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Running an alternative OS "natively" on a Mac doesn't seem very appealing to me. It's almost guaranteed you will never fully get Wi-Fi, audio, graphics accelera

Running an alternative OS "natively" on a Mac doesn't seem very appealing to me. It's almost guaranteed you will never fully get Wi-Fi, audio, graphics acceleration, the trackpad, etc. working flawlessly, especially on the M1 where almost every component is Apple proprietary and it's not a matter of loading, say, some common Intel graphics driver. On the other hand, virtualization _already_ lets you run whatever arm64 BSD, Linux, or Windows that you want. The trackpad and everything else will work flawlessly thanks to guest additions. Yes, you make some tradeoffs -- you sacrifice a core, a few GB of RAM, some disk space for an OS you don't _really_ want to be running. But I'm skeptical that these are not better tradeoffs than constantly using a hacked-together and half-broken OS. To me the ideal solution is not that Corellium or Marcan or whoever reverse engineers the drivers to a sufficient degree. I'd rather see Apple (or the Hackintosh types) release a tiny variant of macOS that contains hardware drivers and Hypervisor.framework and not much else. It could be the next generation of Boot Camp and it would probably take less engineering effort for them to maintain while satisfying the small segment of customers interested in running other operating systems.

sedatk 6y ago
> you will never fully get Wi-Fi, audio, graphics acceleration, the trackpad, etc I agree with your sentiment, but that isn't as serious as you say on, say, M1 Minis used as servers and that's probably where OpenBSD would shine.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I absolutely expect Asahi to get all of those things working in due course. Lots of smart people are working on it.
- rgovostes 6y ago
  It doesn't feel like it's the best use of their talents, though.
  - MagnumPIG 6y ago
    Neither is making a black box a good use of Apple's talents, yet here we are.
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    I'd say let people decide for themselves how to apply their talents.
kitsunesoba 6y ago
> On the other hand, virtualization _already_ lets you run whatever arm64 BSD, Linux, or Windows that you want. The trackpad and everything else will work flawlessly thanks to guest additions. Yes, you make some tradeoffs -- you sacrifice a core, a few GB of RAM, some disk space for an OS you don't _really_ want to be running. But I'm skeptical that these are not better tradeoffs than constantly using a hacked-together and half-broken OS. True in theory, but at least with Linux I've found that desktop environments exhibit a slight but maddening level of sluggishness in VMs, no matter if it's GNOME, KDE, XFCE, or MATE. If all you need is a commandline Linux VMs are great but I'd go insane trying to use one as a graphical desktop for an extended period.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Really, that goes for any guest OS other than maybe Windows, and Windows is different only because VM developers have poured an enormous amount of time and money into it. You can get rid of the sluggishness with GPU passthrough... but then the guest OS would still need GPU drivers.
  - tluyben2 6y ago
    It would be to Apple's advantage somewhat to make that happen right? Apple wants to sell hardware and does not mind people running virtualised Windows or Linux on it?
    - pushrax 6y ago
      Apple also tends to prefer pushing their users to their closed software ecosystem. Given the likely low demand for passthrough on these devices, I kind of doubt they'll implement it in the foreseeable future.
    - presentation 6y ago
      They also sell services though, and their products reinforce one another so that once you’re bought into their ecosystem it ties you to Apple products in perpetuity. I know because it happened to me; doesn’t happen if you’re not actually using the OS.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> Running an alternative OS "natively" on a Mac doesn't seem very appealing to me. It's almost guaranteed you will never fully get Wi-Fi, audio, graphics acceleration, the trackpad, etc. working flawlessly, especially on the M1 where almost every component is Apple proprietary and it's not a matter of loading, say, the right Intel graphics driver. It's not appealing to me now. In 9 or 10 years when Apple has stopped shipping new versions of MacOS for the platform, it will be much more interesting for me. Of course by then it's just a curiosity or fun project, not something I need for day to day. And by then, much of the wifi/ graphics/ audio issues will be solved.
- adamcstephens 6y ago
  I wouldn't be so sure that wifi/graphics/audio will ever be solved. It's possible, but not guaranteed. There are whole generations of Intel Mac systems that have never received support for these. https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
amatecha 6y ago
literally just installed OpenBSD on my iMac G4 last week, haha (oh yeah, everything works flawlessly btw, including graphics acceleration)
- rgovostes 6y ago
  The iMac G4 didn't support virtualization, so booting an alternative OS is more attractive. And the Nvidia GPU is probably easier to find cross-platform drivers for. New drivers or some sort of IOKit compatibility layer need to be developed for the M1 GPU (which is orders of magnitude more complex). (I can run OpenBSD on any modern piece of hardware, though; the novelty and nostalgia are in running Mac OS 9 on that.)
  - anthk 6y ago
    It did. Check Mac On Linux. The iMac G4 didn't support virtualization,
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    I think most people would prefer not having an extra OS underneath when possible. Also, the G4 iMac is a special piece of hardware in my book. I'd love to Frankenstein an M1 G4 iMac.
  - fulafel 6y ago
    It's a PowerPC architecture CPU so from hardware POV it supports virtualization out of the box[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popek_and_Goldberg_virtualization_requirements#PowerPC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popek_and_Goldberg_virtualizat....
  - amatecha 6y ago
    Yeah it's a great model for classic Mac gaming as it has pretty good specs, 3d accel, and can run OS 9 and OS X. I've got two of them (among many other Macs) so I figured I'd try OpenBSD on this one, haha :)
IgorPartola 6y ago
I think there is another way to look at it. If not for Apple’s hardware policies, you would just be able to run your favorite OS on their hardware. It’s the fact that they publish EULAs and NDAs so long that it probably wouldn’t have fit I to the RAM of their first computers which actively slow down or prohibit any work by developers. Why isn’t it Apple whom we should find unappealing?
austinshea 6y ago
