Linux 5.19(lwn.net) |
Linux 5.19(lwn.net) |
The Asahi developers have also stated that Apple tends to keep hardware peripheral interfaces stable across generations (they speculate that this is to keep things easy for their own OS dev teams), and that this has so far proven to be true for M2 (and several iPhone generations before that), and thus once support is available , it should stay relevant for some time.
Given this, it seems like MacBooks could easily end up becoming the laptop of choice for Linux developers in the years to come.
There was a time where Apple laptops came with very good Linux support. It was the time were every bit of hardware support was present in Darwin (a 12" iBook G3 was working flawlessly with Linux for example). I think that at each generation, support gets worse because the hardware is closing down. This translates to far more time between release and having something usable with Linux.
- There were numerous laptops with near-full Linux support, the Apple hardware wasn't categorically better when it came to that.
- The power usage of x86 CPUs was atrocious at the time compared to PPC. Now history is repeating with Apple's M[12] line. Therefore people put up with a lot to get 2-3x longer battery life. As I recall I got 3-4 hours of active use out of my iBook, but (going to conferences) it felt like people's x86s almost always had to be plugged in.
- The Linux support for software suspend/hibernation was really flaky at the time, but it worked perfectly on Apple hardware, because all Linux had to do was to tell the hardware "do the suspend thing now" (IIRC by tweaking a file in /proc). The hardware did a slow "heartbeat" with a front LED hidden behind the plastic frame when suspended (a nice effect). When running Linux it would do the the exact same, as it was all done in hardware.
- There were still edge cases in hardware support, just as with any other laptop vendor, it all came down to what individual components happened to have Linux drivers. Some of this was better on Apple's hardware, some of it was worse.
Eg. I remember getting Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th gen early on in the cycle (I've also got 5th and 8th gen in the house, and X1 Yoga 6th gen which sucks with that metal finish), and the with the removal of "regular" S3 sleep, you close your laptop and it keeps running and potentially burning in your bag. It took Lenovo a year or so to add a "Linux sleep support" BIOS option, though it took community less than that to provide DSDT patches to re-enable S3 sleep.
All I am saying is that Lenovo machines, esp Thinkpad line, are usually a great choice, but you can hit early-adopter hurdles just like with any other laptop. The good thing about them is that community is huge and great, and that they are the best laptops around as far as usability on the go goes (as in, actually typing on them and seeing what you type).
This is true for what we nerds call a "lenovo laptop" (so mostly T series). Install, everything works.
Lenovo also sells a bunch of cheapish plasticky laptops that look like some random noname chinese OEM manufactured and lenovo just put a sticker on... well, linux support there is a bit hit and miss.
Never worked flawlessly in my experience.
There have always been plenty of laptops with very good Linux support.
Of the 3 laptops that I had during the last 15 years (before those I had used an Apple laptop, but then I have switched to Linux), on the first (a HP Compaq) and on the third (a Dell Precision), when I have installed Linux it just worked, while on the second (a Lenovo), I had to spend a couple of days until making everything work, mainly because it used NVIDIA Optimus, which required some workarounds, but after that it worked flawlessly. During these years I have also used Linux on various company laptops, always without problems.
At least some months might have to pass until a MacBook will be able to work under Asahi Linux as well as most laptops with Intel/AMD CPUs work already in the day when they are bought.
Because I've got nothing better to do with my time than diagnose issues due to running a setup only 50 other people in the world use.
If you want manufacturer support, you need to use macOS or Windows or one of the very limited selection of laptops which feature Linux as an option. Most people who use Linux probably already use Linux on a computer without manufacturer support. If that's not for you though, that's totally fine.
Modern laptops are not materially different from SoCs, everything is soldered to the board and the CPU does basically everything memory related.
I guess you think that Intel designs are an open standard?
At the very least they’re extremely patent incumbered; with AMD and Intel having a sort of patent truce between them.
