Every Mac since macOS 13 (2022) ships a pair of daemons whose only purpose in life is to build a graph about who you are, who you know, how those people are related to you and to each other, how you communicate with them, where you go, what you do and when. In this post, we look into how this system works and give you a tool to peek into your own graph.
Linux is great for any of the Intel series max, but apple silicone is so new that they’ve barely cracked the surface of M3 full capabilities with any Linux distro.
I will not post a link to it for privacy reasons, but I wrote an article on this the day before the original M1 was announced warning of this situation. Apples move to their own chipset meant that any attempts at maintaining compatibility would always end up behind the curve.
I am surprised that Apple manage to keep their chips constantly changing as much as they do between generations. Most others seem to be on the ‘same but more’ path nowadays but Apple is still shifting the baseline almost yearly.
The real issue will come if they lock down the boot loader.
I will say this, I love my M5 Air and it doesn’t have An Apple Account. Like, at all. Nor did my last M2. Apple allows me more desktop privacy than Ms or Google will, and I don’t have to gut the OS. I’m not motivated to because they make the horsepower available to me.
Every other machine is running some debian/Ubuntu variant today, principally. I got tired of the cat-and-mouse and all of the uosells under the hood of MS, and I just can’t trust Google in this era.
You know I thought about that as I was commenting, and also kind of rolled the dice on someone calling it out. And ancient Apple equipment are built like tanks.
But I remember running Minecraft Beta on an ancient iMac G5, and it was too choppy even back in the day. I can’t imagine you being pleasant on one in the modern era.
So I think looking back, I would put a hard limit at only putting machines in service that were manufactured at or after 2012 or so. Get a cute Haswell Mac Mini and call it a day.
If you insisted on vintage Apple hardware older than that, I would recommend getting the system and throwing a Raspberry Pi in there instead. I really wish the G4 lamp Macs would make a come back.
Apparently you lose a lot of functionality. I wanted to install Linux on my old Intel Mac but the research showed I’m gonna struggle even getting the kb to work, cause it goes through the T2 security chip. This was about a year ago. Hopefully by now people have worked around those issues with Claude.
I had always wondered why so many people have had compatibility issues with Linux systems, that was until I realized that because I am basically a computer scrap-man, I almost always a decade behind and everything had been long hardened by then.
I know about the patch, but I think back when I checked last, it was in rudimentary state and not very reliable. Hopefully it’s better now. I remember there were more issues, like for sure touchID doesn’t work, but I think there was other stuff, too.
If you install Linux on it, it fixes it, right?
To answer what other have missed, if you run Linux then that will fix this.
Linux is great for any of the Intel series max, but apple silicone is so new that they’ve barely cracked the surface of M3 full capabilities with any Linux distro.
I will not post a link to it for privacy reasons, but I wrote an article on this the day before the original M1 was announced warning of this situation. Apples move to their own chipset meant that any attempts at maintaining compatibility would always end up behind the curve.
I am surprised that Apple manage to keep their chips constantly changing as much as they do between generations. Most others seem to be on the ‘same but more’ path nowadays but Apple is still shifting the baseline almost yearly.
The real issue will come if they lock down the boot loader.
I will say this, I love my M5 Air and it doesn’t have An Apple Account. Like, at all. Nor did my last M2. Apple allows me more desktop privacy than Ms or Google will, and I don’t have to gut the OS. I’m not motivated to because they make the horsepower available to me.
Every other machine is running some debian/Ubuntu variant today, principally. I got tired of the cat-and-mouse and all of the uosells under the hood of MS, and I just can’t trust Google in this era.
also PowerPC
You know I thought about that as I was commenting, and also kind of rolled the dice on someone calling it out. And ancient Apple equipment are built like tanks.
But I remember running Minecraft Beta on an ancient iMac G5, and it was too choppy even back in the day. I can’t imagine you being pleasant on one in the modern era.
So I think looking back, I would put a hard limit at only putting machines in service that were manufactured at or after 2012 or so. Get a cute Haswell Mac Mini and call it a day.
If you insisted on vintage Apple hardware older than that, I would recommend getting the system and throwing a Raspberry Pi in there instead. I really wish the G4 lamp Macs would make a come back.
Apparently you lose a lot of functionality. I wanted to install Linux on my old Intel Mac but the research showed I’m gonna struggle even getting the kb to work, cause it goes through the T2 security chip. This was about a year ago. Hopefully by now people have worked around those issues with Claude.
I have a 2018 Mac mini running Mint. I haven’t had any problems like that.
I had always wondered why so many people have had compatibility issues with Linux systems, that was until I realized that because I am basically a computer scrap-man, I almost always a decade behind and everything had been long hardened by then.
Mac mini is different, it doesn’t have kbm, touchID etc. I’ve run Ubuntu on older minis as well.
You need a T2 patch and touchpad software, it’s not that hard to get working if you follow the right tutorial
I know about the patch, but I think back when I checked last, it was in rudimentary state and not very reliable. Hopefully it’s better now. I remember there were more issues, like for sure touchID doesn’t work, but I think there was other stuff, too.
We had Linux on M1 before Claude was really a thing.
I’m aware of Asahi Linux. It was mostly unusable for the first few years. Nowadays it runs, I think on up to M2 chips.