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Arm Macs are kinda locked down, but that's just for now. We'll see over the next year or so what the community comes up with as far as natively installing Linux

Arm Macs are kinda locked down, but that's just for now. We'll see over the next year or so what the community comes up with as far as natively installing Linux goes.

my123 6y ago
They are not. Locked down = Apple explicitly prevents it through code signing. Here, Apple doesn't prevent it in any way, and drivers can be developed. (drivers not present in Linux is not and will never mean that a device is locked down, don't stretch things please)
- rjzzleep 6y ago
  I see, and having to reverse engineer drivers to be able to run anything else on it to you somehow means that it's open?
  - my123 6y ago
    Not locked down and open aren't the same things, don't conflate matters/deflect to another thing please.
    - rjzzleep 6y ago
      You're the one who's conflating things. The fact that you somehow think that someone _no longer_ locking you out of their bootloader is now considered open just shows how far we've gone off the rails. By that definition 99.99% of devices are open because you can just swap out the rom. All you need to do is figure out the pin and wiring and the serial protocols involved in communicating. My ducky keyboard is NOT open even though I replaced the firmware with my own. What kind of insane logic is that? And the fact that you and the other person here keeps conflating ANY documentation about ANY part of the hardware as contributing to Linux is even more ridiculous.
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        There were no claims of openness, because the opposite of “locked down” is not “completely open and here are the spec sheets”. Apple silicon devices let you boot your own code, which means they are not locked down, like say your iPhone is. FWIW, the person you’re responding to is contributing to Linux for this hardware, so I wouldn’t grill them on conflating things ;)
        rjzzleep 6y ago
        I've contributed to linux for the Mac EFI myself, so that argument is moot. We clearly have different understandings of openness. I also wrote a savage driver for mplayer in the early 2000s but just because it was possible to write a driver for it, that doesn't mean the hardware was open in any reasonable sense of the word. Again, just because they decided to allow you to disable secure boot on those devices, probably mainly to drive adoption of their arch, doesn't mean it is any more open than a lock you can pick with your own lockpicking set. The irony is that the jailbreaking crowd has spend so much time trying to break into apple devices that in comparison this now seems open. EDIT: Also can we stop pretending that english isn't english and the opposite of locked isn't unlocked/open?
        saagarjha 6y ago
        Nobody brought "open" into this discussion other than you. The claim was that this hardware is not locked down, and it is not. I don't think there is much more to say because this computer is literally the definition of not locked down because they give you the key to the lock.
        rjzzleep 6y ago
        Fair enough, but the GP actually did no mention of locked down. He said kinda locked down. Then your jailbreaking buddy defined that as "it's only locked down if it is a secure boot device where no third party access". When it's clear that that's not what the GP meant, not to mention that is english the opposite of locked is open/unlocked. Since we're still speaking english, "not locked" means open. Not to mention that apple can silently overwrite this at any point in time with a MacOS update. As they have done so before leaving plenty of macs bricked because of broken SPI flash[1]. I share the excitement for the M1 chip, but you would have to be blind not to see this as troubling for the future of open computing. [1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/395032 https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/395032
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    For a very long time, that was the position Linux was in on the desktop. Manufacturers providing drivers, or sufficient info to write them, for Linux, is pretty new, and still not exactly universal.

Arm Macs are kinda locked down, but that's just for now. We'll see over the next year or so what the community comes up with as far as natively installing Linux goes.

my123 6y ago

They are not. Locked down = Apple explicitly prevents it through code signing. Here, Apple doesn't prevent it in any way, and drivers can be developed. (drivers not present in Linux is not and will never mean that a device is locked down, don't stretch things please)

rjzzleep 6y ago
I see, and having to reverse engineer drivers to be able to run anything else on it to you somehow means that it's open?
- my123 6y ago
  Not locked down and open aren't the same things, don't conflate matters/deflect to another thing please.
  - rjzzleep 6y ago
    You're the one who's conflating things. The fact that you somehow think that someone _no longer_ locking you out of their bootloader is now considered open just shows how far we've gone off the rails. By that definition 99.99% of devices are open because you can just swap out the rom. All you need to do is figure out the pin and wiring and the serial protocols involved in communicating. My ducky keyboard is NOT open even though I replaced the firmware with my own. What kind of insane logic is that? And the fact that you and the other person here keeps conflating ANY documentation about ANY part of the hardware as contributing to Linux is even more ridiculous.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      There were no claims of openness, because the opposite of “locked down” is not “completely open and here are the spec sheets”. Apple silicon devices let you boot your own code, which means they are not locked down, like say your iPhone is. FWIW, the person you’re responding to is contributing to Linux for this hardware, so I wouldn’t grill them on conflating things ;)
      - rjzzleep 6y ago
        I've contributed to linux for the Mac EFI myself, so that argument is moot. We clearly have different understandings of openness. I also wrote a savage driver for mplayer in the early 2000s but just because it was possible to write a driver for it, that doesn't mean the hardware was open in any reasonable sense of the word. Again, just because they decided to allow you to disable secure boot on those devices, probably mainly to drive adoption of their arch, doesn't mean it is any more open than a lock you can pick with your own lockpicking set. The irony is that the jailbreaking crowd has spend so much time trying to break into apple devices that in comparison this now seems open. EDIT: Also can we stop pretending that english isn't english and the opposite of locked isn't unlocked/open?
        saagarjha 6y ago
        Nobody brought "open" into this discussion other than you. The claim was that this hardware is not locked down, and it is not. I don't think there is much more to say because this computer is literally the definition of not locked down because they give you the key to the lock.
        rjzzleep 6y ago
        Fair enough, but the GP actually did no mention of locked down. He said kinda locked down. Then your jailbreaking buddy defined that as "it's only locked down if it is a secure boot device where no third party access". When it's clear that that's not what the GP meant, not to mention that is english the opposite of locked is open/unlocked. Since we're still speaking english, "not locked" means open. Not to mention that apple can silently overwrite this at any point in time with a MacOS update. As they have done so before leaving plenty of macs bricked because of broken SPI flash[1]. I share the excitement for the M1 chip, but you would have to be blind not to see this as troubling for the future of open computing. [1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/395032 https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/395032
- rsynnott 6y ago
  For a very long time, that was the position Linux was in on the desktop. Manufacturers providing drivers, or sufficient info to write them, for Linux, is pretty new, and still not exactly universal.