[HN Gopher] The first conformant M1 GPU driver
___________________________________________________________________
The first conformant M1 GPU driver
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 953 points
Date : 2023-08-22 15:23 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rosenzweig.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (rosenzweig.io)
| lamontcg wrote:
| how close are we now to being able to plug in an eGPU into an
| Apple Silicon device?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| That's two _completely_ different things. I 'm not even sure if
| the required hardware elements for eGPU - namedly, a "back
| transport" of rendered frames via Thunderbolt and shuffling
| them directly to the screen - are there on M-series machines.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Usually you plug the eGPU into a monitor directly instead of
| backfeed it to the built in display. The bandwidth is already
| low enough without showing rendered frames back across the
| link too.
|
| There are some limitations on the PCIe/Thunderbolt but Marcan
| has written a few times he thinks it may be possible though
| probably not worthwhile from a performance perspective. Of
| course even base thunderbolt is a WIP at this point so that
| answer could always change.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I love this. Finding an unused/undocumented instruction to
| interleave bits extremely simply :)
| johnnyAghands wrote:
| Huge!!
| mirekrusin wrote:
| This is reality-bending class of achievement without any random-
| luck help, just pure attention. Incredible.
| cp9 wrote:
| alyssa and asahi lina are both geniuses, it's unbelievable
| htk wrote:
| Asahi and Alyssa are the titans of reverse engineering. Their
| work is pretty unbelievable. I would bet Apple is planning to
| hire them, or has tried already and they refused.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| I bet Apple already tried and they refused due to NDA and non
| compete clauses, that or HR didn't validate their profile.
| astrange wrote:
| I don't think being able to reverse engineer your project is
| actually a good qualification for hiring you, considering
| your employees don't need to do that.
|
| Also, isn't she a high schooler/freshman? There's always
| internships but it's best to do other things before grinding
| those out.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| If someone understands your codebase without your sources
| and docs - you can bet that they will also understand it
| with the help of those. Usually better, if the docs have
| any value.
|
| And this is kind of a valuable skill, considering how many
| coders don't understand their codebase even with docs.
| IshKebab wrote:
| You also need soft skills to work in a company. There are
| lots of people in the open source world who are technically
| brilliant arseholes.
|
| Not saying that's the case here; just that "amazing
| programming" doesn't necessarily mean "Apple wants to employ
| them".
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Too many people involved in technical hiring, and too many
| pointless interviews. It's likely anywhere they went to
| interview, the people there would have no idea how good they
| were in the first place.
| hoosieree wrote:
| What a waste of talent... why accomplish things in real
| life when you can grind leetcode to give the appearance of
| being able to accomplish things? /s
| catchnear4321 wrote:
| why bother appearing to accomplish anything when one
| could just opine anonymously on the interwebs?
| dan-robertson wrote:
| If I were in their position then maybe applying to random
| jobs wouldn't be the right strategy. Instead either ensure
| you have enough contact information available for leads to
| come in, or reach out to connections at companies to get
| warm introductions. It won't work everywhere but it needn't
| work _everywhere_.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I hope she avoids working for someone else. Why does she need
| to have her inspiration crushed by the pettiness of corporate
| life?
| nicce wrote:
| Usually the reason is always the same: money. That is why
| people work in corporates.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Actually I think it's more being unsure of what else to
| do in life and for want of a structure, and money is one
| of those things people are unsure of. However looking at
| her work to date, she can find money on her own terms.
| She seems to work well on her own terms in her own
| structure. The thing that could hurt her more than
| anything is working under someone else's structure and
| terms.
| varispeed wrote:
| Employment is a poor proposition. Typically employees make poor
| money in comparison to what kind of profit they generate, that
| especially applies to IT.
|
| Anyone with a talent, should rather seek to incorporate and
| sell their services at fair price.
|
| Unfortunately in some countries, big corporations managed to
| lobby governments to put a stop to that.
| kelnos wrote:
| The problem with that option is it involves many skills other
| than the primary tech-focused skill. Sales, marketing,
| accounting, negotiation, support, etc. Many technical people
| don't really want to handle those job functions, even if they
| happen to be decently good at them.
|
| Certainly you can hire people to do those functions, but you
| need to have a decently well-established reputation and
| enough work and income before you're able to hire those
| people.
|
| Employment does give you a trade off there: less money in
| exchange for someone else handling the "overhead".
| memefrog wrote:
| Yeah, it is just another example of specialisation/divison
| of labour.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Massive "it depends" on that
| Yajirobe wrote:
| > Typically employees make poor money in comparison to what
| kind of profit they generate
|
| I think it's the opposite - developers are overvalued.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| If you consider large employers as labor brokers, it makes
| more sense that someone accepts the reduction in potential
| earnings for easier access to labor demand.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Valve already contracts Alyssa. Arguably they have more
| business use case for the skillset than Apple.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| I thought she's working for Collabora. But she's still a
| student, so only part time.
| LeonenTheDK wrote:
| She's doing all this while still being a student, unreal. I
| can't get over just how skilled some people are, and how
| far I myself am from them.
| misterdata wrote:
| Not a single mention of the word 'Apple' in the original post,
| instead 'the manufacturer' and 'the big corporation'.. curious if
| that is deliberate and if so what the reasoning is (legal?)
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Presumably, because this isn't about Apple. They don't care
| about Apple. Merely about getting the M1/M2 arch to run Linux
| properly. It could have been Microsoft, Amazon, Google,
| treatment would have been the same.
| modeless wrote:
| Conformance is not easy. Congratulations!
| stalfosknight wrote:
| > Unlike ours, the manufacturer's M1 drivers are unfortunately
| not conformant for any standard graphics API, whether Vulkan or
| OpenGL or OpenGL ES.
|
| Yes, it is conformant to a graphics API. It's called Metal1. You
| might enjoy pretending that "the manufacturer" hasn't given a
| damn to provide a fully working and highly performant graphics
| API designed under the same roof alongside the people who
| designed the hardware, but this kind of petty dunking on Apple
| that seems to be so popular is not a good look.
|
| 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_(API)
|
| Protip: Downvoting is not the same thing as refuting someone's
| argument with a cogent one of your own.
| [deleted]
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| So, dare I ask, how does the performance of this driver compare
| to native? I mean I know this implements some functionality that
| the native driver does not, I'm just curious how they compare
| apples to apples?
| xet7 wrote:
| It is native GPU driver in Linux kernel.
| perteraul wrote:
| Super impressed by the whole Asahi Linux project - and this takes
| it a big step forward.
| leedrake5 wrote:
| I assume that this primarily benefits games and not any deep
| learning right? The most attractive aspect of Mac M1 is the huge
| memory boost. Might not be great for training due to the
| inability to distribute across multiple cards, but it makes for a
| great inference engine for stable diffusion, llama, and other
| large models.
| robert_foss wrote:
| TensorFlow Lite does indeed support OpenGL ES.
| thangngoc89 wrote:
| Correct. You need CUDA, or ROCm, MPS (native to macOS) backends
| for running deep learning. I found it relatively easy to train
| some Pytorch model on beefy server with CUDA and running
| interference on my Macbook Air.
| astrange wrote:
| MPS is a Metal shader library rather than a programming
| language, which would be MSL (like GLSL/HLSL).
| zamadatix wrote:
| The compute shader portion is a good step but it's still not
| going to provide the interfaces most of these deep learning
| tools expect.
|
| That said eiln wrote an ANE (Apple Neural Engine) driver which
| enables using the dedicated hardware for this instead of the
| GPU. It is set to be merged into linux-asahi in the future.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| There are two modern cross-platform GPGPU standards that Apple
| Silicon can theoretically use or implement - SYCL and Vulkan
| Compute.
|
| SYCL is Khronos Group's vendor-neutral, high-level programming
| framework. Application support is limited, but hopefully with
| Intel's backing, the situation would gradually improve.
| Meanwhile, Vulkan Compute sidesteps the entire headache with
| compute shaders. But I'm not familiar with it in terms of
| application support.
|
| SYCL can be implemented on top of OpenCL and OpenCL's SPIR-V
| extension. It soon turned out that this route is unfeasible due
| to prevalent vendor lock-in that's not going to change anytime
| soon, so it has largely been abandoned by everyone else but
| Intel and Mesa. Right now SYCL is usually implemented by
| backends to GPU vendor's respective APIs, like ROCm, HIP or
| CUDA. Doing the same for Metal would be very challenging.
|
| Mesa already has experimental support of OpenCL w/ SPIR-V on
| Intel and AMDGPU, so theoretically it can be extended to Apple
| Silicon. Difficulty of implementing OpenCL's SPIR-V extension
| should be comparable with Vulkan compute shader (which also
| uses SPIR-V). However, currently OpenCL on Apple Silicon is
| entirely unsupported. The last time I checked, it's on the
| roadmap.
| sheerun wrote:
| Waiting for ability to run machine learning models on Linux
| instead of MacOS on M1
| naillo wrote:
| This blog is a real gem.
| 2upmedia wrote:
| [flagged]
| klausa wrote:
| Please don't do this.
| nwellinghoff wrote:
| I really wish nerds would stop supporting Apple hardware and
| software. It is so closed and everything is a giant pain. Its one
| thing for the average non-techie that does not want to do
| anything advanced and just wants to swallow the blue pill. But
| for an actual techie to support a system that is the antithesis
| of general purpose compute...Can you even be considered a true
| techie anymore? I just don't get it.
| AnonMO wrote:
| When you realize the world isn't strictly dividen it categories
| such as blue or red. you might begin to understand why people
| do what they do. also let me ask you a question since you're
| obviously for free and open source. how much have you
| contributed to riscv development or donated to move their cause
| forward? are you actively maintaining any open projects?
| because if you read the post the authors stated that they are
| small with limited funding which is the case for most open
| source projects.
| nwellinghoff wrote:
| Who are you responding to? By closed I meant they
| artificially restrict you from doing things in the name of
| selling more devices. Like running VM clusters for testing
| unless you run it on "apple hardware" when there really is no
| requirement. Removing support for 3rd party GPUs. Having to
| buy a million dongles that use proprietary connectors (not
| really a problem anymore). Limiting what you can control at
| the OS level. Not letting you run what you want. The list
| goes on. I obviously think what the asahi linux team has done
| is bad ass. Just think us nerds have to force ourselves off
| the tech giants or the end result will likely be; you won't
| be able to easily buy something you actually control.
| dimgl wrote:
| > everything is a giant pain
|
| Have you ever used a Windows machine?
| okamiueru wrote:
| A lot of dev companies force their employees to use bacbooks in
| part as a result of their locked down practices and the only
| way to actually compile and test for "everything", because of
| how much easier it is to cross compile to other platforms and
| markets.
|
| For that reason, I've personally had to use a M2 for a week
| now, and I find the experience unpleasant. The OS feels old and
| cumbersome. I had flashback to a time long ago when I needed to
| install custom apps in Windows for some basic functionality
| that's been built in gnome. Things like "alt + tab" actually
| bringing an app to the foreground, instead of prioritizing the
| minimized state. Why this deliberate action would have
| seemingly no effect is correct, I'm sure will be defended.
|
| Global shortcut to start up a terminal? Install a third party
| utility is probably the easiest. Want to place windows on the
| screen? Install a third party utility. Better screenshot
| functionality? Install a third party app. Change the default
| shell to a custom one? First you got to figure out how to
| access the root system through finder to actually find the
| executable.
|
| It goes on and on. And the performance is much worse than what
| I've become used to. The only thing it actually has going for
| it, which I believe is great, is battery life. But, that's it.
|
| I'm just glad I was able to disable the app validation check,
| because it had literally prevented me from installing a lot of
| third party software, and the suggested workarounds had no
| effect. Just the fact of phoning home every time run an
| executable makes me nauseous.
|
| I wonder how often the homebrew team get offers to add malware,
| because the checks there seem woefully insufficient.
| matthew-wegner wrote:
| Why is M2 Ultra support missing? I'm curious more than anything--
| lack of developer hardware? Something technical?
|
| "The Khronos website lists all conformant implementations,
| including our drivers for the M1, M1 Pro/Max/Ultra, M2, and M2
| Pro/Max."
|
| Edit: Interesting that so many people are downvoting this. I'm
| not complaining; I didn't know, so I asked a question. Seems like
| the answer is that it's too new, especially with the 30-day
| conformance review period on top.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| looks like bring-up was only two weeks ago
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQAE13sZlsY
| freedomben wrote:
| You're being downvoted because people assume you're making an
| implicit criticism with your question, and many people tend to
| assume the worst intent rather than the best intent like
| they're supposed to. Fortunately it usually balances out after
| some time. Adding a clarification like you did is the correct
| thing to do (and always a good idea, especially in a text
| forum).
| matthew-wegner wrote:
| Right, but that clarification was pre-edit?
|
| I'm aware of people's sensitivity to putting demands on
| efforts like this, which is why I tried to frame it as the
| genuine curiosity it is.
|
| This sort of low-level work is out of my depth. Is there
| painstaking probing to find different addresses/states
| between a Max and an Ultra? The M2 Ultra has two GPU variants
| (60-core and 72-core), although the Pro and Max also have GPU
| count variants. Are those transparent from this OpenGL
| driver's point of view? Or is there timing/dispatch work
| involved? Hence the question!
|
| I would have made an explicit criticism if I had one. I
| implied nothing, but I realize that has no bearing on what
| the reader can or will infer...
| freedomben wrote:
| Yes I would have put it in the original (pre-edit), but
| better late than never :-)
|
| Yeah I've never done GPU driver hacking so I can't answer
| your question with optimal specificity, but there's always
| something new. It's usually (but not always) backwards
| compatible, but Apple is a special case since they are
| their only supported customer. That means that they can
| iterate very fast with flagrant disregard for backwards
| compatiblity (I don't necessarily mean that in a negative
| way, it can be great for development/progress), and it
| means that any changes they make have to be reverse
| engineered by setting debug breakpoints, examining state,
| signals, etc to try and figure out what they changed and
| how it works now. It's a truly monumental undertaking.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > That means that they can iterate very fast with
| flagrant disregard for backwards compatiblity
|
| In practice though, Apple is famous for _not_ replacing
| everything left and right. IIRC, the UART part of their
| SoCs dates back to the first generation of iPhones, if
| not even earlier.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Yes I would have put it in the original (pre-edit), but
| better late than never :-)
|
| Huh? The clarification _is_ in the original (pre-edit).
| It 's the second sentence.
|
| "Right, but that clarification was pre-edit?" wasn't a
| hypothetical, it was making a claim.
| freedomben wrote:
| Good point. Either other people missed it like I did, or
| I'm wrong about why the downvotes are happening. (or for
| completeness I suppose a third possibility that it was
| edited in later, but I'm not alleging that in any way).
| valine wrote:
| For what it's worth M2 Ultra is the newest chip in the Apple
| silicon lineup. It was only introduced last June.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| It's missing because Apple doesn't release drivers or upstream
| the drivers so it's on hobbyists to reverse engineer them.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| I didn't downvote you, and I understood your meaning clearly. I
| think people might read "why is ___ missing?" and skip over the
| rest, assuming the question represents an expectation.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| It's quite expensive, so my guess is the same as yours: lack of
| developer hardware
| ta8645 wrote:
| Have been eying a MacBook Air 15-in (M2), and wondering on the
| possibility of running Linux on it. Anyone had success, or
| failure, on doing this themselves? And, how hard will it be to
| port this M1 GPU driver to the M2?
| terhechte wrote:
| The article says: "Conformant OpenGL(r) ES 3.1 drivers are now
| available for M1- and M2-family GPUs"
| samtheprogram wrote:
| Pretty sure sleep still doesn't work, unless the Asahi wiki FAQ
| / Wiki is out of date. Bit of a deal breaker for me until then.
