> MacBooks are still among the nicest if not the nicest laptops hardware-wise, so some people like to run Linux on it

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.

> I wouldn't be surprised if Apple voided the hardware warranty, claiming it overheated or something and Linux was to blame.

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!

What is it about nerd forums that brings out these personalities?

Crikey lol. I haven't seen a single laptop that reaches Apple's HW quality. Besides, why are you assuming that we're buying new laptops?? Also, just generally, don't be such a dick.

I don't think you understand how Linux works overall. It's only relatively recently that manufacturers have catered to the Linux ecosystem and started to treat it as a first class build target. In the early days of Linux every piece of hardware had to be provided for and it sucked but people did it anyway because they wanted to run their own software free as in beer and have full control of it. Now they wanna do the same thing with Apple hardware. There is nothing inherently retarded about it but I do think you're kind of an idiot for writing these comments.

On abstract utilitarian grounds you might have a point, but you won't find much sympathy in the real world. People like macs, simple as, and find value in running Linux on them regardless. To an extent that is part of what it means to be a hacker.

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?

> To an extent that is part of what it means to be a hacker.

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 used to run Linux on an x86 MBP. It was great, because the hardware quality was excellent and I could pair it with a desktop environment that I actually liked.

I want to do the same with Asahi on Apple silicon. I don't understand why this would be "daft".

> 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.

This is hardly a Mac-specific problem: countless devices require or recommend booting to DOS, an EFI shell, or from a custom vendor-supplied boot imnage to update firmware, or to the system's firmware setup utility, even on Windows PCs and x86 Linux, and given the wide variety of PC hardware, even in cases where native OS firmware update tools exist, they may not always work.

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 hardly a Mac-specific problem

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.

> - MacBooks are still among the nicest if not the nicest laptops hardware-wise, so some people like to run Linux on it.

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.

> 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.

Huh? Apple has many problems. but one of them isn’t the resale value of their hardware. Or maybe I should say, if you buy Mac hardware, you don’t have a problem selling it on, not like a used PC the only thing worth selling on in a PC is the graphics card (Nvidia) and the memory.

I bought an M1 Ultra 64G off eBay in March with some 30 battery cycles, it looks new. This thing is a beast compared to most consumer hardware even today with its 800GB/s memory, runs small models well. When I get better HW for LLMs it's going to be a great Linux machine for a decade, well past the point Apple stops supporting M1 entirely.

Isn't that true for anything? Some people will sell 5yo hw in almost mint condition, whole others treat their hw like ass and it's garbage after two years already.

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.