Porting Linux to random devices is easy. I've done one-evening ports to completely bespoke architectures other than the CPU/MMU. Porting Linux to the point where you'd *actually want to use it*, now that is much harder.
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That means all effort is wasted unless exploits keep up, and regular users would never want to do this and severely limit their access to official upgrades and such. But this isn't an issue with M1 macs.
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Of course there are downsides (security-wise) to downgrading your secureboot policy to run Linux, but nothing that would be worse than any old x86 machine with no serious secureboot anyway, so that's hardly a problem for the kind of people who'd want to boot Linux.
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More importantly, Apple isn't going to go off suing people for working on this project. While reverse engineering macOS drivers may be legally questionable in some jurisdictions, it's perfectly legal in others, and so is getting the binaries (any mac owner can do it).
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So what do you think? Is this something you'd actually throw money at? If there is enough interest that this might succeed, I'll open up a Patreon. Obviously all development would be public and open source.
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On a personal level, I'm already freelance and this is the kind of work I enjoy doing, so I'd be very happy to dedicate a large fraction of my time to this. (You've seen what I can do on game consoles in my spare time, think much more than that)
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I think there is no point on working on this unless a certain minimum is met such that I can guarantee a decent time investment - I don't want this to be another half-assed Linux port that makes for a fancy tech demo but nobody would actually want to use.
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So I'm thinking I would set up the Patreon in "pay per creation" mode initially, or otherwise paused, and not charge anything until I reach a minimum threshold (TBD). Thoughts?
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Since someone asked on HN: this would absolutely all be written with upstreamability in mind and upstreamed as soon as practical. None of that forever forked kernel with horrible hacks nonsense.
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Okay, that was... a lot more support than I expected to get. Please stand by while I put together a Patreon!
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End of conversation
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Do they allow alternate signing keys, as UEFI does?
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