Having used MacBook Pro 14" with an M1 Max for ~6 months, I'd really wonder which developer submits themselves to such a glare-emitting screen and crappy keyboard (and potentially imprinting their palms/wrists on the sharp front edge), if you can get a Thinkpad X1 Carbon for much less?
Sure, performance was slightly better than the latest X1 Carbon, and battery life was significantly better, but if I am undocked for a prolonged period, that screen and keyboard make it very unpleasant to use. If I needed more performance, I'd go for a desktop or a workstation-type Thinkpad laptop, though I'd lose on the portability (though MacBook Pros — including 14" — are heavy as well).
But as I only use it on a docking station, all good.
I’m wondering the same. It’s probably just a few?
Not to mention laptops designed specifically to target Linux like the Framework laptop.
It's not amd64, it's especially not Intel. It's not fugly or fnoisy. The bar is really so low.
I got an Linux AMD laptop for work this year, much better on the battery and still very fast. Its been great.
People are writing about Thinkpads below, but the real comparison should be to laptops that are sold with Linux on them, like the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition, the HP Dev One, or the many laptops sold by System76 which even feature 'instant on' since they run open-source UEFI implementations.
The Apple Silicon laptops have gained Linux support faster than most Apple hardware in recent memory, including the Intel MacBooks from 2016 on. But Linux support has long been especially late on Apple machines because the hardware is custom and quirky and volunteer interest in reverse-engineering it has been relatively low.
And let's be real— a computer without GPU acceleration is virtually unusable. You need that these days for everything from actually getting to use basic features of your window manager to videe playback.
That said, Intel and Microsoft have hampered Linux support recently with crap like S0ix and Pluton, so if the GPU support ever becomes stable enough to support most Linux window managers, the Apple Silicon laptops might seem attractive by comparison to laptops that aren't built for Linux. I would consider one at that point. But it's hard to be optimistic when Apple has no material reason not to pull the rug out from under Asahi at any time (not necessarily out of malice).
That is, if they want to subsidize with their own wallets the dominance of consumer-hostile computing that open source was created to avert.
Except for development such as this here, which aims at liberating users from a closed platform, I would have a philosophical problem to buy such hardware purely for my convenience.
Let's not fool ourselves, when proprietary hardware from platform giants like Amazon and Apple becomes dominant killing open ecosystems, the end of road can only lead to consumer coercion, regardless if a negligible fraction of users would be able to still run Linux on such hardware.
Compare that to what's going on in the non-Mac world, with Pluton and SecureBoot stuff, where hardware is being cryptographically locked down. Or compare it to nvidia, who is intentionally making it impossible to make a good FOSS driver. Yet people have no problems buying thinkpads from Lenovo or nvidia cards from System76.
I'll take "undocumented hardware which needs to be reverse engineered, but once that's done we have a great driver and stuff just works" over "undocumented hardware which refuses to run unsigned software and the user can't install their own signing key" any day.
This seems like obvious but really is not.
As long MacBooks keep being the insane machines they now are, they will soon become (and keep being) the best Linux machines available.
Just because people will make sure of that.
Apparently, this is an area where if I'm not in the actual minority, I'm certainly in the quieter faction.
As for the fixed function accelerator blocks, vendors who cooperate will have more robust driver implementations derived from their work to support customers who rely on it operationally.
For developers, macs are just really nice hardware and there are not a whole lot of similarly nice, Linux friendly laptops out there. Most of them seem to be compromises between being noisy, not having great screens, keyboards, and touchpads, mediocre performance, etc.
Typing this on a Samsung Galaxy Book with a meh screen, meh touch pad, alright keyboard, and unimpressive performance. It runs Manjaro. I do miss having a nice screen and input options. I'm actually using a wireless mouse for the first time in a decade plus. Never needed one with a mac.
eh, not quite. for me the OS is the most important part, with great hardware being icing on the cake. I’m not knocking linux, but it’s not for everyone.
And while other comments here have pointed out that not all hardware is supported yet (a valid criticism), I feel it's also important to note that the current user experience of Asahi on Apple Silicon is stellar (as has been since it was released in Alpha).
