- MacBooks are still among the nicest if not the nicest laptops hardware-wise, so some people like to run Linux on it.
- People have older Macs that they like to repurpose. E.g., we still have an M1 Mini that was used by our daughter before she got handed down a MacBook from my wife. It's now collecting dust, but I might install Linux to use it as a headless server.
Also, this is Hacker News.
Yes, daft people.
There are plenty of very nice PC laptops out there that are built and TESTED with explicit Linux support in mind, out of the box.
With a Mac you can count on it never working 100% as well as it could, and will receive NO support. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple voided the hardware warranty, claiming it overheated or something and Linux was to blame.
You are paying Apple hand over fist for a subpar experience and to screw you over.
Repurposing old hardware is one thing and there are plenty of those projects about.
But deliberately buying incompatible hardware? Retardation.
Well, you made it half way through the comment before running out of real points and deciding to make up imaginary ones to support your point. That's not nothing!
You're also not looking at the whole picture, at the time of Asahis creation it was both the Linux on Mac project but ALSO one of the most mature Linux on arm projects; surely you wouldn't say that is daft too?
This is where I disagree fundamentally.
If you are interested in woodworking and want to become a carpenter, your initial reaction shouldn't be, "I have to become a blacksmith first so I can forge my own tools".
At that point you would have wasted your time building tools when you could have been building cabinets instead.
I want to do the same with Asahi on Apple silicon. I don't understand why this would be "daft".
Because AFAIK you still need macOS to periodically update the firmware and binary blobs that supports the house of cards. That doesn't sound like the premium Linux experience it's cracked up to be.
In other words, think of macOS as a somewhat bloated vendor-supplied firmware update tool. "Premium" is subjective, but I wouldn't personally limit my options for SSDs or storage controllers to those that supply Linux firmware update tools, so why should I do so with laptops?
And dual booting to a small native OS partition and auto-updating is hardly less convenient than manually downloading firmware, creating an appropriately configured USB boot disk, and installing it by rebooting and invoking a vendor-supplied tool by hand from a DOS or EFI command prompt.
This is the craziest cope ever.
Having to dual-boot a copy of macOS is quite literally a Mac-specific problem.
UEFI updates can be pulled off a FAT32 thumb drive, natively.
By the time said macbook is fully supported, it is in sorry state. Judging by what I found when looking for second hand laptops, macbooks don't age well.
Are you dumpster diving for your MacBooks, perchance? I buy all of mine second hand, they are all still mint by the 5 year mark, and I have several at the 10 year mark that all I've had to replace is the battery.
The problem with used Macs is that they're still really expensive, and if you want to only run them with Apple software, the support duration is limited (especially true for phones, even more for Android ones). You can pick up used Thinkpads or Dells in great condition for very cheap after a few years.
That's how Linux has been for PCs also for most of its lifetime. Only in the recent 5-10 years things have kind of improved, slightly.
Macbook hardware is superb. I understand why people are interested in replacing the (in some parts) lackluster operating system Apple forces into it.
One major FU was with the 5.x kernel when suddenly it no longer supported my external monitor, this with Intel graphics (and one by one all distros upgraded to that kernel). Not sure what happened there and why, but I had to do using Linux for a while because of that.
Dino fuel generator hooked up to Tesla EV: https://youtube.com/shorts/46bRaGP4uqM
I wish I could install windows or linux on it because MacOS kind of sucks, but the device itself is amazing and reason enough to switch away from PCs.
It didn't used to, but now does.
> but the device itself is amazing and reason enough
By continuing to reward Apple they have no incentive to improve macOS and it will continue to get objectively worse because people keep giving them money.
Strange argument. Their hardware is without competition, that's the reason I use it and also warrants rewarding them with my money. Why should I reward Linux for (mostly) only working on hardware that sucks in comparison?
I was very surprised that almost nothing had changed in that long time! They got virtual desktops (finally), and widgets changed from an expose-like effect to only becoming visible at the right side of the screen, and tbh that's about it. All other "features" seem to be changes to Apple's built-in apps.
I think the OS still sucks about as much as in 2004, it's very much a matter of taste.
To go with your analogy, if I can buy an electric car and replace the engine in it with something that does what I want and gives me 95% of the usable features of the locked down engine that it ships with, why wouldn't I do that? Especially when the rest of the cars on the market are getting 100 miles to a charge when my Apple M2 is getting 300?
I struggle to wrap my mind around it. It's like buying an EV so you can convert it to work on gasoline.