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

[duby229]

I think you have been mis informed about Apple hardware. Not all of it is grossly overpriced even the Mac Mini has machines with rational price points. In the case of the Mini and the MBA you are getting bleeding edge hardware with the T2 acting effectively as a co processor. Shop carefully and you will not be paying for a highly overpriced machine.

As for Mac OS it is in fact worth the little bit of extra one pays for it. I run Mac hardware at home and on a few systems at work, mostly Windows at work and a few Linux machines at home. It is safe to say Mac OS is light years ahead of Linux and Windows when it comes to stability and reliability. It is also better supported than either of those platforms.

I say this with complete confidence but also acknowledge that Mac OS is only supported on limited hardware. Windows is by far the most I’ll behaved OS out there. Linux is pretty good relative to Windows, in my case we are talking the Fedora flavor. Even Fedora is held back by the state of gnome and decisions made there to stay with old development strategy’s. Apples greatest advantage in my mind is their ability to drive third party developers in the right direction. That really started with the advent of LLVM/CLang, the focus on APIs and now Swift. Making things easy (most of the time) for developers has lead to a lot of good quality software for the Mac OS and IOS platforms. Contrast this with Linux that can leave you with broken apps just about anytime after an update.

By by the way I’m not saying Apple is perfect and that software hasn’t been broken after an update or two. However the problem is far less on Mac OS than any other platform. You generally have only one major system update a year and with a solid focus on API stability you are not impacted nearly as much as on Linux. When there are issues you are at times anyways warned by Apple that some apps will require updates. On Linux broken software is always a surprise after an update.

This is not news.... The problem with Apple has never been their OS. It would be fantastic if we could all use their OS on our hardware of choice. The real problem with Apple has always been their hardware, it's always years behind and always shitty. Polished turd comes to mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8

[RussianNeuroMancer]

No, it's not. The notes are just saying that the touchpad doesn't support gestures with 3 fingers or more. Scroll in particular is a 2-finger gesture.

I guess it work as advertised with specific version mentioned in certification notes, or maybe with any kernel from oem branch.

[Hi-Angel]

Thankfully this particular issue mentioned in "Certification notes" of Dell 5495, so customer can avoid such issues if he read about.

No, it's not. The notes are just saying that the touchpad doesn't support gestures with 3 fingers or more. Scroll in particular is a 2-finger gesture.

And, anyway, every device that supposed to work with Windows 10 have bunch of own driver issues, that you can find only if you search about it on vendor's forums. Like, if I would read this before Dell 7285 purchase that would save me a lot of time.

Good point

[RussianNeuroMancer]

Sorry to disappoint, but both sources are a bust.

The "Lenovo reference" lists for example "X260", however it has a fingerprint reader, and Lenovo didn't bother to release drivers for it. Their forum has a giant thread with 102k views.

The "Ubuntu reference" has for example nice DELL 5495, however this device has a touchpad that claims to be a mouse, so don't expect any gestures, scroll, taps-to-click to work.

Thankfully this particular issue mentioned in "Certification notes" of Dell 5495, so customer can avoid such issues if he read about. And, anyway, every device that supposed to work with Windows 10 have bunch of own driver issues, that you can find only if you search about it on vendor's forums. Like, if I would read this before Dell 7285 purchase that would save me a lot of time.

[ColdDistance]

As for Mac OS it is in fact worth the little bit of extra one pays for it. I run Mac hardware at home and on a few systems at work, mostly Windows at work and a few Linux machines at home. It is safe to say Mac OS is light years ahead of Linux and Windows when it comes to stability and reliability. It is also better supported than either of those platforms.

I say this with complete confidence but also acknowledge that Mac OS is only supported on limited hardware. Windows is by far the most I’ll behaved OS out there. Linux is pretty good relative to Windows, in my case we are talking the Fedora flavor. Even Fedora is held back by the state of gnome and decisions made there to stay with old development strategy’s. Apples greatest advantage in my mind is their ability to drive third party developers in the right direction. That really started with the advent of LLVM/CLang, the focus on APIs and now Swift. Making things easy (most of the time) for developers has lead to a lot of good quality software for the Mac OS and IOS platforms. Contrast this with Linux that can leave you with broken apps just about anytime after an update.

