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.
> 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.
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.
I'm don't think you can do GPU or PCI passthrough on macOS. Not sure if/when Apple would consider adding that.
I'm glad the things I want to do on Linux are all terminal based. I used a tiling WM for years on Arch and don't miss it much with all the macOS WM extensions available now (Magnet, Rectangle, Moom, Hammerspoon, etc). Less themeable but perfectly functional.
I doubt Apple has any intention of publishing hardware documentation for someone to write a native driver, but there are behavioral reverse engineering efforts already underway.
Very nice. An advantage of paravirtualization is that compositing across the guest and host will work, unlike passthrough. Any rough indication of the level of performance?
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?
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.
>so that once you’re bought into their ecosystem it ties you to Apple products in perpetuity.
Only because of the seamlessness (within reason) of the experience.
Otherwise, there's nothing to switching to another OS for all or any part of it.
Many (most?) apps people use everyday are web- or Electron based, so they can switch to any other Windows or Linux with e.g. Chrome.
Their music is in some streaming service (Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, etc) all of which play on other OSes (and in any case, they can change subscription and they haven't lost anything). Or, for the fussier, it's mp3 or flac files, they can easily move. Even bought music (aac) from the iTunes Store is playable in other platform (since Apple has removed the DRM for a decade or so).
Ditto for movies. It's all streaming nowadays, and you can just switch to another streaming service (and all play everywhere anyway).
As for professional apps, most heavy ones (MS Office, Adobe Suite, Cubase, Live, Resolve, etc) run just fine in both OSX and Windows, and come with dual installers, so you can switch if you like (some even allow for multiple computers at the same time).
(If you're using Logic or FCPX, then sure, you'll need to find another program, and go through the pain of migrating your projects).
For mobile it's the same thing. E.g. you can sync just fine with an Android phone (you just don't get niceties like Handoff, Scan-to-Notes, etc).
So there's nothing special to "tie you to Apple products in perpetuity" except "I might lose the use of some apps that are Mac Only" (so same thing that would have tied you to Windows or Linux in perpetuity).
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.
There are a couple of projects that improve this (for linux host + linux guest). virgl exposes accelerated graphics to the guest, which chromeOS uses in its offering. Intel also has its GVT-g offering which virtualises intel integrated GPUs. Of course, none of this applies to apple.
> 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.
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.
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.
"Presumptuous" meaning it presumes what a user will want to do with a computer. In this case, the computer comes with no display, no keyboard, no mouse, no trackpad, etc.
I'm not following. Are you saying that one can use an Apple router with an alternate free operating system and it still functions as a router ? I'm not aware of any such project. At least openwrt does not support the Apple router. As for what users would want to do, that is a moot point since there are common expectations for devices based on the specs and form factors. So, why would you buy a $2k laptop to use it as an inefficient, buggy, and underpowered headless linux server (assuming you get networking working)?
The "alternative OS" is the OS that Apple used for its AirPort Extreme router, and which it borrows heavily from for the MacOs userland. Apple writes some software itself, but it also takes a significant amount of source code straight from "alternative OS" projects. To be clear, the OS projects I am referring to are not Linux nor is the computer that is the subject of this thread a "$2K laptop".
Do you mean to imply that those things are known not to work?
There have been many Apple devices where all those mentioned things (if present) work under a non-Apple OS. So as usual the truth is somewhere in the middle. From my Linux experience there are a lot of well working MBP models from this time span. And Minis.
I'd like to point out that the dmesg indicates a M1 Mac Mini. There is no display, no keyboard, no mouse, no trackpad, etc. I think there may be a 3.5mm headphone jack, though.
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?
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.
>Why should there be a fundamental difference in a person's ability to modify one of the above, but not the other?
Because one could trivially modify the first, and people do all the time (and screw the law), whereas the second is, as you said, "next to impossible" to modify even if you want it.
>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
In what universe do "the laws of physics prevent this to be done easily without millions of dollars" is not a convincing answer?
> 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".
That’s a nice strawman you got here. AirPort routers shipped with NetBSD, and it was officially supported. But good luck getting macOS to run on that — macOS would count as the “alternative OS” for the AirPort.
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)
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't matter much for laptops which increasingly seem to depend on Intel/AMD integrated graphics, which are more capable than ever in laptops with more stringent size and power constraints. How many MacBooks sold have discrete graphics cards by any manufacturer? I'd like to see data on this but I couldn't find any relevant statistics after a bit of searching.
>>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.
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.)
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 :)
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.
> 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.
>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...)
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?
Fantastic. OpenBSD on an M1 Mac Mini would be a great home server.
As for desktop, I love cwm on my thinkpads, but macbook touchpads have won me over. That said, if arcan gets to a usable state on OpenBSD, I wouldn't mind sinking a few weekends (and/or crates of beer) into helping with improving touchpad/gesture support. X11 is just too daunting to have me bothered.