I've been using Asahi for over 3 months now as my daily driver to do real development work (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/asahi-linux/), and everything I need is there, and fast. Consequently, I'm not surprised Linus is doing the same.
It's crazy what happens when hardware designers collaborate with software developers. The current de-facto standard of working in silos with no regard for how the other party gets their part done is what's led us to the current global status quo.
What's the situation with traditional USB and HDMI ports? Dongles are easy to forget and easy to break, and lots of us have traditional USB devices lying around and 10-year-old TVs.
Sounds like a failure for free software and open source, and the quest for progressing for open systems in general.
No GPU support is a big miss though. ARM also means that you can't make every binary made for x86 out there work, even if initiatives like Box86 and Box64 help bridge the gap.
You mean aside from system76 or of any of the other Linux first hardware sellers?
> The Asahi developers have also stated that Apple tends to keep hardware peripheral interfaces stable across generations
The Asahi team has made an assumption about apples implementation of mobile chipsets that hasn't had a Linux competitor working to exploit it.
Nothing is stopping apple from rug pulling the project next cycle.
Nobody should be relying on this.
Why would they do that? As others have pointed outed, Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia, etc. are indeed pulling the rug out on the other side (in the name of security). Locking the Mac down 100% would have zero benefit to Apple and just generate negativity.
https://mobile.twitter.com/AsahiLinux/status/155396839473481...
https://mobile.twitter.com/AsahiLinux/status/155086604218397...
Didn't know it was fully usable right now, amazing work!
I think one of the few last things missing is the gpu module, which is being developed with a help of a VTuber, she puts up full live coding session on YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/AsahiLina
I'm not sure whether to read this as a joke, or if there's really no semantic difference between x & y version numbers for the Linux kernel?
[Edit: that was a sincere question, not 'what a joke', I didn't mean anything against it.]
If I hadn't seen that I'd have been very cautious, a bit worried even, about upgrading to :shocked-face: six point oh, scoured for news & changelogs (yes yes as I should anyway.. actually what I do is assume patch will be fine, and check /r/archlinux for minor bumps - that is, I thought they were 'minor' and 'patch' rather than arbitrary) etc.
Check the release post for 5.0: https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/3/3/236
Ref SemVer: https://semver.org/
> (*) I'll likely call it 6.0 since I'm starting to worry about getting confused by big numbers again.
It seems that he ran out of fingers and toes again.
That doesn't feel very controversial, someone wanting to work the way they want to and not some other way.
PS: Im on a p1 gen4 thinkapd very happy with it, BUT it is sometimes really noisy..
Localized versions can be different, the French for example has some symbols in very different places.
Also, the ALT (Option, key to the right of the left CTRL) and Super (Command, key to the left of the space bar) are reversed, but you can tell Linux to swap them.
I use `options hid_apple fnmode=2 swap_opt_cmd=1` to have function keys register as Fx without the FN and to have the ALT key next to the space bar.
+ Windows has the Windows key (which Linux called "super")
+ Windows also has the context menu key, which I think it pretty useless to be honest but others might get value from that
+ The Mac keyboard layout is US-like, even on European models. Which means a bunch of keys are in different places from their European IBM counterparts (like @ and "). The # and / keys I find particularly hard to locate on Macs. I often end up redefining my Mac keyboard to be an IBM keyboard even though it differs from the key caps. It's a nightmare for anyone using my Mac but much easier for me who's had ~40 years of muscle memory.
Not the keyboard hardware (so somewhat out of scope for this context) but it's also worth noting that there's some macOS keyboard shortcuts that differ in really confusing ways too. Like
+ Ctrl+C vs Cmd+C
+ Text area navigation on a Mac is totally different too. Home and End buttons behave differently. Ctrl+Arrow keys don't work. Shift+Arrow keys don't select. etc
Every time I spend a few months in Linux and then switch to a Mac (or visa versa) I inevitably have a few days of pain relearning short cut keys.