| softfalcon wrote:
| I wonder if support for OpenGL, Vulkan, etc will improve now that
| Apple is partnering with nVidia, Adobe, Autodesk, Microsoft, etc
| around the OpenUSD rendering/animation/CAD/3D-scene format?
|
| Considering the whole schtick of OpenUSD is "one file format that
| renders consistently everywhere" (paraphrasing), I would be
| surprised if Apple doesn't use it as a means to cement more 3D
| software vendors into macOS land. It's really hard to render
| consistently if the underlying drivers are all wonk and
| proprietary.
|
| I am curious to see how this plays out. In my mind, there are two
| options:
|
| 1. Apple conforms to the existing standards of OpenGL and Vulkan
| we see gaining steam for many film and game production pipelines.
|
| 2. Apple tries to throw its weight around and force devs to
| support their Metal standards even more, ultimately hoping to
| force the world onto Metal + macOS.
|
| My heart hopes for option 1, but my gut tells me Apple is going
| to push for option 2 with all the might it can muster. In my
| experience, Apple doesn't like any standards it doesn't control
| with an iron fist (not really saying much about Apple here
| though... nVidia, Autodesk, Adobe, and Microsoft are all the
| same).
|
| The next couple of years are going to be interesting for sure!
| JohnBooty wrote:
| In my experience, Apple doesn't like any standards it
| doesn't control with an iron fist
|
| I mean, on one hand, the Metal/Vulkan/OpenGL situation is
| unfortunate and I don't understand Apple's motivation there.
|
| On the other hand I'm sitting here typing on a Mac with nothing
| but USB-C ports that is connected to half a dozen peripherals
| and a big ol' monitor over those standard ports using standard
| protocols.
|
| In general I feel that Apple prefers open standards when they
| actually suffice. USB2 couldn't do a lot of the things that
| Lightning did, so they invented that. Now that USB-C exists,
| they embraced it immediately on the Mac and iPad but are
| unfortunately dragging their feet w.r.t. the iPhone.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > Apple doesn't like any standards it doesn't control with an
| iron fist
|
| You mean like SCSI, FireWire, USB-A, USB-C, USB 3.x, Bluetooth,
| Qi charging, H264, AAC?
| kbenson wrote:
| Just because they used them doesn't mean they like using
| them, just that they don't have the sway to move people to
| something of their own.
|
| FireWire was developed by Apple and some other companies, as
| a competitor to USB, and lost out to USB.
|
| Apple had their own video container and codec formats in
| quicktime, and those also lost out to others.
|
| They definitely prefer to roll their own, they just don't
| always succeed in gaining enough market adoption (in the
| past) or they're told to stop pushing it to the detriment to
| their users (as recently with USB-c).
| robertoandred wrote:
| QuickTime lost? MP4 basically is QuickTime.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > FireWire was developed by Apple and some other companies,
| as a competitor to USB, and lost out to USB.
|
| Apple was part of the patent pool for FireWire and is also
| part of the patent pool for USB C and was early to be
| onboard with Thunderbolt along with Intel.
|
| Apple went all in on USB with the iMac in 1997 well before
| PCs were completely onboard.
|
| > Apple had their own video container and codev formats in
| quicktime, and those also lost out to others
|
| Apple's QuickTime container is part of the standard
|
| https://wiki.videolan.org/QuickTime_container/#:~:text=The%
| 2....
|
| And Apple is in the patent pool for H.264
| dgellow wrote:
| Still no iPhone with USB-C :(
| scarface_74 wrote:
| This year definitely because of the EU mandate. It will
| probably still be nerfed like the low end iPad that has USB
| C. But still transfers at USB 2 speeds
| gumby wrote:
| > In my experience, Apple doesn't like any standards it doesn't
| control with an iron fist
|
| I would add some nuance to this statement: "Apple likes open
| standards when it is weak."
|
| The iMac and early OS X went big on open standards, and Jobs
| made a point of pointing this out: USB for the iMac, JPEG, MPG,
| mp3, Postscript etc for OSX. IP/TCP built in. They even paid
| the danegeld for .rtf.
|
| Then as they clawed their way back from the precipice, they
| started "adding value" again.
|
| The iphone was an HTML device, loudly repudiating the
| proprietary (and terrible) Flash much less the crappy, mostly
| stillborn "mobile HTML" attempts.
|
| You still get H.264, matter/threads, and other standards they
| don't control, where they don't have market power.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Then as they clawed their way back from the precipice,
| they started "adding value" again.
|
| I don't know if I can agree. On the software side, MacOS
| supports all those things. On the hardware side, it's still
| (edit: almost) nothing but industry-standard ports.
| gumby wrote:
| I didn't say they necessarily denigrated the open formats
| but added and preferred their own proprietary image, audio
| etc formats as they gained market strength.
|
| On the hardware side I'm delighted by Apple's USB C/TB push
| (and Apple contributed a lot to those standards, esp based
| on what they had learned with Lightning) but note they
| revived the proprietary "magsafe" connecter on recent
| laptops (though you can still use USB C PD). Apparently
| enough customers wanted it.
|
| And as others have pointed out, Apple is hardly alone in
| this
| als0 wrote:
| > Apparently enough customers wanted it.
|
| Magsafe is genuinely a nice innovation that users missed.
| It solves the cord yank problem. But I do like having the
| option to use USB-C if I don't have the MagSafe cable.
| memefrog wrote:
| Also USB-C absolutely sucks. The socket seems to attract
| dirt and dust in a way that prevents its proper working
| like no other.
| gumby wrote:
| I'm the other way around: I just want to carry a UB C
| cable or two. The cable was designed so wear and damage
| should accrue to the cable, not the connector in your
| device.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| That's true. I forgot they brought Magsafe back. (Side
| note: I don't know why they couldn't just make a standard
| USB-C connector, except magnetic...)
| tuetuopay wrote:
| > Apparently enough customers wanted it.
|
| This magnetic thing saved my macbook from numerous falls
| when people tripped on the power cord.
|
| It was ubiquitous, worked across the whole lineup and for
| several generations. It is hard to forget that until
| usb-c, it was commonplace for a manufacturer to have a
| wide range of power adapters, of varying voltage, power,
| connector, etc. Apple do their own shit, but they do it
| consistently.
| xp84 wrote:
| iChat stored every conversation (if you enabled history) in
| HTML files the user could find in their Documents folder
| and read. Messages history is stored in an undocumented
| SQLite database that you're not meant to touch. I'm not
| saying they're completely proprietary in every way, but you
| can see the progression from wide open to "keep your hands
| off."
|
| For another example, Apple Notes was actually just mail
| messages stored in IMAP, until they decided to deprecate
| that in favor of another iCloud-backed black box in order
| to add more features.
| hooch wrote:
| IMAP notes still works.
| gardnr wrote:
| Right, I quite often charge my Asus laptop with my MagSafe
| charger.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I charge my Mac with USB-C. Your Asus has that, right?
| But yeah, I forgot they brought MagSafe back. Thanks,
| corrected.
| foobiekr wrote:
| You might actually expand "Apple likes open standards when it
| is weak" to "companies likes open standards when they are
| weak."
|
| Generally speaking you get standards consortiums when there
| is a clear winner that is mopping up the space.
|
| Here's an example that's happening right now: Nvidia-NvLink-
| Infiniband.
|
| Nvidia owns the highspeed interconnect inside the chassis
| (HGX), the NICs (Mellanox), the inter-host interconnect
| (Infiniband), the high performance inter-host interconnect
| (switched NvLink), the and the ethernet network (Mellanox has
| the same 52.1Tbps switch performance that everyone else has
| now). GPU training is RDMA heavy and this is a place where
| both NvLink and Infiniband shine, ethernet much less so.
| Retransmissions are very bad, in global-performance-terms,
| for ROCEv2 transfers. Right now Nvidia is just crushing it
| and there's zero chance anyone is going to catch up by
| introducing new Infiniband ASICs.
|
| So what happens? You have a consortium spun up by all of the
| companies in the Ethernet space - Ultra Ethernet Consortium -
| to try and use "standards" to push back on customers who
| don't want to make big investments in "non-standard." UEC is
| pretty vague but seems to be promising Broadcom-style
| cellized fabrics, the whole point of which is to have an
| ethernet-like standard that avoids ECMP-induced flow
| collisions and retransmissions - that is, get Ethernet into
| the same territory as Infiniband.
|
| If you look back in time in the tech industry, you see this
| over and over and over and over. Standards are great, they
| make certain kinds of multi-sided markets and markets that
| need broad participation to be viable possible - but they are
| also routinely about the losers joining together to compete.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| > they are also routinely about the losers joining together
| to compete.
|
| That is the greatness of it. It reminds me of democracy:
| The less powerful join together to give everyone an equal
| vote, rather than having one vote per dollar.
| colechristensen wrote:
| > "Apple likes open standards when it is weak."
|
| Everyone does. AMD is the same. The market leader focuses on
| features, the runners up try to take them down with openness.
| The competition is good for consumers, but the motivation is
| one of self-interest, not the common good.
| i_am_jl wrote:
| >The iphone was an HTML device, loudly repudiating the
| proprietary (and terrible) Flash much less the crappy, mostly
| stillborn "mobile HTML" attempts.
|
| Skipping Flash wasn't so much an ideological decision as a
| practical one.
|
| At the time Steve Jobs listed a ton of reasons that they
| didn't implement Flash. Listed among them were concerns about
| it not being an open standard, inferiority to H.264, security
| and performance issues, etc. However, all of these things
| could've been ignored or overcome.
|
| The principal problem was that a huge proportion of Flash
| applications, games, and websites used mouseovers as crucial
| methods of interactions, and Apple simply had no way to allow
| users to mouseover an element on a touchscreen.
| photonerd wrote:
| Also, from a practical perspective, even Adobe never had a
| fully working (feature parity to desktop) way to _actually
| load Flash_ on the iPhone. Apple kept asking for one: Adobe
| could never produce something that wasn't buggy crap.
|
| There were some 3rd party things that _sorta_ worked _a
| bit_ , but they were not good either.
|
| Flash was bad on touchscreens for sure, but we'd have seen
| content adapt eventually anyhow, if it had actually ever
| worked in the first place.
| xp84 wrote:
| Very true. In case anyone is too young to remember, in
| the days of the iPhone 3G, it was somewhat popular to buy
| apps which would use a real browser on a server somewhere
| to render a browser session, complete with Flash, and
| stream it to you. It was very handy for those of us who
| played Flash games and needed to check in on our game on
| the go. (Think FarmVille, Cityville, etc.)
| jjoonathan wrote:
| That could have been overcome. The general crustiness of
| flash could not have been (from Apple's POV).
|
| Apple used to ship a dev app called "Spin Control" that
| would log stack traces whenever an app failed to drain its
| event queue in a timely manner (i.e. beachball). One time I
| accidentally left this open for an entire week, went about
| a bunch of assorted business, and when I came back _every
| single stack trace had to do with flash_ , and there were
| many. Either flash in a browser or flash in a browser
| embedded in something else (ads embedded in 404 pages for
| broken help pages that were never even displayed, lol). At
| first I thought it had to be a mistake, a filter I had
| forgotten about or something, so I triggered a spin in
| Mail.app by asking it to reindex and sure enough that
| showed up as the first non-Flash entry in Spin Control.
|
| As hard as it was to believe: Flash had been responsible
| for _every single beachball_ that week. Yikes.
| zdw wrote:
| Back in the day there was even a Mac browser plugin
| called "Click to Flash" that would prevent Flash from
| loading in web pages and draining battery like crazy.
| Made the web livable and more secure throwing Flash
| garbage ads everywhere.
|
| Ah, the dev page for these:
| https://hoyois.github.io/safariextensions/clicktoplugin/
|
| People also don't remember the huge number of CVEs that
| Flash had: https://www.cvedetails.com/version-
| list/53/6761/1/Adobe-Flas...
| dimator wrote:
| Yeesh, thank you for the reminder about how much the
| flash-based web sucked. It's easy to forget.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Yeah Flash was slow, but the common alternatives for in-
| browser animation/games were (and still are) far slower.
| H.264/5 maybe did video better than Flash, even then idk,
| Flash YouTube was always way faster on my old iMac than
| HTML5 YT. Google Hangouts/Meet will lag a high-end Intel
| MBP thanks to the unaccelerated VP8/9 video, but AIM
| Flash-based video calls ran fine on an iMac G4. On top of
| that, there was never a real replacement to the Flash
| creation software. All those Flash games that people made
| without really understanding how to code, no longer
| doable.
|
| I guess Flash had to die because of how outdated,
| insecure, and proprietary it was. It did seem like a
| nightmare to support well on mobile. Just wish someone
| made something strictly better.
| i_am_jl wrote:
| I was mistaken, I found a copy of Jobs' letter re:Flash
| and he does cite the proprietary nature of Flash and
| Apple's lack of control over the content served on its
| platform as the most important reason Flash was kept off
| the iPhone.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/culture/steve-jobs-letter-
| explaining-ap... As hard as it was to
| believe: Flash had been responsible for every single
| beachball that week. Yikes.
|
| I used OSX and Flash in the late 2000s so I have _no_
| problem believing that.
| bootsmann wrote:
| > This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying
| a cross platform development tool. The third party may
| not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are
| available on all of their supported platforms. Hence
| developers only have access to the lowest common
| denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an
| outcome where developers are blocked from using our
| innovations and enhancements because they are not
| available on our competitor's platforms
|
| Funny how one could and maybe should point the same
| criticism towards electron.
| brianpan wrote:
| Not hard to believe. Reliability was one of the points in
| Steve Jobs' _Thoughts on Flash_:
|
| > We also know first hand that Flash is the number one
| reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix
| these problems, but they have persisted for several years
| now. We don't want to reduce the reliability and security
| of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.
| _jal wrote:
| I don't think that wasn't the deal-breaker. Jobs didn't
| want Flash to become the de facto development environment
| for the phone.
|
| I'm pretty sure he always knew they'd end up with apps on
| it, they just didn't pull that together for the first
| release, thus the HTML song and dance. But if they
| supported flash, that would reduce a lot of the demand for
| apps later, and worse - it would be cross platform.
|
| So he used the other (still good) reasons - battery life,
| security, etc. to obscure the real reason - Apple was not
| yet ready to compete with it on their own terms, so they
| banned it.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Apple did find a solution in mobile Safari for touchscreen
| hover states on the Web. However the Web platform generally
| offers more affordances for accessibility than Flash ever
| did, which I'm sure helps.
| gumby wrote:
| > more affordances for accessibility than Flash ever did
|
| TBF one thing Flash did manage to achieve was the
| proliferation of web sites and apps that were as hard to
| use for people _without_ protected disabilities as for
| people who did have them.
|
| Whether this increased empathy for people with
| disabilities is an open question
| i_am_jl wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken the solution was to make touching an
| element trigger the :hover state and the click action
| _unless_ the :hover state changed the visibility of
| another element. If the :hover state changed the
| visibility of another element, then the click action was
| not triggered until a user tapped again.
|
| This is possible in HTML because it's trivial to
| determine whether or not a :hover changes display or
| visibility properties of other elements. As you've
| supposed, Flash did not afford browsers with that sort of
| ability.
| overgard wrote:
| Apple is definitely not going back to OpenGL. I can't say I'm
| particularly sad, OpenGL is very long in the tooth and writing
| a good driver for it seems like a nightmare, considering how
| hard it is to even write good performant application OpenGL
| code. I wish they had thrown in behind Vulkan instead of
| creating Metal, but it seems like outside of linux vulkan is a
| second class citizen everywhere (although it's a pretty good
| second class citizen to target).