I don't mean to be dismissive, but isn't almost anything a decent home server nowadays? As long as your'e OK with the performance, size, cost, storage, there are just myriad options available. Just about any PC or mac would do. Finally, we all have our own preferences, but I'm not sure why one would really want to use OpenBSD for a home server. There's less driver support or application support than just about any other choice. It sounds like an ideal choice if you like to spend countless hours fiddling with things.
I'm really curious what you see to like in this setup.
The M1 mini would be a great home server in its form-factor (small size), power usage and performance. As the current mini is pretty much an empty shell, the minis' size should get smaller in the next generations. Intel nucs are popular for these reasons, but it seems the M1 will give better performance/power/size.
I've used Linux for the past 20 years. I recently tried OpenBSD because I never used a BSD, so I thought I wanted to have a look and had a pet project building a home router. My experience of OpenBSD as a headless server is it's been an absolute joy to use. Simple, well structured and strong consistency with config and where files are placed, great man pages etc. From no experience at all with OpenBSD I had a fully functioning router with PF, multiple vlans, cross vlan firewall roules, mdns repeating etc etc within a few hours. Regarding fiddling with things, for a headless server, it's been the easiest server I've set up to date.
The only negative experience I've had is when not shut down properly I've had a few issues starting it. I think I could solve that if I wanted to. Using it as a router I can set up a read-only filesystem etc. The other drawback is it's not Linux and I use Docker daily for development so would need to do what Docker on OSX does and run Docker in a Linux vm.
CPU performance is a funny argument for a router as the hardware reqs on a home router are already so low. My current router is gigabit, has best in class WiFi, is smaller than a mac mini and is fanless.
I got to say though: PF, multiple vlans, cross vlan firewall roules, mdns repeating do not sound like something a home user should be setting up. The only reason one would play with these things in a home environment is because they want to. Which is fine... but makes it a toy/pet project and not something to recommend to others. My home router is Ubiquiti and it "just works" zero fiddling required. I'm not sure why one would want anything more complex for a home environment.
I guess we all have different preferences where we like to spend our time. I fiddled with things for decades, now I only want to fiddle for something really worth it.
Yeah for a router you wouldn’t use the M1, it has one Ethernet port and overkill. I use one of the Pc Engines APU2 board’s.
The reference to the router was in regards I used OpenBSD and found OpenBSD a great server OS.
I have multiple vlan’s as have a guest wifi for visitors, all iot devices like tv, soundbars on a private vlan with restricted network access, dns ad blocking, dns over tls, wireguard for remote access etc. I use ubiquiti access points/switches but run my own router for learning purposes plus the flexibility. To be honest, since I’ve set it up I haven’t done any fiddling, it’s been rock solid. I’ve had more issues doing updates on the ubiquiti devices dropping the wireless uplink I have then having to power cycle them to come back up.
Again, nothing wrong with it, but your home network is far more complex than most small (10-20 person) offices I've ever seen. It's the kind of thing you do because you're interested, not because of a practical reason. I guess you mentioned it was for learning purposes which is a good reason.
Agree available drivers/applications might be less than a mainstream linux, but for what is there, things work completely solidly and require basically negative fiddling
I love BSDs and try to use them personally because I like the experience, but as far as drivers go, I feel like Linux is generally on par with the BSDs. It's the userland which can be a PITA.
Basically, I'm not sure there's enough of a difference to warrant someone who can already do linux to use openbsd. Diminishing returns if you're interested in hosting a media server or NAS or whatever people wanna do with home servers.
That said, I highly recommend running either Open or NetBSD for a while just to get the experience. For me, running NetBSD as my only OS on my laptop through my late teens gave me a great foundation for my professional life up till now in my mid twenties. Really pleasant and simple OSes, great for learning OS problem solving too.
> OpenBSD on an M1 Mac Mini would be a great home server.
That does sound really nice. Once the price on SSDs comes down a bit I'd love to replace my Dell PowerEdge T20 Plex/Time Machine box with a Mac mini with stackable TB4 enclosure containing a few M.2 SSDs. It'd take a fraction of the space and power while being much more responsive.
So much for the many remarks made on HN claiming that Apple would use the M1 to further exert control over users’ ability to boot an alternative OS. Between this and Asahi Linux, I’d say things are off to a good start.
Btw, Asahi has a Patreon page for anyone who wants to contribute. I’m tossing twelve bucks a month and recommend any Mac users with interest in booting alternative OSes support such projects.
Now I’m gonna see if there’s an option to throw money at this.
I'm not sure I understand what Apple contributed here. It's not supported, helped, or encouraged by Apple. And Apple does not document their H/W in ways that allow reuse. Hence these are all reverse engineering projects.
