anyone compete?
  - vacri 10y ago
    As I understand it, Nvidia and AMD can't open-source their graphics drivers are parts of them are under third-party NDA.
    - dispose13432 10y ago
      >As I understand it, Nvidia and AMD can't open-source their graphics drivers are parts of them are under third-party NDA. OK, so the question is upstream. Why would Qualcomm, ARM, or any upstream care about people finding out the interface to their hardware? What secrets are there in the drivers?
      - Someone 10y ago
        One argument I've heard is that they fear patent lawsuits because it might give hints as to how their hardware works.
        dispose13432 10y ago
        How would it? As I understand things (which I'm clearly not an expert at all), CPU opcode is like an ABI, put this value into register A, this value into register B, and a magic opcode into register C, and poof, the register D contains the value of A+B. A driver will say that you put int X into memory point A, Y into memory point A+1, and call function C with argument of A and D will contain the multiplied number. So how does #2 protect IP over #1?
        Someone 10y ago
        Let's say your driver exports an API that computes f(x,y,z) where the math turns out such that g(h(x,y),i(y,z)) is an easier and/or numerically better way to compute it. Let's also say your hardware implements g, h and i, but doesn't wire them together yet. So, your driver's code calls the three functions. Unknown to you, the trick to use that decomposition is patented. if you release your driver's source code, you make it easier for the patent holder to figure out that you are violating their patent (your programmers might even have made it patently obvious by mentioning the paper describing the trick in a comment) Unlikely? Maybe, but the way patents are written, who knows? For an almost random example, I searched for "driver code and hardware patents". The first link I clicked was https://www.google.ch/patents/US20090006831 https://www.google.ch/patents/US20090006831. Reading that, I wouldn't know what driver would _not_ infringe on it. Also, there are many patents on ways to move data around efficiently. Avoiding all of them while still writing a performant driver at not be possible.
- umanwizard 10y ago
  "Blame" might be the wrong word since nobody involved with Linux has committed any moral failing here. It can certainly be analyzed as a drawback of the open-source model. Microsoft has a lot of resources to incentivize hardware manufacturers to go to great lengths to make sure their drivers work well with Windows. No organization connected with "Desktop Linux" has that.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  And don't want to reveal the number of ugly hacks they have implemented to get things working in the first place. the reason Linux drivers are a "mess" is that the hardware they are trying to support are a mess, and said mess is papered over in Windows by the OEM drivers.
drvdevd 10y ago
Although I have experienced that choice on Apple hardware recently (2015 mbp retina), lately Linux seems to, let's say, 95% Just Work on non-apple x86 hardware for me, WLAN, sound, and suspend/resume. [edit] and this is with any distro, perhaps with more or less setup work
- kagamine 10y ago
  I find sleep/resume is successful when the proprietary driver is installed, nouveau isn't doing it doing it for me on Ubuntu derived 16.x distros (this month I have tried KDE Neon and Bodhi). The problem though, is that installing the drivers can be a pain. Last time I tried I soft bricked the PC and ended up doing a full reinstall to save time. As someone further down this thread said, what advantage is there these days in Nvidia not open-sourcing the drivers? They are still going to be selling the display cards. The other problem for Linux I have encountered recently that burned through my free time was updateing the bios, there are no bios updates with Linux installers, which is annoying because the bios is update is OS agnostic. I had to create a bootable USB drive from a windows program (luckily I have a Windows PC for work) and boot from that. But the how-to guide from HP was lacking in details, and on one PC the program doesn't allow me to create the drive on one PC for use on another, so no bios update there. The problems I have with Linux never seem to be to do with Linux, it is almost always hardware manufacturers being obstinate and refusing to share their toys with other adults.
  - drvdevd 10y ago
    Yeah in the future, I will certainly be buying hardware that is designed to run desktop/server Linux (and support features you mention like BIOS upgrades easily as well) or is otherwise known to support it well. No more random COTS buys for me without research first. I'm done burning hours on this sort of weird crap vendors want to give us. So if a vendor wants to sell me a PC or enterprise anything, it needs to support Linux well. I also don't plan to purchase any brand new Apple hardware. I will only adopt Apple hardware late (and used) and will only run OS X if absolutely necessary for some reason.
  - rodgerd 10y ago
l1k 10y ago
Author here. As explained in the intro, folks like antirez are considering moving back to Linux and in his linked HN comment he specifically talks about trying Linux on the MacBook he's currently using to see where he's headed. The article seeks to give these folks in particular a helping hand in understanding what works and what doesn't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12820490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12820490 That said, the kernel developers working on Mac hardware support aren't Apple haters. We're fans. I also don't share the "not for professionals" criticism that was widely directed at the new MacBook Pro fully: E.g. as stated in the article, the four Thunderbolt ports are interesting for HPC applications as you can build a portable compute cluster with up to five fully-meshed high-speed networked nodes. If that's not professional I don't know what is.
- andrepd 10y ago
  > E.g. as stated in the article, the four Thunderbolt ports are interesting for HPC applications as you can build a portable compute cluster with up to five fully-meshed high-speed networked nodes. If that's not professional I don't know what is. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? Are you implying a MacBook cluster is an effective HPC platform?
  - l1k 10y ago
    Let's say you're a penetration tester, you're on-site trying to break into a network, have no Internet connectivity (e.g. because you're in a shielded data center or don't want to raise suspicion) and need to crack some passwords. 5x Skylake CPU + 5x Polaris GPU would be a sufficiently beefy platform for Hashcat, and it would fit into your backpack. Or let's say you want to quickly set up a Hadoop cluster to crunch some data. Five machines is certainly small as HPC clusters go, and in reality you'll probably have to cap this to four machines because you need one port to attach to a power socket if you need the cluster for more than 2-3 hours. Nevertheless the 4x 40 GBit/s Thunderbolt ports offer some really interesting possibilities, and I'm not aware of any other portable machine that has this right now.
    - skynetv2 10y ago

