> Does this effect dual booting OS X? I doubt the side-effect of blocking Linux boots was anything but a coincidence. But could Microsoft be fearful of Hackintoshes becoming more popular and a increase of OS X running on non-Apple hardware?
I doubt it. Whilst I don't mean to belittle the hard work that goes into the hackintosh projects out there, we're talking about a tiny, tiny group of people that probably have an imperceptible impact on MSFT's bottom line.
> Also, is anyone else afraid of the possibility of Apple deciding to screw us up by imposing restrictions to prevent people specifically from doing this for...reasons?
According to Marcan, Apple explicitly went out of their way to support secure booting of other OSs as well.
Also, it’s hard to predict, but I think it would only increase revenue if the small, but rich linux-using software community would choose MacBooks as “the next thinkpads”, and it’s not like most people would not just have both OSs available and switch between them.
> Obviously not all hackintosh's are not as bad as that (AMD being a completely unsupported platform in Apple-land) but the /risk/ of it is a very large blocker for many people.
> I bought my first mac precisely to avoid these kinds of issues.
The lock-in to Apple products should also be considered as a large blocker.
> I can make a bootable Linux disk on Windows, and a bootable Windows disk on Linux
Have you ever noticed how Apple considers Macs a separate platform from PCs? Not as in "Windows or Linux or macOS on a computer", but as in "macOS on a Mac, or anything you want on a PC".
They don't want you to make a bootable macOS disk on Linux, because Macs and PCs are not supposed to be friends. Like PlayStation and Xbox, their hardware is similar and from the outside they both look like general purpose computers, but they're different platforms and they're not friends.
You can run macOS on generic PC hardware (Hackintoshes) and you can run Windows or Linux on Mac hardware, but that's mostly a byproduct of the platforms being similar.
You can disagree with Mac not being a PC and not being an open general computing platform, you can choose not to buy them, use them or develop for them, but I don't think it's a difficult concept to understand that Apple doesn't sell, support or care about PCs.
> Is there anything on OS X-only that you think you'd miss?
I've paid for a lot of software that can't run on Linux, but I feel like I've gotten the value out of most of them. In theory everything I do either works in Linux natively or has a Linux equivalent. I just haven't tried any of it on modern hardware to know if it'll actually work.
> Have you considered a Hackintosh? And what's keeping you off of Windows?
Most of the reasons for switching to Linux are related to OS/security/privacy/automation tweaks that I haven't been able to make work (or work reliably) in Windows/OSX. I have all that stuff working in Linux today, but my hardware is too out of date to do the bulk of my work on.
Honestly, I could probably spend some time in mastering powershell, and educating myself on the current state of Windows and maybe do everything I want, it's just not something I'm interested in doing.
> Consuming media through the laptop is another sticking point. I had tons of bizarre issues with Chrome/Firefox and streaming video sites. It was just a mess.
This has been my experience as well, but I'm also on 7 year old hardware.
> One possible downside of the new Macs, is that Apple keeps talking about the new secure boot feature only allowing Apple signed operating systems to boot as a security feature. Does this mean we won’t be able to run Linux on these new Macs, except using virtualization?
> I doubt that it would happen given that Microsoft's modus operandi is to make as much money as possible by trying to lock people into their products, with Windows being the primary product on which they want people to be dependent.
How easy is it to port the average program from MacOS to Linux?
While the Kernel may be close enough, the window library is so vastly different that it's probably the same work to port from windows to Linux as to port from MacOS to Linux
What's this about? You can make an Android version of the game too. Does Apple prohibit that?
> Microsoft motion to lock-in github developers, now requiring a Microsoft account
How is requiring a Microsoft account fundamentally different from requiring a Github account? What is the tangible difference?
> tried to set up a dual-boot
> failed because Ubuntu installer could not find any disk space
> Get angry that I can't seem to use hardware I BOUGHT
Yes you can, you just have unrealistic expectations. Dual-boot is unsupported by both Windows and Ubuntu, it's an advanced technique that requires you to break lots of assumptions.
> Install Ubuntu on whole drive, removing W10
See? You were able to use the hardware you bought, what's the problem?
> And Microsoft could ask the OEMs to push a UEFI update that enforces secure boot with only the Windows keys. I don’t think they will though.
