True in theory, but at least with Linux I've found that desktop environments exhibit a slight but maddening level of sluggishness in VMs, no matter if it's GNOME, KDE, XFCE, or MATE. If all you need is a commandline Linux VMs are great but I'd go insane trying to use one as a graphical desktop for an extended period.
You can get rid of the sluggishness with GPU passthrough... but then the guest OS would still need GPU drivers.
I'm glad the things I want to do on Linux are all terminal based. I used a tiling WM for years on Arch and don't miss it much with all the macOS WM extensions available now (Magnet, Rectangle, Moom, Hammerspoon, etc). Less themeable but perfectly functional.
With Big Sur, Apple now has paravirtualization support. It exposes Metal API to manipulate virtual display devices. See https://developer.apple.com/documentation/paravirtualizedgra...
I doubt Apple has any intention of publishing hardware documentation for someone to write a native driver, but there are behavioral reverse engineering efforts already underway.
Only because of the seamlessness (within reason) of the experience.
Otherwise, there's nothing to switching to another OS for all or any part of it.
Many (most?) apps people use everyday are web- or Electron based, so they can switch to any other Windows or Linux with e.g. Chrome.
Their music is in some streaming service (Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, etc) all of which play on other OSes (and in any case, they can change subscription and they haven't lost anything). Or, for the fussier, it's mp3 or flac files, they can easily move. Even bought music (aac) from the iTunes Store is playable in other platform (since Apple has removed the DRM for a decade or so).
Ditto for movies. It's all streaming nowadays, and you can just switch to another streaming service (and all play everywhere anyway).
As for professional apps, most heavy ones (MS Office, Adobe Suite, Cubase, Live, Resolve, etc) run just fine in both OSX and Windows, and come with dual installers, so you can switch if you like (some even allow for multiple computers at the same time).
(If you're using Logic or FCPX, then sure, you'll need to find another program, and go through the pain of migrating your projects).
For mobile it's the same thing. E.g. you can sync just fine with an Android phone (you just don't get niceties like Handoff, Scan-to-Notes, etc).
So there's nothing special to "tie you to Apple products in perpetuity" except "I might lose the use of some apps that are Mac Only" (so same thing that would have tied you to Windows or Linux in perpetuity).
It's not appealing to me now. In 9 or 10 years when Apple has stopped shipping new versions of MacOS for the platform, it will be much more interesting for me. Of course by then it's just a curiosity or fun project, not something I need for day to day. And by then, much of the wifi/ graphics/ audio issues will be solved.
This statement is a bit presumptuous: "It's almost guaranteed you will never fully get Wi-Fi, audio, graphics acceleration, the trackpad, etc. working flawlessly."
Maybe I do not want all those things every time I boot. Apple used an "alternative OS" for their Airport routers: NetBSD. Kernel was around 6.x if I recall correctly. Seemed like Wi-Fi worked preety good, maybe even "flawlessly".
It's a computer. As the purchaser, I should get to decide how it is used. Using Apple software should be optional.
I don't know, like Tuxedo,
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Infos/News/OpenBSD-6-3-cu...
It's not. Anyone who has followed the last 10 years of Apple devices knows what works and what doesn't.
I agree.
The "alternative OS" is the OS that Apple used for its AirPort Extreme router, and which it borrows heavily from for the MacOs userland. Apple writes some software itself, but it also takes a significant amount of source code straight from "alternative OS" projects. To be clear, the OS projects I am referring to are not Linux nor is the computer that is the subject of this thread a "$2K laptop".
There have been many Apple devices where all those mentioned things (if present) work under a non-Apple OS. So as usual the truth is somewhere in the middle. From my Linux experience there are a lot of well working MBP models from this time span. And Minis.
A) a hypothetical device, let's not call it a computer, but similar, exists that asks you politely by means of something like a license not to modify it even though it would be possible to do so pretty easily.
