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Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

I've heard solid rumors that they do have their own internal linux distro, specifically so the hardware teams can do bringup without a dependency on the XNU team(s). That Linux distro is also supposed to be kind of a shit show held together with bubblegum and paperclips, in contrast to asahi which is bending over backwards to do things right (gods bless them).

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To be fair, if it's only for hardware bring up then I would kind of expect it to to be hacked together without any regard for things you care about in a "real" distro. (Heavily patched kernel? Who cares, we're not going to update it. Can't self-host? Whatever, cross compile the whole thing. Software leaks memory? No problem, just reboot the test rig hourly. Broken package manager? We can build+flash a new image every time we want to change the installed software.)

There’s a slight problem with this approach - you can’t trust your test results in such environment… if you manage to complete your test suites at all before the next revision drops.

> in contrast to asahi which is bending over backwards to do things right

Not having to reverse engineer drivers for pretty much every single component would probably require a fraction of the effort though. And it's not like Apple would really need to actually maintain their own distro, releasing the drivers (which they are more than capabable of doing) would be perfectly sufficient.

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