> It’s your machine, but the inner workings are this ineffable mystery.
At some point, every machine's software becomes an ineffable mystery. Do you know what is going on in all your 3rd-party Linux drivers, say, from NVIDIA?
At some point, every machine's software becomes an ineffable mystery. Do you know what is going on in all your 3rd-party Linux drivers, say, from NVIDIA?
If people wanted to fight for it, stop using NVIDIA products, but do you see that happening? Not bloody likely.
This isn't so much whataboutism as it is about trying to coerce an ecosystem of hundreds of vendors to listen to a small cadre of open source proponents.
If the Linux kernel forces AMD to improve UAI and make it look like LAM, I'd consider that a victory. Let's see what happens.
Nouveau will get there, one hopes...
i.e. the ability to examine and understand something weird that’s going on and that may be a potential problem.
This ideal falls short in the hardware realm, where we have to contend with the Intel Management Engine and the like.
Nevertheless, the modern Linux world is vastly more open and accessible than the closed-by-design Apple world. Even if I had to use Nvidia drivers, that would be one binary blob in a sea of open source, whereas the Apple ecosystem is opaque binary blobs as far as the eye can see, without even the courtesy of documentation. It makes a difference.
Here's the practical upshot - once, many moons ago, I forwarded port 22 to my home desktop machine so I could access it remotely. I had fail2ban running and regularly checked the logs, so I wasn't worried. What I didn't realize was that maybe 6 months prior I'd made a test account for some purpose, with 'test' as the username and password. Inevitably, some worm managed to guess this combo in less than the 6 tries before fail2ban kicked in. The kicker, though? I was sitting at the machine when it happened, and I could tell immediately. The HDD light was flashing, and I knew it shouldn't be. There was load on the CPU, and I knew there shouldn't be. Checked 'top', spotted the weird process immediately, killed it, locked the account (it never escaped the test account so no harm done) and went on with my day.
Can you imagine that story on Windows? "My hard drive light is blinking and I don't know why" - yep, that's daily life. "There's a weird process in the list" - yep, there's lots of those, good luck tracking down which company is responsible.
Why would I ever buy Nvidia? Asking as a non-AI developer who doesn’t play PC-games.
I’m perfectly happy with Intel graphics. I hear it has good, open-source drivers too.
Exactly what am I missing?
I don't use Nvidia because of this, and I'm not alone. If you ask "what is the best graphics card for linux" on a linux forum you will invariably get a chorus of "not Nvidia".
Similarly, all fruits have fat content. Just off the top of my head:
1. avocados (a whopping 15% fat content!)
2. there is no legal requirement for me to list another fruit here
It really is nice to have, when you want to look it up. Userspace daemons and their behavior should not be a mystery.
At an extreme minimum, most daemons on macOS have at least a man page describing their high level function.
man triald will report no manual entry, though.
The replies to my original post seem to me to be arguing for 100% transparency from the keyboard to the atoms on the finfets. I don't think I'm strawmanning that (maybe hyperbolizing a little, but with RISC-V proponents, maybe not!)
That sounds like a noble goal, like world peace, ending starvation, and curing all modern ails. However, the extent to which tribalism and out-grouping emerges from people who don't use the "superior, pure" solution is nonsense: just look at the tone of the first post, snidely declaring that this is proof apple is again such a bad solution. That's not helpful, and after hearing similar tech arguments for nearly 35 years online, it is tiresome (ironic). On top of that, the dream of transparency seems unlikely because every open source hardware project I've ever seen has failed [1], there is zero motivation for it.
Again, not to say it isn't a noble goal, but don't fetishize it to the point of outgrouping others.
[1] This is a broad statement, as there is plenty of gadgetry that is open source hardware. I mean: open source hardware for Linux laptops. Or at least hardware that has open source drivers but doesn't have an "Appendix H".
Since I can't meaningfully audit kernel level stuff anyway (not my area) I mostly care whether it works for me (or for the production purpose the customer needs or etc.) and that's not an ideal world but I choose to prioritise open source userspace contributions and running code.
I also run windows 10 on a Thinkpad Helix 2 for my personal machine - with WSL to provide me an X11 environment that I use to ssh to the debian/freebsd/<whatever the customer runs> machines I'm actually doing development work on. I like writing server side code (and tolerate writing browser side code) so being a linux desktop admin would involve a whole extra field of expertise that wouldn't gain me anything, and I'd rather spend the required learning time on writing and publishing more code instead.
Other people are entirely welcome to choose entirely different trade-offs, of course, but this particular attitude works for me.
Edit: Ironically, my one foray into OS X ended because Aqua insisted on reaching into my X11 instance and controlling focus, which completely trashed my fvwm2 FocusFollowsMouse setup in terms of usability for me, so I decided the Microsoft black box was a better trade-off than an Apple black box even though in those days I had to have cygwin for my X11 + ssh setup.
I hate using Linux on the actual laptop. The touchpad is always a trainwreck. Sensitivity and scroll speed/acceleration is infuriating (too much Xorg config hassle). Trying to get "middle click" working -always- has issues. Power buttons never work properly, same with LidClose actions (i've read many knowledge bases and stackoverflow posts, none seem to work for my particular hardware, as is always the case). It is frustrating as hell to get it to act like a well-behaved "normal" laptop. Don't get me started on suspend/hibernate issues, or the flaky bluetooth drivers that always need system ctl restart command line help.
Now that I've made the tradeoff to not use Linux as anything but a remote server via VNC, my choices are Windows or Mac for a primary computer. I don't like ads showing up in start menu, or idiotic MFA and login requirements, so I'm left with Mac.
But I don't get on with touchpads (the apple ones are absolutely superior to anybody else's but it's just not my thing) and my wrists -really- don't get on with mice these days, so a trackpoint is pretty essential to my comfort.
Happily, I see the start menu sufficiently rarely that any presence of ads doesn't even register to me, and the login stuff is basically "meh" since it's (so far) stayed out of my way sufficiently for me not to care.
But that's my choice of trade-offs - may you have great joy out of yours :D
Sadly not because, like OSX, that software is proprietary and us filthy peasants are denied the honour of gazing upon the holy source code crafted by the holiest engineers, anointed by Huang himself.
Of course, that's assuming you don't download the Nvidia leak and gaze upon the source code within. That would be bad, you're bad for thinking it, don't do that. Only bad people would do that. May Huang have mercy on your soul.
There's also a large difference between a closed driver or firmware blob, where the function is known but the workings are not, and large portions of the userspace, including system services and applications, that are entirely opaque.
I’d certainly like to.