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Comment by CarelessExpert | Hacker News Reader

> And yet here I am, with Linux on an Intel laptop that can't play video without tearing.

Odd, because here I am with an Intel laptop running Linux that manages that just fine.

> Support from chip manufacturers doesn't mean you're actually going to end up with a better user experience.

Honestly, this is just ridiculous. Go ask the Nouveau folks how their reverse engineering project is going.

I love the drive you guys have, and I wish you the best of luck. But Apple could pull the rug out from under you any time they want in a future hardware rev (either deliberately or accidentally), and all you can do is keep on reverse engineering in the hopes of keeping up.

Edit: Updated pronouns since apparently the OP is one of the project maintainers.

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> Odd, because here I am with an Intel laptop running Linux that manages that just fine.

Then it's not an Ivy Bridge running multiple external displays on KDE.

> Honestly, this is just ridiculous. Go ask the Nouveau folks how their reverse engineering project is going.

Nvidia created an actively hostile firmware situation. We already have the firmware story worked out. Plus having to support a bazillion GPU generations with incompatible interfaces burns people out. We're starting with one, and Apple has a much better track record of incremental change and avoiding hardware churn. This is unique, and we've literally heard from Apple employees that this is an explicit goal. It shows all throughout the SoC design.

> and all you can do is keep on reverse engineering in the hopes of keeping up.

And we will keep on reverse engineering, and we'll keep up :-)

> Then it's not an Ivy Bridge running multiple external displays on KDE.

Tiger Lake (whose microarchitecture I just learned is Willow Cove) running Gnome via Wayland (damn HiDPI...), single external display via USB C dock plus an onboard.

More fully, previously I was running a Lenovo X1C5 with Intel integrated graphics. Again, no issues there. In that case I ran Xorg with TearFree enabled.

I'm currently running a Framework sporting an i7-1165G7 with the aforementioned setup.

It was genuinely a little shocking, having spent my earlier days manually hacking modelines in X, to see this hardware come up flawlessly on first boot with Ubuntu 21.04... amazing what a reasonably open hardware ecosystem will enable. jab jab ;)

> We're starting with one, and Apple has a much better track record of incremental change and avoiding hardware churn. This is unique, and we've literally heard from Apple employees that this is an explicit goal. It shows all throughout the SoC design.

Absolutely a fair point! I concede that the reverse engineering story with Apple may very well be less painful than it is with other vendors. Honestly, I hope for your sanity that it is! :D

I think it's a little bizarre that you seem to think that just because you have no issues with video tearing on a few different Linux-based setups you've used, no one else possibly could on their (likely pretty different) setup.

I think you're being incredibly reductive with your claims about screen tearing. I've run a 1080p display off my horribly outdated i5 520m, and I never noticed any tearing on it. Same goes for my Skylake notebook, desktop Haswell iGPU and even my old Raspberry Pi from 2014. You may have just gotten extremely unlucky with your hardware.

I feel like the "everything works great on my machine, so if it doesn't on yours then you must be really unlucky" argument should have been retired years ago.

On the contrary, I'd argue it's become increasingly relevant in the age of ARM laptops and Windows 11 hardware requirements.

cough You may as well say “you” instead of “these guys” btw, perhaps a careless mistake but you were speaking to the lead developer of the Asahi effort and I would hazard a guess his views on the Linux kernel and vendor support are a tad more nuanced than “ridiculous”

LOL, just because they're running the project, doesn't mean their opinions are sacrosanct or unquestionable.

The statement they made is ridiculous, and I stand by my decision to label it as such.

If you want to explain to me how I'm wrong instead of simply appealing to authority, you're obviously free to do so.

You made an absolutist statement that support from a manufacturer will always result in a better user experience than community support only.

That sounds entirely ridiculous and unsupportable to me.

And please don't trot out the "appealing to authority" bit. That absolutely doesn't apply here; when it comes to an opinion about some hardware/software project, I would 100% take the word of the lead developer on that project over a rando on HN who has for some inexplicable reason decided to pick a fight about something they appear to not have any domain knowledge about.

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