But, presumably, you can understand why it is very appealing to others. These devices are mass produced, and have long lifespans. It's a good target for development.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Nah, I want to choose the kernel. This statement is a bit presumptuous: "It's almost guaranteed you will never fully get Wi-Fi, audio, graphics acceleration, the trackpad, etc. working flawlessly." Maybe I do not want all those things every time I boot. Apple used an "alternative OS" for their Airport routers: NetBSD. Kernel was around 6.x if I recall correctly. Seemed like Wi-Fi worked preety good, maybe even "flawlessly". It's a computer. As the purchaser, I should get to decide how it is used. Using Apple software should be optional.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  You can also decide to give the money to other computer vendors that actually care about BSD. I don't know, like Tuxedo, https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Infos/News/OpenBSD-6-3-current-on-Tuxedo-InfinityBook-Pro-14.tuxedo https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Infos/News/OpenBSD-6-3-cu...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- soheil 6y ago
  I'm just really curious and don't have a dog in this fight against/for ability to do as you will with a product you purchase. A) a hypothetical device, let's not call it a computer, but similar, exists that asks you politely by means of something like a license not to modify it even though it would be possible to do so pretty easily. B) another device, this time a hypothetical CPU that is next to impossible to modify with any degree of ease since it requires nanoscale tools. Why should there be a fundamental difference in a person's ability to modify one of the above, but not the other? Just because the laws of Physics don't allow mere mortals to so (not at least without a highly sophisticated nano fabrication lab) doesn't seem like a very convincing principled answer. Is there a stronger argument?
  - lmm 6y ago
    Intent is important in law and in most people's moral principles (acknowledged or not). It seems to me that going out of your way to make the things you sell easier to repair is supererogatory, but going out of your way to make the things you sell harder to repair is bad and wrong, even if two companies did those two different things and reached the same end result.
mvanbaak 6y ago
Being able to run OpenBSD or FreeBSD on a M1 mini would be AWESOME. That little machine is pretty powerful and does not need much power to do what it does. If you are talking purely about desktop, I have to agree with you that the only real option is MacOS because of all the apple-only stuff (at least for now until drivers show up) But there's more uses of hardware then desktops.
atoponce 6y ago
> On the other hand, virtualization _already_ lets you run whatever arm64 BSD, Linux, or Windows that you want. The trackpad and everything else will work flawlessly thanks to guest additions. The OpenBSD kernel doesn't support loadable kernel modules, so virtual machine guest additions are not an option for a virtualized OpenBSD.
giomasce 6y ago
Most laptops are more or less in the same situation as M1. Maybe they different quantitatively, but not qualitatively: devices do not have (sufficient) specs available and people need to reverse engineer them if you want to run any free OS on them. Yet people want to do that and often manage. Why is M1 different? What I really would like to see is hardware manufacturers (Apple and anybody else) releasing the specs, so that people are free to do whatever they want with the metal they buy. I might event consider appropriate a legislative intervention in this field.
- xorcist 6y ago
  Not all laptops. Regular stock Intel components, for example, have solid Linux support because Intel nowadays hire kernel developers to support them. Some even have upstream drivers before the hardware is even commercially available.
  - waheoo 6y ago
    Yup found this remark super weird. Mac users seem to live under a rock or something. Got some weird idea that anything not a Mac must be windows like it's the 90s or something. Both AMD and Intel hardware supports Linux and wouldn't ship without it. NVIDIA is really the only hold out I this space.
    - udp 6y ago
      Anecdotal counterpoint: I bought a cheap Intel SoC laptop in 2019 thinking it would make a nice ultraportable writing machine. Things that it shipped without Linux support for: the trackpad, wifi, Bluetooth, and disk (eMMC controller). It just about works now with the latest kernel version and some manually compiled drivers, nearly two years later.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >Both AMD and Intel hardware supports Linux and wouldn't ship without it. NVIDIA is really the only hold out I this space. So just the most important graphics vendor huh?
rualca 6y ago
>>Running an alternative OS "natively" on a Mac doesn't seem very appealing to me. It's almost guaranteed you will never fully get (...) working flawlessly This statement is rather miopic. I still recall when this very same argument was made regarding the idea of wanting to install Linux in computers which were bundled with Windows. I can tell you it made absolutely no difference to me a couple of decades ago when I installed Mandrake Linux on a Windows laptop, and it made no difference to me that I couldn't get hardware acceleration or the webcam to work, and that wifi only worked with ndiswrapper. I was able to run the software I wanted to use in the hardware I bought, and that's what matters. M1 Mac minis are on the market for around 800$, which is an affordable price point, and their form factor and looks make them an interesting choice for a home server or workstation. It would be incomprehensible if we couldn't take advantage of that hardware by running our choice of software.
coldtea 6y ago
>It's almost guaranteed you will never fully get Wi-Fi, audio, graphics acceleration, the trackpad, etc. working flawlessly And yet people have done it with Linux just fine... Linus himself run a G5 as his desktop (circa 2003-2005) and later a Macbook Air as his daily driver laptop (circa 2011-2013...)
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  But this was not on an M1. This was on an AMD64 system that was far less Apple-specific as far as I know.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Yes, but the parent comment said " especially on the M1", implying that that was the case on Intel too...
beermonster 6y ago
I run Linux natively on a MacBook just fine. In fact I had to, when High Sierra went out of support not that long after I’d upgraded my RAM and HDD to SDD. It now flies and honestly I don’t know why I waited until High Sierra went end of life as I feel Mac OS X has got worse and worse. Also the hardware has got less and less upgradable/fixable in that time too.