|
| In terms of supporting games or steam and such, I think the
| reality is that a large segment of games now use engines that
| handle the API stuff for you, and if you do have the
| resources/time/inclination to write directly to the API, you're
| _probably_ ok with MoltenVK as long as you 're not doing
| anything too cutting edge.
|
| Seriously though, while I've written OpenGL most of my life to
| be cross platform and support the most I can, it's an
| absolutely TERRIBLE api. Global state everywhere, tons of
| functions you can-but-shouldn't-use, all sorts of traps
| everywhere, monsterous header files for extensions, incredibly
| hard to debug. Vulkan is verbose but in a lot of ways it's
| actually easier, even if it's advertised as being the more
| hardcore way to do things.
| bookmark1231 wrote:
| I don't think that's the shtick behind OpenUSD. It's not a
| transmission format like glTF, so the intent is not to get
| consistent rendering but rather to standardize _intermediate_
| graphics representations so that software that works on 3D
| scenes (unreal, Maya etc) can represent all of their workflow
| in USD and get consistent _interop_.
| softfalcon wrote:
| Someone should tell Jensen Huang then. That's the message he
| pushed heavily at Siggraph 2023 over and over and over again.
|
| Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2VBKerS63A
|
| They even did a big demo shot showing the same frame being
| rendered in multiple different editors all creating the same
| consistent result and matching. All of it was said to be due
| to OpenUSD standardizing how a scene is defined, animated,
| and rendered.
|
| Probably just a bunch of marketing buzz though.
| zamadatix wrote:
| OpenUSD is a way of bundling and specifying the data to be
| rendered. It doesn't relate to which API the app uses to
| accelerate rendering. Adobe, Autodesk, Blender, and most others
| support different backends per operating system including Metal
| on macOS already.
| softfalcon wrote:
| Yeah, I know it's just a file format for scene description.
|
| I still believe rendering would work better for the industry
| as a whole if they could agree to all support, say, Vulkan.
|
| I doubt it'll ever happen, but a consistent graphics
| driver/API standard across operating systems would be pretty
| rad.
| zamadatix wrote:
| While not at the kernel level I think WebGPU is probably
| better than something like Vulkan for that "I can target
| this low level access to the GPU resources but expect it to
| work everywhere" use case. Ignoring the name hint that it
| was designed for the web (it works fine outside the
| browser), it's a lot more portable than Vulkan across its
| various implementations precisely because it needed to work
| on various devices that could browse the web. It's also
| already backed and supported by all the big players,
| including Apple.
| softfalcon wrote:
| I'm a big fan of webGPU. I use it within my Three.js
| projects. Really happy to see it gaining support
| worldwide. I hope either it or similar projects continue
| to gain traction!
| dicriseg wrote:
| > In my experience, Apple doesn't like any standards it doesn't
| control with an iron fist
|
| Apple supports a number of open standards. I think I'd modify
| your statement to say Apple doesn't want to depend on any
| standards it doesn't control. And while that may appear
| nefarious, I get Apple's implied position there. They have
| really tight coupling between hardware and software in order to
| deliver on the UX that they intend (whether or not you like all
| or some of it). If they're designing their own software and
| hardware, I can see why they'd also want to implement standards
| that they can control to some degree - otherwise their UX is
| dependent on others. This is also why I think Apple sometimes
| implements new industry standards, USB-C being one example - if
| no one else has made an effort yet, they can influence the
| direction by being first movers.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| > 1. Apple conforms to the existing standards of OpenGL and
| Vulkan we see gaining steam for many film and game production
| pipelines.
|
| Read what gamedevs have to say about this, Metal is more
| appreciated than Vulkan
|
| > 2. Apple tries to throw its weight around and force devs to
| support their Metal standards even more, ultimately hoping to
| force the world onto Metal + macOS.
|
| Apple was part of the Vulkan working group, knowing what
| gamedevs prefer, it now make sense why they parted away and
| created Metal instead
|
| In retrospect I can only show compassion to Apple, they made
| the right choice
| memefrog wrote:
| Vulkan is way better than Metal. Metal is simpler to learn.
| That is about it.
| nicce wrote:
| Can someone give concrete examples, why? Let's exclude the
| learning.
| [deleted]
| TillE wrote:
| Do you mean engine developers who actually use the Metal API,
| or game developers writing shader code? I know game
| developers prefer HLSL (Direct3D) over GLSL, but I dunno what
| people think about MSL.
| fhools wrote:
| They are doing such good work. That was amazing to read and I
| learned something about finding hidden instructions by thinking
| about how a HW engineer would encode bits.
| nla wrote:
| Way to go Alyssa!!!!!
|
| I knew you were going to get this done!
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| > Unlike ours, the manufacturer's M1 drivers are unfortunately
| not conformant for any standard graphics API, whether Vulkan or
| OpenGL or OpenGL ES. That means that there is no guarantee that
| applications using the standards will work on your M1/M2 (if
| you're not running Linux). This isn't just a theoretical issue.
| Consider Vulkan. The third-party MoltenVK layers a subset of
| Vulkan on top of the proprietary drivers. However, those drivers
| lack key functionality, breaking valid Vulkan applications. That
| hinders developers and users alike, if they haven't yet switched
| their M1/M2 computers to Linux.
|
| This becomes very obvious to anyone who has to debug now-
| deprecated OpenGL apps in macOS, because the abstraction layers
| do not actually expose OpenGL state in ways that old Apple OpenGL
| debuggers can read. Which means unless you still have old Macs,
| with old versions of macOS installed where OpenGL is not Metal
| under the hood (I can't even remember the last version where that
| was true) then it's literally not possible to debug OpenGL on
| macOS anymore using stock debuggers.
|
| Your debugger and or app will just crash.
| mastercheif wrote:
| My blood pressure just drove up reading this.
| Bluescreenbuddy wrote:
| "Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal
| funding. It's a little awkward that we beat the big
| corporation..."
|
| While I'm glad they did this, and it's a crazy fucking
| accomplishment, it's not really a beating. It's just Apple
| doesn't care. They were never in the race to begin with.
| alberth wrote:
| For clarity, this isn't the first conformant _linux_ drivers.
|
| Apple themselves are _not_ conformant to OpenGL(r) ES 3.1.
|
| So this is literally the first conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 drivers
| for M-Series, for _any_ operating system (Apple or Non-Apple).
|
| Hence why the call to action to donate to the team.
|
| https://asahilinux.org/support/
| renewiltord wrote:
| The Github link there goes to marcan, who leads Asahi, but I
| want to primarily support this driver development. Is that an
| option? If so, where do I do that? If not, I'll just use this
| later today.
| zamadatix wrote:
| In addition to the other post: I don't think Alyssa takes
| donations but Ella Stanforth has a GitHub sponsor page for
| the Vulkan driver.
| stirlo wrote:
| In Asahi Lina's guest post[1] on the Asahi Linux blog she
| mentions "If you want to support my work, you can donate to
| marcan's Asahi Linux support fund on GitHub Sponsors or
| Patreon, which helps me out too!"
|
| So yes, donating to Marcan helps driver development too.
|
| [1] https://asahilinux.org/2023/03/road-to-vulkan/
| renewiltord wrote:
| Thanks!
| anentropic wrote:
| Makes me wonder... is it possible to use this from macOS?
| kccqzy wrote:
| Depends on what you precisely mean by "this". The user space
| part can easily be used from macOS. That's how the author
| first developed it without a working kernel driver.
|
| From https://asahilinux.org/2022/11/tales-of-the-m1-gpu/
|
| > But wait, how can she work on the user space driver without
| a kernel driver to go with it? Easy, she did it on macOS!
| Alyssa reverse engineered the macOS GPU driver UAPI enough to
| allocate memory and submit her own commands to the GPU, and
| this way she could work on the user space part without having
| to worry about the kernel bit. That's super cool! She started
| writing an M1 GPU OpenGL driver for Mesa, the Linux userspace
| graphics stack, and just a few months later she was already
| passing 75% of the OpenGL ES 2 conformance tests, all on
| macOS!
| klausa wrote:
| Can you use Windows drivers for your GPU on Linux?
| bravetraveler wrote:
| With a cursed _ndiswrapper_ fork, perhaps :D I jest, but
| using drivers from another OS has happened
| zamadatix wrote:
| Intel did. Obviously there is more to it than just setting
| a different target and hitting compile but it's also not a
| ridiculous question because of that measure alone. It'd
| require enabling reduced security mode to load kexts or a
| custom kernel as well as a good amount of additional code
| for interfacing it with the macOS kernel interfaces but the
| majority of the code would be reused. Not trivial by any
| measure but also not an unreasonable approach in terms of
| total effort to get a working driver.
|
| I'd be very surprised if anyone was interested in doing all
| that work given the security limitations and ability to
| just use Linux.
|
| Edit: I forgot Metal is actually a userspace driver, you
| don't need to mess with the kernel side... though I can't
| remember if you still need to lower security to poke the
| right areas.
| paulmd wrote:
| intel's linux driver is completely different from the
| windows driver. it also has been open since the start
| (well, since the start of the rewrite in 2010 or
| something) actually before AMD did theirs.
| klausa wrote:
| You're right, I was being overly dismissive in my
| original reply.
| ColonelPhantom wrote:
| If you look the other way around (which is more relevant
| anyways), you can compile Mesa for Windows. However I'm
| pretty sure only the software renderer is available because
| Mesa is not capable of interfacing with the Windows kernel
| driver, as all the other drivers are coupled with Linux
| driver interfaces, iirc. (At least I'm quite certain this
| is the case for AMD.)
|
| I'm also quite certain the proprietary NVIDIA driver shares
| a ton of code between Windows and Linux.
| zamadatix wrote:
| To add on, just because it's cool, there is a 3rd
| category in play with Mesa of layered drivers. Microsoft
| worked on and officially supports running OpenCL and
| OpenGL on devices which only have a DX12 driver via Mesa
| this fashion. Still all user space of course but not
| software rendering. More akin to MoltenVK from the blog
| post, except fully supported and maintained by the OS
| provider.
| ajdude wrote:
| I love what they're doing, but last time I clicked a link for
| asahilinux on hacker news I was taken to a pop up that
| specifically said that readers from Hacker News are not
| welcomed on their site and couldn't read their content.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| I just clicked on it and it doesn't say any such thing. Did
| you actually see this from the above link, or were you so
| traumatized by your previous experience that you're too
| scared to click now?
| MBCook wrote:
| And this is exactly the kind of attitude they don't want to
| deal with.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| That they're in the right? What?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Well, Asahilinux was rude to do what they did, _and_ the
| person you are responding to is a troll.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| That's because HN has since removed referral headers on
| links, to work around this specific kind of blockage.
| kelnos wrote:
| Hm, strange, HN seems to set referrer-policy to 'origin',
| which seems like it should send a referer header when
| going to external sites[0]? But clearly it does not. So I
| guess I'm just misunderstanding how that header works.
|
| [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Re...
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Look at the 'a' HTML tag. <a
| href="https://rosenzweig.io/blog/first-conformant-m1-gpu-
| driver.html" rel="noreferrer">The first conformant M1 GPU
| driver<a>
| paulmd wrote:
| Asahi and a few other websites blocked HN traffic
| (because of the aforementioned problems) and then HN
| added special nofollow/noreferrer for only these domains
| to prevent this. and then the sites responded with more
| assertive measures.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Look at the link itself: <a
| href="https://asahilinux.org/support/" rel="nofollow
| noreferrer">https://asahilinux.org/support/</a>
| unethical_ban wrote:
| This is a profoundly rude comment.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Well if I'm going to be rude I'd best be _profoundly_
| rude.
| catchnear4321 wrote:
| feel better soon.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Half of the average HN users spends their their either trying
| to dox Asahi Lina, or to be violently transphobic towards
| Rosenzweig. The other half is horribly pedantic assholes.
|
| I can't really blame them for not wanting that kind of
| company.
| justin66 wrote:
| _Half of the average HN users spends their their either
| trying to dox Asahi Lina, or to be violently transphobic
| towards Rosenzweig. The other half is horribly pedantic
| assholes._
|
| Also, if you donate before 6PM you'll receive a free NPR
| mug and a t-shirt.
|
| (I predict this year's funding drive will be less
| successful than last year!)
| memefrog wrote:
| I have never seen anyone on this website be "violently
| transphobic", or even transphobic at all. How can you be
| "violently" anything in a comment on a news aggregator? Can
| you give us links to some examples?
|
| Pointing out that "asahi lina" is actually one of the
| blokes working on the same project is not "doxing". Doxing
| is when you publish someone's personal information, usually
| their address or telephone number. It is not "doxing" to
| say "X is actually Y" when Y is _another_ public figure
| that has chosen to put his face all over the internet for
| attention.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| I will not give you links, no. I will, however, give the
| broader HN community an example of what you are, and why
| you deserve to not be interacted with.
|
| * Complaining about the closure of pro-nazi accounts and
| blaming "woke cancel culture terminally online students"
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37206508#37207920
|
| * Denying that the 3/5ths compromise was an actively
| racist and dehumanising choice -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=37185628
|
| * Calling bringing children to drag performances
| pedophilia, amongst a bunch of queer hatred -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=37139669
|
| * "Maybe there's a reason the Nazis got to power", just
| after a tirade against immigrants -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=37115837
|
| * Calling various queer groups "mentally ill" -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=37032635
|
| Couple that with the fact that most people bringing up
| Lina's potential identity (when Lina is explicitly made
| to hide such identity) are the despicable hateful shits
| of kiwifarms, and you'll have a good idea why I'll tell
| you to go fuck yourself, and why Asahi members are not
| interested in interacting with HN.
| mkl wrote:
| > I have never seen anyone on this website [...] even
| transphobic at all.
|
| These kinds of comments are here, but are are usually
| quickly downvoted/flagged to death. If you really want to
| see them, turn on showdead and look down the bottom of
| threads somehow related to trans people. It's not nearly
| as common as ohgodplsno implied though.
| camgunz wrote:
| Doxing is nonconsensual unmasking of any kind.
| brapbrap wrote:
| [flagged]
| kossTKR wrote:
| Isn't that a weird thing to say when this thread is filled
| with people absolutely praising them and this achievement?
|
| I doubt HN is more or less toxic than traffic from any
| other mainstream site, but maybe i'm wrong.
| MBCook wrote:
| There a reason a number of sites have taken similar
| positions about HN.
|
| It's more toxic on a few axis.
| masfuerte wrote:
| > toxic on a few _axes_.
|
| (Sorry, you did tee it up)
| camgunz wrote:
| I imagine since they're on the receiving end, they'd
| know. Also if even one HNer tried to dox me I'd ban the
| lot of you, and I'm a relatively cantankerous straight
| white guy.
| kossTKR wrote:
| I get it. I guess i find it so exceedingly bizarre to dox
| someone, especially when known for being brilliant people
| - it probably doesn't register properly.
| slily wrote:
| Doxing is an exaggeration of what it is. They have a very
| public online presence in the first place and made it
| pretty obvious, and they self-promote. It's just putting
| 2 and 2 together. The "block" on HN seems to have more to
| do with their gripes about inaccurate or negative
| comments than about attacks, unless I missed something.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| "Half" is hyperbole, but it's a sizable minority that's
| obnoxious and persistent enough that nearly every trans
| hacker I follow has a gripe with HN. (Which is a greater
| number than you'd think; not that long ago I found out
| it's a meme in the transfemme community to refer to
| striped thigh-highs as "programmer socks")
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| [flagged]
| shmerl wrote:
| Eat that, Apple.
| [deleted]
| nla wrote:
| Someone should ping Tim and let him know Alyssa is not working at
| Apple for some strange reason.
| ok123456 wrote:
| How do you know they're not?
| darthrupert wrote:
| Why do people want her to stop working on Asahi so much?
| Aissen wrote:
| Wow, very interesting that mesa can now emit an instruction (and
| use a hardware feature) that even Apple's GPU driver does not
| support.
| [deleted]
| om154 wrote:
| Can someone ELI5 what this means?
| fulafel wrote:
| OpenGL is used for pretty much all graphics acceleration on
| Linux desktop - desktop compositing, browsers (booth 2D content
| and WebGL & WebGPU), games (also console game and windows game
| emulation), etc.