B) another device, this time a hypothetical CPU that is next to impossible to modify with any degree of ease since it requires nanoscale tools.
Why should there be a fundamental difference in a person's ability to modify one of the above, but not the other? Just because the laws of Physics don't allow mere mortals to so (not at least without a highly sophisticated nano fabrication lab) doesn't seem like a very convincing principled answer. Is there a stronger argument?
Because one could trivially modify the first, and people do all the time (and screw the law), whereas the second is, as you said, "next to impossible" to modify even if you want it.
>Just because the laws of Physics don't allow mere mortals to so (not at least without a highly sophisticated nano fabrication lab) doesn't seem like a very convincing principled answer
In what universe do "the laws of physics prevent this to be done easily without millions of dollars" is not a convincing answer?
That’s a nice strawman you got here. AirPort routers shipped with NetBSD, and it was officially supported. But good luck getting macOS to run on that — macOS would count as the “alternative OS” for the AirPort.
If you are talking purely about desktop, I have to agree with you that the only real option is MacOS because of all the apple-only stuff (at least for now until drivers show up)
But there's more uses of hardware then desktops.
What I really would like to see is hardware manufacturers (Apple and anybody else) releasing the specs, so that people are free to do whatever they want with the metal they buy. I might event consider appropriate a legislative intervention in this field.
Mac users seem to live under a rock or something.
Got some weird idea that anything not a Mac must be windows like it's the 90s or something.
Both AMD and Intel hardware supports Linux and wouldn't ship without it. NVIDIA is really the only hold out I this space.
So just the most important graphics vendor huh?
This statement is rather miopic. I still recall when this very same argument was made regarding the idea of wanting to install Linux in computers which were bundled with Windows. I can tell you it made absolutely no difference to me a couple of decades ago when I installed Mandrake Linux on a Windows laptop, and it made no difference to me that I couldn't get hardware acceleration or the webcam to work, and that wifi only worked with ndiswrapper. I was able to run the software I wanted to use in the hardware I bought, and that's what matters.
M1 Mac minis are on the market for around 800$, which is an affordable price point, and their form factor and looks make them an interesting choice for a home server or workstation. It would be incomprehensible if we couldn't take advantage of that hardware by running our choice of software.
I agree with your sentiment, but that isn't as serious as you say on, say, M1 Minis used as servers and that's probably where OpenBSD would shine.
(I can run OpenBSD on any modern piece of hardware, though; the novelty and nostalgia are in running Mac OS 9 on that.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popek_and_Goldberg_virtualizat....
Also, the G4 iMac is a special piece of hardware in my book. I'd love to Frankenstein an M1 G4 iMac.
The iMac G4 didn't support virtualization,
These devices are mass produced, and have long lifespans.
It's a good target for development.
The OpenBSD kernel doesn't support loadable kernel modules, so virtual machine guest additions are not an option for a virtualized OpenBSD.
And yet people have done it with Linux just fine... Linus himself run a G5 as his desktop (circa 2003-2005) and later a Macbook Air as his daily driver laptop (circa 2011-2013...)
This was on an AMD64 system that was far less Apple-specific as far as I know.
On the other hand, virtualization _already_ lets you run whatever arm64 BSD, Linux, or Windows that you want. The trackpad and everything else will work flawlessly thanks to guest additions. Yes, you make some tradeoffs -- you sacrifice a core, a few GB of RAM, some disk space for an OS you don't _really_ want to be running. But I'm skeptical that these are not better tradeoffs than constantly using a hacked-together and half-broken OS.
To me the ideal solution is not that Corellium or Marcan or whoever reverse engineers the drivers to a sufficient degree. I'd rather see Apple (or the Hackintosh types) release a tiny variant of macOS that contains hardware drivers and Hypervisor.framework and not much else. It could be the next generation of Boot Camp and it would probably take less engineering effort for them to maintain while satisfying the small segment of customers interested in running other operating systems.