![]() Including very subtle, but surprising bugs (e.g. As this driver is based solely on reverse-engineered workings of the input system and Apple does very unique stuff there this was so much effort. There is one person I want to point out in particular and that's roadrunner2 who took the existing input driver for the 12" Retina MacBook and not just made it work with the MacBook Pro's, but also implemented support for the TouchBar and ambient light sensor. The serious work of reverse engineering and implementing custom drivers was done by others which are to be applauded much more! The only code I contributed are very small workarounds for the NVMe controller and webcam. I mostly did just coordination and verification. ![]() What you've done is beyond my capabilities. You mean like asking NVIDIA for Wayland support following the same standards as everyone else? That worked well.Įveryone's drivers are bad, but I don't believe for a second that Apple's are measurably worse than Linux or Windows drivers. In some cases, they share code, in some cases they release a driver update. If I have an issue with what I'm building, I can hop into a chat and immediately talk to Nvidia/AMD/Intel folks/etc. The recent Intel driver problems literally took months 4-5 months to fix, while they show-stopping errors were in an LTS kernel release that was rolled out in various distributions. There may be exceptions, but I never had anything like the graphics glitching that the Nouveau drivers had or known problems that would lock up Intel GPUs every one 1-2 days or consistently in some workloads, or broken Intel WiFi drivers. I sincerely hope my predictions are wrong and Linux will still go strong on Macs in future as well, but for the time being I'm done with Macs.Īpple lacks this feedback loop, and their drivers are garbage. There are lots of great people passionate about running Linux on Macs out there, but reverse-engineering the hardware is what makes it really complicated to produce robust drivers for it. Most of these problems could be easily solved if Apple would simply make documentation for their hardware available. As Apple continuous to use more and more custom designed components, the effort for proper Linux drivers for such hardware only increases. Next year we might see MacBooks with custom ARM SoCs and that's where I expect the driver situation will get even more dire. Models with T2 chip (2018 and up) are even worse in some regards and I believe it won't get better anymore. I really love the hardware Apple produces, but we're at a point where I believe it's not feasible anymore to use Linux on MacBooks.įor the MacBook Pros 2016 and up I put significant effort into trying to get mainline Linux running as smoothly as possible by documenting and coordinating the efforts to have drivers for all internal devices, but just have a look where we're at over three years later: Audio doesn't work properly, Wifi does neither (expect for the non-TouchBar models, like the one the OP uses), hibernation is still somewhat broken and let's not even start talking about the advanced abilities of the TouchBar or support for TouchId. I used MacBooks with Linux starting in 2006 till the end of last year. ![]()
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