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Comment by throwaway13337 | Hacker News Reader

Sounds extremely exciting!

If I could run linux on apple hardware without compromise, my life would meaningfully be improved.

It's not well understood how important it is that humans feel in control of their environment. I feel like it's a fundamental to human happiness. Software that takes that away contributes to the general malaise and hopelessness that many are feeling today. It's just water to them at this point. They don't even see it. But it's the primary means of interaction.

Making that a true option to millions of people could do a lot of good for the world.

It's important work.

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I wholeheartedly agree. If I think about it, I must have thought "god I wish this ran Linux" at least once every single time I opened my MacBook - likely for the last several years.

I have run Asahi and while I love the project, it's not ready for that type of use.

Recently, I got a new MacBook and repurposed my old M1 MacBook Pro for local inference. The unbelievable number of compromises and hacks you need to do to run daemonized always-on software on MacOS was another reminder.

I know it goes completely against Apple's business model, but I'd love to be an Apple customer if I could buy their hardware and use it with software of my own choice. Holding an iPhone or a MacBook feels great, they're all easily among the best consumer electronics ever as far as the physical part goes. But Apple's software is completely different from how I want to use my devices so I just don't end up considering them when buying.

Would love for Asahi or similar projects to be fully usable but it also doesn't seem very likely. Apple is arguably not hostile to other OSes on MacBooks, they're designed to freely boot non-Apple operating systems, but by not publishing any hardware manuals Apple ensures that an Asahi-style project is always going to be well behind, likely years behind, in hardware support.

Absolutely. In some ways it makes me wonder if the ability to boot unsigned OSes was just to avoid anti trust lawsuits.

Despite the ethical grey area of LLMs regarding stolen IP, I'm at the point where I'd cheer on a complete set of reverse engineered firmware appear.

Damn the consequences

Oh, they’re definitely hostile, by the way, Darwin is still open source, but no one’s bothered in 26 years market inertia? Just like no one’s bothered to take a license out with SoftBank to design something from the ground up (like those three ex Apple engineers) using Linux, the easiest and fastest way to get something working from the ground up.

Wouldn’t the time be better spent taking a license out? With SoftBank to design? Arm chips that work from the ground up running Linux instead of this time-wasting exercise? Apple is one year away from M7 two years away from M8 processors Asahi are just chasing smoke…

> I feel like it's a fundamental to human happiness. Software that takes that away contributes to the general malaise and hopelessness that many are feeling today.

I would like to see a full-featured Linux on Apple hardware too, but I think over 99% of people don't feel anywhere near this strongly. Do you feel this strongly about being able to replace the engine in your car with one you made yourself? I don't, and I think most people view computers the same way.

> Do you feel this strongly about being able to replace the engine in your car with one you made yourself?

I am not one of those people, as I do not do cars, but I would hazard a guess that most car people over a certain age do in fact feel very strongly about what modern cars have become. The ones who grew up without knowing what ownership feels like less so, which reflects the exact same dynamic with younger generations who are growing up without ever knowing what it feels like to own the hardware they use.

As a person over a certain age I mostly like the fact that cars are so much more reliable than they were when I started driving.

I like the creature comforts on a long journey. I would have given my right arm for satnav when I was driving for work.

I’m much the same when it comes to technology. A phone that doesn’t break is much more valuable to me than a repairable device that fails.

I think it would be disingenuous not to point out that this was also true of new cars 20 years ago - which is much more pertinent to the point of the people you're replying to.

I am looking forward to swapping the engine in my MX5, if I ever manage to kill it.

Considering how easy it was to replace engines of most cars before the integration of electronics I'd say it used to be quite common. Just as most hardware vendors used to ship full specs for their components up until the 80s or even 90s.

So, yeah, yes, definitely. I wouldn't be working with computers on a daily basis if I had to use Windows.

I'm not gonna overly generalize this though. I don't think it'll be the same for most people but I tend to not care about what most people do 99% of the time anyways.

If it was as cheap and easy to install a new engine as it is for an OS, I imagine swapping engines would be even more popular than new OSs. (And I think far fewer would clamor to replace their OS if it cost $x,xxx for each OS swap and took many hours of manual labor - I.e. I think whether someone wants something can be heavily influenced by whether it is ~free vs cost $x,xxx, etc.)

If it was easy, someone would’ve done something. with Darwin or many the other abandon/obsolete OS’s from the past…

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