On Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 5:33 AM, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh(a)redhat.com> wrote:
Just to address this specifically, I am referring to Apple's
penchant for
stuffing their machines with hardware from vendors that don't play well with
open-source (for example, switching to wifi-only devices and shipping Broadcom
chipsets with no open-source drivers).
I don't understand how this relates to installer problems and thus
installer release criteria. Other vendors use Broadcom and end up with
the same lack of out of the box wireless, but out of the box wireless
doesn't cause installer problems or failure (OK unless you choose to
use the netinstaller) or data loss.
Then also playing games with their
bootloader system so that we have to go through lots of hoops to trick it into
letting us install.
OK I don't know what either "games" or "hoops" refer to, plural
means
you must have at least two examples of each.
Their firmware works the same as any other UEFI system, except they do
additional things. The firmware can read HFS+ out of the box, and can
use information in the HFS+ volume header to boot a computer when
NVRAM contents are ambiguous or have been reset. This is because Apple
has 30+ years of experience with NVRAM corruption, loss, and confusion
that they have the same exact keyboard sequence on every single Mac
made in that 30 year period to clear the NVRAM and still boot.
If there's a game being played, it's with other vendors who could have
agreed to the same feature and keyboard sequence, and codified it in
the UEFI spec. All for the benefit of their users. But they didn't do
that did they?
Apple's entire business model is predicated on the idea that they
know best and
you should only ever run software on their devices that they have provided to
you... at a substantial percentage for themselves. They do whatever they can at
a technical level to enable this.
They do whatever they can to enable the primary experience. They don't
go out of their way to sabotage their compatibility, quite to the
contrary, they've spent a lot of effort to accommodate Windows on
Macs.
(Note: I'm not attempting to vilify Apple here. Their devices are
usually
sturdy, well-constructed and certainly attractive. They are however a company
trying to make money and they have a certain business model that is largely
dependent on *not* enabling us.)
Apple isn't doing what they're doing so that Fedora doesn't work.
They're doing what they're doing with their primary and secondary use
cases in mind only, and both of those use cases have no issue with a
dependency on proprietary components. Fedora has chosen to avoid
proprietary components, and it just has to live with the consequences
of that choice rather than rephrase the difference as if Apple and
other vendors are actively trying to prevent Fedora from being used.
Fedora isn't on any of Apple's lists.
--
Chris Murphy