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That's kind of how open source development works, right? We buy hardware and we use software people wrote for free. What am I missing?
by simonh 1mo ago
That's kind of how open source development works, right? We buy hardware and we use software people wrote for free. What am I missing?
- OroPla 1mo agoMy steelman read of that would be that there is a difference between paying Apple a premium to make installing Linux hard vs. paying, say, Framework a premium to make installing Linux easy.
- simonh 1mo agoExcept the Asahi Linux team are pretty insistent that Apple isn't making it particularly hard. Yes the hardware is novel, but hardly any hardware vendors share low level details on the Intel side either, all that has to be reverse engineered anyway.
- kelnos 1mo agoIntel themselves writes a ton of the software for their own hardware that makes in into the Linux kernel.
- philipallstar 1mo agoIntel is not the only hardware in an Intel CPU-based laptop.
- izacus 1mo agoThey also famously manufacture the most stable and performant network cards, wifi card, thunderbolt controllers, etc. And provide drivers for Linux. Plenty of components for quivalents of which Avahi struggles with on MacBooks.
- izacus 1mo agoYeah, they insist on that and then write long blog posts on how they have to reverse engineer basic things which have been contributed by other manufacturers to linux kernel directly.
- ndiddy 1mo agoA lot of hardware gets Linux support because the hardware manufacturer itself (Intel, AMD, Mediatek, NXP, Marvell, etc) takes responsibility for writing and upstreaming Linux drivers. This is how companies like Lenovo or Dell can offer systems with Linux preinstalled.
- GeekyBear 1mo agoSure. When you make a big chunk of your revenue selling Enterprise Servers, you can no longer rely on drivers written by volunteer labor, as they did in the past.
- vbezhenar 1mo agoYou don't need to write performant 3D graphics drivers for servers. Intel, AMD, Nvidia does it anyway. Apple is the only Linux-hostile company.
- GeekyBear 1mo ago> You don't need to write performant 3D graphics drivers for servers. Intel, AMD, Nvidia does it anyway. Apple is the only Linux-hostile company. You can't think of an Enterprise use case for GPUs that has become popular of late?
- vbezhenar 1mo agoIf you're hinting to neural networks, it's not about providing drivers for 3D graphics. For Nvidia that's CUDA and it's basically different set of libraries. Also Intel is not in this business anyway.