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Notable Developer Starts Patreon to Fund Apple Silicon Linux Port

mannyvel said:
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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If you watch the videos of The Xerox PARC GUI you quickly see that there was a good nugget of an idea there. But what Apple, Jobs and the crew did with that nugget was an epoch leap of differntiation. From three mouse buttons and a keyboard functioning together to issue commands, down to one mouse button with gestures (click, double-click, click-drag, key-click, etc). The PARC system was a noun-verb input much like the Apollo flight systems. The Mac was much less structured and allowed for far more creativity and approachability to the common user.
You could show a kid a Mac and they could use it, the metaphore of the mouse pointer being your finger was intuative. The PARC system required thought and effort to use.
 
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Apple probably wouldn’t have much to lose adding some of their drivers to Darwin if there are no issues with licensed IP. They could become the hardware of choice for Linux devs if they are more open then AMD and nVidia. Besides selling more hardware, it could help further entrench Apple among developers. Currently only Intel provides open source GPU drivers. It may even benefit Apple. They use Linux in their server farms.
 
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Madd the Sane said:
I don't think they stole any actual code, but they definitely took the idea (as well as some developers).
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That's a more accurate explanation. But "took the idea" even still overstates things. They were inspired by the ideas they saw would be a more accurate way to say it.

By comparison, Microsoft Window's relationship to Mac OS is a little less, ahem, innocent.
 
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crcuilla said:
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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Yeah right the magical Apple did it all with nothing from them or anyone else, those developers they got and the agreement was for show. You Apple die hards are incredible rewriting history when the facts are there for everyone to see and know. There is no shame in using other people ideas and building upon them for something better. It is an actual achievement to be proud of, denying it makes you seem so petty and pathetic.
 
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Someday I’ll want to replace my Linux servers running on PPC and Intel boxes especially in 5-10 years with old M1 hardware that’s available for less than $100
Hopefully Apple doesn’t lock down the hardware like the iPhone or iPad rendering it useless when it is abandoned by Apple with macOS 13 and higher in a few years.
 
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grjj said:
Not in any way shape or form is macOS based on Linux and I wish this idea would die.

macOS is based on Darwin, which is in turn based on the Mach micro kernel. None of that has anything to do with Linux or Linus Torvalds.

Both run utilities and codebases written by GNU.

All of these are attempts to build a "better" version of UNIX.
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macOS doesn’t run many GNU tools out-of-the-box. Most command line utilities originally came from BSD Unix.
 
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MacUser2525 said:
Yeah right the magical Apple did it all with nothing from them or anyone else, those developers they got and the agreement was for show. You Apple die hards are incredible rewriting history when the facts are there for everyone to see and know. There is no shame in using other people ideas and building upon them for something better. It is an actual achievement to be proud of, denying it makes you seem so petty and pathetic.
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Let me get this straight you make an incorrect claim. I correct it with information from, well, someone who was actually there. Your response is just incredulousness without any actual counter-facts?!

You've misread things. I've not denied that the Mac and Lisa were inspired by the things Apple saw at PARC. In fact I acknowledged that. In fact I agree that what the folks at Apple did from the inspiration they received at PARC is downright amazing.
 
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q64ceo said:
I wonder if the lack of eGPU support is due to a hardware limitation or if Apple just does not want to deal with AMD graphics in the M1 version of macOS.

If it is theoretically possible to use an eGPU on the machine, it shouldn't be that hard for the Linux devs to add such support. AMD's drivers for Linux are mostly open-source. Getting the M1's graphics to work on Linux isnt as easy as he makes it sound.
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Big Sur has ARM64 AMD GPU Drivers. The M1 only has a 1x PCIE interface allocated for Thunderbolt.
 
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lederermc said:
If you stipulate that Linux is Unix then yes. Linux and Unix factions probably disagree.
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Not even close Linux is the kernel developed by Linus and others put together with the GNU tools (GNU is Not Unix is what the GNU stands for). They were developed by Stallman and others to replicate the functions found in a UNIX system. Unix and it many variants are the code in all the splinters of it leftover from the court battles to try and sort out the mess. Apple used the FreeBSD as the basis of its efforts and some other parts of linux code in their OS. It is all there is the history but some just will not see what is in front of their lying eyes, they have to be lying, it is not possible to be different than what they want it to be..
 
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Maconplasma said:
Macs are running on UNIX.
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No.

Some versions of OS X/mac OS have achieved certain UNIX certifications. But not all.

It's a moot point anyhow.

The ongoing issue with Linux is their piss-poor device driver and notebook power management support.

Linux is still a battery hog on well-documented x86 notebooks. This has been one of Linux's shortcomings for over two decades; there's nothing new with this.