sedatk 6y ago

> you will never fully get Wi-Fi, audio, graphics acceleration, the trackpad, etc I agree with your sentiment, but that isn't as serious as you say on, say, M1 Minis used as servers and that's probably where OpenBSD would shine.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

I absolutely expect Asahi to get all of those things working in due course. Lots of smart people are working on it.

rgovostes 6y ago
It doesn't feel like it's the best use of their talents, though.
- MagnumPIG 6y ago
  Neither is making a black box a good use of Apple's talents, yet here we are.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  I'd say let people decide for themselves how to apply their talents.

kitsunesoba 6y ago

> On the other hand, virtualization _already_ lets you run whatever arm64 BSD, Linux, or Windows that you want. The trackpad and everything else will work flawlessly thanks to guest additions. Yes, you make some tradeoffs -- you sacrifice a core, a few GB of RAM, some disk space for an OS you don't _really_ want to be running. But I'm skeptical that these are not better tradeoffs than constantly using a hacked-together and half-broken OS. True in theory, but at least with Linux I've found that desktop environments exhibit a slight but maddening level of sluggishness in VMs, no matter if it's GNOME, KDE, XFCE, or MATE. If all you need is a commandline Linux VMs are great but I'd go insane trying to use one as a graphical desktop for an extended period.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Really, that goes for any guest OS other than maybe Windows, and Windows is different only because VM developers have poured an enormous amount of time and money into it. You can get rid of the sluggishness with GPU passthrough... but then the guest OS would still need GPU drivers.
- tluyben2 6y ago
  It would be to Apple's advantage somewhat to make that happen right? Apple wants to sell hardware and does not mind people running virtualised Windows or Linux on it?
  - pushrax 6y ago
    Apple also tends to prefer pushing their users to their closed software ecosystem. Given the likely low demand for passthrough on these devices, I kind of doubt they'll implement it in the foreseeable future.
  - presentation 6y ago
    They also sell services though, and their products reinforce one another so that once you’re bought into their ecosystem it ties you to Apple products in perpetuity. I know because it happened to me; doesn’t happen if you’re not actually using the OS.

