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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

I am very curious why they mentioned Linux but not Windows?

Might be competition type thing, MS not wanting to or because they simply didn't get it to work yet. Speculation is free.

> or because they simply didn't get it to work yet

Based on how poorly every other Windows on Arm experiment has gone, I'm guessing Apple is not willing to officially sanction bootcamp (yet).

Other possibility: bootcamp (native Windows booting) requires something like iBoot starting a CSM or UEFI stub (if the A-SoC doesn't use UEFI - which it might not) to then start the Windows Boot Manager.

I don't actually know the current status of supported Windows firmware loaders, but the most recent information I had was that even on ARM you needed UEFI with Secure Boot.

I am interested in Linux on those Mac ARM desktop machines, probably takes a lot of effort, I don't see Apple making the effort themselves. On the other hand: there is a super small chance that if the A-series SoCs are marketable you'd get no-OS ARM (micro) servers. That'd be pretty cool.

I don't think it's an issue like that. You can run windows without secure boot[1], and the windows boot loader can be chain loaded from whatever apple is using if they are not using a standard eufi firmware for whatever reason.

At the very least, booting windows is a relatively low effort problem to solve compared to everything else that has to happen to move a whole ecosystem to a new architecture. We can conclude its a low priority for Apple, if it's something they still want to support at all.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...

I don't think you can run Windows on ARM without UEFI and Secure Boot.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/br...

Apple doesn't use UEFI on their ARM systems, so it'd be an extra effort indeed.

Apple uses UEFI on it's Intel Macs.

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/uefi-firmware-overv...

Why assume this would change?

Two reasons: 1. Windows competes with macOS and 2. I assume x86 Windows can't be run as a virtualized guest on an ARM Mac due to the different ISAs between the host/guest; it would have to be run in an emulator instead?

Windows 10 runs on ARM on the Microsoft Surface Pro X.

There are huge number of Web developers on Mac. And 99% of them deploy to Linux. Comparatively speaking I dont know know any one doing Bootcamp apart from rare gaming.

Only times I've used it was for occasionally needing to touch SQL Server.

That was a few years ago, there might be better ways of interacting with it now.

We probably run with different crowds, but Parallels or BootCamp are installed on all the Macs we have because of specific programs needed to fulfill grants.

Yep, there are lots of weird clunky little windows only apps for doing calculations for things in my industry as well, usually stuff thats required for regulatory compliance. But I can't think of any that use really any processing power. As long as parallels can emulate x86 windows on ARM even a big speed drop would be manageable, as long as the windows UI doesn't get sluggish.

Yeah, possible is fine. We don't need amazing speed just an ok UI speed. It is truly a shame that Java apps didn't actually take off with government & industry developers. Maybe they will do Electron at some point.

It might be worth someone's time to research this area of the economy and provide cross-platform tools.

It's probably an ARM64 version of Linux. I don't know if you've tried it but Ubuntu 20.04 for ARM64 runs really nicely on the Raspberry Pi 4.

Yeah, it's an ARM version of Linux.

Servers...

A lot of people developing apps that run on Linux servers use Macs, and have had MS targeting them for a couple of years as well.

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