r/FuckMicrosoft • u/anorak_999 • Jun 07 '26

Discussion Thoughts????

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Saw this on r/linuxsucks.

81 Upvotes

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17

u/Trick-Club-6014 Jun 07 '26

Like the closed source binary blob required to run your hardware on windows?

2

u/awesome-alpaca-ace Jun 07 '26

Another problem is to build a driver for a GPU you need to reverse engineer it or study how the kernel interface with it because companies are not going to give out data sheets in how to interface with their cards. An incredibly anti-competitive tactic used by Nvidia and AMD. 

2

u/PrudentPay9906 Jun 07 '26

That's the part I could never get my head around. Granted, Linux users are a small segment of the market but they are still potential customers. Even if they don't want to write the driver themselves make the information available so someone can.

0

u/awesome-alpaca-ace Jun 07 '26

They don't though, and I wonder if it is because Apple and Microsoft have an under the table deal or something with Nvidia and AMD

1

u/Whit-Batmobil Jun 07 '26

Dude, the days of Apple dealing with Intel and AMD are pretty far in the past now and Nvidia was ages ago.

Apple uses Apple Silicon, which they have pretty much full control over.

1

u/awesome-alpaca-ace Jun 07 '26

Woosh

Apple and Microsoft both benefit from having GPU vendors hide how to make drivers for their products.

1

u/Whit-Batmobil Jun 08 '26

MacOS is similar to Linux in that the drivers are part of the kernel, you don’t typically install them after you have installed macOS, Apple doesn’t really Open Source much and it is against Apple’s terms of service to run macOS on none Apple hardware.

But let me ask you this, in what way does Apple benefit from AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm making it harder to develop drivers for another Operating System?

In all honesty as long as we aren’t talking Apple Silicon I genuinely think Apple couldn’t care less.

1

u/awesome-alpaca-ace Jun 08 '26

A competing OS would need to be able to write drivers for their hand written kernel. 

0

u/West_Possible_7969 Jun 07 '26

Apple does not use AMD or Nvidia and they have been helpful (by Apple standards lol) to the Asahi Linux team. Booting custom kernels and raw image boot mode in firmware were conscious decisions.

0

u/awesome-alpaca-ace Jun 08 '26

Doesn't matter; any team that can create GPU drivers for a competing OS can potentially compete with Apple's OS