[kwlug-disc] m1 RISC silicon: impression

[Doug Moen]

I would buy an Apple laptop because of the hardware, especially the CPU, trackpad and display.
The CPU is famous because it totally dominates intel + AMD in performance per watt.
But another issue that people don't discuss is the absence of malware in the CPU.
Intel CPUs have the Management Engine, which is considered malware, and AMD has a similar feature.
But there's no ME in Apple Silicon.

MacOS is, from my perspective, malware, so I want Linux instead.
It's that simple.

I do not classify every large corporation into one of two buckets, either wholely Good or wholely Evil.
I can't support that kind of moralistic thinking.
It is overly simplistic and doesn't fit the facts.

Consider Apple.

On one hand, iPhones are a distopian nightmare of malware and surveillance capitalism.
This applies to the hardware, the OS, and the cloud infrastructure.
I refuse to own one, and I refuse to develop iOS applications due to the abusive relationship that iOS developers have with Apple.

On the other hand, Apple supports many important open source projects.
LLVM is the most prominent one. The availability of a high quality, free software, portable optimizing compiler backend has revolutionized free software. So many new things have become possible.
Apple is also one of the main contributors to the new WebGPU standard, a free and open standard with multiple free software implementations and a large comprehensive test suite that all implementations must pass. This is going to revolutionize GPU programming and I am very excited to begin using it.
For this, I am grateful to Apple.

Doug Moen.

On Wed, Nov 17, 2021, at 11:30 PM, William Park via kwlug-disc wrote:
> I don't understand this Linux on Mac thing.  Why would you buy Apple, 
> and then run Linux on them?  Just more PR and hype for Apple.  Apple 
> says, "Thanks, you Linux suckers!"
>
> On 11/17/21 10:17 PM, Jeff Smith wrote:
>> It seems that even HackaDay is onto you...
>> 
>> https://hackaday.com/2021/11/17/linux-coming-soon-to-m1-macbooks/
>> <https://hackaday.com/2021/11/17/linux-coming-soon-to-m1-macbooks/>
>> 	
>> Linux: Coming Soon To M1 Macbooks | Hackaday 
>> <https://hackaday.com/2021/11/17/linux-coming-soon-to-m1-macbooks/>
>> Regardless of the chipset or original intended use of any computer 
>> system, someone somewhere is going to want to try and run Linux on it. 
>> And why not? Linux is versatile and free to use as well as …
>> hackaday.com
>
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