Uri, with all the powers you have you shall be famously remembered for bending f****** spoons. What a legacy to leave behind. Maybe in the future there is no spoon.
I think I have the first or second gen ipad.
For some years now the OS and apps are frozen in time. I have basically some old games and the old safari browser.
The old safari is slow and, can you believe it, HN does not fully function!
Now, we all know the hardware is premium and this device would probably run linux very smoothly and the touch interface would be a dream.
But we can only dream right?
WTF? Apple won’t allow us to use another OS or open software on old non-supported devices?
What a waste of physical material!
What a waste of human creativity!
What a waste of my money!
What a waste of my time!
I don’t give a shit how its enabled the masses to be able to do selfies.
This also mostly applies to android devices as well - which is another shit show.
For fucks sake - its 2023 and occasionally we have HN posts that are announcing how we are getting closer to run linux on the latest macs with the new processors.
Holy shit! Even with more access and control to the apple macs we still don’t have full linux capability.
Apple has the best mathematicians to optimise for pure profit and as you can see they have done a great job.
Apple 1 - Rest of the world 0.
Woz, please have have a talk with Tim (Nice but dim) and tell him the wonders that can be unlocked by allowing apple devices to run linux natively without jailbreaks or hacks.
Don’t give me any shit they can’t do that by next month.
Until then I can only dream.
Thank god we have surplus machines (eg thinkpads XNNN) available that show us the light of truth.
So which devices actually support LineageOS, though? The one that wipes its proprietary firmware for the camera, leaving you with one that is orders of magnitude worse than the day you bought it?
This may not matter as much for a tablet, but let’s not give the impression as if the android side of things were better. Especially that that ipad will have insane lifetime. That android tablet may not in the first place.
The old safari is slow and, can you believe it, HN does not fully function!
Now, we all know the hardware is premium and this device would probably run linux very smoothly and the touch interface would be a dream. But we can only dream right?
Safari is not known for being slow.
That machine is _old_. The iPad was released in 2010 - 13 years ago. And even when new it was substantially slower than contemporary PCs or Macs - Apple then was not the CPU powerhouse it is today. It has 256Mb RAM and early (so, slow) NAND flash storage.
I really think you would (or, at least, most people would) be very disappointed at how well it would run Linux now. Things like web browsing and running recent applications, and more ‘HN’ things like coding, would be very sluggish.
So now I’m going to put an open source operating system on my first gen 256MB RAM iPad to run a web server and that’s the same functionality I had in 2010 when I was using it to browse the then modern web?
You could arrange it like that, sure. Webkit ships Linux builds, there are DEs that will give you a miserable but usable experience on those specs. If you really want to condemn yourself to a fate Apple doesn't support, there's no technical reason you couldn't.
Replacing the same functionality was never an inherent part of the deal though. There will never be Find My Linux or the Linux Store. The overall idea is that we put older hardware to use instead of recycling it for marginal returns on scrap. It's why they put "Reuse" before "Recycle" in the EPA maxim.
So your alternative to mean old Apple not allowing you to run Linux is to have a shitty experience running Linux on hardware that wouldn’t meet the needs of a modern consumer ?
Maybe. Apple doesn't let you put third-party OSes on iPhones or iPads, it's unclear what would happen if they did.
It would probably start with something niche like a barebones Linux port, but then it might turn into an Asahi-style project that does give the user a perfectly normal user experience. Maybe people start shipping CalyxOS-style hardened iOS distributions for people who want to further neuter Apple's control over their system. Or maybe people reverse-engineer a Vulkan driver onto the hardware and use iPads as low-power ASICs. The sky is really the limit, here.
> But the devices were dreadfully slow and RAM constrained by todays standards.
Yeh. That's why people turn them into DNLA servers or FTP heads or motion sensors or security cameras or weather machines, spotifyd servers, Docker playgrounds, RC cars, GPIO controllers, home assistants, esoteric K8s nodes, et. al.. There's plenty of things you can do with hardware you don't intend to directly interact with, things that the iPhone is perfectly suited to do.
