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Show me an open source hardware system as performant and power efficient as M1 and I'll throw some support (time, money, press, something) at it and forego usin
by cestith 5y ago
Show me an open source hardware system as performant and power efficient as M1 and I'll throw some support (time, money, press, something) at it and forego using Asahi Linux. If, however, I can run an open software system on the M1 and also still run an open hardware system right beside it on the same desk while the hardware in the open hardware system plays catch-up, I'd rather do that. If everyone forwent open software because it didn't run on open hardware, we wouldn't have Linux, BSD, Darwin, FreeDOS, ReactOS, Haiku, OpenIndiana, X, Wayland, MySQL, Postgresql, KDE, Gnome, XFCE, i3, LibreOffice, Apache, Nginx, HAProxy, Kafka, Pulsar, gcc, clang, rust, Julia, Perl, Python, Ruby, Node, Chromium, Konqueror, Safari, Firefox, bash ... any open software at all.
Your ideal taken to its conclusion is that we wait for RISC-V or OpenMIPS or something to catch up to ARM before we write or use any software. That's simply untenable. What software would we even have to port to such things if we couldn't develop open software on closed hardware? What use would RISC-V be outside of embedded projects without QNX, Linux, BSD, RiscOS, or something else developed originally on closed hardware to run on it?