When the microcomputer first landed in homes some forty years ago, it came with a simple freedom—you could run whatever software you could get your hands on. Floppy disk from a friend? Pop it in. S…
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What a wonderful article.
Here are some straight shots:
Here’s what bothers me most: we’re losing the idea that you can just try things with computers. That you can experiment. That you can learn by doing. That you can take a risk on some weird little program someone made in their spare time. All that goes away with the walled garden. Your neighbour can’t just whip up some fun gadget and share it with you without signing up for an SDK and paying developer fees. Your obscure game community can’t just write mods and share content because everything’s locked down. So much creativity gets squashed before it even hits the drawing board because it’s just not feasible to do it.
Don’t let Personal Computing become Consumer Computing, where you’re only allowed to run code that paid the corporate toll. Make sure the computers you’re paying for are doing what you want, not just what the executives approved of for their own gain. It’s your computer, it should run what you want it to!
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Unfortunately with Macs now you can’t even reinstall/format the machine without an internet connection to ‘activate’ it. Least with macOS, probably ok to put Linux on them… I think!
Ah, this explains why downloaded MacOS disk images expire after a period of time. Pathetic work from Apple. I think they are on a slow downhill spiral with their products.
I looked at the latest Macbook M5 and it had one fan and yet it’s CPU was throttled because the computer generated a lot of heat reasons. Logic would dictate that a computer like that needs 2 fans, but no, Apple decided to go cheap with one fan and throttle everything.
I don’t understand that kind of thinking. You have a wise decision based on reality but decide to choose a stupid one and then proudly release the product as the “latest evolution”?? What the…???
If you have an old Intel Mac, Linux works just fine. I resurrected a 2013 MacBook Air this way, the machine runs really well with Linux Mint, I think any modern Linux distro will work on it.
For ARM64 Macs … maybe Asahi Linux (seems to work on M1 and M2 Macs), but clearly the system is less open than before. Also, if you have an M3/M4 you are currently out of luck if you want to install Linux directly on the device.