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Notable Developer Starts Patreon to Fund Apple Silicon Linux Port

hot-gril said:
Funny enough, Linux is also better than macOS for games since Steam Proton only exists for Linux, but idc about games.
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Proton is for x86 Linux though, you'd need to add in an emulator to make games work.

gridlocked said:
Isn't MacOS based on Unix which came originally from Bell Labs?
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Kind of. You can think of Unix as a conceptual framework for how an OS should be designed. macOS follows that framework, as does Linux.

I don't believe macOS contains any actual code from the original, Bell Labs version of Unix.
 
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Wowfunhappy said:
Proton is for x86 Linux though, you'd need to add in an emulator to make games work.


Kind of. You can think of Unix as a conceptual framework for how an OS should be designed. macOS follows that framework, as does Linux.

I don't believe macOS contains any actual code from the original, Bell Labs version of Unix.
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For the overarching design principals you can look at POSIX.
Unix, Minix, OS/9, BSD, macOS/Darwin, GNU/HURD/ GNU/Linux and innumerable other kernels and full OSes have used POSIX as the standard. How they get there and what additional features is what sets them all apart.

POSIX is like defining a car as a four wheeled self-propelled vehicle which completely encloses its occupants with, perhaps, the omission of a roof.
You get the idea. The definition is detailed enough that there's quite a lot of similarity and interoperation possible but vague enough that you can take the idea in a lot of directions.
 
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gridlocked said:
Isn't MacOS based on Unix which came originally from Bell Labs?

I used linux for years but finally left it because it seems almost impossible to get everything one wants on a distro.

That market is so fragmented its a quagmire.
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FreeBSD or as the statement reads "Copyright 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved." As seen when booting in verbose mode on a macOS system. The copyright BS over it during that time was epic with group after group trying to lock up the code. But it was the FreeBSD variant of it Apple used as their base alnog with the code they got from Xerox for the GUI..
 
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gridlocked said:
Isn't MacOS based on Unix which came originally from Bell Labs?

I used linux for years but finally left it because it seems almost impossible to get everything one wants on a distro.

That market is so fragmented its a quagmire.
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Well, MacOS and iOS are based on NeXTstep which is Mach-based. The unix "personality" of MacOS and iOS is BSD-based, which is the Darwin level stuff.

To be honest, I don't remember the relationship between NeXTstep and BSD anymore. I remember NeXTstep had a command line and all the *nix tools, but I never really paid attention to all the *nix derivatives back then.

Wikipedia says this:

"From day one, the operating system of NeXTSTEP was built upon Mach/BSD."

But I'm not sure what that means in real life. Was/is BSD just a mach personality? I wan to say yes, but this is sort of ancient history.
 
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icanhazapple said:
You can run unsigned code on an M1 - if Apple backtracked from this, there would be a HUGE uproar from the Developer Community. Apple does listen to Developers if they go too far on something.
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Running unsigned code is not quite the same as installing and booting another OS.
Even my old 2009 iMac gave me quite a lot of headaches when I installed Lubuntu on it (it was just for the sake of it, a few weeks before the iMac died anyway).
I shudder to think how much more difficult it would be to install Linux on the M1.
 
MacUser2525 said:
KHTML and CUPS off the top of my head are clear examples of apple using Open Source code in their macOS operating system. Safari would never have gotten off the ground without the KDE projects code to render web pages.
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Darwin is Open Source. As is WebKit.

But while Linux is Open Source not all Open Source is Linux.
 
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MacUser2525 said:
KHTML and CUPS off the top of my head are clear examples of apple using Open Source code in their macOS operating system. Safari would never have gotten off the ground without the KDE projects code to render web pages.
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100% true. But none of that has anything to do with Linux.
Linux is a monolithic kernel written by Linus Torvalds.
KHTML is written by the KDE group and completely unrelated to Linus or Linux
CUPS (the printing system) was, as far as I know, developed completely in-house by Apple

All of those pieces of software are distributed under some form of open source copyright or copyleft.
 
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MacUser2525 said:
crcuilla said:
What GUI code did Apple get from Xerox?
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There was a story on folklore.org about that. Apparently Xerox owned the insurer that Apple used for corporate liability. Xerox didn't sue Apple for infringement because they'd essentially be suing themselves. Go figure, right? And in any case the stuff Hertzfeld actually wrote was orders of magnitude better than anything Xerox had...or anyone else for that matter. And Apple did get some kind of license eventually.

But Apple didn't get any code from Xerox, as far as anyone knows.
 
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jayducharme said:
Of course the irony is that Macs ARE running Linux, just a heavily customized version.
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I would not say MacOS is a heavily customized version of Linux. Rather, it's a heavily customized version of BSD (Berkeley Standard Distribution), and both BSD and Linux are Unix-based systems.

I.e., it's not:
Linux-->BSD-->MacOS.

Rather, it's

Unix-->Linux
and
Unix-->BSD-->MacOS

The relationship between Linux and MacOS is more like they're cousins once-removed, not parent-child.
 
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arn said:
Not quite. Both are Unix but have different origins.
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Linux is not UNIX. Linux is a UNIX clone. macOS is a proper UNIX variant, with code from BSD and Mach.
crcuilla said:
What GUI code did Apple get from Xerox?
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I don't think they stole any actual code, but they definitely took the idea (as well as some developers).
 
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grjj said:
100% true. But none of that has anything to do with Linux.
Linux is a monolithic kernel written by Linus Torvalds.
KHTML is written by the KDE group and completely unrelated to Linus or Linux
CUPS (the printing system) was, as far as I know, developed completely in-house by Apple

All of those pieces of software are distributed under some form of open source copyright or copyleft.
Click to expand...

I actually lived it so remember what happened at the time, CUPS was bought by Apple from the original developer. Now I have seen rumblings in article or two that Apple has abandoned it with only something like a commit or two this entire year in the code development. KHTML is related to linux due to the fact it was developped for the KDE desktop for linux to render web pages. Apple took the eintire tree and started developing Safari from it. There were many complaints on the KDE mailing list by the massive garbage code dumps by the Apple developers. Living up to the giving back but doing it in trashy way to make extra work for the people who gave them the start. It was all one big tarbar or something like that not put into the code management apps used by KDE.

en.wikipedia.org

CUPS - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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MacUser2525 said:
They entered in licensing deal with them for the GUI they had developed, this is basic computer history for anyone who has been alive to know. macOS did not magically spring into existence, it borrows on the ideas of many of the greats that have went before them.
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That's not quite accurate:

Folklore.org: On Xerox, Apple and Progress

www.folklore.org www.folklore.org

And the financial arrangement with Xerox was Apple offering some (pre-IPO or very early) stock in exchange for simply the opportunity to come visit PARC and watch, listen, learn. But there was never any code licensed at all. As the article above explains, Apple riffed off of ideas they saw and hired people away from PARC to create Lisa and Mac but wrote both from the ground up.
 
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HiVolt said:
Waste of time. Apple will more than likely lock down the ability to boot from other operating systems.
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You obviously don’t know who hector is. He can make it happen and whatever be apple trows, he will override it
 
There are already several Linux distros that run on ARM, so I assume the challenge is more specifically to port Linux-for-ARM to Apple Silicon.

Since there aren't any good ARM-based workstations out there, I assume that, if he's able to do this, it might make a future AS Mac Pro of interest to researchers who want to do local prototyping for the increasing number of ARM-based supercomputers.
 
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