-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Fwd: PayPal pool for developer M1 Mac mini for OpenBSD port
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2020 21:56:51 +0000
From: Jeff Joshua Rollin <j...@jeffjoshua.club>
Oops, forgot to reply to the list. Sorry for the duplicate, Mihai.
On 03/12/2020 01:18, Mihai Popescu wrote:
I have only good wishes for the project, but I still don't get one thing:
why do some people start to behave oddly whenever Apple comes into
discussion.
They are doing a proprietary thing, closed as hell, no documentation
and so
on. Why is this impulse to write code for such a thing. Just asking ...
Apple make great products. My iMac, which is nearly ten years old, runs
without problems even today (try that with Windows). iPads and iPhones
have much better lifetimes than Android devices - we'll see if the
increasing number of devices running "real Linux" make a dent in the
market, but either way there are AFAIK no phones using any of the BSDs
(unless you count macOS/iOS, which for these purposes I don't) anyway.
Other than the fact that the platform is proprietary, the only other
thing that annoys me about Macs, and always has, is their half-arsed
attempt at a British keyboard, which unless it's changed since my iMac
was manufactured still puts @ and " in the wrong places for Brits -
exactly the opposite places on a US keyboard. (Even Commodore, infamous
in its day for reliability problems and which bought the Amiga company
in what no less august an institution than Amiga Format magazine called
"a rare fit of insight," managed that one.) Fortunately, if you also use
Linux/UNIX, the problem of switching between keyboards with @ and " in
'the wrong place' is easily solved for X11 by selecting a Mac UK
keyboard in the software settings even on a PC. (They did stubbornly
stick with that crap butterfly keyboard for four years, for reasons
presumably best known to themselves, but luckily that era also seems to
be over, and I didn't bother buying one during that time, for that and
other reasons.)
As for the proprietaryness, other than the fact that it's a nice new
hardware architecture as other people have mentioned, pretty much every
other architecture OpenBSD, NetBSD and Linux has ever run on (Amiga, Sun
and VAX, for example) is/was proprietary. And that's without considering
the closed peripherals (without which OpenBSD wouldn't have to eschew
NDAs) or the BMC on a Wintel - heaven knows what that thing really gets
up to.
My £0.02
Jeff.