> Which modern browser engine do you real think would work decently on such a device?
Webkit? You can still build it for 32-bit arches, I don't really see what the holdup is. Firefox could squeeze into ~100mb of memory if you're light on tabs, and Chrome would... well, run. With a little help from swap space.
> Besides that, no pre- 2012 iOS devices supported 4G and the carriers are dropping 3G support completely in the US by the end of the year.
That's fine. If you want to use iOS, use iOS. Running the entire iOS userland would be a complete waste of CPU cycles if you wanted to just use it as a homelab.
> Webkit? You can still build it for 32-bit arches, I don't really see what the holdup is. Firefox could squeeze into ~100mb of memory if you're light on tabs, and Chrome would... well, run. With a little help from swap space.
If you tried to use swap on any older iOS device the storage would rapidly fail. Those devices had storage that was never designed for swap.
These are the minimum system requirements for running Firefox on Linux.
Apple hasn’t updated or supported WebKit for 32 bit processors for years and from what I can tell neither does Chromium or Firefox
How well do you think a 256MB RAM, 500Mhz processor will run Firefox and be able to access todays web?
The first iPhone introduce in 2007 had the performance of a 1997 iMac. By 2010, you weren’t even up to the speed of 1Ghz processor that came out in 2001. iOS devices didn’t reach anywhere near turn of the century PC performance until 2012 with the 1Ghz dual core iPhone 5.
That would also make a horrible DLNA server and god forbid you needed any transcoding. My old 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo from 2010 could barely handle Plex by 2017 with any moderately complex videos.
You can buy a $50 cheap Android phone today that would run rings around it or a $100 Raspberry PI or Windows stick.
Yes it is slow on older hardware. It was slow even back then. You must have forgotten the time it took to paint the rest of the page if you scrolled or zoomed out a liiittle too fast.
Sure this was due to the minuscole amount of RAM Apple ships their product with, but “Safari is slow” is appropriate.
Also “Safari is slow” on my i9 as well, I just need to open a GitHub PR with 10+ files to see it come to a crawl, whereas Chrome never feels it. But hey, its scrolling is buttery smooth even if clicking doesn’t work.
A first-gen iPad is 13 years old. How many tablets running a 'user-friendly' OS from 13 years ago do you still think are actually out there, being used? The only old tablets I see are running iOS/iPad OS. Probably because they're built on solid metal and glass skeletons.
While I agree things could be better, Apple also does a commendable job of providing updates and support for devices much longer and much more consistently than their competitors. They are after all incentivized to do so thanks to their cut of App Store revenue.
The Google Nexus 7 is from 2012, so 11 years ago, and is still perfectly usable with a battery upgrade (possible because it's not glued/soldered) and a custom ROM (possible because the bootloader is open).
Hmm I would beg to differ. I have some N7s and they are too slow to even run as a panel for home assistant. Apps have really got much heavier since then.
Of course they are running only a mid-range SoC from 2012 so that makes sense.
I don't think so, the battery on one still works fine, and on the other I have replaced the internal battery with a DC-DC converter, so according to the tablet there is a "battery" which works fine and never runs dead :)
I always do this when I use tablets as wall panels, because eventually the battery will bloat and possibly catches fire. This way I can remove the battery altogether. None of the tablets and phones I have tested are capable of even starting up on USB power alone: With a dead battery or removed battery they simply won't even power on.
> None of the tablets and phones I have tested are capable of even starting up on USB power alone: With a dead battery or removed battery they simply won't even power on.
This is likely to combat instability. A large sudden spike in current draw that has to be supplied by the wall wart a few feet of wire away from the PCB can trigger a brown-out. Especially with the usual quantity of decoupling capacitors, specced around having a large current source on tap much closer to the point of use.
It’s true, but also it would cost little to unlock the device after they add it to the Vintage category.
I’m sure that the EU will eventually come up with legislation that forces some larger manufactures to open artificial gates automatically after they declare the products “obsolete”
The pixel, for example, already has a secure yet user-unlockable bootloader. So do modern x86_64 PC's. Statements like these, claiming that only apple can properly secure a device (and hence that users deserve to be locked out), simply show astounding ignorance.
