> Agreed, supporting apple devices is going to be a maintenance nightmare as it goes against the wishes of apple. At best, apple involuntarily makes reverse incompatible changes which breaks the drivers and at worst apple specifically sabotages the drivers to keep people in the walled garden.
Apple explicitly chose to provide a way to boot third-party operating systems when designing how the M-series SoC boots. Their SoC stuff dates in some components AFAIK back to the very first iPod SoCs in its design.
I would understand that attitude if someone wished to, say, upstream code for PlayStations or other game consoles because that is a bunch of fights waiting to happen, but Apple hasn't made any move directly against FOSS OSes on their computers in the past and there is no reason to believe that will change.
Great, so you boot your custom OS, and you can... I guess display a terminal and maybe talk to the disk? How do you use the hardware without drivers? Did Apple document their hardware interfaces?
The fact that Apple re-uses components from very long time ago in their SoCs is what enabled Asahi Linux to be where it is in the timeframe it took with the staff they had. Obviously marcan, lina and the others involved are damn geniuses, but even they built on the research of others like iPodLinux that laid foundational groundwork.
But the comment you replied to argues that maintaining those drivers is a nightmare because of lack of cooperation from the manufacturer. What you're saying is that Apple hasn't had the inclination to rip up the floor from under them, but that's an inherently unstable situation that could change at any time.
> Apple explicitly chose to provide a way to boot third-party operating systems
And they explicitly chose against a UEFI interface like prior Macs, which would have actually enabled proper Linux support. Now you have poor people trying to reverse-engineer a Devicetree from scratch to get basic features to kinda work, emulating hardware features in software and working with no documentation from Apple. They "explicitly" chose to expose iBoot because otherwise you wouldn't be able to reinstall MacOS in a full data loss situation.
By comparison - reverse engineering an unsupported AMD or Intel CPU would at least give you some basis to work off of. You have UEFI as standard, ACPI tables provided by hardware, even CPU documentation and Open Source drivers to work off of most the time. Asahi shot themselves in the foot by trying to support hardware that doesn't support them back. You can argue that Apple was conspiring to help, but we have no actual evidence of that.
> Their SoC stuff dates in some components AFAIK back to the very first iPod SoCs in its design.
And none of those platforms ever got proper Linux support either. I love Linux as much as the next nerd, but it doesn't seem wild to suggest that Apple Silicon will never have feature-complete Linux support. And for many people, maybe that's okay!
Apple explicitly chose to provide a way to boot third-party operating systems when designing how the M-series SoC boots. Their SoC stuff dates in some components AFAIK back to the very first iPod SoCs in its design.
I would understand that attitude if someone wished to, say, upstream code for PlayStations or other game consoles because that is a bunch of fights waiting to happen, but Apple hasn't made any move directly against FOSS OSes on their computers in the past and there is no reason to believe that will change.