majority of linux users buy AMD because of drivers alone. avoid broadcom like the plage etc.
asahi linux is weird. theres no good reason to explain its existence other than there are too many people willing to give money to apple for no good reason.
Different people have different needs, preferences & ideological beliefs to you. If you measure the actions of others, based on your viewpoint alone, you will never understand the rest of humanity.
Fucking nobody cares about the gripes I would have with it, and I've even come around to appreciate the fact that Apple sells goods engineered to the desires of people who aren't me (read: the majority): I can't deny the speakers on my Macbook are fucking amazing, and most people would care about that rather than whether something is FOSS.
Sometimes it is even just a practical issue: having as low level control as possible can increase performance in certain aspects, for example in latency related tasks, that can be important in certain applications. This does not make everything else useless, but there are definitely tasks for which I choose an AMD gpu over an NVIDIA gpu (or apple silicon) just because of the open source drivers in linux.
You could also take this to the extreme, as Stallman used to do with his OLPC where he deleted the wifi blob to only use lan because it wasn't free enough. If you have to wait for hardware company's to build free and open drivers and open hardware docs and open firmwares to use linux well im afraid your options are basically some X220 with a Open rom bios reimage.
For now, Apple's arm64 silicon is the most compelling option for anyone that wants to develop on the architecture locally. It's the same way as how i386 was the most compelling option for anyone that wanted to run a free unix at home in 1991. It just does not matter that Apple hasn't done a dump of all their drivers and hardware docs because it is all we have and the hardware is damn good at that too.
i.e making the linux port possible even if not supporting it publicly.
1) if everyone (especially kernel devs) all had your attitude linux wouldn't run on a darn thing
2) Apple's made no indication that they would stop alternative operating systems from working with their boot loader. in fact their own engineer(s) have tweeted that their boot loader has that in mind and theyre going to do nothing to stop it
3) it happens to be the most cost effective high performance arm hardware that anyone can get their hands on. Even if you take the top end ampere the single threaded perf is half (although the 80 core+ versions make up for it in multithread). It would be absolutely foolish to not use this hardware target for Linux.
4) the M1 architecture (the entire SoC) breaks a lot of assumptions that other hardware has made, and this is a great way to fix bugs in Linux as well a lot of the software on top of the kernel as well.
Finally I think the work folks have done on asahi is probably really useful for anyone trying to optimize graphics shaders on Apple devices at the per instruction level (which they have consistently obfuscated with pretty charts in their performance tooling in Xcode).