and more importantly, AirDrop works without network, it's P2P. There's situations where the devices you want to share to/from aren't on the same network or can't put them on the same network for various reasons.
Around 2008 I saw two girls, not too versed in technology, share a mp3 song over bluetooth. At the time I thought that if technology finally arrived at the point where "normal people" could be able to do things that required lots of technical knowledge just a few years ago then we were very close to a future where technology could be a giant enabler of powers to everyone.
I am really ashamed by how wrong I was and how WE allowed things to became so artificially limited.
In high school (2003-2007) it was super easy for any of my friends and I (varying technical levels) to send arbitrarily large files to each other with AOL Instant Messenger's Direct Connect. Honestly not even sure how a non-technical person would do that nowadays.
The closest I've seen is 'send file over message service or e-mail', but this has a decently low maximum file size.
The alternative for larger files is Dropbox or Google Drive or similar and share a link, but there are limits to how full you can have those be, so sending a 5 GB file might be inconvenient if you don't pay for the upgraded service.
For anything larger than that again, I don't think I would do anything than pass a physical flash drive, since there's nothing else that has a lower barrier of entry and I can rely on a random person to be able to use and understand.
I have upgraded dropbox and google accounts and also a VPS, so it wouldn't be hard for me. But for people who aren't big fucking nerds, nothing exists that's as easy as that. Email's limit is crazy low.
> install Windows 11. This came with the laptop. And the installation makes installing Linux feel easy: I had to do so many weird tricks to avoid having to create an account with Microsoft during the installation.
The way secure boot evolved is disgusting. Specially because, at the time it was becoming popular, people we're warned that was more a tool of control than for security. Having to install a proprietary OS to install another should be forbidden.
But what happened doesn't make sense even. Why would upgrading the BIOS suddenly restore the option to toggle Secure Boot? If the previous owner (assuming, some company) disabled this, why would it be so trivial (comparatively) to work around it?
I've seen laptops stuck in weird state. Most likely, Fujitsu didn't bother to test turning off secure boot once they received the BIOS they bought, and fixed the toggle in a firmware update.
Linux boots fine using standard secure boot, so if it refused it's either NixOS using an unsigned bootloader (which is surprising to me) or secure boot just being bugged to hell.
Another option is that NixOS uses secure boot but uses a signature that's too recent: one of the secure boot CAs is expiring soon, and an old BIOS may not carry the new key if NixOS opts to sign their bootloader with the latest key. This issue doesn't just affect Linux, certain Windows images won't boot on older devices either if this mismatch happens.
My bet is on NVRAM getting into a weird state or a buggy BIOS. That's the most obvious thing that would get fixed by updating the BIOS.
The trivial way would be just going into the UEFI (it's not the BIOS for 15 years but anyway) config and just disable Secure Boot (and proceed to do the Evil Maid attack or whatever).
99% Secure Boot was forced to a locked state by the laptop firmware through some management utils to support the enterprise configuration.
It's just happens what someone with a full administrative access on the machine ie no boot password, no UEFI password, ability to run any (secure boot enabled) OS - can run firmware updates and one such update for whatever reason - reset the ability to change Secure Boot.
Or maybe author wasn't attentive enough and missed something, who knows.
If the company fully managed the previous windows install, they'd have control on the upgrades to the BIOS as well and could just block them. These restrictions disappear with standard windows install.
Apple does not support running other OS's on their hardware. This is bad in many senses but it is specially bad since it weakens competition and reduces incentives for Apple to improve their own OS, meaning it is bad even for their users in the long run.
If you choose to buy hardware from apple, you must consider that you're encouraging a behaviour that is bad for everyone, including yourself.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Their bootloader explicitly supports other OSes. They make it easy to run Windows (even through a built-in app that helps you set it up). There are plenty of reasons to criticize Apple, but they literally don't do anything to prevent you from running another OS.
That’s true but that’s probably only so that it wouldn’t have been a subject when Apple Silicon Macs were released because Intel Macs weren’t locked.