Well, let's be fair: They could try, but again, that'd require those OEMs to cooperate. And you'd still end up with folks like System76 and Framework that'd go their own way because nothing can stop a vendor from creating an open x86-based design. They just wouldn't be able to ship Windows pre-installed.
Apple, by contrast, could just do it by fiat because they own the entire ecosystem, and no one could do a damn thing about it.
That's the difference between an open, interoperable ecosystem and a closed one.
I genuinely don't understand the debate, here. Are you seriously trying to claim that the Apple hardware platform and the x86 ecosystem are equally open/closed?
> I wonder if Apple could sell a developers edition of MacOS that supported a vetted list of non-Apple hardware? Even if that was a short list and it was $999 a seat, I'm thinking people would pay the price to stay with their preferred OS and run the latest hardware.
How that situation would be different from now? It's not like Apple actively trying to defend itself from hackintoshes, they just don't care at all, so you can use hackintosh if you want. Apple supports selected list of hardware which is present in their products and it's not something proprietary, so you can buy those parts and build computer.
For $999 I bet most people would just torrent it. For $99 there wouldn't be enough purchases to justify a lot of additional work, especially support, because selling product presumes that you're going to help customers with their issues.
What Apple probably would do is just to release their OS X free without legal restrictions and with some working installer, loader, etc. It's not a lot of work and you're not getting support if you're not buying their hardware. Then hardware manufacturers would build drivers, at least for some of their hardware. Now hackintosh doesn't exist for manufacturers, because it's not completely legal and community around hackintosh isn't good enough to write their own drivers.
> Is windows better or worse than macs/osx with Linux hostility? To me, it seems like Microsoft is less bad than Apple in this regard.
I'm not sure what you mean.
Personally I like the Mac because it lets me run Unix stuff in a no BS way from the command line. It also runs Docker fine (haven't tried it on the M1).
It doesn't have something like WSL, but it doesn't really need it because you can compile most things for the MacOS command line.
Windows needs to run Linux well because it isn't Unix. The Mac is BSD Unix.
> They want to protect users with Secure Boot, and still they get a lot of crap for it.
No. That's only to make it difficult/impossible to boot anything that wasn't signed with a Microsoft key. It protects against one kind of rootkit and that's it.
> Apple implemented the Palladium spec pretty much to the letter.
Apple wasn't trying to force the PC industry to implement Palladium (or UEFI Secure Boot). If you buy Apple, you are buying Apple. When I buy Dell, I don't expect to be forced to also buy Microsoft (although I often am).
> Also, wasn't Miguel supposed to be Microsoft's shill or something for introducing Mono for Linux and pushing C# on Linux and Mac?
People change careers.
> Maybe he was just a technology lover all along!
Maybe I just don't agree with his taste for technologies.
> Can someone explain why you would want to run an operating system that actively tries to prevent you from running it?
If you're a developer, OS X is great.
Windows is a second class citizen if you aren't using Visual Studio.
Linux is great - it's basically your deployment environment - but you often have to mess around with it a bit.
OS X is 90-95% of the benefit of Linux, but it just works™. If you want to get work done, that's a pretty good feature.
The trouble is that, if you want to run a desktop, there are basically no good options. Mac Mini is very limited, same with the iMac. The Mac Pro is not limited, but it supports such enormous expansion that the base config is extremely expensive, while not being very performant.
> That blows my mind. Microsoft has had an ARM version of Windows for years. I would have thought they would have lept to support Bootcamp on these new Macs.
Why and for who though? Yes, there is an ARM version of windows, but there is pretty much no software for it - and most of the Windows ARM software (Office?) likely has already iOS versions and will have upcoming Mac ARM versions.
I have the feeling that 99%+ of Bootcamp users use it for x86 software.
> Can someone explain why you would want to run an operating system that actively tries to prevent you from running it?
Because for a variety of reasons they don't want to pay for a "real" Mac I'd assume.
Personally I'd not consider it as the value I get from a Mac is that I don't have to worry about updates, hardware, drivers and spending hours reading up on Hackintosh forums what's safe to do.
I doubt it. Whilst I don't mean to belittle the hard work that goes into the hackintosh projects out there, we're talking about a tiny, tiny group of people that probably have an imperceptible impact on MSFT's bottom line.
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