ogre_codes 6y ago

> Running an alternative OS "natively" on a Mac doesn't seem very appealing to me. It's almost guaranteed you will never fully get Wi-Fi, audio, graphics acceleration, the trackpad, etc. working flawlessly, especially on the M1 where almost every component is Apple proprietary and it's not a matter of loading, say, the right Intel graphics driver. It's not appealing to me now. In 9 or 10 years when Apple has stopped shipping new versions of MacOS for the platform, it will be much more interesting for me. Of course by then it's just a curiosity or fun project, not something I need for day to day. And by then, much of the wifi/ graphics/ audio issues will be solved.

adamcstephens 6y ago
I wouldn't be so sure that wifi/graphics/audio will ever be solved. It's possible, but not guaranteed. There are whole generations of Intel Mac systems that have never received support for these. https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux

amatecha 6y ago

literally just installed OpenBSD on my iMac G4 last week, haha (oh yeah, everything works flawlessly btw, including graphics acceleration)

rgovostes 6y ago
The iMac G4 didn't support virtualization, so booting an alternative OS is more attractive. And the Nvidia GPU is probably easier to find cross-platform drivers for. New drivers or some sort of IOKit compatibility layer need to be developed for the M1 GPU (which is orders of magnitude more complex). (I can run OpenBSD on any modern piece of hardware, though; the novelty and nostalgia are in running Mac OS 9 on that.)
- anthk 6y ago
  It did. Check Mac On Linux. The iMac G4 didn't support virtualization,
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  I think most people would prefer not having an extra OS underneath when possible. Also, the G4 iMac is a special piece of hardware in my book. I'd love to Frankenstein an M1 G4 iMac.
- fulafel 6y ago
  It's a PowerPC architecture CPU so from hardware POV it supports virtualization out of the box[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popek_and_Goldberg_virtualization_requirements#PowerPC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popek_and_Goldberg_virtualizat....
- amatecha 6y ago
  Yeah it's a great model for classic Mac gaming as it has pretty good specs, 3d accel, and can run OS 9 and OS X. I've got two of them (among many other Macs) so I figured I'd try OpenBSD on this one, haha :)

IgorPartola 6y ago

I think there is another way to look at it. If not for Apple’s hardware policies, you would just be able to run your favorite OS on their hardware. It’s the fact that they publish EULAs and NDAs so long that it probably wouldn’t have fit I to the RAM of their first computers which actively slow down or prohibit any work by developers. Why isn’t it Apple whom we should find unappealing?

austinshea 6y ago

But, presumably, you can understand why it is very appealing to others. These devices are mass produced, and have long lifespans. It's a good target for development.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

Nah, I want to choose the kernel. This statement is a bit presumptuous: "It's almost guaranteed you will never fully get Wi-Fi, audio, graphics acceleration, the trackpad, etc. working flawlessly." Maybe I do not want all those things every time I boot. Apple used an "alternative OS" for their Airport routers: NetBSD. Kernel was around 6.x if I recall correctly. Seemed like Wi-Fi worked preety good, maybe even "flawlessly". It's a computer. As the purchaser, I should get to decide how it is used. Using Apple software should be optional.

pjmlp 6y ago
You can also decide to give the money to other computer vendors that actually care about BSD. I don't know, like Tuxedo, https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Infos/News/OpenBSD-6-3-current-on-Tuxedo-InfinityBook-Pro-14.tuxedo https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Infos/News/OpenBSD-6-3-cu...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
soheil 6y ago
I'm just really curious and don't have a dog in this fight against/for ability to do as you will with a product you purchase. A) a hypothetical device, let's not call it a computer, but similar, exists that asks you politely by means of something like a license not to modify it even though it would be possible to do so pretty easily. B) another device, this time a hypothetical CPU that is next to impossible to modify with any degree of ease since it requires nanoscale tools. Why should there be a fundamental difference in a person's ability to modify one of the above, but not the other? Just because the laws of Physics don't allow mere mortals to so (not at least without a highly sophisticated nano fabrication lab) doesn't seem like a very convincing principled answer. Is there a stronger argument?
- lmm 6y ago
  Intent is important in law and in most people's moral principles (acknowledged or not). It seems to me that going out of your way to make the things you sell easier to repair is supererogatory, but going out of your way to make the things you sell harder to repair is bad and wrong, even if two companies did those two different things and reached the same end result.

