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Comment by TheRealSteel | Hacker News Reader

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."

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hfkdlg/craig_federig...

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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.

They're quoting Craig Federighi: https://youtu.be/Hg9F1Qjv3iU?t=3794

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.

Not just documented, documented well. bputil’s man page is probably the best new one I’ve seen in years.

> 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.

I reiterate that I believe it was a reasonable interpretation of what Apple said.

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.

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