Apple _is_ a walled garden ecosystem. That has many obvious advantages, things just work, etc.
Personally I happen to not like it, but it's a choice folks have to make by themselves.
I buy my H/W from vendors that actually support running Linux (in my case) like Dell, Lenovo, and others.
They explicitly built a mechanism for loading alternate OS's. I'm not going to sing Apple's praises over that or anything, but it means that Macs are still an order of magnitude less locked down than, say, an iPhone. You have the ability to do whatever you want with a Mac... provided you figure out how.
Infinitely, really, since on iOS it’s zero and on macOS it is nonzero ;) Of course, on macOS it’s still not a lot, but you can see why everyone is excited about what Apple is offering right now.
Technically, that is true. But it is getting there. Apple makes more money, and importantly recurring revenue, from its services now than selling its hardware. The move to ARM processors is one of their strategic moves to further "close" their desktop platforms too. The only reason they don't do it outright right now is because they know people like you and me will immediately abandon the platform if we are stuck with only macOS and can only install everything from the App store. But we would be fools to ignore that the noose is tightening and, with M1 you are now stuck with macOS (unlike the older macs). The next iterations will close it down further ...
Yes, the line I've been hearing for the past 15 years or so.
Meanwhile Homebrew still works, I can still install non-App Store Apps, and Apple is publishing directions on how to install non-MacOS operating systems.
Literally the single difference their "Closing the platform" has made in my life has been getting prompted for permission to open various directories and services on the platform and much of that can be disabled.
> But we would be fools to ignore that the noose is tightening and, with M1 you are now stuck with macOS (unlike the older Macs).
Are we on the same conversation here? Did you read the article? Or the similar ones about people loading Linux on the M1? This is literally a thread about people who followed Apple's documentation on how to install a different OS on the M1 Macs.
Yes, Apple fans seem to be forgetting that the ones in power at Apple are business people, who care as much about customers as any other company. And being business people they don't have sympathy for developers either and in fact would rather see their power reduced. In their best scenario, all developers become low-wage employees but without the benefit of employees. A bit like Uber drivers.
You can't sell $10,000 Mac Pros and $6,000 displays with a neutered operating system. Nobody is buying the 16" MacBook Pro if they can only buy apps in the App Store. Overnight they would lose pretty much every (non-iOS) developer, most video editors, every podcaster and audio engineer, most photographers, every single scientist, most engineers, mathematicians, and many artists...
That would be an absolutely fantastic pitch in a management meeting. Who is left, accountants... teachers? A few schools?
Not only would this be a massive hit to the Mac... likely lethal, it would also be a massive blow to iOS. Because much like every other developer on the planet iOS developers lean heavily on tools which cannot ever be found in the App Store like git, Python, Ruby (required for CocoaPods), and a million other Unix tools.
This has to be one of the most bone-headed, yet commonly repeated bits of anti-Mac nonsense out there.
There is zero reason Apple would do what you suggest. You haven’t provided one, you just assume if you utter the phrase “Business Sense” enough that people will agree with you.
shrug
There is zero sense or logic in these assertions, business or otherwise. It’s baseless nonsense.
I guess we could fairly call it a undocumented or obscure garden? But there's no real designed wall there.
Apple aren't preventing anything, they're just not helping us out either. Agree it would be nice for them to help out a little, but it's really not the same thing.
IIRC, it turned out that ability to run non Apple OSes depends on one person who implemented it and is responsible for it. It wasn't part of any road map for M1
> Apple aren't preventing anything, they're just not helping us out either.
It's the same thing. (And the only reason they aren't yet outright preventing it is because it would be bad PR - nobody wants their desktop computer to be like the iPhone or iPad. But it will happen.)
>nobody wants their desktop computer to be like the iPhone or iPad
You'd be surprised.
(Also, this exactly has been the proposition and allure of the Chromebooks - a computer that you can just wipe and restart again and it's like a phone or tablet device, and your data are synced in the cloud).
Apple has a computer with a locked down OS, it's the iPad. Apple sells the iPad as a locked down system because some users prefer a less flexible, more predictable, and secure system.
Apple has a computer which isn't locked down, it's the Mac. Apple maintains MacOS as a flexible/ pro platform because if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to sell $2000-8000 Macs to pro users who need that power and flexibility to do their jobs.
For Apple there is zero profit in neutering the Mac. Whatever profits you think Apple could make by forcing people to use the Mac App Store, would be dwarfed by the sales lost due to pro & power users leaving the system en-masse.
What would Apple even have to lose by proving the specification and documentation needed to boot alternative operating systems? People would still need to by the hardware from Apple and the number of people who even consider this option is so small that the PR it would bring easily outweight any potential cost. How many bought the Intel Macs initially because: If it doesn’t workout, I just install Windows.
