----- Original Message -----
> While we can make our Mac hardware story better, we need to keep in mind that
> Apple is a pretty hostile company here in terms of running alternative
> operating
> systems. There is absolutely no information from them on their hardware, so
> we are
> often left with having to reverse engineer to fix bugs, which is slow and
> time consuming.
That's mainly wrong. The hardware from this year's MacBook Pros is 99% the same
as last year's MacBook Pros. Apart from the usual rigmarole of keyboard and touchpad
USB IDs updates, it works as well as last year's. The only thing that doesn't
work out of the box on those machines is the wireless card.
The dual boot experience is sub-par, but that's mainly because we regressed
the installer compared to when Matthew fixed all that a couple of years ago.
> My goal here instead is for us to work with more friendly hardware makers to
> ensure that
> their hardware work well, so that we can provide Fedora users with a
> recommendation,
> i.e. if you want things to work perfectly out of the box get a laptop from
> vendor X of
> series Y.
While that's a great goal, we're not going get Lenovo (for example) releasing
*less* SKUs. With Apple, you get 2 new SKUs per year for the laptops (one Pro,
one Air). That's much easier to target.
That's not to say that a brand new funky model from Apple wouldn't be a royal
pain to get supported, but the amount of work required these days isn't on par
with supporting a new laptop from some of the other makers ("hey! here's a completely
new touchpad you don't have a driver for, enjoy!").
> This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to work as well as we can with as much
> hardware as possible,
> but realistically we are not in a position to guarantee more than a select
> set of series.
Even if we should privilege hardware manufacturers that will support us, we (that's Fedora
and Red Hat as well) should still spend time on making sure Apple's hardware works.
(Slightly bogus numbers ahead) If they sell half as many laptops as HP, but HP has 10 new
SKUs in the year, I would know which one to focus on to reach more potential users.
Cheers
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