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| You can play games and use gui applications on the new M1
| devices using Asahi Linux. Which means running Linux instead of
| MacOS.
|
| The only caveat is that most applications won't be compiled for
| ARM yet, so emulation will still be needed.
|
| This is in contrast of Apple dropping support for OpenGL on
| their devices, and using their own API layer: Metal.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| Source? The mainstream distros already have comprehensive ARM
| support in their repos.
|
| Asahi is working on a Fedora respin which will mean all your
| usual packages are a `dnf` command away.
| solardev wrote:
| As a user, what does this mean? Are there games that still target
| opengl?
| pacifika wrote:
| SecondLife
| jwmcq wrote:
| Surprisingly there has not been a rush to go back and update
| multiple decades' worth of games to use newer rendering APIs.
| solardev wrote:
| I was more hoping this would open up another pathway (in
| addition to Crossover 23 and GPTK) for Apple Silicon
| computers to be able to play modern games. Doesn't sound like
| that's the case.
| nicce wrote:
| I have found GeForce Now perfect for the Apple devices.
| Since the client is native code, you don't even notice that
| game is running in cloud. And <10ms latency, at least for
| me.
|
| And you can play 7 hours in battery the best graphic games
| out there, with 1000nit display...
| sspiff wrote:
| Yes, quite a few Linux games still run on OpenGL, even recent
| ones[1]. Most support Vulkan as a backend as well, and this
| would be preferred once supported on MacOS, but that is still a
| work in early stages of progress.
|
| [1] One example is the Clauswitz engine from Paradox
| Development Studio, which is used in all their games.
| valine wrote:
| It means general support for hardware acceleration in linux.
| OpenGL is used more places than you would think. Switch to
| software rendering and you'll immediately see the difference
| just navigating the OS.
| xet7 wrote:
| When I tested it, at Asahi Fedora at M1 Air, Extreme Tux Racer
| runs very smooth.
|
| Godot 3 and Godot 4 did not recognize this OpenGL ES 3.1.
|
| Wishing for Godot compatible support and external monitor
| support for M1 Air.
| cobrabyte wrote:
| It was fun to watch the livestreams showing the development of
| these drivers. Amazing work.
| btown wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/c/AsahiLina for those who aren't aware
| - some of the most incredible low-level programming work I've
| ever seen!
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| If only it weren't obscured behind unbearable levels of anime
| cringe. I guess I'm getting old.
| vGPU wrote:
| It's just part of the "coder" subculture these days. To
| quote @SwiftOnSecurity:
|
| "I said that all furries are programmers. I have been
| contacted and am issuing a correction. There are three
| furries who are not programmers."
|
| https://x.com/swiftonsecurity/status/511043756788043776?s=4
| 6
| btown wrote:
| For some, vtubing is capitalizing on a trend; for many,
| though, it's a way to express and experiment with
| developing one's identity in a way that transcends the
| physical limitations of both presenter and audience - and
| for those for whom that freedom to experiment can unlock
| unbounded creativity, it's an incredible way to "limit
| break."
|
| A bit saccharine from an aesthetic perspective, but it's
| something that would be entirely familiar (if old-school)
| to denizens of a cyberpunk universe, and I don't think
| there's a better way to articulate how it's connected to a
| broader vision.
| dimator wrote:
| I choose to see that as the cyberpunk future that we are
| living in. Everything ends with your avatar, just like
| Gibson foretold. What an amazing time.
| zbentley wrote:
| Shrug. It's certainly unusual by the standard of
| programmers-as-geeky-yet-professional-folks, which is what
| most people expect these days.
|
| However, programming has, for most of the last 60 years,
| attracted many people from the weird, misfit, or cringe-du-
| jour segments of the population. This is nothing new;
| plenty of hackers in the '80s and '90s had public personas
| that were weirder than this.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| How is the current graphics driver situation on Apple Silicon
| macOS? Would it make sense or even be possible to backport this
| OpenGL ES 3.1 implementation from Linux to macOS?
|
| Or maybe an OpenGL ES 3.1 / Metal compatibility layer
| lifeinthevoid wrote:
| Extremely impressive!
| mike_hock wrote:
| Do we know that there aren't some iterations of the hardware that
| lack the shuffle instruction? It seems a bit odd that the
| official compiler fails to emit the instruction.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Amazing work. Congratulations to Alyssa, Lina, an the Asahi team.
| This is some hard core hacking!
| lemper wrote:
| rosenzweig's drive and passion is enviable. I just hope that
| burnout won't come to her way. she's still have a long road
| ahead, yeah.
| bsaul wrote:
| "Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal
| funding. It's a little awkward that we beat the big
| corporation..."
|
| Love the euphemism. This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple.
| They obviously don't care about standards, or compliance, because
| they like people to be walled in their own little private garden
| (still waiting for the facetime standard, or any kind of cross-
| platform technology created in the past 10 years).
|
| If i weren't an iOS dev, i would have ran away from the apple
| ecosystem a long time ago. I love their hardware, and loved the
| brand back in the 80s and 90s when apple was about creativity,
| putting humans first before machine, etc. But what this company
| has become is just a corrupted mess of greed behind a curtain of
| politically correct marketing videos.
| Jasper_ wrote:
| It's because OpenGL is a dying specification based on an
| outdated, horrible programming model, and Khronos's conformance
| tests are weird and ridiculous. The conformance tests are not
| open-source (there's a separate "conformance suite" available
| on GitHub which is based on Google's dEQP, not the Khronos
| internal test suite), and there can be some pretty major bugs
| and gaps in your implementation while still getting it
| "certified standards-compatible".
|
| Apple has committed to support for OpenGL 3.1, and that's it.
| They even rewrote their OpenGL driver for Apple M1 to be an
| emulation layer on top of Metal, so that existing applications
| keep working, but they're not going to implement any newer
| versions of OpenGL. Nor should they.
|
| I have a lot of criticisms of Apple, and I think they could be
| doing a lot to make Metal a better API with better tooling, but
| not caring about OpenGL is a perfectly sane decision here.
| ferbivore wrote:
| For GLES all the relevant tests are open-source, under
| KhronosGroup/VK-GL-CTS on GitHub.
|
| There's a small set of legacy "confidential" tests that you
| have to pass for GL conformance. They can't be open-sourced
| for legal reasons. The current CTS working group would like
| to get rid of them, but it's hard to justify spending time on
| GL these days...
|
| You can definitely pass conformance with a driver that's
| horribly broken in practice. GL/ES/GLSL are huge and there
| are holes found in these specs all the time. And it's not
| like game developers read them anyway; whatever works on
| their test devices gets shipped.
| [deleted]
| mmaunder wrote:
| Yep. Just switched to PC for Davinci Resolve renders/exports
| and built a threadripper 64 core with 128G of RAM, 16 TB of
| SSD, dual RTX 4090 GPUs and dual thunderbolt 4 ports with
| awesome cooling for $15K. Something worse from Apple would cost
| you three times that and be less serviceable.
| labcomputer wrote:
| I'm curious how that is possible, considering that a fully
| maximal configuration of a Mac Pro (which including pre-
| installed FCP and Logic) costs less than $13k.
| intrasight wrote:
| > If i weren't an iOS dev, i would have ran away
|
| I used to wonder why anybody who is not an iOS developer would
| buy a Mac. Now I just accept that some people make different
| choices than I would - just with most everything in life.
| freehorse wrote:
| If somebody makes a laptop as energy efficient as an apple
| silicon macbook, while being more serviceable, running linux
| etc, I will gladly buy that one. I am definitely not staying
| in apple for Macos.
| jolux wrote:
| Apple ended up in a battle with a patent troll over FaceTime,
| which could be part of why it hasn't been opened up.
| behnamoh wrote:
| I'm just glad we now have much better alternatives to
| FaceTime that Apple will soon have no choice but to open up.
| seeknotfind wrote:
| Lol. It's intentionally closed, so network effects can drive
| usage. Common Apple strategy, straight from Jobs.
| jolux wrote:
| Jobs is the guy who claimed they were going to make it an
| open standard originally.
| izacus wrote:
| Jobs also repeatedly lied and backstabbed his business
| partners when he thought he gained an advantage. As we
| see here.
| selectodude wrote:
| Jobs just added that to the keynote presentation after
| running it past nobody.
| jolux wrote:
| He was the CEO, if he wanted it done it would have
| happened.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Yes, Jobs, the great satan of tech. He died so that Tim
| Apple could sin with impunity. No FaceTime for Windows
| users -- it will bring the rebels to their knees.
| astrange wrote:
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212619
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| OpenGL(ES) are basically old legacy APIs at this point, it's
| not too surprising that Apple won't invest in them besides
| existing app conpatibility right?
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Sometimes I think the biggest secret in this industry is that 2
| people can outproduce even the largest companies. The only
| thing keeping everyone's job secure is that nobody can
| accurately identify which 2 people.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Yeah, that's definitely not true. You'll know when you
| interview them and they have extensive contributions to open
| source, an active GitHub or GitLab account, can show you
| things they're proud of having made in their spare time, can
| talk at length about technologies and implementation details
| none of your other candidates can, can show you their
| participation in mailing lists, etc.
|
| There are a billion obvious signals compared to the people
| who clock in at 8 AM, sign out at 5 PM, and argue with your
| teammates about problems that entire swaths of engineers
| consider rudimentary: understanding how to write patches in
| readable ways, not screwing up git logs, not submitting PRs
| 10k SLOC long with no explanation as to how the automated
| output was created for replication and verification.
|
| There are obvious clowns in the industry, and people who
| really love doing this stuff, and you can figure out who they
| are in a 5 minute conversation.
|
| It really insults people when you tell them this, because
| yes, there are absolutely people that work harder and longer
| than you because they want to and enjoy it--they don't just
| go home and watch Netflix.
| hotdogscout wrote:
| And a lot of times companies won't hire these passionate
| people.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| They don't even know who they are because B-players only
| hire other B-players.
| pyb wrote:
| They know who these A players are but are afraid to hire
| them.
| soulbadguy wrote:
| This is in my opinion very wrong, you will end up just
| selecting for a sub population which might or might have
| the qualities you are looking for.
|
| You seem to be confusing volume of work and passion for
| skill. Some of the best engineers i know will are very
| diligent about work life balance (i guess you call that
| clock in/sign out), do not have publicly visible git hub
| because in their spare time they are either with their
| families/communities or enjoying other non tech related
| hobbies.
|
| A good programmer (from an employer perspective) is first
| and foremost a professional, passion and loving doing stuff
| is good but can only get so so far. I know a lot of the
| passionate programmer who basically suck.
|
| > There are obvious clowns in the industry
|
| Agree, and the worst seem to be the one thinking they have
| this magical/predictive ability to discern talent based on
| their limited life experience.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| People who do more will, by definition, have more
| experience than those who do less. The engineers who
| spend their time reading and working on problems because
| they want to, creating larger volumes of work than those
| who only work an 8-to-5 job will generally always have a
| larger breadth and depth of experience.
|
| Saying the inverse is true is highly unlikely over large
| populations of individuals across any field, not just
| software development.
|
| You're telling me that you think musicians who are "very
| diligent" and practice less can be "some of the best"
| you'll ever have exposure to compared to those who are
| working in music all the time, just because they like it?
|
| It's a delusional concept. If you want to be good at
| anything in life, you will end up spending more time than
| other cohorts in any given discipline. But for some
| reason in tech, people like to believe that's not true
| because "work life balance."
|
| Did it ever dawn on you that some people just like to
| write all the time? Or produce music all the time? Or
| paint? Or sing? Or act?
|
| "Very diligent" people doing less than "very diligent"
| people doing more will generally always have less
| experience and skill.
|
| There's nothing meaningful to argue here. Some people
| delude themselves into thinking it's sacrifice and that
| some people have to give up "work life balance":
|
| The reality is that there are populations of people
| across all sorts of discipline where giving up more time
| doing X, Y or Z isn't sacrifice, it's because people
| genuinely enjoy doing more than others, spending time
| becoming better than others, and producing more:
|
| And yet, that scares people, and people like to deny that
| it's true instead of acknowledging their own mediocrity.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> People who do more will, by definition, have more
| experience than those who do less. The engineers who
| spend their time reading and working on problems because
| they want to, creating larger volumes of work than those
| who only work an 8-to-5 job will generally always have a
| larger breadth and depth of experience.
|
| Nope. Some people spend a lot of time doing because they
| need more time to get it right. Hopefully they do improve
| over time.
| stetrain wrote:
| I think it's more that there are multiple spectrums here
| and a lot more than two buckets to put people in.
|
| Sure there are very passionate people who enjoy
| programming so much that they wish to do so far outside
| the standard workday.
|
| Some of those people are also very highly skilled,
| experienced and organized.
|
| There are also people who work a standard day, push Jira
| tickets around, and try to blend into the organization
| and hope nobody really questions how much they personally
| get done.
|
| There are also plenty who have good work/life balance and
| are also skilled, experienced, good problem solvers, good
| communicators, and very valuable to have on your team.
| They might have some measurable productivity loss
| compared to your ideal, but probably not by 2x or 10x.
|
| I have also run into several of the ultra-focused
| passionate folks who will stay up all night hacking at a
| problem to make it work, who produce prolific line-counts
| of code, and fall very much into your camp of 10k line
| indecipherable PRs that are definitely not going to be
| maintainable long term in a team or organization.
|
| You can try to correlate some of these factors together,
| but it's perhaps not as simple as your original comment
| presented.
| soulbadguy wrote:
| You continue to equate volume and time with quality of
| work. But still...
|
| > People who do more will, by definition, have more
| experience than those who do less.
|
| Disagree. The quality of work, and the intensity is as
| important as the length of work. 100hr of focused work is
| better than 1000hr of distracted, unfocused work.
|
| It also depends on the type of work, i would argue that
| someone who does 50hr of Haskell and 50hr of c++ has more
| experience than someone who does 150hr of just c++;
|
| It also depends on the type of experience, sure maybe ( a
| strong maybe) your lone 1000 github star can produce more
| code, but being a professional programmer is more than
| just producing code. Communication, planning and general
| don't be a doucheness are also important. A parent who is
| doing 8-5, and spend the rest of the time managing a
| family would score higher on those metric.
|
| > The engineers who spend their time reading and working
| on problems because they want to, creating larger volumes
| of work than those who only work an 8-to-5 job will
| generally always have a larger breadth and depth of
| experience.
|
| Same remark here, depends on the focus and intensity of
| work. It's a well documented things that after 40hr a
| week, the quality of work and focus tends to degrade.
|
| But even more important, you are assuming that the time
| the "8-5 people" spend not working on computer related
| things somehow also doesn't count as experience, and can
| not somehow synergisticly enhanced one professional work.
|
| At the base level, you have the foundation health related
| thingy like good diet, proper rest etc...etc.. which does
| take time. But also well know thingies like ideas poping
| in when one get some distance to a given task.
|
| More important, cultivating other interest and stretch
| one's minds and have some interesting effect.
|
| > Saying the inverse is true is highly unlikely over
| large populations of individuals across any field, not
| just software development.
|
| Strawman, not really gonna touch this.
|
| > You're telling me that you think musicians who are
| "very diligent" and practice less can be "some of the
| best" you'll ever have exposure to compared to those who
| are working in music all the time, just because they like
| it?
|
| This is still a strawman. But at least it's more
| interesting.
|
| To answer the question : Yes... its called
| talent,training quality and genetic predispositions.
|
| If long hours of work was the only thing required, the
| profession of coach wouldn't exits. In sport, most of the
| top player are very motivated people, with ungodly work
| ethics and drive... They still invest in personal
| coaching because just "doing" is not enough, doing the
| right thing and the right way is also very important.
|
| > It's a delusional concept. If you want to be good at
| anything in life, you will end up spending more time than
| other cohorts in any given discipline. But for some
| reason in tech, people like to believe that's not true
| because "work life balance."
|
| > Did it ever dawn on you that some people just like to
| write all the time? Or produce music all the time? Or
| paint? Or sing? Or act?
|
| I see this as faulty logic at multiple level. Even if i
| give you the fact that hard work/passion etc... are
| strongly correlated with excellence. It doesn't follow
| that hard work/passion etc... are a good selection
| criteria when looking for excellence.
|
| A good analogy is height and basketball skills. It's
| pretty clear that being tall helps some might even say is
| required. But within the NBA (or any other organization
| of "professional basketball player), nobody is drafting
| people based solely on height. One might even say that
| the relationship between height and skills in the NBA is
| fuzzy at best.
