Apple's New Hardware With The T2 Security Chip Will Currently Block Linux From Booting

[cynic]

actually, for a price comparable to Apple products, Lenovo offers better (and mostly Linux-friendly) hardware

[jrch2k8]

Honestly, I've always wondered why someone would buy highly overpriced Apple hardware to put GNU/Linux on it.
I know some people buy Apple because it's cool and/or it shows that they have money to spend (often taxpayers' money, of my experience ; and after that, they say government must save money…) but a technically informed person (GNU/Linux user) should not do that.
I also heard some people saying macOS is easier to use than GNU/Linux (macOS most probably not harder to use, but distros like Mint are easy to use ; the only potential hard thing is BIOS configuration when installing, especially with UEFI) and safer than Windows (which (10) I actually find pretty hard and inconvenient when I use it for games ; I will never use it again as main OS), but in this case, you do not put GNU/Linux on your mac.

few clarifications from someone who actually use a mac mini(2012 tho)

1.) If you are a decently advanced of Linux, you can get very a comfortable environment on Mac OS X to develop with using many of you already common FOSS software(GIMP, Audacity, MPV, QtCreator, VSCode, etc.) as long as you use ports and other tools.

2.) Why Mac hardware, OMG, blah blah blah? You need to develop Mac/IOS apps too and tho Hackintoshs are doable(i also have one for when the mini is not powerful enough btw) you take a huge risk of getting banned from the Apple Store hence any multi platform developer need at least 1 legit apple machine to upload code into the store.

Note: probably someone will come and say is an urban legend and he uses his hackinstosh all the time without issues, etc. That is probably true and is just fine but business don't like those risks so i still prefer to keep an clean upload mac around just to be extra safe

3.) Is a truly royal pain in the ASS do anything for IOS without Xcode and its simulators, so is usually easier to develop the main chunk on Linux, test it to death and then boot OS X, make adjustment and test on Xcode and upload.

I do agree with you is not optimal financially or technically to buy Mac hardware this days to put linux on it but as stated there are legit use cases for it simply because Apple market is too big to ignore and is usually cheaper to buy the damn Mac than work around it (business time wise)

[chithanh]

It's ok, Windows has WSL now which allows for most of the things that you would normally do in Linux natively.

Even some of the more exotic Chinese hardware that I have ( based on Atom Z-8350 ) boots Linux without any problems. Getting it to work flawlessly though is another thing but that's mostly because of the Linux kernel and the kernel drivers.

I get that you never tried to boot Linux on an Atom X3 (SoFIA) tablet then, or one of the Intel-based Android smartphones?

Once it boots, the heavy lifting part of getting your Cherry Trail Atom to work has thankfully been done by Hans de Goede for 4.12/4.13 kernel cycle. https://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/18017.html

[L_A_G]

...

Those chinese boxes work just fine because they're typically bog standard hardware and not full of bespoke hardware like this. This is a side effect of some understandable design choices from Apple, which include some pretty hefty disc encryption with the encryption key kept in an on-silicon secure enclave. A real world analogy would be burglar protection that ends up crippling handicap access.

Seriously thou, not everything needs to be made for your purposes and considering how overpriced the new Mac Mini's are, Apple is probably doing as all a favor by doing this seeing how €900 for a machine with an i3 (quad core thou), 8GB or RAM and a 128 GB soldered-to-the-motherboard-SSD isn't exactly reasonable.

[polarathene]

I'm guessing unlikely, but is the T2 thing likely to be baked into macOS boot in some way that VMs would cease to boot?(though I imagine that'd mean any Apple hardware without such a chip would cease to get newer versions of macOS, sort of like they do with older iphones and iOS)

Install a virtual machine and you don't even need to boot.

Legally, you're not allowed to run macOS on hardware or VM that's not deemed Apple hardware. I think you can get away with it for personal use, but you can't sell such systems, nor can you run a business doing such if the hardware isn't Apple. So if you're a developer and need macOS for building/releasing to apple products, a VM probably isn't legal without the mac hardware.

Or are you talking about the other way? Running Linux in a VM guest on macOS? Ew. At least with a Linux host you can make a guest VM more native in performance by giving it exclusive hardware access(such as GPU or Disk).

Honestly, I've always wondered why someone would buy highly overpriced Apple hardware to put GNU/Linux on it.

Like Windows for games, macOS for any apple dev(and I don't mean developers that only do apple dev) since for many they cannot build/deploy for apple products without macOS :\ In some cases you'll see them just used for building/release stuff, otherwise running Linux on it or another system.

[Candy]

Legally, you're not allowed to run macOS on hardware or VM that's not deemed Apple hardware.

You can install Linux on a virtual machine. And said virtual machine of course runs under macOS. Not the other way around.

[Wilfred]

Honestly, I've always wondered why someone would buy highly overpriced Apple hardware to put GNU/Linux on it.
I know some people buy Apple because it's cool and/or it shows that they have money to spend (often taxpayers' money, of my experience ; and after that, they say government must save money…) but a technically informed person (GNU/Linux user) should not do that.
I also heard some people saying macOS is easier to use than GNU/Linux (macOS most probably not harder to use, but distros like Mint are easy to use ; the only potential hard thing is BIOS configuration when installing, especially with UEFI) and safer than Windows (which (10) I actually find pretty hard and inconvenient when I use it for games ; I will never use it again as main OS), but in this case, you do not put GNU/Linux on your mac.

Linus Torvalds himself used to own a macbook running Linux.

[commodore256]

Knowing Apple, that's just the beginning. I'm assuming going forward all Macs will have a T Security Chip and in about 5-8 years, Mac OS won't boot without it and killing off hackintosh.

[Xaero_Vincent]

According to the T2 chip manual, Macs will have this utility:



Shouldn't disabling "Secure Boot" enable Linux bootloaders and therefore Linux to boot?

[Bigon]

Managing the trusted keys is IMHO the basic functionality you need with any TPM, otherwise it's not your machine anymore...