If you want good notebook battery performance, run Windows on notebooks designed for Windows, run macOS on notebooks designed for macOS.

One cannot expect a change in this for the foreseeable future.

My guess is that the overall difficulty level will be comparable to trying to run Android or Linux on an iPhone.

Torvalds isn't a idiot.

I imagine this effort might actually result in a Linux kernel that actually boots on an M1 Mac but that doesn't mean that every single feature will work.
 
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Erehy Dobon said:
No.

...

The ongoing issue with Linux is their piss-poor device driver and notebook power management support.

Linux is still a battery hog on well-documented x86 notebooks. This has been one of Linux's shortcomings for over two decades; there's nothing new with this.
...
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And to completely hijack the thread, I'd opine that the reason for Linux's horrid power management is the monolithic nature of it. It's unwieldy and requires compilation or flagging to get a kernel even remotely optimized for your setup.
Everything and the kitchen sink is in that monstrosity and the entire design is almost entirely but not completely unlike anything that UNIX stands for.
To be "Unix-y" is to make small, modular components that all interoperate to form a greater function. Linux said "to hell with that" and vomited everything into one big bucket.
 
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grjj said:
And to completely hijack the thread, I'd opine that the reason for Linux's horrid power management is the monolithic nature of it. It's unwieldy and requires compilation or flagging to get a kernel even remotely optimized for your setup.
Everything and the kitchen sink is in that monstrosity and the entire design is almost entirely but not completely unlike anything that UNIX stands for.
To be "Unix-y" is to make small, modular components that all interoperate to form a greater function. Linux said "to hell with that" and vomited everything into one big bucket.
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Linux's power management and device driver support sucked when it was still a modular kernel back in the late Nineties.

I believe much of Linux's shortcomings in this area is because there's no official distribution unlike FreeBSD. There's the Linux kernel plus everything else and a bajillion distros.

I know that I rankle a bunch of Linux pundits -- who morph into Linux apologists -- whenever I post about Linux's inadequacies (despite being a UNIX/Linux sysadmin for years).

Linux is a great OS for servers and embedded systems (like ATMs).

Linux completely sucks as a desktop OS. It was a failure as a desktop OS twenty years ago and it still sucks rocks (I have the Raspberry Pi OS on my RPi4).

If you want a Linux instance on your Mac, install it on a VirtualBox VM.
 
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Erehy Dobon said:
...

Linux is a great OS for servers and embedded systems (like ATMs).

Linux completely sucks as a desktop OS. It was a failure as a desktop OS twenty years ago and it still sucks rocks (I have the Raspberry Pi OS on my RPi4).
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I caveat this. Linux is great for embedded systems if you want a "free" kernel. There are MUCH better options out there if you're willing to pay and just better ones if you're not willing to pay.
If I were designing an embedded system I'd give significant credence to OS/9. It does incredible things in almost no space with almost no CPU resources.
If I recall the history, at one point NASA's internal comms systems all ran on OS/9 for a long while. I don't know what life it has had since I left it behind in the Tandy CoCo/MM1 days but wow that os let a sub 1Mhz system do incredible things.
 
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aberamati said:
Nope...
macOS uses BSD tools, unlike Linux which uses GNU.
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There are GNU tools in the standard macOS distribution bash and emacs would be two of the more commonly used ones.
I wasn't trying to imply that major portions of macOS or Darwin are GNU based, just that GNU is a common thread through almost all discussions of *nix OSes. rms and crew did an absolutely astounding job and creating all the foundational tools and utilities required in any OS and as a result they crop up in lots of places.
 
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Erehy Dobon said:
Linux is a great OS for servers and embedded systems (like ATMs).
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Yup. Been saying this for years (well not the ATM part, but for servers it's hard to beat a good Linux distro).

Erehy Dobon said:
If you want a Linux instance on your Mac, install it on a VirtualBox VM.
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I'm actually hopeful that a new contender pops up to do what Veertu started doing a few years ago: provide a no-frills, free VM solution based on Apple's underlying hypervisor framework.

VirtualBox IMO is the ********* common denominator: sure it's free and mostly available on all desktop platforms, but it's also painfully obvious why it's free, and why anyone would pay for the 'enhanced' version (compared to the other commercial options available) is completely beyond me.
 
Erehy Dobon said:
Linux is still a battery hog on well-documented x86 notebooks. This has been one of Linux's shortcomings for over two decades; there's nothing new with this.
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I've gotten comparable battery life to Windows with Linux on x86 notebooks, it really depends on what software you're running. You can even get it much better than Windows if you want, but you'll give up a lot of visual niceties in exchange.
 
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