prodigal_erik 10y ago

The article talked about how Linux supports several models, not just the latest one. If I owned an older Macbook but now regarded the product line to be doomed, I'd want to know how painful it would be to start migrating to a different platform on my current hardware.

WWLink 10y ago

I wouldn't necessarily blame the "WLAN, sound, or sleep" thing on linux. I'd blame that on cheap parts manufacturers that refuse to distribute open source drivers for fear of releasing company secrets and lack of profit margins to operate on.

DasIch 10y ago
Or it could be that Apple just really doesn't care and most Apple customers don't either.
dispose13432 10y ago
>I wouldn't necessarily blame the "WLAN, sound, or sleep" thing on linux. I'd blame that on cheap parts manufacturers that refuse to distribute open source drivers for fear of releasing company secrets and lack of profit margins to operate on. I don't understand why would anyone not open-source their drivers? What's NVIDIA's secret sauce? Being able to build great silicon. What's Intel's secret sauce? Being able to build great silicon. What's Samsung's secret sauce? Being able to put together great silicon. So let's say tomorrow Nvidia open-sources all their drivers? So now you know that which registers do you use to shade what. So now what's AMD going to do? Copy the interface? It's already copied. Most users use standard OpenGL/DirectX to communicate with their board. I mean look at Intel. You practically know what's what there. You can make an OS on (at least older) Intel chips without drivers. Did it help anyone compete?
- vacri 10y ago
  As I understand it, Nvidia and AMD can't open-source their graphics drivers are parts of them are under third-party NDA.
  - dispose13432 10y ago
    >As I understand it, Nvidia and AMD can't open-source their graphics drivers are parts of them are under third-party NDA. OK, so the question is upstream. Why would Qualcomm, ARM, or any upstream care about people finding out the interface to their hardware? What secrets are there in the drivers?
    - Someone 10y ago
      One argument I've heard is that they fear patent lawsuits because it might give hints as to how their hardware works.
      - dispose13432 10y ago
        How would it? As I understand things (which I'm clearly not an expert at all), CPU opcode is like an ABI, put this value into register A, this value into register B, and a magic opcode into register C, and poof, the register D contains the value of A+B. A driver will say that you put int X into memory point A, Y into memory point A+1, and call function C with argument of A and D will contain the multiplied number. So how does #2 protect IP over #1?
        Someone 10y ago
        Let's say your driver exports an API that computes f(x,y,z) where the math turns out such that g(h(x,y),i(y,z)) is an easier and/or numerically better way to compute it. Let's also say your hardware implements g, h and i, but doesn't wire them together yet. So, your driver's code calls the three functions. Unknown to you, the trick to use that decomposition is patented. if you release your driver's source code, you make it easier for the patent holder to figure out that you are violating their patent (your programmers might even have made it patently obvious by mentioning the paper describing the trick in a comment) Unlikely? Maybe, but the way patents are written, who knows? For an almost random example, I searched for "driver code and hardware patents". The first link I clicked was https://www.google.ch/patents/US20090006831 https://www.google.ch/patents/US20090006831. Reading that, I wouldn't know what driver would _not_ infringe on it. Also, there are many patents on ways to move data around efficiently. Avoiding all of them while still writing a performant driver at not be possible.
umanwizard 10y ago
"Blame" might be the wrong word since nobody involved with Linux has committed any moral failing here. It can certainly be analyzed as a drawback of the open-source model. Microsoft has a lot of resources to incentivize hardware manufacturers to go to great lengths to make sure their drivers work well with Windows. No organization connected with "Desktop Linux" has that.
digi_owl 10y ago
And don't want to reveal the number of ugly hacks they have implemented to get things working in the first place. the reason Linux drivers are a "mess" is that the hardware they are trying to support are a mess, and said mess is papered over in Windows by the OEM drivers.