Linux users would buy M1, with the intention of running Linux, and if it doesn’t work, they can still run macOS.
I don’t see the risk to Apple, if they at least provided documentation for the M1.
>What would Apple even have to lose by proving the specification and documentation needed to boot alternative operating systems?
They already describe how to do so, and the specification to merely boot is trivial anyway. Linux, OpenBSD (as in TFA), and others have booted already.
It's the details of the GPU and other such stuff that needs drivers (touchpad, etc) that are missing. And those are rarely well documented on the Intel side, by AMD and NVIDIA either, anyway.
It's not about risk, it's about philosophy. They want to control the entire stack, and it's been in their DNA for decades. Most internal documentation also generally isn't public-level quality, so it's a non-zero amount of effort to release docs.
It is in some aspects, so I am not surprised that there are people willing to claim that the walls are too high for them. Personally, they could be a bit lower but I can still see over them I’m not up in arms quite yet.
> You are conflating the concept of commercial software with the concept of a walled garden.
Commercial software is the software for which developers get money. It can include free software, too. It has nothing to do with the license or the topic we are discussing. You are conflating the concepts here.
Walled garden in general is a convenient system, from which a user can hardly escape when the users wants to. This is exactly what Mac license does. Wikipedia has Mac OS as an example of a walled garden. I did not make it up myself.
The Wikipedia article does mention Mac OS, but does not, anywhere, use it as an example of a walled garden.
Here is the definition from the page you link:
“A closed platform, walled garden, or closed ecosystem[1][2] is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applicants or content. This is in contrast to an open platform, wherein consumers generally have unrestricted access to applications and content.“
Did you even read the article I linked? I quote for you:
A 2008 Harvard Business School working paper, entitled "Opening Platforms: How, When and Why?", differentiated a platform's openness/closedness by four aspects and gave example platforms.
Platform provider (hardware/operating system (OS) bundle), Mac OS: closed
Platform sponsor (design & intellectual property (IP) rights owner), Mac OS: closed
Tl;dr:
It's not a walled garden in all aspects, but it definitely restricts users in a significant way, depending on your use case.
I did read it. What you are quoting has nothing to do with the definition of a walled garden on that page.
Notably for some reason you chose not to include the part where they also say about Mac OS:
Demand-side use (end-user): open
Supply-side user (application developer): open
It is not a walled garden in any way that they define a walled garden.
Here is the definition from the page you link:
“A closed platform, walled garden, or closed ecosystem[1][2] is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applicants or content. This is in contrast to an open platform, wherein consumers generally have unrestricted access to applications and content.“
It doesn’t apply to Mac OS.
Restricting installation of the operating system itself on other hardware just isn’t part of the definition.
No matter how much you selectively copy and paste from a Wikipedia page, it will not say what you claim it is saying.
Trying to say any restriction of use means a walled garden is akin to saying any software that isn’t completely free is a walled garden.
By the definition you quoted, Mac OS is also not an open platform. This is exactly what I am saying: in some aspects, it's a walled garden. Depending on your use case, it may be essential.
Are you suggesting that the Wikipedia page should not mention Mac OS in the table, because it has nothing to do with the topic? But it comes from the cited paper. You should probably read it.
I cannot access my OS and all my applications after changing the hardware or using a VM. Do you call it “unrestricted access to applications”? How is this unrestricted if there are restrictions? This is not an open platform by the original Wikipedia definition, more so by my definition. One cannot escape from Mac OS after using it, because all apps will not work (without the legal OS). My SSD dies, I cannot event replace it. All I can do is to pay $$$ to Apple to help me.
> There is nothing preventing you from having your SSD repaired or replaced by anyone with the capability to do it.
This is just bullshit (if one uses your wording). Every new Apple laptop comes with glued SSD.
> By your definition, Linux is a walled garden because you can only run Linux binaries on Linux.
This is absolutely not what I am saying. The problem is not in the compiled binaries. The problem comes when I want to escape the Mac OS walled garden. I can run Linux or Windows in a VM on any operating system and escape its ecosystem any moment in this way. All apps will work in the VM. Not so for Mac OS. I don't think you are even trying to understand my reasoning. Instead you are finding every possibility for a tangential reply having nothing to do with my point.
>It would be weird to think that merely mentioning an operating system in a discussion about walled gardens makes it into a walled garden.
Then please tell me what the example of Mac OS with word "closed" nearby is doing in that Wikipedia page? Does it indicate that Mac OS is an open ecosystem?
> Generally, when words are ‘nearby’ other words you have to read the context to understand why they are there.
You are absolutely right. Let me quote it for you, so that you understand the context:
"Harvard Business School working paper... differentiated a platform's openness/closedness by four aspects and gave example platforms".
Then, in the table you can see that in 2 out of 4 aspects Mac OS is a closed ecosystem according to the published research. I am astonished by Apple fanboys who cannot accept flaws in Mac OS, even if it's clearly explained by respectful independent researchers.