mvanbaak 6y ago

Being able to run OpenBSD or FreeBSD on a M1 mini would be AWESOME. That little machine is pretty powerful and does not need much power to do what it does. If you are talking purely about desktop, I have to agree with you that the only real option is MacOS because of all the apple-only stuff (at least for now until drivers show up) But there's more uses of hardware then desktops.

atoponce 6y ago

> On the other hand, virtualization _already_ lets you run whatever arm64 BSD, Linux, or Windows that you want. The trackpad and everything else will work flawlessly thanks to guest additions. The OpenBSD kernel doesn't support loadable kernel modules, so virtual machine guest additions are not an option for a virtualized OpenBSD.

giomasce 6y ago

Most laptops are more or less in the same situation as M1. Maybe they different quantitatively, but not qualitatively: devices do not have (sufficient) specs available and people need to reverse engineer them if you want to run any free OS on them. Yet people want to do that and often manage. Why is M1 different? What I really would like to see is hardware manufacturers (Apple and anybody else) releasing the specs, so that people are free to do whatever they want with the metal they buy. I might event consider appropriate a legislative intervention in this field.

xorcist 6y ago
Not all laptops. Regular stock Intel components, for example, have solid Linux support because Intel nowadays hire kernel developers to support them. Some even have upstream drivers before the hardware is even commercially available.
- waheoo 6y ago
  Yup found this remark super weird. Mac users seem to live under a rock or something. Got some weird idea that anything not a Mac must be windows like it's the 90s or something. Both AMD and Intel hardware supports Linux and wouldn't ship without it. NVIDIA is really the only hold out I this space.
  - udp 6y ago
    Anecdotal counterpoint: I bought a cheap Intel SoC laptop in 2019 thinking it would make a nice ultraportable writing machine. Things that it shipped without Linux support for: the trackpad, wifi, Bluetooth, and disk (eMMC controller). It just about works now with the latest kernel version and some manually compiled drivers, nearly two years later.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >Both AMD and Intel hardware supports Linux and wouldn't ship without it. NVIDIA is really the only hold out I this space. So just the most important graphics vendor huh?

rualca 6y ago

>>Running an alternative OS "natively" on a Mac doesn't seem very appealing to me. It's almost guaranteed you will never fully get (...) working flawlessly This statement is rather miopic. I still recall when this very same argument was made regarding the idea of wanting to install Linux in computers which were bundled with Windows. I can tell you it made absolutely no difference to me a couple of decades ago when I installed Mandrake Linux on a Windows laptop, and it made no difference to me that I couldn't get hardware acceleration or the webcam to work, and that wifi only worked with ndiswrapper. I was able to run the software I wanted to use in the hardware I bought, and that's what matters. M1 Mac minis are on the market for around 800$, which is an affordable price point, and their form factor and looks make them an interesting choice for a home server or workstation. It would be incomprehensible if we couldn't take advantage of that hardware by running our choice of software.

coldtea 6y ago

>It's almost guaranteed you will never fully get Wi-Fi, audio, graphics acceleration, the trackpad, etc. working flawlessly And yet people have done it with Linux just fine... Linus himself run a G5 as his desktop (circa 2003-2005) and later a Macbook Air as his daily driver laptop (circa 2011-2013...)

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
But this was not on an M1. This was on an AMD64 system that was far less Apple-specific as far as I know.
- coldtea 6y ago
  Yes, but the parent comment said " especially on the M1", implying that that was the case on Intel too...

beermonster 6y ago

I run Linux natively on a MacBook just fine. In fact I had to, when High Sierra went out of support not that long after I’d upgraded my RAM and HDD to SDD. It now flies and honestly I don’t know why I waited until High Sierra went end of life as I feel Mac OS X has got worse and worse. Also the hardware has got less and less upgradable/fixable in that time too.