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| Supposedly there is good data to suggest that people who
| work 10% longer make 40% more money. Now, that's not
| necessarily causal or anything, but it doesn't have to
| be. From a hiring perspective, it just has to be true.
| Unless you suspect that a candidate has scammed his
| previous employers, it is rational to prefer candidates
| who, based on their hours worked, are more likely to be
| effective at making money. Making money is generally the
| business of business.
|
| "The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the
| average person working 45 hours per week earns 44% more
| pay--that is, 44% more pay for 13% more work"
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > People who do more will, by definition, have more
| experience than those who do less.
|
| You're assuming skill rises meaningfully with just volume
| of experience. Who's a more skilled driver? The plumber
| that drives his van around to jobs all day and does about
| 1K miles/month or the guy that mostly rides his bike
| except for weekends when he's taking a defensive drivers
| course or going to a track day?
|
| I'd bet $$$ that the plumber spends a lot of time checked
| out / in zombie mode on the freeway between jobs and the
| motor-sports enthusiast is hyper diligent when driving.
|
| > Saying the inverse is true is highly unlikely over
| large populations of individuals across any field, not
| just software development.
|
| Perhaps, but this is - again - because you're missing the
| point; meaningful advancement in skill comes from
| experience gained while attempting something an
| individual is new to/uncertain/uncomfortable with and not
| the same thing that the individual has done a thousand
| times before.
|
| > You're telling me that you think musicians who are
| "very diligent" and practice less can be "some of the
| best" you'll ever have exposure to compared to those who
| are working in music all the time, just because they like
| it?
|
| Yes. A simple counterfactual: not all musicians that
| practice 18 hours a day become successful. There's a lot
| of work in being the best, absolutely. But some people
| have some fantastic genetics/general-
| upbringing/predisposition to leverage. Same thing with
| sports. There are comedians that you've never heard of
| that spend more time writing jokes than world-famous
| comedians do.
|
| > Did it ever dawn on you that some people just like to
| write all the time? Or produce music all the time? Or
| paint? Or sing? Or act?
|
| Absolutely, but the people that do $thing all the time
| _and get better at it_ are the people that are constantly
| looking to $difficulty++ on $thing. I love reading and
| I'm always getting better at it because I don't stick
| with the same language/length/difficulty level all the
| time :).
| soulbadguy wrote:
| Video worth a thousand words :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMEzr5uvrNM
| duxup wrote:
| Isn't that often a case of "What one programmer can do in one
| month, two programmers can do in two months."?
|
| Companies with all their bureaucracy are often slow, but that
| bureaucracy also isn't entirely superfluous, and frankly I
| don't know if any of this was on any given company's list of
| things to do. Not sure anyone beat anyone to the punch here.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Yes, it is. Such a case. A team should be dependent on what
| needs to be implemented.
|
| For "boring" and "well-trot" stuff that people can just do
| on autopilot, sure, that scales.
|
| For projects with zero obvious paths, an experienced and
| lean team is necessary.
|
| I have wasted too much time for superficial CRs, and hand-
| holding people who didn't provide value.
| misterbishop wrote:
| A rational economic system would eliminate the distinction
| between education and production so that people are
| constantly learning/improving while occasionally contributing
| to massive breakthroughs. We systemically under-develop every
| single human being on a global basis right now.
| nxobject wrote:
| Everyone deserves an experience like that, at the very
| least - everyone deserves to be in a position where they
| have the opportunity to really enquire, or engineer, or
| know what it's like to solve new problems. It really is a
| good purpose that education could meet.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I'm frustrated that "good management" involves breaking
| things down so small that there is no room for enquiry or
| engineering. Jira ticket #5229 "Port get_order_* API"
| doesn't leave much room for problem solving.
| azinman2 wrote:
| It's almost like business needs come first
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Is there a world where we put people's needs first?
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| Really? There are tons of people who learn while working,
| which is what I assmue you are advocating for rather than
| literally "eliminat[ing] the distinction between education
| and production," which would include school children
| working. This is especially true in the top end of fields
| like medicine. Surgeons create and learn new surgeries, for
| example. And I don't think Sergey Brin took a course on how
| to create Google in university, and the Google engineers
| did not learn how to scale it there either. See also the
| massive research arms of Google et al. So "every single
| human being" is trivialy false.
|
| But even in the general case, college does not directly
| prepare you for your profession (nor is it meant to) and
| you are expected to learn on the job. And if what you say
| is true that you are not learning while working there would
| be no reason for companies to seek employees with
| experience.
| justinclift wrote:
| > ... 2 people can outproduce even the largest companies.
|
| Only if they're not including documentation. Or maybe only
| very, very, very minimal documentation.
|
| If you want full documentation, translated to a bunch of
| languages, then (for now at least) you'll need more than
| those 2 people.
| rob74 wrote:
| Fortunately, in the case of a GPU driver, you don't need a
| lot of documentation beside the standard it implements...
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Apple themselves tell you to use Metal instead of OpenGL on
| Apple platforms. It's not beating the big corporation if the
| big corporation isn't in the competition.
| surajrmal wrote:
| Agreed. It's a misrepresentation. Apple doesn't do it because
| it's too hard, they don't do it because they don't see value
| in doing it.
| twoodfin wrote:
| They probably see alternatives as providing negative value
| vs. total clarity from the platform owner re: how to use
| the GPU.
| MBCook wrote:
| > This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple
|
| But Apple clearly has zero interest in OpenGL. Thats been
| obvious since before the M series chips.
|
| What they've done so far and continue to do is incredible. I
| love following what the Asahi team has done.
|
| But anyone can win a "race" against an opponent who refuses to
| play.
|
| Shame Apple for not playing the game if you want, but they
| could have easily done this if they wanted to.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| These two are tremendously cool.
|
| The story seems really complicated from a technical point of
| view.
|
| Whom is OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance for?
|
| Apple is shipping DirectX compatibility in Game Porting
| Toolkit.
|
| I understand you are making a stylized comment. My stylized
| comment is, there's a lot of stuff going on everywhere, all the
| time, with all sorts of technologies. You're not illuminating
| for me, compared to all the other people toiling in obscurity,
| what about this has pressed so many buttons for the Hacker News
| audience? Because it's not OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance.
| jmull wrote:
| I just don't see how it's incumbent on Apple to implement a
| standard only because it exists.
|
| It takes significant resources and impacts release schedules
| to, say, support an on-going vulkan implementation... I think
| there would need to be a business argument for it. Avoiding
| "shame" probably doesn't cut it.
|
| It just strikes me as strange when people expect Apple to spend
| money and focus on their own personal priorities... especially
| for things that are inherently community-driven.
|
| Perhaps there's a "community goodwill" argument to make, though
| I doubt they'll try to chase the goodwill of people who
| complain that Apple "has become is just a corrupted mess of
| greed behind a curtain of politically correct marketing
| videos."
| atoav wrote:
| > I just don't see how it's incumbent on Apple to implement a
| standard only because it exists.
|
| I mean it isn't. But it would be nice if they supported at
| least _any_ graphics standard.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| Developers don't want to create seperate Apple only backends
| for everything. Users want to use software, they don't care
| about what backend is used. When Apple has to personally
| implement a metal backend for blender, it's obvious that
| there is a problem. This is despite blender being one of the
| most well-funded open source projects. Having to support
| multiple backends also increases development time and future
| tech-debt surface area. It's mostly not a moral arguemt as
| you seem to imply. This is just a feature that developers and
| users want. Apple is free to not implement it. It just means
| that many apps will not support Apple, or they will support
| it at the cost of other features, or they will use MoltenVK.
| kouteiheika wrote:
| > It takes significant resources and impacts release
| schedules to, say, support an on-going vulkan
| implementation...
|
| Let's see... on one hand we have two devs who made it happen
| (for OpenGL; with Vulkan coming in the future), with
| essentially no funding, purely in their spare time and
| without any documentation, just by reverse engineering the
| hardware.
|
| On the other hand we have a trillion dollar corporation, with
| 100 billion dollars in profit last year, with over 150k
| employees, with full documentation for the hardware.
|
| Yep, it checks out. Apple's definitely resource strapped and
| can't afford to do it. No way they can compete with two
| spare-time hobbyist. Would be too expensive.
|
| I'm sometimes really amazed how Apple-biased a big portion of
| HN is. People here can _always_ find some sort of excuse to
| justify whatever shitty new thing Apple is doing (or why it
| isn 't doing something), no matter how much mental gymnastics
| it requires.
| Dinux wrote:
| What? I'd argue the graphics APIs are one of the most
| important interfaces right now. It's not that we all feel
| good if apple would adhere to standards for once, it's
| supporting a legacy of applications that have been build over
| the last 20 years or so. Allowing a platform to be used
| however the rest of the industry has been evolving, not cheap
| vendor locking
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I just don't see how it's incumbent on Apple to implement
| a standard only because it exists.
|
| Well Apple does implement the standard. They DO have OpenGL,
| but their driver is not fully compliant apparently.
|
| >> It takes significant resources and impacts release
| schedules
|
| Well it seems 2 people working for a couple years managed to
| do it without much in the way of documentation that Apple
| clearly has (they built the F-ing thing).
|
| Apple has considered OpenGL deprecated for a long time now,
| but they do support it (they brought it to M1 and M2) and it
| makes sense to keep doing so. They really should be more
| conformant. If a standard is worth supporting, it's worth
| supporting well - and Apply has unlimited funds in comparison
| to these two people.
| europeanNyan wrote:
| I agree with you completely and yet it's practically impossible
| finding a worthwhile alternative. I've tried finding
| alternatives on my last upgrade cycle and it's like having to
| live with endless amounts of compromises just to get away from
| Apple.
|
| For the iPhone, I tried looking at the Pixel for the Vanilla
| Android experience and long support, yet it seems like people
| are fighting battery life issues all the time. Not to mention
| the polish of the software, app ecosystem and stability.
|
| Also, couldn't find anything coming near the value of a
| baseline Macbook Air M1 as far as build quality, battery life,
| stability etc. is concerned.
|
| I like to also read comics and magazines on the iPad and that's
| also a market where I have no idea what an alternative would
| be. And that's the state of the tablet market for years now.
|
| Maybe I could get rid of my Apple Watch, but it just works and
| has endless amounts of third party accessories. I've been
| looking at Fossil Hybrid Smartwatches and it seems like they
| are a hot mess of instability and bad support.
|
| At the end of the day, it's about stability and ease of use.
| I'm way past the time where I had the time and found it really
| cool to try every new ROM coming out ("daily driver", "What
| isn't working? You tell me") and it seems like Apple still
| can't be beat at this front. Sadly.
| shoffmeister wrote:
| > I've tried finding alternatives on my last upgrade cycle
| and it's like having to live with endless amounts of
| compromises just to get away from Apple.
|
| Everything is a compromise.
|
| A while ago, I wanted a new notebook:
|
| I looked very hard at a 16" M1 Pro with 64 GB of RAM, at
| approximately USD 4000, tiniest storage possible. I really
| really wanted to run this with Asahi Linux.
|
| I purchased a Dell Inspiron 7610 with 16" display (and known
| design touchpad design defects), 3K resolution, sort of
| light-weight, Tiger Lake 11800H CPU, Intel + Nvidia hybrid
| graphics, now running at 64 GB of DDR4 RAM, 2 TB of very fast
| PCIe 4 SSD, 1 TB of PCIe 3 SSD.
|
| Professionally I run this with Windows 11 Professional +
| VMware Workstation -> Fedora 38 because of an Azure VPN; in
| my private life this is plain Fedora 38 dual-booted.
|
| Why? USD 1700. Less than half the cost.
|
| Native podman / docker. CUDA. The (still) dominant
| architecture (x86). I am typing on Proper Keyboards anyway.
| post-it wrote:
| > Also, couldn't find anything coming near the value of a
| baseline Macbook Air M1 as far as build quality, battery
| life, stability etc. is concerned.
|
| And the trackpad! I always evangelize the Macbook trackpad
| because that shit is bananas, as it were.
| gilbetron wrote:
| I used to think that, but my latest Asus laptop has a
| trackpad just as good as the macbook (which I use
| professionally). Actually, I like PC trackpads more, just
| because they tend to be reasonably sized rather than the
| monster trackpads on most macbooks (although, fortunately,
| they seemed to not be quite as big in the M1/M2
| iterations!).
| Klonoar wrote:
| I'm sorry, but I just don't buy that it's as good as the
| MacBook. Can you detail what model Asus laptop you're
| using? I'm legitimately curious what the hardware is.
|
| The only trackpads I've found that feel close to Apple's
| on a hardware level are the ones produced by Sensel
| (https://sensel.com), and those aren't in every laptop.
| _Then_ you have the driver situaton on top of it, and
| Apple 's tight vertical integration just always seems to
| give it the edge - I literally never experience invalid
| taps or movement, etc.
| jwells89 wrote:
| On the app development side of mobile, I find Android so much
| more messy to develop for. It has its perks like the
| Jetbrains IDE and ability to use bleeding edge libraries
| (Jetpack), but those don't counteract the downsides like
| needing a laundry list of third party libraries to do
| practically anything, there being no well-supported vendor-
| preferred "happy path" for various things, Java ecosystem
| baggage, fighting Proguard, etc.
|
| And that doesn't even get into the "fun" of there being
| differences between the versions of Android shipped by
| different vendors significant enough that maker and model-
| specific bugs and behavior inconsistencies are a concern,
| which is only a thing because of manufacturer insistence on
| deep customization (compare to Windows where if it runs on
| fine your PC, it probably does for 99%+ of other PCs too).
| paulddraper wrote:
| > yet it seems like people are fighting battery life issues
| all the time
|
| I miss the days when I charged my cell phone twice a week.
|
| It didn't take 100 mexapixel photos or display 4K cat GIFs,
| so I understand why.
|
| But I miss that battery life nonetheless.
| digging wrote:
| I charge my Pixel 5 pretty infrequently, couldn't give a
| number though. I leave it in battery saver mode
| automatically when it's below 70%, and often I will just
| plug it in to a quick charging cable (the one from my steam
| deck actually) for 20 minutes to "top up" (may not fully
| charge but who cares). I only notice my battery life about
| once every other week. Other than frequent photography, I
| guess I don't do very much intensive processing on my phone
| though.
