SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Linus Torvalds doubts Linux will get ported to Apple M1 hardware:
In a recent post on the Real World Technologies forum—one of the few public internet venues Linux founder Linus Torvalds is known to regularly visit—a user named Paul asked Torvalds, "What do you think of the new Apple laptop?"
If you've been living under a rock for the last few weeks, Apple released new versions of the Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, and Mac Mini featuring a brand-new processor—the Apple M1.
The M1 processor is a successor to the A12 and A14 Bionic CPUs used in iPhones and iPads, and pairs the battery and thermal efficiency of ultramobile designs with the high performance needed to compete strongly in the laptop and desktop world.
"I'd absolutely love to have one, if it just ran Linux," Torvalds replied. "I've been waiting for an ARM laptop that can run Linux for a long time. The new [Macbook] Air would be almost perfect, except for the OS."
[...] In an interview with ZDNet, Torvalds expounded on the problem:
The main problem with the M1 for me is the GPU and other devices around it, because that's likely what would hold me off using it because it wouldn't have any Linux support unless Apple opens up... [that] seems unlikely, but hey, you can always hope.
[...] It's also worth noting that while the M1 is unabashedly great, it's not the final word in desktop or laptop System on Chip designs. Torvalds mentions that, given a choice, he'd prefer more and higher-power cores—which is certainly possible and seems a likely request to be granted soon.
Previously: Apple's New ARM-Based Macs Won't Support Windows Through Boot Camp
Apple Claims that its M1 SoC for ARM-Based Macs Uses the World's Fastest CPU Core
Your New Apple Computer Isn't Yours
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2020, @01:35AM (4 children)
The Amiga will rise again!
... because all the other OSes will be so compromised and full of adware and malware, that the few knowledgeable users will retreat to the last known good OS.
Well I can dream.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday November 30 2020, @02:23AM (3 children)
It's worth contemplating. Perhaps not Amiga OS, even tho I love it I'm not sure I would want to go back to it as a main and core everyday OS.
But I'm thinking for my parents if I should get them something old like Mac OS 6 or 7. That said I have them somewhat fooled already -- they still think they are running IE (after all they click on the big blue E icon) but they have been running Pale Moon for years now. If I could only easily inject the Google logo on DDG I would switch them over to that to. I tried once but after the calls about how there was something wrong with Google and the Internet I had to switch them back.
But in general if all that is need is to do some light surfing, check your email and perhaps every now and then type some documents. There is no need for new and shiny. Problem with a lot of the old systems tho is a lack of modern connectivity. Finding a network card can be a bit of a challenge, and a tcp/ip stack since it didn't come with one from the start. I think Miami is still OK for the Amiga, AmiTCP might also probably be ok, but I'm not sure if they have been updated to the latest standards and/or support IPv6 etc. I guess the browsers might be an issue since they might show a lot of blanks and a lot of messages about upgrading the browser cause it doesn't support their new design etc.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday November 30 2020, @02:47AM (2 children)
From what I remember of the networking in Mac OS 8, it was using Appletalk (because it's Apple, so it's better, right?) which of course it wasn't it would shit the bed pretty much every day, usually during some file copy operation, requiring a restart (again).
My memories of that time are exclusively of waiting for my Mac to restart. But of course we were smugly sure that what we were using was so much better than a PC.
There was a TCP/IP stack for Apple before OSX but I think that came a bit later.
(Score: 2) by EEMac on Monday November 30 2020, @05:14PM
> My memories of that time are exclusively of waiting for my Mac to restart. But of course we were smugly sure that what we were using was so much better than a PC.
You're not wrong about the restarts! But remember Mac OS 8 competed against Windows 95, which was also famous for crashing. Windows people suffered along with us.
It was roughly 2000-2001 (Windows 2000, OS X, a few really Linux/BSD people) that microcomputers got really stable.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Tuesday December 01 2020, @09:22AM
Mac OS 8 still did support AppleTalk on pre-iMac machinery, but by then you'd mostly use it to access printers. While slow, and upsetting the cooperative multitasking, it had the nice property of full network auto-discovery. "Proper" networking was done through the OpenTransport stack by then, which was pretty much what Solaris used. From 8.6 on, there was the Nanokernel, which could do some neat multiprocessing. Unfortunately, the overall infrastructure was held back by too much crap that had piled up, and some really bad mistakes made, when the PPC was introduced (particularly the way of low-memory-accesses), so you'd still have applications take down the whole system.
Yet, on the surface, 8.6 was the finest OS ever made. Only people with pathological Windows conditioning disease or command line autism can say otherwise. Jobs then messed up the perfection in 9 with the Sherlock 2 search.