Sorry, but in my humble opinion, your comment is "a little outdated". Ten years ago I would be fully agree with you, but today, I think that choosing between Windows, Mac o Linux is more a personal preference than a technical reason.

The first years of Intel era were the best for Mac computers. In those days OS X (now macOS) was far better than Windows and GNU/Linux, but Windows did a big jump ahead with 7 and in 2009 GNU/Linux started a wonderful progression that put its quality to the same lever to its competitors and surpassing them in some areas.

Apple decided to be a mobile company and the Mac platform was almost abandoned in this decade. Result? You can finds lots of benchmarks where the performance of GNU/Linux and Windows is better than macOS on the Mac hardware.

The first time I used a Mac computer was in 2007 and I was impressed by the performance, the reliability and the integration, but in 2012 my opinion fully changed and I saw in OS X a "common" system with some special features that contribute nothing to improve the user experience.

I didn't see an application broken since many years ago, but if you use the system through compilation, obviously you are at risk to have these kinds of problems. But if you use an Ubuntu system rarely you will have an application broken by the system.

Talking about Swift, today the operating system market is open, so it's prefer to use a multiplatform technology (Qt, Electron... ) than other that lock you to a system. Yes, Swift gives you a powerful framework (with the tools) to make applications fully integrated with the macOS and iOS, but you probably need to develop again the same application from scratch because Swift is multiplatform, but I think it doesn't let you develop apps for Apple systems, Windows and GNU/Linux with the same code.

[slalomsk8er]

That's a very weird concept of "gift" this person has (I know some people who are like him). If you gift me something you lose all control over it.

(not shouting at you, it's a general rant at this type of behavior).

It's not this bad. I offered him a last look before nuking the installation - he refused without even flinching.
I just can't find the motivation to invest any more time into the machine - this will change only if I get a request from my wife.

[starshipeleven]

I got 4 years old iMac as a gift. I upgraded the OS but now I can't update the OS and free Apple programs because some of them got installed by the original owners Appstore/iCloud account

I didn't want to wipe the system as he is a frequent guest in the music room where the machine now stands and requested to not deleting his account because of all the nice music still in there.

That's a very weird concept of "gift" this person has (I know some people who are like him). If you gift me something you lose all control over it.

I also can't stand people that use older full blown computers as mass storage devices, wtf is "all the nice music still in there", wtf it means I can't take your old laptop you never used in years "because you have your photos on it". Move your shit to an external storage device people. Same people that will cry when the internal drive dies and try to get me to perform a miracle to restore their data.

(not shouting at you, it's a general rant at this type of behavior).

[slalomsk8er]

I guess I too can share my negative experience with Mac OS.

Let me share mine:

I got 4 years old iMac as a gift. I upgraded the OS but now I can't update the OS and free Apple programs because some of them got installed by the original owners Appstore/iCloud account

I didn't want to wipe the system as he is a frequent guest in the music room where the machine now stands and requested to not deleting his account because of all the nice music still in there.

Now I lost any motivation to touch this OSX crap ever again - snow leopard was the last usable version IMHO. After that I got pissed off every release by some paper cuts that were worse then the minor benefits of the new version.

[starshipeleven]

The worst thing is that there's no way to debug this thing. Internet is full of guess-work solutions (lots of which we tried), and nobody has any idea how to debug it. There's no way to figure out, for example, which kernel modules are involved. I bet on GNU/Linux debugging "kworker" in the same situation would have been a lot more easier.

To give some context, also Windows can be debugged to a pretty decent extent, and you can usually figure out what drivers are involved in some crash or "high CPU usage issue" (like for example finding out that the driver is ACPI.sys aka the ACPI driver, at that point you know the hardware's ACPI tables are fucked up and that getting a good HP laptop model is a crapshoot).

[Hi-Angel]

I guess I too can share my negative experience with Mac OS. My gf got a mid-2012 air notebook. At some point, probably after some update, it started lagging as hell due to kernel_task hogging all processor cores. We tried everything, including full reinstall of OS, nothing helped. At the same time, she has Windows installed which works fine, and I also tried loading Live Fedora System, which also worked fine.

The worst thing is that there's no way to debug this thing. Internet is full of guess-work solutions (lots of which we tried), and nobody has any idea how to debug it. There's no way to figure out, for example, which kernel modules are involved. I bet on GNU/Linux debugging "kworker" in the same situation would have been a lot more easier.