>In the parts of the table describing the ecosystem it has the word open in the rows for MacOS.
All four points describe the ecosystem, not just those which you choose. Again, quote: "differentiated a platform's openness/closedness by four aspects".
> All four points describe the ecosystem, not just those which you choose. Again, quote: "differentiated a platform's openness/closedness by four aspects".
The two on which Apple is rated as ‘open’ are the criteria which the article’s definition uses to determine whether a platform is a walled garden.
You are using a definition of walled garden to mean ‘any level of closedness’.
This is not what a walled garden means, and not what the article says.
If you want to use a private definition, by all means do so, but the article doesn’t have anything to do with your private definition.
For the third time - here is the definition from the article:
“A closed platform, walled garden, or closed ecosystem[1][2] is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media.”
The table shows that Mac OS is open when it comes to applications, content, and media.
The definition is clear, and Mac OS is not a walled garden by the definition. The table supports this conclusion.
Glued components are common and do not prevent repair - what has that got to go with anything?
An emulated VM obviously doesn’t allow a binary to escape the platform because of course you still need the platform, and the binary is still running on the platform so nothing has ‘escaped’.
As I say, your point is just about what hardware you want a license to run MacOS on, which is nothing to do with whether it is a walled garden.
Seems to me like a whole lot of arguments about Apple involve changing accepted definitions of things or using different standards for Apple versus others.
Apple does enough things wrong and I'm perfectly willing to accept those things and understand when people are frustrated by those things. No need to invent whole new things or shift definitions just so you can complain about them.
Not you. Just frustrated by the seeming religious fervor some Apple-haters have. Seems like sometimes people are willing to go through great contortions to figure out how whatever Apple did is wrong.
Totally understand why people might prefer Linux/ Windows/ Amiga/ whatever. People should just enjoy what they want.
> Just frustrated by the seeming religious fervor some Apple-haters have.
It goes both ways. I'd add that atleast the "Apple-haters" have more of a standing in defending open computing standards and demanding Apple be open too.
> Now I’m gonna see if there’s an option to throw money at this.
Even if I were God I wouldn't stop anyone doing it, but does it not leave a bad taste in your mouth that Apple charge the best part of 2 thousand dollars for a laptop with a basically brand-new (so not rotted) stack but utterly refuse to document anything beyond the absolute basics - this is the world's largest tech company, from which I conclude that they have no interest in allowing users to control their own hardware since it's literally chump change for them to (say) publish some extremely basic info about the peripherals like even nvidia do now.
> but does it not leave a bad taste in your mouth that Apple charge the best part of 2 thousand dollars for a laptop with a basically brand-new (so not rotted) stack but utterly refuse to document anything beyond the absolute basics
Computers are tools to get a job done. I buy a computer so I can write software on it. While I am happy that we can get Linux and OpenBSD on a Mac, it's not a deal breaker. Regardless of whether OpenBSD or Linux boots on it, I can get my job done quickly and effectively.
If they did something that got in the way of building the software I need to build? Then I'd punch out in a heartbeat.
Not everyone is interesting in fiddling with the internals of the tools they buy. Even if that tool is a computer.
I fully support this effort and the Linux port for the eventual time when Apple does eventually stop supporting this hardware. But at that point in time, I won't be relying on it for work anymore, it will be a hobby/ project, much like my G4 iMac.
In the mean time, it's very fun seeing how quickly people are making progress on this.
> If they did something that got in the way of building the software I need to build? Then I'd punch out in a heartbeat.
Sadly I don't do it for a living, but the stuff I like to write is all tuned for performance, they don't tell me anything about the CPU, so even if I was in the market for one I still wouldn't buy one as I couldn't have any fun using it.
And Computers stopped being mere tools years ago - the phone has now supplanted the laptop and desktop in this regard, but it remains true that many people are in terms of knowledge and purchasing power completely at the whim of (in this case) Apple to go about their lives.
> And Computers stopped being mere tools years ago - the phone has now supplanted the laptop and desktop in this regard
Is just plainly inaccurate. The phone has nowhere near supplanted the desktop in multiple scenarios. Office work and programming [0] both come to mind.
[0] And this was the specific use-case brought up by the parent. Pretty obvious a phone is not a competitor for that.
My point was that the phone has supplanted the computer as the sole device for many people i.e. people of my generation will often ask for an app rather than a website
To add to your point, an app is typically preferred for it’s performance compared to a website in a browser. As is developing on hardware with known quirks and structure vs vague hardware. I don’t understand the defense that developing on FOSS within unknown walls is somehow acceptable.
That is a fair point. I just found it important to point out that for many use-cases, including most of the ones in this discussion, phones are a complete nonstarter.