drvdevd 10y ago

Although I have experienced that choice on Apple hardware recently (2015 mbp retina), lately Linux seems to, let's say, 95% Just Work on non-apple x86 hardware for me, WLAN, sound, and suspend/resume. [edit] and this is with any distro, perhaps with more or less setup work

kagamine 10y ago
I find sleep/resume is successful when the proprietary driver is installed, nouveau isn't doing it doing it for me on Ubuntu derived 16.x distros (this month I have tried KDE Neon and Bodhi). The problem though, is that installing the drivers can be a pain. Last time I tried I soft bricked the PC and ended up doing a full reinstall to save time. As someone further down this thread said, what advantage is there these days in Nvidia not open-sourcing the drivers? They are still going to be selling the display cards. The other problem for Linux I have encountered recently that burned through my free time was updateing the bios, there are no bios updates with Linux installers, which is annoying because the bios is update is OS agnostic. I had to create a bootable USB drive from a windows program (luckily I have a Windows PC for work) and boot from that. But the how-to guide from HP was lacking in details, and on one PC the program doesn't allow me to create the drive on one PC for use on another, so no bios update there. The problems I have with Linux never seem to be to do with Linux, it is almost always hardware manufacturers being obstinate and refusing to share their toys with other adults.
- drvdevd 10y ago
  Yeah in the future, I will certainly be buying hardware that is designed to run desktop/server Linux (and support features you mention like BIOS upgrades easily as well) or is otherwise known to support it well. No more random COTS buys for me without research first. I'm done burning hours on this sort of weird crap vendors want to give us. So if a vendor wants to sell me a PC or enterprise anything, it needs to support Linux well. I also don't plan to purchase any brand new Apple hardware. I will only adopt Apple hardware late (and used) and will only run OS X if absolutely necessary for some reason.
- rodgerd 10y ago

l1k 10y ago

Author here. As explained in the intro, folks like antirez are considering moving back to Linux and in his linked HN comment he specifically talks about trying Linux on the MacBook he's currently using to see where he's headed. The article seeks to give these folks in particular a helping hand in understanding what works and what doesn't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12820490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12820490 That said, the kernel developers working on Mac hardware support aren't Apple haters. We're fans. I also don't share the "not for professionals" criticism that was widely directed at the new MacBook Pro fully: E.g. as stated in the article, the four Thunderbolt ports are interesting for HPC applications as you can build a portable compute cluster with up to five fully-meshed high-speed networked nodes. If that's not professional I don't know what is.

andrepd 10y ago
> E.g. as stated in the article, the four Thunderbolt ports are interesting for HPC applications as you can build a portable compute cluster with up to five fully-meshed high-speed networked nodes. If that's not professional I don't know what is. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? Are you implying a MacBook cluster is an effective HPC platform?
- l1k 10y ago
  Let's say you're a penetration tester, you're on-site trying to break into a network, have no Internet connectivity (e.g. because you're in a shielded data center or don't want to raise suspicion) and need to crack some passwords. 5x Skylake CPU + 5x Polaris GPU would be a sufficiently beefy platform for Hashcat, and it would fit into your backpack. Or let's say you want to quickly set up a Hadoop cluster to crunch some data. Five machines is certainly small as HPC clusters go, and in reality you'll probably have to cap this to four machines because you need one port to attach to a power socket if you need the cluster for more than 2-3 hours. Nevertheless the 4x 40 GBit/s Thunderbolt ports offer some really interesting possibilities, and I'm not aware of any other portable machine that has this right now.
  - skynetv2 10y ago