Some comments seems not on this. It seems to a mac arm notebook he tried to use not in a big way. But will be for travelling.
For the release itself tbh I am confused his last merge window (*) comment. Is it 6.1 or not I am not sure? ( should it be odd number if it replaces 5.x9?or it 6.0 as it is after 5.x9)
<edit>Wikipedia agrees with my memory.</>
> It's the third time I'm using Apple hardware for Linux development
No mention of ARM64 there.
Although Apple branded hardware is not apple developed hardware, so I read that in a different way. But now I realize that PowerPC was not an Apple Development, too, so he means Apple branding. So in my head, this is his first time of using Apple hardware (CPU, not keyboard, casing, etc.) for kernel compilation.
Thanks Apple for insisting that "this is the first Apple hardware" for clamshell laptops in your PR statements.
Ubuntu's not a daily driver, there's a bit of initial effort in switching between macOS + Linux keyboards, but it's usable.
They look like that because they basically are.
There's really two companies called Lenovo. One of them makes the ThinkPad T, X, P and one of the budget lines (L or E, always forget which, we don't use either). And the ThinkStations.
The other makes the IdeaPads and the other ThinkPad budget line which lacks the great keyboard and Linux compatibility, it just looks a bit like a ThinkPad. And the Legion gaming stuff etc.
They're really two different companies with different factories. We have a global contract with Lenovo and we can't even order the consumer laptops. We wanted to get some Legions because some of our dev teams prefer the Legion with RTX over the ThinkPad P which come with Quadros. But they simply can't sell them to us. I think RTX came to the ThinkPad P since anyway, not sure because I'm not involved anymore.
It seems one company because as a consumer you can buy all of them from Lenovo.com but that's not even really Lenovo, it's a third party reseller called DigitalRiver.
That's interesting to read, because I ran Linux on a Macbook Pro for a few years around 2012 and the only thing on that machine that _never_ worked right was suspend and resume.
Then again, I'm typing this on a 2019 Macbook Pro (Intel) that has nary a single replaceable part.
I liked coolness of "Connected Standby" - laptop sleeping, but playing music over bluetooth. Other than coolness, cannot say I found much use of it - may be my ssh didn't terminate? Don't remember.
Or I could just look for a laptop that has an anti-glare screen ;-) And a good keyboard.
Too bad new AMD-based Thinkpad Z series do away with a bunch of the good things from X1 Carbon (soft-touch palmrests for one), or I'd seriously consider them to be able to drop my desktop entirely (Intel iGPUs struggle to do full screen video calls on 4k external screens under Linux, I am _hoping_ AMD 680M would do a better job).
Closing the cover does not put it to sleep, no matter what I do to the settings (admittedly it’s a very locked down device so there may be settings that are not available to me).
That being said, an imperfect out the box experience just gives me an excuse to get another (old) thinkpad, so every cloud
It’s way too much work syncing workspaces, repos, configuration, installed software, etc.
As lawyers usually play it safe (they're paid to defend the company) they'll tell you to keep everything internal internal, since Apple makes money selling finished products and services, not selling discreet chips to OEMs who's functionality needs to be explained to third parties.
If you are looking for a fallacy take your argument from authority: if Linus does something then it cannot possibly be wrong. Which doesn't even get the point I'm making above, where I clearly contrast developing FOSS for the MacBook which is clearly a good thing (what Linus is doing), with buying a development MacBook for convenience, thereby putting your money to work against software liberty.
Fyi, the App Store license is deliberately incompatible with the GPL.
I'm gonna say that it's a "generic" driver, which is totally fine on desktops but almost always (except for Thinkpads and Linux-focused laptop manufacturers) has a nasty edge case (modified chips or chip firmware) that just makes it incompatible. This isn't exclusive to Linux by the way, even Windows suffers from this exact problem (usually audio, fingerprint and touchpad).
Edit: for example, this is the FreeBSD code for HDA sound device (it's messy): https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/sys/dev/sou...