I do apologize for how aggressively I came across as well, that was uncalled for.
> And Computers stopped being mere tools years ago - the phone has now supplanted the laptop and desktop in this regard, but it remains true that many people are in terms of knowledge and purchasing power completely at the whim of (in this case) Apple to go about their lives.
I don't follow your chain of though here at all. It is a thing I use to get a job done... that's pretty much the definition of what a tool is.
Nvidia does so kicking and screaming, because 1) they have no choice but to abide by the GPL for things that use kernel internals, and 2) Since they make money from linux, at least in the HPC/ML space, they want users to at least be able to see the screen light up so that they can install the proprietary stack.
> utterly refuse to document anything beyond the absolute basics
I don’t see how that’s any different from PC or ARM world, save for a couple of larger scale exceptions (Dell, Lenovo, Intel, AMD) and a bunch of insignificant players (Raspberry, System76 & al), and even then it’s a fairly recent development in PC history that these players document/support/contribute anything.
The fact that Linux pretty much works+ on any PC out there is mostly due to volunteers hacking stuff around on PCs that are getting increasingly normalised.
And even with the normalisation of hardware architecture, there are still a lot of either unspecified of spec violating special cases. If one is not convinced by that, I encourage one to lurk the Linux kernel tree for quirks, device trees, and other various DSDT hacks. The weird size of payloads for the T2 SSD controller that stumped everyone for some time is only one among many, many other quirks that exist overall.
After 10+ years, dust is only settling on the BIOS to EFI transition, and I’m not the least surprised that it takes a bit of time to adapt to the overall ARM Mac architecture.
+ by “works” I mean boots reasonably well to init 5+VESA, and most of the time something else than VESA. But taking random hardware and having a bulletproof system out of the box down to every nook and cranny is still a tall order. There are systems that fully work optimally out of the box, but they’re a very small minority.
Intel refuse to document significant portions of their technology, and Linux works less well on their platforms as a result. They definitely do a better job of documenting things than Apple, but I'd really frame this as a difference in degree rather than in kind.
They release plenty of open code, but then you also end up with situations like them not documenting DPTF and so laptops running slower under Linux than under Windows (https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/54923.html has more on this), failing to document the requirements for entering deep power saving states and so laptops consuming more power under Linux than under Windows (https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/41713.html), not doing any upstream work on the IPU4 camera platform so the webcam doesn't work on various laptops - instead this ends up with random people outside Intel having to reverse engineer stuff or do integration work on Intel's behalf. Is it better than Apple? Yeah. Is it good? No.
...to play devil's advocate a bit (because I really do agree with you), I could have asked the same question about Linux on the PS3, and we all know how that ended.
I run a “Hacker News advocate” against the comments I post, and this was one of the things I thought of. You will note that in that case Sony actually suffered quite a bit in their response, and they only really did it out of fears of piracy. In this case the I believe backlash will be fairly large, not the least from their own platform security people for having years of their work invalidated. Also, in this case the only thing I can see that could drive them to do this would be if FairPlay keys were somehow made available in the fully unsigned OS environment: I haven’t really looked into this (don’t have my M1 Mac yet) but I would be very surprised if so.
To have every open source app ported to their processor, and get the usage up. I'm a developer and I love the specs of the hardware, and I need open source tools to work on it.
On the long term though they can get more App store / cloud revenue by making sure that Apple's apps are always ahead in hardware compatibility.
Wait till you get to wifi, power management, suspend resume, etc. The fact that linux (I know this post is about OpenBSD) boots on some random piece of hardware is commendable, but not that surprising in 2021.
At the point the hardware shipped, it was impossible to boot non-Apple operating systems on M1 systems. Post-release updates added this, but Apple had not publicly committed to doing so before that.
WWDC included discussion of "Reduced security" mode, which allows downgrading to old signed versions of MacOS, but I don't remember any disclosure of plans to permit arbitrary operating systems at that point - do you have a pointer?
You found the right talk, but it’s actually only waved at and not explicitly discussed so it’s not in the transcript. At about 19 minutes the engineer mentions that a csrutil will be able to do more things and on the slide disabling secure boot is one of them. (This actually got moved into bputil, but the intent was there at least.)
That indicates that csrutil would be able to do /something/ with secure boot policy, but I really don't interpret that as a commitment to being able to boot arbitrary operating systems - if we were still unable to do so today, I don't think you'd be able to put up a strong argument that Apple had broken a commitment.
The only thing I can plausibly interpret that as is “we’ll let you turn off secure boot” (I mean, what else can you do?). I agree that Apple never committed to anything beyond that (and I am pleasantly surprised as to how much effort and documentation went into what they have currently given) but I think it is a reasonable interpretation from the slides that getting some sort of OS loaded that isn’t Apple’s is something they had advertised.