In reality, the bootloader isn’t closed (yet) but the hardware is so much undocumented that it’s easy to understand that Apple doesn’t want anything else than their OS on your mac. The « alternative os » situation is actually worse than it used to be with Intel Macs and Apple is paying a lot of attention in never talking about this "feature".
IMO, they will just quietly remove this possibility on new generations when everyone will have forgotten that boot camp used to be a thing.
Eh, you may be right, but there's a big difference between "they are going to forbid other OSes by placing a software restriction where they explicitly permit things now" and "they already effectively forbid other OSes by not publishing developer documentation for proprietary hardware"--that's a tall order, and not a bar that many other hardware manufacturers meet either.
Like, could they lock down the bootloader? Sure. But that's effort they'd have to put in for minimal benefit at the moment. Opening up their hardware would be a lot more effort for questionable benefits (to Apple).
> they literally don't do anything to prevent you from running another OS.
Like not documenting their hardware? Like making Asahi Linux becoming a multi-year reverse engineering project that may possibly never achieve perfect compatibility?
> They make it easy to run Windows
On apple silicon without virtualisation? Sorry, didn't know that.
The point is that Apple could have easily locked down the bootloader and made it not possible at all to install something else. In designing the M1 hardware they explicitly went out of their way to make sure other operating systems could be installed and they’ve said as much. They took their smartphone SoCs and bootloader that never allowed alternate operating systems and added that feature in actively.
Technically Asahi Linux isn’t facing a much different situation than standard Linux distributions as they relate to x86 hardware. There are thousands of PC components that don’t provide any sort of Linux driver where contributors reverse engineer those drivers.
Sure, in the PC world a lot more vendors do voluntarily provide Linux drivers, and Apple will never to that for its hardware, and that specific point is a valid criticism.
As far as assisting in running Windows, my understanding is that the company that makes Parallels and Apple have some kind of relationship. Microsoft officially endorses Parallels.
You can complain about it being virtualization but it’s perfectly fine for desktop apps or even some more intensive apps. And it’s not really a very valid complaint considering that Microsoft doesn’t distribute a general purpose ARM distribution of Windows.
They aren't actively hindering that reverse engineering effort. They aren't _helping_ either, but I didn't claim that they were helping. For as long as I can remember, Apple's stance with Mac computers has been "We sell the computers to you in the way we think is best. If you want to tinker, that's on you." and I don't think that has materially changed.
Because computers don't boot the way they used to in the commodity BIOS era. The boot loader has to cryptographically check that it's valid operating system it's attempting to boot.
Well, Apple could follow industry standards, too. The argument was Apple approves alternate operating systems as evidenced by boot camp. That's demonstrably not true anymore.
Neither does any other hardware vendor, even the likes of Dell, Lenovo and Asus clearly state on their online shops that their laptops work best with Windows, even when something like Ubuntu or Red-Hat is an option.
Entering a multi billion risky market is no easy task even if you have investira and teams with deep knowledge. That's the reason monopolise should be avoided.
TSMC isn’t a monopoly, they are just better than all their competitors. Nothing forces you to buy TSMC; you can buy Intel, Samsung, SMIC, GlobalFoundries and various others.
This is getting faded out, but this is absolutely right. For very few use cases do you truly need the bleeding edge. So many things do not have such strict requirements, and will meet all necessary requirements on an older node. An ATTiny85 is still an incredibly useful microcontroller even today.
This monopoly is unavoidable due to the limited number of people in the world with the know-how to make these products, with the second constraint being that you need to risk $10B+ and 10+ years with a risk that you fail.
Edit: per link below, seems like you need $100B+ and 10+ years
This business is expensive, making and running fabs is way way more expensive than most anybody thinks. There are very few companies able to do it profitably.
Two things can be bad! But the GTK file picker has improved and now has thumbnails, while you can't really trust MS not to continue to damage its file picker
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