| saltcured wrote:
| It's largely the background data-hungry apps and the
| obsessive screen time with foreground apps. As someone who
| almost uses their phone like a dumb phone, I charge my
| Pixel 5a about once every 7 days now, when it gets to
| around 20% remaining. It was more like 10+ days when I
| first got it, but that was also before I decided that
| avoiding the 0-20% range might be better for long-term
| battery health.
|
| The most power-hungry apps I run are Slack, the built-in
| GMail and Messages clients, the Garmin app to periodically
| sync with my watch, and sometimes Firefox if I actually
| spend time browsing there instead of on my preferred laptop
| environment. The camera app also eats power when actually
| taking pictures or video, but I guess I rarely do.
|
| When I first start using a phone, I go through a little
| effort to disable things I don't want via the system apps
| menu. For me, that includes the Google Assistant and their
| native launcher, because the last thing I actually want is
| to trigger search functions willy-nilly. If I want to
| search, I'll open Firefox and search...
| jamincan wrote:
| I have found that my newest phone (Samsung S23) has
| significantly better battery life than my old Pixel 3a ever
| did. I really have to try hard to run the battery down and
| with my normal usage it easily lasts two days.
| josephg wrote:
| I only charge my iPhone 12 about every 2 days as well -
| at least with normal usage. But I can also easily run it
| down with an audiobook playing all afternoon over
| Bluetooth. No idea why that uses so much power.
|
| When I'm at home I'm so close to charge points all day
| that I don't worry about it. And when I'm travelling, I
| bring an external usb-c battery pack that can fully
| charge my phone about 6 more times or give my laptop
| another few hours of use.
|
| Sure, more battery life would be strictly better. But I'm
| happy with the state of things right now.
|
| Apparently the EU has legislated toolless user
| replaceable phone batteries by 2027. I'm curious if apple
| plays ball and if so, what iPhones will look like in a
| few years.
| TillE wrote:
| You can still buy basic phones that last all week, they're
| very cheap.
|
| But nobody wants a _phone_ , they want a tiny portable
| computer.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > But nobody wants a phone, they want a tiny portable
| computer.
|
| Yes, including me. I want everything :/
| pezezin wrote:
| I recently bought a Sony Xperia 10 IV and the battery
| easily lasts 4 days. Performance is great too, at least for
| my usage (I don't play games on the phone though).
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| I don't get these battery issues people have. I use a 3
| year old Huawei P30 Pro, and I still get 2 days of battery
| life when charged to full. Apparently I average around 4
| hours of screen time per day.
| msp26 wrote:
| Tachiyomi makes Android significantly better for comics/manga
| than iOS.
|
| It's one of the reasons I sold my iPad for a galaxy tab s7+.
| Every alternative I tried on iOS was just shit in comparison,
| paperback especially.
| eru wrote:
| > Also, couldn't find anything coming near the value of a
| baseline Macbook Air M1 as far as build quality, battery
| life, stability etc. is concerned.
|
| The ThinkPads are pretty good laptops, especially if you put
| Linux on them.
| [deleted]
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Use to be 100% linux person. I've gone through many
| thinkpads. M1 Air is so far beyond them it's not even
| close.
|
| Battery life is (not exaggerating) 5x or more in my
| experience.
|
| It's honest to god, much faster.
|
| Completely silent and cool. (one of my thinkpads almost
| burned me it got so hot, and the fans get so loud)
|
| I've never had a single crash, random restart, failure to
| sleep, failure to charge, driver problem, touchpad randomly
| not working, wifi failing, all of which I've had with
| thinkpads.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> driver problem, touchpad randomly not working, wifi
| failing, all of which I've had with thinkpads._
|
| Those are Linux driver issues, not HW issues.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| If you're too lazy to make a Linux driver for your
| hardware, it's a hardware issue.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Maybe some HW companies don't have the budget to write
| drivers for the 3% userbase that is PC Linux users,
| especially since most commodity HW is in a constant race
| to the bottom in terms of pricing so profits are slim as
| it is.
|
| So better check for the HW you're buying it, if it's
| compatible with the SW you intend to use, especially now
| that there's almost a dozen laptop brands selling Linux-
| ready laptops. Like you don't buy an X-BOX hoping it will
| run your Nintendo games collection and the blame Mycroft
| when you realize it doesn't work, do you?
|
| And calling those driver devs "lazy" is a huge slap in
| the face, especially if you knew how overworked and
| underpaid people in that industry tend to be, as the
| profits are also very small. Not everyone is rolling in
| cash like Nvidia, AMD and Intel.
|
| This sub can be quite pretentious at times.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They are very likely hardware issues that the Linux
| driver is simply _not working around_ rather than being
| actually wrong.
| dlivingston wrote:
| That only matters in a technical sense -- as a consumer,
| I want a flawless out-of-the-box experience. I don't care
| if X isn't working because of Y or Z; I only care that it
| isn't working.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Incompatibility is a two-sided issue, there are enough
| laptops out there that work perfectly fine in Linux. But
| a brand isn't a technical promise, they'll miss with some
| models and hit with others.
|
| People always complain about Lenovo in these threads, I
| think because they are held up as the "good non-Apple
| laptop" brand for whatever reason. I suspect this
| reputation makes people assume they can just grab any
| random model and it will work perfectly. That's just a
| roll of the dice, maybe weighted in favor of working, but
| still random.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> But a brand isn't a technical promise, they'll miss
| with some models and hit with others._
|
| Sure, that's why there's now a dozen Laptop brands that
| ship with Linux compatibility in mind.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| If you're using Linux and there are no good, reliable
| drivers for your machine, it might as well be a hardware
| issue.
| padjo wrote:
| And when I can't join a call because the Wi-Fi has
| stopped working I'm sure everyone will appreciate that
| distinction
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Did Lenovo sell you the laptop with Linux compatibility
| explicitly stated?
| organsnyder wrote:
| > Those are Linux issues, not HW issues.
|
| The touchpads on my wife's T470 and my T480 have very
| similar intermittent issues, despite her running Windows
| and me running Linux.
| bee_rider wrote:
| A 5x battery life improvement seems like the baseline had
| some issues, unless your MacBook goes like a week without
| charging.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| My M2 MBA _routinely_ goes past 10-16 hours of life time
| with simple coding stuff (phpstorm and PHP in Docker),
| and it stays comfortably cold all time. Most Windows
| laptops struggle to get more than 3-4 hours and will fry
| off your balls if used as actual laptops.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The poster was apparently a 100% Linux person previously,
| though. I'm pretty sure Windows was designed to heat up
| like that as a funny joke. For example on Reddit I see
| somebody complain that they only get 5 hours with my
| laptop model (zenbook flip 13)
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ASUS/comments/ry0nwb/the_asus_fl
| ip_...
|
| But it is pretty easy to get 14 in Linux I think, at
| least if you believe the battery indicator.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I'm pretty sure Windows was designed to heat up like
| that as a funny joke
|
| Nah, it's common across all x86 devices. Even Apple's old
| lineup... which is why they went for M in the first
| place, Intel couldn't be arsed to deliver something power
| efficient.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I guess I find this troubling because it would seem to
| indicate that I spend multiple hours a day typing at a
| dead laptop, hallucinating that it is still working.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Most recent Thinkpad was X1 Carbon with Kubuntu, running
| intellij / browsers / docker would last around 3 hours or
| so. M1 Air is 15+.
|
| I also have a Anker 737 battery, with it I can double the
| macbook's battery if fully charged. The Thinkpad would
| only charge partially, so wouldn't even double.
| bee_rider wrote:
| That's weird, I wonder which program did it.
|
| I typically get a day of work out of my Zenbook flip 13;
| I haven't really measured the battery performance
| rigorously because it is easily long enough that I don't
| think about it (the battery indicator will say 14 hours,
| but those are of course pretty flaky). I'm a vim/Firefox
| with ads blocked guy though so I guess I must not be
| making it work very hard.
| nicce wrote:
| > The ThinkPads are pretty good laptops, especially if you
| put Linux on them
|
| I used ThinkPads for 7 years until getting new M2 Pro,
| mostly with Linux.
|
| Touchpads on Thinkpads are not getting even close to
| Macbooks. You need external mouse.
|
| Also the the basic screen quality on current Macbook Pros
| is beyond their top quality products. Try to look for 1000
| nits screen? Not even gaming laptops have quality ones.
|
| And battery life...
|
| And performance...
|
| When you have enough performance on your machine, the
| physical touch, screen and overall stability goes beyond
| everything else. Thinkpads have better durability on
| keyboard tho.
|
| I also used to have one of those OLED Thinkpads and that
| was the biggiest mess I ever hard. They even cancelled OLED
| screens on all products for 4 years after that. The screen
| just broke every one month.
| hgomersall wrote:
| The nipple on the ThinkPad is unsurpassed. It's basically
| the reason I can't migrate away from them.
| nicce wrote:
| I have tried to use nipple many times but maybe I was
| unfortunate with it. I was not able to get good enough
| drivers on Linux for it, and as a result it was never
| accurate, but very clunky instead.
| hgomersall wrote:
| This was on Linux. It takes a bit of getting used to, but
| I won't go back unless I'm absolutely forced to.
| davidgerard wrote:
| I've found Thinkpads to be trash for the past few years.
| Could be bad batches, but I sent back my X390 three times
| for warranty repairs and its replacement T14gen3 once so
| far.
| selectodude wrote:
| My brand new work thinkpad is total garbage compared to my
| two year old MacBook Pro. Only laptop where I need to use
| an external mouse.
| mfink wrote:
| Yes, and the fan blows directly onto your mouse hand,
| making mouse usage awkward as well.
| ixmerof wrote:
| Actually this is my favourite feature of my work
| thinkpad. Especially during winter. Really. Besides tons
| of disadvantages of the platform for the price.
| lostdog wrote:
| Agreed. I got a gen10 thinkpad (with Linux). The power
| supply makes a crackling noise. After 6 months the fan
| starting making grinding. The screen flickers when the
| CPU is loaded, and once a week the whole thing just locks
| up. Worst laptop I've owned.
| eru wrote:
| Did work install any crapware on the laptop? Or is it bad
| even without?
| selectodude wrote:
| The software is fine. The computer isn't slow at all.
| It's just not a well designed computer.
| paulddraper wrote:
| I've used Linux+Thinkpads for years.
|
| W-series, P-series, top of the line
|
| Switched to Mac M1 this year, and....longer battery life,
| better performance, higher resolution, brighter
| screen...it's not even close.
| sbuk wrote:
| I have an M1 Pro 14 and a work-issued P14s, which is
| awful. Creaky plastic, the _worst_ trackpad I 've ever
| used, has a terrible display, spongey keys and runs
| unfathomably hot. All. The. Time. Every time I see
| someone recommending Lenovo, I cringe. It is night and
| day when compared to the MacBook Pro.
| nullwarp wrote:
| Weirdly I have both of these as well and feel total
| opposite. Give me the Thinkpad keyboard any day of the
| week. The mac keyboard feels down right anemic.
|
| I wish mac would stop making the track pad so damn big
| though, the amount of palm activations I have on that
| thing drive me bonkers.
| sbuk wrote:
| I'm intrigued by this. I'm typing this one-handed on the
| MacBook with my other hand _resting_ on the trackpad
| without interference of any kind. The hinged trackpad on
| the P14s takes between 5-10 minutes to be useable from a
| cold start (these happen often due to the combination of
| an anaemic battery and power-hungry Intel processor); it
| 's as though it needs to warm up. It is a pile of
| overpriced junk not worth the value of the parts it's
| made with. I've had other ThinkPads and generally
| disliked them - even the X series, but that boiled down
| to personal taste - not a fan of the aesthetic - and a
| crap trackpad. This P14s, though, is unmitigated shite.
|
| My experience of the P14s says that either I have a dud
| (other colleagues complain vociferously about them, too),
| your MacBook is defective, or both. None of which are
| ideal!
| paulddraper wrote:
| I have zero love for the trackpad+keyboard.
|
| But 80% of my usage with external keyboard and mouse.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| Apple is an ecosystem much more than windows is. Devices work
| together and enhance each other. So jumping to Linux isn't as
| easy as Everything has to change.
|
| It's more like emigration or a divorce it will hurt and it's
| a big change. For most it's not worth the bother.
| cfiggers wrote:
| > Also, couldn't find anything coming near the value of a
| baseline Macbook Air M1 as far as build quality, battery
| life, stability etc. is concerned.
|
| I have a Surface Laptop 4 with an AMD processor and 16GB of
| RAM. I'm extremely happy with it, though I'll concede that
| the build quality is a click lower than a M1 MacBook Air (two
| of the rubber feet have fallen off of mine, being my main
| ding against it) and nobody can touch Apple Silicon's battery
| life. But aside from that, it's definitely in the same arena
| for build quality as an M1 MacBook Air (my wife's daily
| driver, so I'm not just saying that out of ignorance) with,
| IMHO, a better keyboard and a touch screen if you're into
| that sort of thing. Oh, and the facial recognition unlock is
| _the best._ I 've had zero issues with stability--Microsoft
| pays more attention to squashing Windows bugs on their own
| hardware, it seems like.
|
| Surface Laptop 5 has been out for about a year, but it was a
| totally microscopic incremental refresh. That means the
| Laptop 4's have dropped in price a lot, even though it's
| still 95% the same laptop.
|
| My exact model of Laptop 4 can be had on periodic sale,
| refurbished on Woot.com for ~$700 or less, which is a
| screaming good deal IMHO for what you get. You could almost
| get _two_ of these things for the price of one new M1 MacBook
| Air once you factor in the (IMHO mandatory) RAM upgrade.
| vuln wrote:
| > Oh, and the facial recognition unlock is the best.
|
| This is scary as fuck. Combined with all the telemetry and
| tracking M$ is now doing without care from within its
| operating system.
|
| Windows and Android are subsidized data collection
| applications which run on subsidized hardware. Simple as.
| blackoil wrote:
| LOL, How would you unlock iPhone?
| [deleted]
| astrange wrote:
| There's nothing valuable about your Windows telemetry. It
| just means if you hit a crash it's possible it'll get
| fixed.
| europeanNyan wrote:
| A refurbished Macbook Air M1 with 8GB of RAM (which works
| wonderfully for day to day stuff, even development with VS
| Code) is $849 directly from Apple. I never felt any
| slowdowns. The thing is chugging along nicely and I don't
| feel a need for an alternative any more. Apple Silicone has
| turned the industry upside down IMHO.
| scns wrote:
| Does anyone have experience how IntelliJ runs on this
| machine?
| acomjean wrote:
| I have an AMD 5700U linux notebook for work. I'll second
| that they're really quite great on battery and speed.
| nwallin wrote:
| > I tried looking at the Pixel for the Vanilla Android
| experience and long support, yet it seems like people are
| fighting battery life issues all the time.
|
| I have the opposite experience. A few months ago a friend of
| mine had to buy a new iphone because their phone couldn't
| hold a charge. Shortly after they received their new phone,
| towards the evening, they remarked how happy they were that
| their new iphone (literally a few days old) still had 36%
| charge after most of a day's usage. I looked at my 2.5 year
| old (at the time) pixel 4a and I still had 84% charge.
|
| > having to live with endless amounts of compromises just to
| get away from Apple.
|
| Having basic system functionality, such as GPU accelerated
| OpenGL, Vulkan, or OpenGL ES, seems like a catastrophic
| compromise. Like I can compromise about how the widgets of
| application foo and the widgets of application bar don't
| match each other, I couldn't care less. But no Vulkan
| support? Forgetaboutit.