To be fair that wasn't the only type of knee jerk negative reaction here on this topic. IIRC there was another, more Apple-fan style commentary of "a free OS will never run on this bespoke Apple product, and shouldn't".
Like djrogers, I can't honestly say that I've seen a comment like that. I recall ones more like "I'm not interested in running another OS on my Mac" and "if you wanted to run Linux, why would you buy a Mac," but those really aren't the same sentiment.
> Running an alternative OS "natively" on a Mac doesn't seem very appealing to me.
Which is pretty much exactly the kind of comment that I said I've seen ("I'm not interested in running another OS on my Mac"). Again, not the same as "a free OS will never run on this bespoke Apple product, and shouldn't."
It's the difference between "I bought a Mac because I wanted to run macOS on it" and "I bought a Mac out of vanity and want to separate myself from the plebes." Or, to put it another way, the difference between actual Apple users and Artie MacStrawman.
Maybe you are more accurately describing it. Some of them also say that free OSs are often behind on Mac hardware anyway, even on Intel. But the implication that I read into it is there's little reason to do it.
No big mystery here, people who buy Macs, prefer MacOS and don't see why you'd bother with Desktop Linux in general.
I'm personally interested in Linux on the Mac as a curiosity and as an alternative in case Apple ever screws up MacOS so much I feel desktop Linux is the least bad alternative.
I think M1 is a perfect example of why one might want to consider Apple's hardware and software in isolation, rather than a single integrated piece. There isn't currently another ARM laptop with the same performance characteristics.
There have been other times when I thought apple hardware was more interesting than macOS. I don't think macOS is bad per se. There are times when I find it pleasant and times when I would greatly prefer something else. The attitude we're describing -- why use Linux when there is macOS?? -- strikes me as a little odd, because there is a built in hostility and assumption that everyone shares the Mac fan's opinions and preferences, universally and in all circumstances.
As a Linux/ OpenBSD user, Mac hardware is suddenly a bit more appealing.
As a Mac user, the reverse it not true. OpenBSD or Linux are no more appealing than it was before the switch.
As for the rest of your post, I feel like the conversation is moving here under me. Use whatever OS you want. I don't see a ton of Mac people on here discouraging or disparaging any of this. I do see a a fair number of posts like the top one. "Running an alternative OS natively on a Mac doesn't seem very appealing to me." Which I don't see as the same as what you are suggesting.
I like those middle 2 lines; for a user of a free OS, Mac hardware is interesting, but the reverse is not true.
And sure, "use whatever OS you want" is kind of my point too. I have seen the Mac community at large seeming to not have that live and let live attitude. Not anyone on this thread, but I think it is a thing that happens.
I’ve read just about every M1 story and thread on HN since launch, and one of us is apparently mis-reading some posts here. I have never seen anything that I could remotely interpret as matching that sentiment.
I didn't see it on the M1 threads but there have been some bizarrely "Corporations are not only people, but my friend"-ish arguments about "sideloading" (i.e. running software on a device you paid for!) on Apple products in general.
In short, "But think of my Grandma" as opposed to think of the children.
you're misrepresenting the point, the point people make is that apple curating apps on the app store is a good thing for user privacy and minimizing spyware, and that allowing sideloading or third-party app stores would immediately negate that as some of the biggest, most intrusive, and most socially-inescapeable apps (like facebook) would immediately demand they be sideloaded in order to escape the apple rules on permissions/user surveillance/etc.
nobody thinks apple is doing it because they're their friend. And they know apple is making money off it. Some people prefer having apps with limited, audited permissions over a more wild-west approach where you could install anything and apps could demand anything or prevent you from using the app.
(and if you don't that's fine, Android exists and no apple users mind that. Market choices are good, stop trying to shut down Apple's ability to provide a different experience.)
if you really really want to sideload an app on an apple phone, pay the $50 a year for a developer account and you can compile and sideload whatever you want. Same for xbox btw, you can run any UWP app on an Xbox if you have a developer account.
I'm sure microsoft would've made the same argument in their anti-trust case - you're free to "sideload" any browser you want, or just buy a mac.
Most apple users have almost zero-information in an economic sense. Market choices are being made when consumers are being segmented into very rigid, hard to leave, cultures like Apple and Google - on top of that Apple and partly google own much of the stores, they do all the marketing, and can wield considerable basically unchecked power over their users.
And also, your mum isn't going to be using third party app stores, that whole part of the argument is quite vacuous and is effectively a logical basis for Apple to have complete oversight of everything on the app. And if she did want to play fortnite, Apple obviously aren't doing this for the goodness of their customers because they only pulled the plug when fortnite did the payments itself - that's just rentseeking.
Microsoft is making exactly the same argument as Epic Games, in fact, but they're not racing to allow third-party app stores on the Xbox either. This is a one-way street, these companies want to sell locked-down hardware but be allowed onto their competitors' platforms.
