The reason seems pretty obvious.

Except when they are, which is anytime something is poorly documented, which is pretty much all the time. Let's not even get started on vendors who don't WANT you to write drivers for their hardware.

> Hell, Apple OSes barely support any hardware.

Would be interesting to see an OS target specifically Apple HW to make it a bit easier on the devs.

Having a driver for a given Ethernet controller is hardly a good proxy for sophistication…

Followed by

> helping Linux grow doesn't financially benefit them, now or in the future

Is a bit perplexing. Why are you baffled?

Opportunity cost is a very real thing. Apple would probably be better served by developing Windows drivers, if they were going to take developers away from macOS drivers.

It's supported everywhere I care about…

More seriously, though, there was a time when I had to install MacTCP and others had to install WinSock or Trumpet or whatever it was called. The upgrade was worth it then, and I bet it could be worth it again.

Or they wrote different, non-portable software for each os.

That doesn't make any sense. There's plenty of open-source Windows/Mac apps, but they don't give you access to Windows/Mac OS itself.

As someone who've been on linux for almost a decade on different notebooks and then switched to mac - no, not an inferior product in any way.

Which, going by Linux logic, is entirely Apple's fault.

I hope they never do that. The UI on Windows has been too compromised by the need to support both tablets and traditional users.

I don't see a trend there. Some things always worked, while others didn't. Same for the current MBP's. It's the usual problem for hardware where the vendor doesn't provide Linux drivers: you need somebody to write these drivers in their spare time and only a few people are willing to do so. I maintain an overview of the Linux compatibility of the MBP's >=2016 (https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux/) and it's absolutely astonishing what a few people can achieve, even without documentation of the hardware. Given, the hardware support isn't that good yet in Linux, but if there would be 10 instead of 2-3 people working in their spare time on the drivers, first class support would be there pretty soon. So if you care about Linux compatibility of Macs: Get your hands dirty and do something about it!

> It's just not worth getting a Mac to run linux.

For me it's worth it, because it feels like somebody thought really hard about getting things right, which results in really, really nice hardware (except for the latest keyboards and the Touch Bar of course).

I like how nobody ever complains about software that's OSX only, but if something is windows only then HOLY SHIT CALL OUT THE FUCKING CAVALRY

Apple's drivers are upstreamed, in Darwin. I'm not aware of any reason to believe that Apple has any Linux drivers that they could upstream.

> Until it works for everyone it's just not good enough.

You are pretty well proving the GP point. There is no system that works for everyone. Windows can be very challenging to get up and running on hardware setups that are not the most common.

> Windows and MacOS don't make people do that

False. And it's funny that this is about sound drivers. I have a piece of older but perfectly working Roland audio/MIDI equipment that uses USB drivers that are no longer supported on modern MacOS. How did I get it working? By compiling a fucking driver the other day. (And yes it works perfectly out of the box on any Linux kernel for the past 20 years).

Now go ahead and move the goalposts about older hardware not mattering or some nonsense. This hasn't been the only frustration with MacOS. It took you idiots the better part of a year to fix VLAN configuration in the network setup window. The only way to configure them for a lot of hardware was to drop down to the command line - so much for working for everyone.

This is no different than with windows. Except that more vendors sell you windows compatible pre-built systems. With macos the situation is far worse.

If you want more Linux enables hardware it will help to vote with your wallet and buy hardware from manufacturers that do provide support for Linux.

Using more than is explicitly mentioned that is supported, you mean? I mean yeah, duh.

Linux has a bit of a Thunderbolt audio problem though. Apple dragged the world into compatibility with class compliant USB; there's no equivalent for Thunderbolt though :-( we're back in the bad old days of individual (nonexistent) drivers per device.

Please, please, no. Presumably you've never gone through this particular form of hell:

1. You have a [Toshiba|Dell|HP] laptop. You've upgraded something. You need [graphics|sound|network] drivers.

2. You go to [Toshiba|Dell|HP].com to get those drivers. You navigate to the "Support" page for your laptop model.

3. You - you, the user - are presented with options. Do you want the AMD network drivers, or the Intel? Err. What? Why should I know? I typed in the model number of my machine. You, the vendor, should know what's in it! But you don't.

This is infuriating madness. It's one of the many things I hate about the Wintel ecosystem. Opening up the Mac leads us down that path. Please no.

MacOS is bloated anyways; they might as well use that bloat for something important like backwards-compatibility and not zombie-code left over from the PowerPC era. That's just an objective failure, on Apple's behalf; they break software support more often than Microsoft and even Linux at this point. A professional OS really has no excuse to break someone's software and leave it broken. Even Microsoft gets that.

So... yeah, you know what? I do want it to be bloated with drivers, because whatever they're stuffing it with right now clearly isn't working. I don't trust Apple to write or maintain a long-lived successor, I demand third-party alternatives I can maintain myself. Give me more options for writing and delivering software, or else I am going to continue ignoring MacOS as a build target for the foreseeable future.