| huijzer wrote:
| Based on reading Taleb, I have a theory and love to hear
| counterarguments if there are any:
|
| Products are as good as the worst part. Apple's complete
| integration allows them to more easily fix the worst part
| since they have control over almost everything. Historically,
| "open" systems, as Bill Gates would call Windows together
| with the suppliers such as Intel and Dell, could get away
| with some bad aspects as long as they just threw in new CPUs
| with smaller transistors. Now that Moore's law and Dennard
| scaling have slowed down, fixing the worst part is the only
| way to find good improvements.
| benreesman wrote:
| Apple has enjoyed, and seems set to enjoy for awhile longer,
| a _full process node_ advantage over _everyone_.
|
| People whiff that (cough RDNA3), and people overcome it kinda
| (Raptor Lake), but ceteris paribus, their shit is just from
| the future.
|
| Having a bone to pick with Apple is a very reasonable thing,
| I've got a few gripes myself, but that's why you buy
| something 2-3 years behind the cutting edge. It's not because
| it's better.
| therealmarv wrote:
| I still don't understand why people think in 2023 that
| Android can not be a viable alternative to an iPhone. I would
| never use an iPhone for certain software and UX related
| issues (biggest is the missing back gesture/button). My Pixel
| does better photos than ANY iPhone on the market.
|
| Macbook Air M1, just look at Dell XPS series.
|
| Samsung S9 tablets have an OLED display. OLED... you don't
| get that on any iPad.
|
| Apple Watch really has no competitor which matches 100%. On
| certain areas like fitness (Fitbit) or hiking (Garmin) there
| can be also some good and better alternatives but it does not
| match 100% of the features.
|
| I think there is always a choice except when looking at the
| Apple Watch.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > I still don't understand why people think in 2023 that
| Android can not be a viable alternative to an iPhone.
|
| Because Google... I could live with not having iMessage or
| AirPlay, that's annoying but something I could live with.
| So it's either a de-googled Android phone or iPhone, and I
| do need a few apps which are only available in the App
| Store or Play Store, so I figure I'm limited to phones that
| can run something like CalyxOS, which basically limits me
| to Pixel or FairPhone.
|
| The FairPhone isn't a terrible choice, but I'm not going to
| replace a functional iPhone with it... if it break maybe,
| or I can get a used iPhone.
|
| It's not that I trust Apple all that much, I just trust
| them way more than Google at this point. I don't think
| Google is evil or bad, but their interest and mine doesn't
| really align.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| >I could live with not having iMessage
|
| So, literally any messaging app, something that non-Apple
| users have to do anyways, and have to deal with your
| bullshit about only going through iMessage when they have
| to send you SMS.
|
| >AirPlay
|
| Chromecast is infinitely more ubiquitous. Also, if Apple
| didn't patent AirPlay and refuse to share it with anyone,
| you wouldn't be in this situation.
|
| I will absolutely agree with Google being an absolutely
| dreadful steward of Android, but make no mistake: you
| gave Apple full support in locking themselves down in
| their own little playground, and now you're complaining
| you can't get out.
| sbuk wrote:
| > Chromecast is infinitely more ubiquitous.
|
| Chromecast is a device.
|
| > Also, if Apple didn't patent AirPlay and refuse to
| share it with anyone, you wouldn't be in this situation.
|
| _Google Cast_ is just as proprietary as AirPlay. Both
| require licensing to be included in devices. I have an LG
| TV that supports both, an ancient Roku device that does
| the same, as well as supporting Miracast. I suspect you
| 're confusing Chromecast and the Google Cast protocol
| with Miracast, an open standard; one dropped by Google in
| favour of their proprietary stack.
| buildbot wrote:
| Stuff like the 911 calling bug is a great example:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32713375
| kelnos wrote:
| > _I still don 't understand why people think in 2023 that
| Android can not be a viable alternative to an iPhone._
|
| I don't think most people -- even iPhone users -- hold that
| opinion. In the US, at least, the iPhone is still a status
| symbol. People have iPhones because they don't want their
| iMessage bubbles on others' phones to be the wrong color.
| They're locked into that ecosystem with various purchases
| and don't want to throw that away. They use a Mac and like
| the integration.
|
| On top of that, I (as an Android user) am constantly
| uncomfortable running a mobile OS built by a company that
| exists mainly to track people's behavior and invade their
| privacy, with the goal of selling ads (and I am more
| vehemently anti-advertising than most people). As much as I
| don't fully buy "Apple's commitment to privacy", they are
| in a much better place in that regard than Android is. I
| lock my phone down and give nearly every app (including
| Google's) zero permissions, and only enable (and then
| immediately disable[0]) as necessary, but I'm still
| convinced my privacy posture would probably be better with
| an iPhone. But I don't want to live in that walled-garden
| nanny-state, so that's that.
|
| [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samru
| ston....
| [deleted]
| tverbeure wrote:
| > Macbook Air M1, just look at Dell XPS series.
|
| If you want an unusable trackpad, a middling keyboard, a
| fan that spins up and down at random when the laptop is
| just sitting there, a space heater for your backpack when
| you close the laptop and stow it away, and a pathetic
| battery life, then, yes, a Dell laptop is just what you
| need.
|
| I'll admit, I have a more expensive Dell Precision laptop,
| so maybe the XPS is actually usable, but I'm not going to
| hold my breath. The one that I have is the worst POS laptop
| I've ever had the pleasure of being forced to use.
| antonyt wrote:
| I had a personal XPS 13 back in 2015 or 2016 that I
| loved. Right now for work I have a Precision 5560 from
| 2021 which has all the drawbacks you listed and that I
| hate. I don't know if it's a year thing or a model thing,
| but certainly there is no brand consistency when it comes
| to Dell.
| sneak wrote:
| I had a top of the line XPS. Battery life is less than half
| that of the Air. The speakers in the XPS sound like they
| are from the 90s. It gets painfully hot on the bottom case.
| The keyboard wrist rest area is cheap plastic. It was
| thicker and heavier than the MBA. Intel Iris GPU (ie slow
| af) versus M1/M2 GPU.
|
| One point to the XPS: the pixel density of the 4k 13" was
| absolutely LOVELY. I have never seen a screen so nice.
|
| There is really no comparison overall, though: the Apple
| laptops blow them (and everything else in that category)
| out of the water.
|
| The top end iPhones are similarly 2-3 years ahead of the
| flagship Pixel devices in build quality, too. I tried,
| really I did.
| nwellinghoff wrote:
| Been running a XPS 9560 since 2017 and its rock solid.
| Windows 10 with WSLv2. Basically the key to any Windows
| machine is finding the combination of drivers that are
| stable. That is the trade off with Windows. They support
| a ton of hardware so naturally the driver quality varies.
| Apple's problem space is easy in comparison. One set of
| hardware, one set of drivers. A lot of the complaints
| about XPS hardware really boil down to the bad set of
| drivers Dell ships them with. As I get older it has
| become pretty clear the sweet spot is to be two
| generations behind the latest and greatest. You get the
| ideal spot between price, cheap replacement parts and
| stability.
|
| So not turn key, but also not a rip off prison like Apple
| :)
| mook wrote:
| Isn't a good high density screen typically a large power
| drain? Perhaps there's a trade-off that was made there...
| astrange wrote:
| It's not included because it's really hard to make a high
| quality screen, not because of the battery tradeoff.
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| Same here. The XPS's hard drive died within two years and
| I had to replace it.
|
| The keyboard and touchpad also don't hold a candle to
| MacBooks.
| tornato7 wrote:
| I bought a MacBook Pro in 2013 and my mom bought a Dell
| XPS at around the same time. Her laptop died, she got a
| Lenovo Yoga. That one died within a year and was replaced
| for free. The new one died after two years. When the M1
| Air came out I gave her the old MacBook Pro, which she
| still uses every day, going strong (aside from battery
| life, but it's mostly plugged in).
|
| It has essentially outlived 4 Windows laptops. I expect
| the M1 Air to still be relevant in a decade, as well.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| I bought a mid-range Acer laptop in December 2012. I used
| that thing as my daily driver until 2018 until I finally
| got a desktop. In 2020 I repurposed that laptop as a
| server and it's been running ever since. For tens of
| thousands of hours.
|
| My point is that Apple doesn't have a monopoly on
| quality. Perhaps I'm pretty lucky in this sense, but I
| have had great longevity out of all of my hardware, and I
| have owned very few Apple devices.
| Zetobal wrote:
| The M1 won't, the SSD will wear out before that and with
| no way to swap, it will be landfill as well.
| yetanotherloss wrote:
| Do the M1s have especially short write lifetimes? I have
| a Toshiba from 2010 or so and the SSD is still fine even
| if the trackpad and speaker ports died years ago.
| tverbeure wrote:
| In 2013, TechReport did an SSD endurance test: for
| months, it ran non-stop write operations, a much more
| strenuous use case than what a regular laptop would
| experience, which will be primarily read operations. 4
| months in, after writing 300TB, all the tested devices
| were still working without issue.
|
| If the characteristics of the SSD in an M1 are
| sufficiently similar to the SSDs that were used back then
| (I have no clue if that's the case), wear out will be a
| non-issue.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Agreed Android is a suitable iOS replacement. Maybe a bit
| wonky at times but I've used both and they're the same for
| my needs.
|
| XPS is not comparable to M1. Not even close.
| deskamess wrote:
| I have a Pixel 3a and longevity of phone is important. But
| Android is cutting down their supported cycles to 3 years.
| Unless something changes, in fall next year I will get an
| iPhone 14/15 (possibly refurbished) and keep it for 6/7
| years. ios16 is still possible on the iPhone8 - a solid 6+
| years of official updates!
|
| Walled garden or not, their products are solid and
| supported. That is what most consumers look at. No hassle
| ownership for most.
| musictubes wrote:
| "...missing back gesture/button"
|
| Swipe from the left of the screen goes back a page in the
| current app. Swiping right on the bar at the bottom goes
| back to the previous app used. Two different locations but
| the same gesture. What else is missing for a back
| gesture/button?
| trogdor wrote:
| >I would never use an iPhone... missing back gesture/button
|
| One finger swipe right.
| akshaybhalotia wrote:
| > I would never use an iPhone for certain software and UX
| related issues (biggest is the missing back gesture/button)
|
| Um, swiping from the left edge takes you back on iPhone and
| iPad. Not sure how long ago did you last test the "missing
| back gesture" theory. Been using an iPhone for 3 years and
| has always been this way.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Not in several google apps -- they deliberately break the
| convention.
| pirates wrote:
| just google ruining the experience as usual. same with
| youtube on iOS, they get away with it so why not try
| breaking the rules everywhere.
| bwanab wrote:
| My son bought a Dell XPS for exactly that reason. After 1.5
| years, the battery life was at 50%. He called Dell support
| and they said it was normal. He's now in the market for a
| MacBook Air M2.
| HankB99 wrote:
| The key to battery life/health on the XPS is to use the
| BIOS functions to limit charging. My XPS-13 9370 has been
| plugged in most of its life (about 4 years now) and
| battery health has dropped from 96% to 93%.
|
| I can't speak to the rest of the comparison to the Macs -
| they're probably better overall - but the battery life is
| a solved problem if you know to limit charging.
| nly wrote:
| This is a limit of battery technology. Your Apple laptop
| will ha e shit battery life in a few years as well
| pohl wrote:
| Device manufacturers can engineer for longer useful
| lifespan by oversizing the battery, can't they? Do they
| all do that to the same extent?
| tracker1 wrote:
| To an extent, there's a limit for air travel, generally
| speaking as they can be dangerous. The m1/m2 are just
| killer in terms of lifetime and usage for general
| reading/browsing/email.. and still very long for even
| content viewing. Most people aren't rapidly draining
| their batteries, so the longevity gets to be a bit better
| overall.
|
| AMD is getting pretty close and the perf:watt on the
| coming generation(s) for laptops (including integrated
| gpu) look to be really impressive to say the least...
| hedora wrote:
| They can also implement better battery management
| technology (cooling, charge rate curves, keeping the
| charge between 10%-90% instead of 0-100%, but reporting
| 0-100% to the user via scaling), etc, etc.
|
| For a good counter-example, look at the early Nissan
| Leafs. They burned out their batteries in a matter of a
| few years, but battery replacements for other brands from
| that time are basically unheard of. (The inherent
| information asymmetry for new car purchasers is one
| reason Biden's IRA dictated minimum car battery
| warranties.)
| ralferoo wrote:
| Funny, I heard the total opposite about Nissan Leafs. The
| industry was guesstimating that batteries would last 8-10
| years. The first Nissan Leafs (which was about the first
| commercially mass-available EV) had battery lives where
| something like 90% were still going strong and still 80%
| of original capacity left after 13 years.
|
| Rather than the Leaf being problematic, it was the car
| that showed the market that worrying about the lifespan
| of EV batteries wasn't really necessary.
| mwint wrote:
| I have an Apple laptop that is a few years old. It does
| not have shit battery life. Probably 90% of new.
|
| Did you research this statement before making it?
| josephg wrote:
| Yep. Apple battery health in system preferences will show
| you how much the battery has degraded since the device
| was new. My ~2yo M1 MacBook Pro still has 92% capacity
| compared to when it was brand new.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I don't know if it's in System Preferences, but for me,
| System Information shows my mid-2015 MBP (running macOS
| 10.14.6 Mojave) still has a battery capacity of 8266mAh
| and a remaining charge of 8079mAh at 100%. Compared to
| the advertised capacity at launch of 8755mAh, that's a
| charge capacity of ~92% after ~five years (AppleCare
| replaced my battery during their recall). MacBooks are
| just built different.
| Closi wrote:
| I can't believe my M1 Mac is almost 3 years old, performs
| just like the day I bought it (blazingly fast).
|
| My work Thinkpad from the same period feels half way
| dead.
| kelnos wrote:
| That's likely more a reflection of the software you run
| (and update over time) than of the hardware itself, no?
| sharts wrote:
| When most people you know use iMessage then Android is a
| bad experience.
|
| Also, as someone who switched from Pixels and other Android
| devices to the Apple ecosystem . It's nice that everything
| "just works."
|
| It's kind of like running BSD or Debian stable after having
| been on Fedora/Arch/etc.
| insanitybit wrote:
| > When most people you know use iMessage then Android is
| a bad experience.
|
| Isn't this because Android uses open standards for its
| SMS and iOS refuses to do so?
| marzullo wrote:
| This is correct. Google put a lot of effort into making
| carriers adopt RCS (which has most of the functionality
| of iMessage), but Apple will not adopt it to keep their
| "competitive advantage."
|
| https://www.android.com/get-the-message/
|
| I use an iPhone now but these kinds of business tactics
| and the others mentioned here really make me wish there
| were more competitive products on the other end.
| paulmd wrote:
| RCS as a baseline standard is proprietary, but google
| then slapped a bunch of proprietary extensions onto it
| that it refuses to license, so no, it's not.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-
| begs...
|
| > Google's version of RCS--the one promoted on the
| website with Google-exclusive features like optional
| encryption--is definitely proprietary, by the way. If
| this is supposed to be a standard, there's no way for a
| third-party to use Google's RCS APIs right now. Some
| messaging apps, like Beeper, have asked Google about
| integrating RCS and were told there's no public RCS API
| and no plans to build one. Google has an RCS API already,
| but only Samsung is allowed to use it because Samsung
| signed some kind of partnership deal.
|
| > If you want to implement RCS, you'll need to run the
| messages through some kind of service, and who provides
| that server? It will probably be Google. Google bought
| Jibe, the leading RCS server provider, in 2015. Today it
| has a whole sales pitch about how Google Jibe can "help
| carriers quickly scale RCS services, iterate in short
| cycles, and benefit from improvements immediately." So
| the pitch for Apple to adopt RCS isn't just this public-
| good nonsense about making texts with Android users
| better; it's also about running Apple's messages through
| Google servers. Google profits in both server fees and
| data acquisition.