Developing a GPU driver for a custom chip with no public reference or support from Apple isn't a problem ? I guess you're saying it's not a problem in other laptops - but for Apple Silicon it sounds like more fundamental than those issues you mentioned.
I have been using exclusively T and X laptop for the past 20+ years and it always worked perfectly. There was a time where the battery life was better with Windows, but maybe only 2 or 3 years "in-between". Nowadays, the hardware support is for me a non issue.
except the fingerprint one because I don't have a fingerprint reader, I had all these issues on my windows laptop
I had some issues with my AMD X13 when getting it new - but they weren't show-stopping, just annoying, and they got ironed out over the next 6 months.
I'm confused where you got that idea. T2 chips changed a lot. The most recent Intel MBPs have a different wifi with a known-broken firmware for Linux. The sound handling has also changed and hasn't been reverse engineered yet since 2019. And that's before we even get to changing the entire architecture to M1. How is that less changes than lenovo?
Notably the Asahi project got M2 laptops up to parity with the M1 family in ~48 hours of dev work. No doubt this won't always be the case (there's bound to be major hardware revisions at some point) but at the moment this is quite promising looking towards the future.
On Macs it's a big deal; about as big a deal as making open source AMD drivers was before they had official open source drivers. And people did that, and people are working open source GPU drivers for Apple's GPU now.
I'm actually moderately surprised they are not actively helping, as often having a second OS option allows for various fun legal tricks when importing, bidding on government contracts, etc.
Apple in contrast has helped Asahi Linux for literally no reason. It wasn't requiest, it wasn't even required. It just made life easier for Asahi Linux.
The change you're talking about is likely to have been for Asahi, but no statement from Apple so far about it.
I think projects like VLC request some sort of copyright waiver from contributors so they can relicense in the future, or simply ignoring the TOS, and exposing themselves to summary deletion.
It’s a random protocol someone came up with that some other people decided to follow. It’s nowhere near a de facto standard for version numbers: plenty of software has non-semver version numbers (in fact, this applies to all software I have worked on so far in my career!)
I think most software should just have date-based versioning. It fits the development models we actually use far better, and actually communicates useful information to the user, unlike semver. Are you running a kernel from 2016? Might wanna update that.
My original message was a bit joke which some missed, but SemVer has a place and need.
> All software is continually developed, every release contains both new features and bug fixes, which violates semver.
Combination of them is not violation. Overall impact of the change should be described with the correct increment. It does not matter how do you categorise the content of the change.
That would seem to be contradicted by Linus's "WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE"[1].
The Linux community clearly cares for backwards compatibility too.
Interesting. I'd characterise it more as 'responsibly breaking backwards compatibility'. Just a tool to communicate the nature of changes, a really (really) brief summarising changelog - what's included, breaking changes, non-breaking new features, or just misc. fixes?
I quite like it, but I tried to phrase my top-level comment not to be about it specifically. It would have surprised me to learn that Linux used 'semver' - that doesn't mean there's no semantic meaning to the version numbers it uses though.
It's not about maintaining backwards compatibility. It's about making it explicit when you break compatibility. Whether you do or not is completely up to you - semver doesn't care.
> "Okay, it's been over a year, and it's time to end the nonsense speculation."
> "I have heard from several Apple employees that:"
> "1. The boot method we use is for 3rd-party OSes, and Apple only use it to test that it works, because"
> "2. It is policy that it works."
> "Hacker News peanut gallery, you can drop the BS now. It's not an "assumption" that this stuff exists for 3rd-party OSes. It couldn't "be something internal Apple uses that could go away any minute". That is not how it works, it never was, and now I'm telling you it's official."
> "And this isn't even news because @XenoKovah (who invented and designed this entire Boot Policy 3rd party OS mechanism) already tweeted about this whole thing a long time ago, but apparently it needs to be restated."
So no, we do know why this was made and no, Marcan hasn't made the claim that you have.