Similarly Facebook runs similarly exclusive stores on their Oculus Quest platform, which they also argue they should not have to open up.
This is purely down to companies who themselves employ similarly locked-down stores, which they feel should not have to be similarly opened, wrapping themselves in the language of openness and using it to attack their competitors' business models while arguing they themselves should be excluded. They are not making a good-faith argument for openness, they are using the legal system to take down a competitor.
Frankly I have much less problem with Microsoft opening up, since we don't do day-to-day business on our game consoles. How about they go first, model for us how an ethical company is supposed to behave?
> And also, your mum isn't going to be using third party app stores,
Yeah, actually, she will, that is the point. If she wants to use Facebook, she will use a third-party app store (where the application is not subject to Apple's rules about permissions and datamining). This is an immediate race to the bottom, won't even be a year and the superior privacy of the Apple ecosystem will have been completely undermined.
Here's an example of Facebook encouraging people to sideload a developer-licensed application with enhanced permissions so they could bypass permissions and leech more data.
So this is not a theoretical problem, this is something that actually happens, and that Apple has had to push back on.
> IIRC there was another, more Apple-fan style commentary of "a free OS will never run on this bespoke Apple product, and shouldn't".
I’m the person to whom you are responding. I’m very interested in the M1 and never saw such a post. I’ve literally never heard anyone express this view about a Mac.
That wasn't an assumption or knee-jerk reaction. Apple went on record as saying other operating systems wouldn't boot on Apple Silicon. Admittedly there's enough vagueness that they didn't 100% rule it out completely, but I think it was a fair interpretation of what they said at the time.
Craig Federighi said this when talking to John Gruber:
"We're not direct booting an alternate operating system, it's... purely virtualization is the route. But these hypervisors can be very efficient, so the need to direct boot shouldn't be the concern."
You are quoting a reddit comment which mis-interpreted what Federighi said. They didn't say they would prevent alternative operating systems from booting, only that they aren't doing it. As opposed to the fact that they are in fact helping get Linux running in the hypervisor and actually demoed Linux running in a VM before it was public.
Apple documented how people could boot alternative operating systems.
I don't get the downvotes of the parent post, the interpretation is completely reasonable. The point is that Apple was very clear that they are only supporting macOS on their hardware.
I know who they are quoting. I also re-listened to what he said because at the time I'd made the same assumption.
Apple execs are infamously careful about how they word things. Federighi could have said they won't allow other operating systems, but he didn't because that's not what they did or were planning.
If they didn't intend for this to be possible, they wouldn't have shipped it this way and documented how to do it.
> The point is that Apple was very clear that they are only supporting macOS on their hardware.
And that is exactly what they mean. They’re not going to help you with your port or field your questions when you ask for how things work. They are just going to leave the door open for you.
I took what Craig said more as “we aren’t doing Bootcamp, run Windows in a VM”. Apple never really supported the efforts to run Linux/BSD on their hardware in Intel, why would they start with the M1?
They support it about well as they did in Intel, which is to say that they left the door open to it. At the volume that Macs ship at, and the interest they garner, this is mostly enough to get people willing to put in the effort to make it work.
Yeah, I agree they “left the door open”, but the point I was making is that Apple provides zero resources (docs, data sheets, people to help, etc) that I’ve seen to those who are trying to reverse engineer the components in their machines to get them to work with an open source OS. Like an internal engineer tasked with working on an A series processor gets a tens of thousands of page PDF on the processor alone, not including similar PDFs for the GPU, but good luck ever getting that from Apple to port say Linux to it.
While I can understand interpreting what he said as you did, I did at the time. There are facts on the ground which illustrate quite clearly that they do in fact allow alternative OSs.
I suspect Federighi chose his words carefully and deliberately. The alternative is they changed their approach. Regardless, documentation and code don't lie, nor do they contradict him in any way.
This is what I love about OpenBSD (as an observer, and being adjacent via NetBSD) - in surprising ways, when they want something, they leap on it. Forefront of wireless chips, accelerated gfx (perplexing to me, but happily so), and now this? Keep it up, OpenBSD. This is impressive.
Also probably tests things like signals/job control. I ran into an issue bootstrapping ppcle (on linux) where everything but the signal handler (and vDSO) were working, but context switching from a kernel to a signal handler ended in SIGILL. Booting multi-user probably wouldn't work without working signals.
In the sense that single user mode is used as a failure mode for the boot process, it indicates that the system was successfully able to bootstrap from the EFI to its own (critical) drivers successfully.
Relevant I guess since, besides the GPU, I'd expect one of the hardest parts of porting to the M1 would be full support for its very non-standard storage interfaces.
Still impressive, but installing on or booting off the internal storage will be a big milestone for an prospective OS.
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.