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Comment by moonchrome | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I'm going to use a completely custom SoC + enthusiast driven driver support - with no support from manufacturer - to be my daily driver as a developer.

Because I've got nothing better to do with my time than diagnose issues due to running a setup only 50 other people in the world use.

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Most laptops don't use a completely custom SoC, but most of them have enthusiast driven driver support -- or worse, formerly-enthusiast driven driver support where nobody currently cares -- with no support from the manufacturer. And on less popular hardware; the most popular laptop models in the world are macs.

If you want manufacturer support, you need to use macOS or Windows or one of the very limited selection of laptops which feature Linux as an option. Most people who use Linux probably already use Linux on a computer without manufacturer support. If that's not for you though, that's totally fine.

Dell, one of the largest manufacturers of laptops supports Linux and OSS. It's not some red headed step child anymore.

Dell laptops support Linux for a select few models. You can't just get any Dell and expect manufacturer support. I think "laptops from a few tiny Linux-focused companies, plus a few Linux models from dell" counts as a "very limited selection", even though it's better than it used to be.

PC component manufacturers offer Linux drivers for their hardware, sometimes it's binary blobs, etc. but at least there's some effort there. And companies like Intel and AMD are paying engineers to maintain it. For example AMD and Intel both have open source Linux GPU drivers available. Does Apple even have specifications for their GPU available ?

It's not the big components like the CPU and the GPU that's the problem most of the time, it's the wifi/bluetooth chip, the sound chip, the LAN controller, the USB controller, the trackpad, the power management stuff, display backlight, etc etc.

>GPU that's the problem most of the time

Developing a GPU driver for a custom chip with no public reference or support from Apple isn't a problem ? I guess you're saying it's not a problem in other laptops - but for Apple Silicon it sounds like more fundamental than those issues you mentioned.

Yeah, I wash just countering the idea that "AMD and Intel make GPU drivers for Linux so drivers on PC hardware isn't a problem".

On Macs it's a big deal; about as big a deal as making open source AMD drivers was before they had official open source drivers. And people did that, and people are working open source GPU drivers for Apple's GPU now.

> PC component manufacturers offer Linux drivers for their hardware, sometimes it's binary blobs, etc. but at least there's some effort there.

I'm gonna say that it's a "generic" driver, which is totally fine on desktops but almost always (except for Thinkpads and Linux-focused laptop manufacturers) has a nasty edge case (modified chips or chip firmware) that just makes it incompatible. This isn't exclusive to Linux by the way, even Windows suffers from this exact problem (usually audio, fingerprint and touchpad).

Edit: for example, this is the FreeBSD code for HDA sound device (it's messy): https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/sys/dev/sou...

I'm not sure whether this is an argument for or against Asahi. The "50 other people in the world" statement is hardly true for a machine offered with a single SoC and zero customization options except RAM size and SSD.

Honestly. That’s what I’ve been doing my entire professional career.

Modern laptops are not materially different from SoCs, everything is soldered to the board and the CPU does basically everything memory related.

I guess you think that Intel designs are an open standard?

At the very least they’re extremely patent incumbered; with AMD and Intel having a sort of patent truce between them.

Intel and AMD have developers working on Linux support and drivers and support running Linux on their hardware.

Intel and AMD don't make the whole widget. They want people to buy the components, so publicly 'supporting' multiple OSs makes sense. Apple on the other hand want people to buy and use Macs and macOS...

I wonder if you ever got any meaningful support from an OEM. I never have. But I have gotten meaningful support from enthusiasts.

Enthusiast driven software can be really good. Eg the enthusiast community has given us OSS automated insulin delivery systems.

If some of those 50 are kernel devs Linux is likely to run just fine.

You've put in a support ticket with Apple, had an engineer assigned to it, and had it fixed promptly?

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