However, how it impacts downstream, the dependents of your software, cannot be tested. You can only inform about it. For people, with changelog. For automated systems, with version number. But if you do not follow systematic version numbering, you fail to inform automatic systems. They update to the later version of you software and dependents will break.
They can read the changelog. And if they can't be bothered to read the changelog, then why even update?
It's more of a philosophy than a law, and it can't really be relied on that much; as often the developers themselves can't accurately predict what is a major breaking change and what isn't.
The Linux kernel itself has some baggage from the 2.4/2.6 era that Linus is explicitly walking away from.
> often the developers themselves can't accurately predict what is a major breaking change and what isn't.
There is a difference with a breaking change and a bug. All breaking changes are predictable. If you modify API, it possible breaks. If you don’t modify API but it breaks, it is just a bug. If you add feature, and don’ t modify API, but something breaks, it is a bug. You are not expected to apply SemVer for bugs because you can’t predict them.
Package managers cannot read the changelog. That is why we have version numbers.
It might not "feel" premium or durable but it's way more durable than aluminum... Also doesn't heat up as much on your lap.
No, they just have an absolutely huge farm of CNC machines cutting them out which is expensive to maintain, not generally available from contract manufacturers in the volumes required, and would take a huge capital outlay from competitors who wanted to replicate it.
Plastic is better in most ways for a laptop shell.
And Mac keyboards have the Windows key, they just call it "command" instead of "Windows" or "super" but it's in the same place.
As a curiosity, this is actually very useful for keyboard-only users.
On X11 at least, context menu display is typically associated to Shift+F10. However, in some cases (I think the file panel in Sublime Text 3 was a notable case; not sure in v4), this binding doesn't work.
Context menu key gives a binding that is guaranteed to work :)
It is a convenient key to map compose key on.
This is absolutely false. European Mac keyboards are ISO. The labeling doesn’t matter, as rolling your own layout is trivial.
Furthermore I made the exact same point about redefining the layout. You claim to debunk my post yet go on to make literally the same points I did. In literally the same bullet point you're trying to debunk too!
(I'd forgotten why I usually avoid commenting on Apple-based threads. Ever word is analysed and if it can be interpreted in even a remotely disparaging way by either your Apple or Linux fanboys, then they'll stop reading the entirety of your comment and pull that one phrase out with some terse rebuttal phrased as if the original poster was an idiot. Completely irrelevant of whether that rebuttal is actually just reiterating the OPs comment or even if the original comment, when read in full, was actually negative at all.
The French Apple layout is closer to the Windows layout than the Mac US version. But it is quite divergent from both US layout and french windows because it included localized typographic enhancements inherited from the 1980's. They basically localized differently on Windows and MacOs.
There is another ISO international flavor of the Apple Keyboard that look closer to the US version but it never took traction in french market. I guess that even if switching from Win/Mac french layout require some time to rewire muscle memory it's still easier than to to opt for international layout.
For instance on both Win/Mac fr by default numbered keys pad require shift to produce number while by default they are used for accentuations.
PS: I have a mechanical Mac Intl ISO keyboard because I sometimes switch to US, but when writing in FR I still as of today use french layout using muscle memory
What is actually ashaming from Apple is that oftentimes some dev oriented shortcuts (like Cmd + Shift + Period) have never been properly localized in macOS which is why using Intl keyboard help in some contexts (it fail because shift is already required to produce "Period" in classical french layout)
I just checked three external Apple keyboards, one integrated Apple Keyboard and a Logitech G15, and as far as I can tell, all of them have the @ and " in the same places.
UK Mac keyboard: https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MMMR3B/A/magic-keyboar...
A random UK "IBM" keyboard: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ultra-Classic-style-keyboard-Black/...
Cmd+C is actually more comfortable to me, as you use your thumb instead of pinky. My pinky is always fatigued after using a Win/Lin machine.
Shift + Arrow keys do select text, you must have something configured differently.
