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180 points K0IN | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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tekacs ◴[] No.45951235[source]
This is kinda wonderful to see - a peek into a world where we get to see the 'other side' of what would have been possible had Apple not locked our devices down beyond belief.

Jailbreak stores have never felt like a particularly strong illustration of what's possible due to their tiny user market - I'd love to see what developers would do if even for a period we could use these devices to anything remotely like their potential.

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frfl ◴[] No.45951276[source]
There was a comment few weeks ago - I forget the topic, maybe it was the new M-series release or something - that was talking about how freaking fast these things are. And the comment was pointing out how locked down everything is and most of that power is pretty useless - I mean sure on device "AI" and faster apps...OK I guess. I'm not the target demographic for these things anyway, so my opinions are whatever.

But really, imagine how much power these things have and if you could actually run a free (as in freedom, in the GNU sense) OS on them and really get access to all that power in a handheld device. Only if.

I have an M1, which is like N-times faster than the laptop I write this on. Yet it collects dust because I'd rather continue to use this old dinosaur laptop because that M1 macbook is a locked down, very fast, shiny Ferrari, but I just want a Honda Civic I can do whatever I want with.

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Nursie ◴[] No.45951619[source]
> M1 macbook is a locked down

Sure, iOS is certainly restrictive, fully locked-down, app store only etc etc, and I'd love a full-fat firefox with its plugin system available on my phone. But what are you doing on a non-Mac laptop that you can't do on an M1 mac?

I'm a big fan of linux and have used it as a main machine for many years, but use an M4 macbook as my daily driver at the moment (everyone else I work with does too, it's just easier). I haven't felt limited at all. I can build and install whatever I like, I have brew for my tooling needs...

Yeah I don't see it with Mac. Unless you're actually needing linux and dockerisation won't cut the mustard I guess.

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esseph ◴[] No.45951662{3}[source]
If you're a Linux sysadmin type, it's nice to stay in the same environment as your vms, kubernetes, docker/podman containers, etc.

You also get nice eBPF tools.

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Nursie ◴[] No.45952081{4}[source]
Sure, it's definitely nice to have a consistent env, no particular argument there.

It's more "where are the barriers/locks?" that I was interested in

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esseph ◴[] No.45952446{5}[source]
Well, I can't really put Linux on most Macs. That's a barrier to me.

Apple doesn't want my money, because Apple doesn't want to sell me a laptop. Apple wants to sell me a curated experience with multiple components in their ecosystem.

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1. undeveloper ◴[] No.45960009{6}[source]
On M1 / M2, asahi linux has decent support. People daily drive it.
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2. esseph ◴[] No.45961554[source]
Yes there has been some initial work done, but it's not exactly a mainstream daily driver suitable for deploying in a production environment.