Sure, but they were designed with that in mind, and have presence and authentication requirements, that, as I understand, are not retro-fittable to older devices.
My claim isn’t “it’s impossible to implement a secure bootloader that also has escape hatches”. I’m saying it’s borderline impossible to do that retroactively for a fleet of obsolete devices, in a way that doesn’t compromise security of those.
>A first-gen iPad is 13 years old. How many tablets running a 'user-friendly' OS from 13 years ago do you still think are actually out there, being used?
How many first gen iPads do you think are still being used. Those were slow as a sloth from their first year and quickly stopped getting support from Appel. Most users gave up on them and upgraded. So yeah, they're also e-waste.
Yes? Have you ever touched any code or wtf are you talking about? Literally every component’s driver has to be rewritten for a different operating system.
> They can install it on any x86 laptop and yet it runs worse than windows a lot of times
Spoken like someone who hasn't been near a Linux desktop/laptop for more than a decade.
This is flat out false. FFS even gaming has massively advanced to the point where most games just work out of the box with Proton (some even run better than on Windows, like Elden Ring). What issues are there with user-level software outside of certain vendors not porting their software, for which usually there's a FOSS/cross-platform alternative which is usually good enough (of course it can't cover every scenario, but nobody is saying it should).
Some drivers are still shit, but funnily the last one I had issues with is a MediaTek WiFi/BT chip, which also has a shitty driver on Windows..
Mainstream distros are absolutely fine on desktop, especially compared to Windows which has been declining a lot since Windows 7 due to Microsoft pushing hard for extra monetization.
I'm using PopOS and it's as good as it gets. I have a few minor I18n complaints because I'm picky on that but Windows is much worse in this area.
The amount of misconceptions about Apple in this post is staggering. It shows you know nothing about the company and how it operates.
Yet, like chatGPT, you wrote it in a convincing enough way, so here you are with a post full of wrong inferences and segues at the top of a comment section. Disheartening.
>linux very smoothly and the touch interface would be a dream
linux distros have not yet managed to get proper interface for mouse+keyboard. Linux desktop is still a shitshow. They can't even provide an experience as good as what windows was doing back in the XP era. Even if Apple allowed alternative OS, I doubt linus would be good on it.
Not only is it pretty good with enormous amounts of flexibility in terms of looks, keyboard combinations, etc. but it's actually better than macOS which is so lauded for it's UX. For one, you can have a different scroll direction between mouse and touchpad; and for two, you can do custom keyboard shortcuts without installing a third party keylogger.
Even in the XP era the Linux desktop experience was way better. Windows behaves consistently inconsistent and destroys productivity instead of staying out of my way. Now, in a business environment, add network drives and endpoint protection and see where you end up …
I guess you last tried Linux on desktop in XP era. Choose the right distro and it's perfectly fine, much better than Win 10 / 11 and fairly similar to XP.
Can you recommend any mud “engines” that can be used on a modern linux system which are easy enough to get into (both for users and devs) and battle tested for security?
i am afraid that this is rather difficult to answer. the first question is where you really want to go with this?
some of the issues to consider are:
do you want to potentially commercialize the game? that rules out some engines (most notably some LPmuds) because their license only allows noncommercial use.
then you have to consider the size of your future game. some MUDs are huge and their code has a long and checkered history. while they are more likely to be battle tested, i don't know if a huge engine would be a good start for a new game because it would prescribe a lot of game mechanics already, and may not be so easy to get started with.
personally i would rather opt for a small engine that doesn't have more than basic game mechanics so that you are free to develop your own. but those are most certainly not battle tested, and there are probably quite a few that were started but are now abandoned.
finding a small, active and tested engine may not even be possible.
i would recommend to actually play and build with a couple of MUDs that are based on potentially interesting engines to familiarize yourself with how it works and see if that is something that you'd be comfortable to work with, and then take it from there.