I don't remember what Ctrl + Arrow keys does on Win/Lin, assuming it's word boundaries that is Option + Arrow keys.
Overall my experience with Apple keyboard shortcuts is much more positive than on Window and Linux. On Windows it feels like they've run out of modifier keys due to locking the Windows key behind windows specific features, and Linux mostly just copied windows.
I'd say they're the same in terms of comfort but I do appreciate CMD+C when working in the terminal.
> Shift + Arrow keys do select text, you must have something configured differently.
They select text differently. I went into more details about the differences there in a different post on this same thread.
> Overall my experience with Apple keyboard shortcuts is much more positive than on Window and Linux. On Windows it feels like they've run out of modifier keys due to locking the Windows key behind windows specific features, and Linux mostly just copied windows.
I think it's 100% down to whatever is muscle memory. I've you're more familiar with the Mac shortcuts then you'll prefer that, and likewise for the Windows/Linux shortcuts. Saying one is better than the other is rather silly when it's entirely down to whatever you've committed to muscle memory.
Hence why my point wasn't about preference but rather just pointing out that there are differences one has to adapt to when switching from one platform to another (whichever direction that switch might be).
Think about this from the high level, it’s obvious yes? Why did you write an essay on “Windows, Linux, and Mac key shortcuts are different” and then “it’s clearly subjective” These are obvious statements.
In Israel we have the option of choosing Macs with US layout or keyboard layout. What changes is mainly the enter key on two rows of the European models, the character "`", and the characters next to the shift keys.
I'm not suggesting that a UK Mac keyboard is "the same" as a US Mac. Just that for someone used to a UK IBM keyboard, a UK Mac keyboard will feel different (and visa versa for Mac users switching to IBM keyboards).
As for # in macOSdon't use a UK layout use Irish or Australian which are the same except for shift-3
Only the last two items and I did prefix those items saying it was the OS so wouldn't be affected by running Linux. I'm not trying to deceive people here.
> As for # in macOSdon't use a UK layout use Irish or Australian which are the same except for shift-3
...or you can just redefine the keyboard layout, as I also stated in my comment (I assume you did actually read it?).
None of the problems I raised were intended to be negative about Apple so you don't need to jump to the defence here. I'm just stating the differences between Mac and IBM/Microsoft keyboard layouts.
The issues I've noticed are around desktop applications. For example if I select some text in KWrite (KDE's "Notepad") by using SHIFT+CTRL+LEFT_ARROW then it will select the word. If I do the equivalent in Notes (macOS) it will select the whole line, not just the word (I tested this just now too).
This platform specific behavioural differences isn't something that's unique when comparing to KWrite vs Notes, I just picked those applications as an example. It also isn't just SHIFT+CTRL+LEFT_ARROW that differs. There's a quite a few subtle differences when using the keyboard to navigate around text areas. None of them significant but they're always enough to break my concentration when trying to get stuff done.
A lot of these can be redefined. Both on Linux and on macOS though. So you can absolutely make the two platforms behave the same way, given enough time and motivation. So we are just talking about defaults here.
Use option instead of control here.
How is my original post an essay? It was basically just a bullet pointed list. Are we really that deep into the Twitter generation that anything more than a couple of sentences is considered an "essay"? Or are you just throwing that term about to be derogatory about my comments?
I don't really understand what your problem is here. The OP said mac's and IBMs differ, then someone else replied saying there's only one difference. That's where I replied with a bullet pointed list of additional items the commenter before me missed off.
The conversation was really that simple.
All this extra stuff about "essays", preferences, subjectiveness, etc are additional contexts you're adding and not something I was ever discussing. It doesn't matter what you, or anyone else, prefers in relation to my post. Literally the only point I was making was that they differ. Because the commenter before me seemed unaware of many of the differences. That's literally it.
Is this something that needs to be enabled? Or is it dependant on something else to work? It's definitely a feature I'd welcome.
[edit] A friend checked on his Montery machine and said they work as expected in system text boxes.
Thanks for the link, that will come in handy!