|
| Like c'mon google doesn't care about open-standards
| except insofar as that allows them to embrace-extend-
| extinguish. google's end goal is imessage but with google
| servers in the middle instead of apple ones.
| insanitybit wrote:
| Thanks, glad I asked - I genuinely was not sure.
| tverbeure wrote:
| Does it matter for me as a user?
| insanitybit wrote:
| No, and I wouldn't want to imply otherwise. I was
| genuinely asking because my recollection is that the
| answer is "yes" but I don't recall.
| tornato7 wrote:
| I loved Android back when I had the time to hack around
| with ROMs and crazy customization. It's fun. But these
| days in my busy working life, I don't have time for that
| kind of stuff, I just want something that works well and
| gets regular security updates. My Android phones weren't
| really cutting it.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > I still don't understand why people think in 2023 that
| Android can not be a viable alternative to an iPhone.
|
| Because some people, like yours truly, enjoy having a
| patched up-to-date mobile os, but also don't need to change
| their phone every other year. My Iphone 7 which I bought
| refurbished in February 2017, still works perfectly after a
| battery change. It has the previous iOS version, but it
| keeps receiving security updates. All the apps I need work
| on it (games may be too much for it, but luckily, I have a
| PC with a big-ass GPU for that). My dad's Galaxy S7 hasn't
| had an update in a while. He tried to install 1password, a
| freaking password manager which is basically a glorified
| notepad, says it doesn't support the phone and / or the
| android version. His GS7 is working fine otherwise, though.
|
| > Macbook Air M1, just look at Dell XPS series.
|
| This has to be a joke. I can wholly understand people not
| valuing build quality and preferring to save money over
| that or invest it someplace else. But that doesn't make it
| "comparable".
|
| Have they finally fixed the touchpad moving by itself or
| ignoring your finger? The fan spinning like a jet engine
| for no reason? I hear nowadays everybody's on the "modern
| standby" bandwagon. How do you like your battery draining
| 50% while on your commute home while the PC supposedly
| sleeps? Or waiting around for it to wake up from
| hibernation? That's if you're lucky enough it doesn't burn
| down your bag because it figured it's as good a time as any
| to wake up and do who knows what, which absolutely couldn't
| wait.
|
| I won't comment on the ipad nor the watch, since I've never
| owned any of those.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| My android phone is from 2011. All the apps I want to run
| on it run on it. I know of some that won't, but I don't
| want to use them.
|
| So what does this prove? Anything? Probably not.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Probably the closest option to M1 on build quality and
| battery will be the AMD version of the Framework laptop... if
| you want can run Windows or Linux without issue. Will
| probably go that direction on my next purchase. Later this
| year and next year AMD are releasing new laptop CPU/APU that
| will absolutely kill on performance:watt, while they're a bit
| ahead of Intel at the moment, they're going to leap a bit
| further ahead if GPU perf matters to you. Not that Intel is
| asleep, just behind.
|
| On the phone, I started with Android, so just kind of used to
| it... I've bought about every 2-3 generations for a while,
| currently on a Pixel 4a. I tend to avoid the high end, and
| find if you wait 3 months or so after a new release, the
| kinks are usually worked out by then.
|
| As to the iPad, there really isn't a good alternative that
| I'm aware of... there are still a few Android options, none
| are great... the MS surface tablet and other convertable
| laptops are okay, but still not as nice a UX, it's not my
| thing so doesn't bother me, but can understand why if it
| works, it really works for you.
|
| Watch is about on par, from what I understand.. again, not
| something I'm into personally.
|
| I tend to take the Apple option for work (software dev,
| mostly web/svc oriented) only because corp Apple experience
| is generally better than corp windows.
| Klonoar wrote:
| In terms of "premium finish" feeling, I think that the
| Starbook from Star Labs might be in the convo - they
| actually make their own chassis, unlike so many other
| vendors.
|
| https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starbook
|
| (I know Framework isn't rebranding stuff - just throwing
| another in the mix)
|
| Good luck getting one though, wait times seem bad every
| time I look.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| I vote with my wallet.
|
| The Framework laptop is my choice. It is not the best in
| every category, but it is mine.
|
| I didn't like the weak hinges, I replaced them. I can
| replace the battery when I need. I can upgrade the memory
| or hard disk, or motherboard or screen when I need.
|
| The thing with Apple is that their way of vertical tech
| integration results in highly polished, non-standard,
| unservicable machines. They are nice, but not worth the
| trade of ownership for me.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I feel exactly the same about Apple's software. It's
| great as long as your preferred workflow matches the
| Apple-blessed workflow. But if it doesn't, you're pretty
| much hosed.
|
| Desktop Linux is not as nice or facile or polished, but
| it feels like "my" desktop because I can modify it. When
| I use MacOS, it feels like I'm just renting somebody
| else's computer. It's a very nice computer, but it can
| never be mine.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| >As to the iPad, there really isn't a good alternative that
| I'm aware of...
|
| As someone who refuses to use Samsung phones because of the
| bloatware (and was using a Pixel 4a until the sim slot
| crapped out last week, of all things) I've actually been
| pretty happy with Samsung's tablets.
| insanitybit wrote:
| I've found that ChromeOS + Pixel 6 is fine. I have a Fitbit
| Sense 2 for a watch (I _hate_ the idea of my watch telling me
| I have a meeting coming up lol).
|
| ChromeOS is great. The host OS "just works" and I have a
| VM/container env to do development in. It feels secure,
| operationally straightforward, and low maintenance.
|
| I don't really care a ton about my phone. It works, battery
| is fine. It makes phone calls, plays music. idk. I care way
| more about my laptop.
| michelb wrote:
| How did they beat the big corp who probably didn't even have
| this on the agenda? Or any other big corp that wasn't planning
| on doing this? I'm all for it but they clearly did something
| someone else wasn't willing or even planning to do.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| If Apple didn't care, they wouldn't release anything at all.
|
| But they did. It means somebody did care.
|
| But they failed, got beaten by almost one-man-army "team" that
| started running miles behind from another country behind chain
| of mountains. It's unreal.
|
| It's unreal because Apple has everything - talent, hardware and
| software and got beaten by reverse engineering the whole thing.
|
| Such a slap in a face.
| Salgat wrote:
| We're kidding ourselves if we think Apple was putting an
| earnest effort into this.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Genuine question. Why would apple make a driver for something
| they don't support? and if they wouldn't, is there really any
| shame?
| asddubs wrote:
| well, the article mentions webgl
| Aurornis wrote:
| > This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple. They obviously
| don't care about standards, or compliance, because they like
| people to be walled in their own little private garden
|
| Is everyone missing the part where Apple left the door open for
| other operating systems and development thereof when it would
| have been relatively trivial for them to lock the laptops down.
|
| They literally made their own silicon and built an entire
| platform. Do you think it's a mere mistake that they left it
| open to running other operating systems?
|
| It's really disappointing to see everyone bashing Apple when
| it's clear to anyone paying attention that they made a
| conscious decision to leave the door open for 3rd party
| development.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > It's really disappointing to see everyone bashing Apple
| when it's clear to anyone paying attention that they made a
| conscious decision to leave the door open for 3rd party
| development.
|
| Maybe I'm just a jaded grey-beard but I suspect that this is
| more of a "placate the anti-trust regulators" play and not a
| genuine olive branch offering.
|
| Apple gets to say "see, look! Not only are we not locking
| people out - there's a whole micro-niche community that's
| taken root. If that isn't proof we're not abusing our
| position, I don't know what is..."
|
| They left the door open, but just barely. The reverse
| engineering efforts will always be a step behind making sure
| that there's always going to be a "non-apple" experience that
| will be objectively inferior in one way or another.
| Klonoar wrote:
| This is one moment where I really hate what happened to
| Twitter, since I feel like I recall a tweet from Marcan
| ages ago pointing out that Apple has fixed some things
| regarding 3rd party OS support.
|
| That is to say, unless I am truly off my rocker and
| remembering a fever dream: it's not just a "placate the
| anti-trust regulators" play.
|
| I'm pretty sure I've also seen it mentioned on HN itself
| that Linux is still used within Apple for certain aspects
| of hardware development, so Apple themselves need it to
| work to a certain degree.
| klausa wrote:
| I remember reading that too, but I think it was on
| mastodon -- I don't feel like tracking down that
| particular thread now, but maybe that helps you on your
| search :)
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > I remember reading that too, but I think it was on
| mastodon -- I don't feel like tracking down that
| particular thread now, but maybe that helps you on your
| search :)
|
| That would be strong evidence that there's at least
| _some_ support internally for them but doesn't explain
| why they bothered at all.
|
| The lack of explicit endorsements and documentation
| certainly has me thinking that at least _some_ of apple
| doesn't want this happening at all so they're at least
| going to make it hard. It may not be a "what's the bare
| minimum support we have to do to avoid being a poster-
| child for anti-competitive behavior" that's completely
| driving it after all.
| Klonoar wrote:
| _> but doesn 't explain why they bothered at all_
|
| I mean, you're kind of glossing over my second point from
| my comment:
|
| _> I 'm pretty sure I've also seen it mentioned on HN
| itself that Linux is still used within Apple for certain
| aspects of hardware development, so Apple themselves need
| it to work to a certain degree._
|
| Anyway, I went and dug around and found the HN discussion
| of that Marcan tweet that's been deleted - you can browse
| it below if you missed it or are curious:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578
|
| Notably, this comment from Saagarjha who I trust on
| Apple-related matters is what I was referring to
| regarding Apple using Linux internally for some of their
| work:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29599889
|
| All this to say, if the people who have some level of
| vested expert knowledge in this domain - like Marcan or
| Saagarjha - don't buy the conspiracy theory angle, then
| I'm inclined to side with them.
| klausa wrote:
| I can't imagine any reasonable argument that would make
| Apple be a target for an anti-trust action for _Macs_.
|
| I understand skepticism and not always giving corporations
| the benefit of the doubt, but they _clearly_ spent a lot of
| time and resources to make third-party OSes viable on Apple
| Sillicon Macs.
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > I can't imagine any reasonable argument that would make
| Apple be a target for an anti-trust action for _Macs_.
|
| Why can't the same "there is no OS except iOS allowed on
| iPhones" argument be applied here? If the only os that
| boots on a macbook is macOS, that's starting to smell
| like anti-competitive behavior the same way that only app
| store approved apps can run on iOS is anti-competitive.
| klausa wrote:
| Because the market share is order of magnitude smaller.
| dlivingston wrote:
| > _clearly_ spent a lot of time and resources to make
| third-party OSes viable on Apple Sillicon Macs.
|
| This actually isn't clear to me -- can you explain?
| Besides keeping an open bootloader [0], I'm not aware of
| any affirmative actions Apple has taken.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Open-OS-
| Ecosystem-on...
| klausa wrote:
| The open bootloader didn't magically appear one night in
| Apple's git repository.
|
| It boots in a notably different way than iOS machines do,
| and has some (AFAICT) pretty unique capabilities,
| including a fully-verified signed-boot of macOS
| partitions, while allowing third-party kernels at the
| same time.
|
| Asahi's "Introduction to Apple Silicon" [0], and
| specifically "Security modes, Boot Policies, and machine
| ownership" paragraph outlines some of that, Apple's
| "Platform Security" [1] whitepaper does too.
|
| Asahi's docs also explicitly state the same thing [2].
|
| If you still don't think that shows significant amount of
| work and care were put into deliberately allowing third-
| party OS's to work on those machines, I don't think I can
| convince you otherwise.
|
| [0]:
| https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Introduction-to-
| Appl...
|
| [1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/welcome/web
|
| [2]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Apple-
| Platform-Secur...
| enos_feedler wrote:
| There is also no precedent for Apple making any kind of
| pro-active design choices around future regulation. They
| clearly are the kind of company that does whats best for
| them and when asked to change, nudges in that direction,
| and then moves on. This is in the DNA from the top down.
| It would certainly be weird to make the decision about
| third-party OSes be about that.
| josephg wrote:
| They did. Which is why it's so baffling that they didn't
| document any of this stuff. 5 minutes of documentation by
| apple engineers on the boot process or GPU would have
| saved 5 hours of reverse engineering work by the Asahi
| Linux team.
|
| Seems to me like they can't decide whether they want
| Linux on their hardware or not. I bet different people in
| the org are pulling in different directions.
| sharts wrote:
| They learned from Microsoft in the 90's.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| I've been watching the Asahi Linux project from the beginning
| from the sidelines. I find it both exciting and fascinating for
| two reasons:
|
| 1) It's a project that a lot of people want to see happen, and
|
| 2) It's a stellar example of a well-executed open source
| project at all levels.
|
| Moreover, Asahi has been my daily driver since the alpha was
| released back in March 2022. I migrated to Fedora Asahi Remix
| (their new flagship distro) earlier this month, which is
| excellent (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/fedora-asahi-
| remix/).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| kelnos wrote:
| > _This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple._
|
| Not really? Like, we can look at this and point fingers, but
| Apple will not be ashamed, because they do not care. They
| deliberately don't bother with standards conformance unless
| doing so is a part of their strategy. Standards conformance for
| OpenGL or Vulkan doesn't make sense when they want everyone to
| use Metal.
|
| It's dumb, and I marvel at how childish Apple always behaves
| with things like this, but that's just who they are.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _They obviously don 't care about standards..._
|
| Apple has invented, contributed to, and adopted a long list of
| standards. You can easily Google or ChatGPT the list if you
| don't know your tech history.
|
| Apple deprecated OpenGL and OpenCL support in 2018 for very
| reasonable technological and strategic reasons that I
| understand you disagree with. But that doesn't change the fact
| that OpenGL is a terrible fit for modern computing/GPU
| architectures.
| astrange wrote:
| Apple also invented and contributed OpenCL. Then later
| Khronos invented OpenGL compute shaders, which is completely
| different.
| amelius wrote:
| > If i weren't an iOS dev, i would have ran away from the apple
| ecosystem a long time ago.
|
| Yeah, instead of drivers for M1, I'd be more impressed+happy if
| someone implemented the iOS APIs running on Linux, like we have
| Wine for Windows on Linux.
| fsiefken wrote:
| Now if Steam and SteamVR compile to ARM, VR on a M1 might be a
| possibility!
| zamadatix wrote:
| Would need the Vulkan driver for SteamVR on Linux.
| xbar wrote:
| Thank you A. Rosenzweig.
| blindfolded_go wrote:
| Fantastic work, must really applaud the Asahi Linux team for
| their commitment and sheer competence.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| > Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal
| funding. It's a little awkward that we beat the big
| corporation...
|
| Is the big corporation even racing you? Does it care? What devs
| and superusers want is regularly at odds with what makes sense
| for the actual business cases of a product.
|
| I want all these things, too! But I recognize that it doesn't
| happen because what I want fails to make a solid business case,
| not because Apple is somehow incapable of writing an OpenGL
| driver for their own hardware.
|
| If I'm in charge of the resourcing that could be committed to
| broader graphics standards support for M1/M2, what is the
| concrete (not hypothetical) case one can present to sell me that
| this is the right thing to focus on? I won't pretend to have the
| answer to this. There may very well be a very strong case to
| make. But it just doesn't quite feel right how I notice, on a
| daily basis, this lack of exploration or even just appreciation
| of all the factors and constraints that exist outside the
| technical portion of the problem. Maybe I'm just sensitive to
| this kind of issue because I feel this pain often at work.
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