mac help needed

[Chris Murphy]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 3:07 PM, kendell clark <coffeekingms at gmail.com> wrote:

> "I'm sorry. I wasn't criticizing mjg59's work, but rather the amount of
> work that's needed just to make an apple computer boot linux.

I know but it's a lot of work to get any machine to boot linux, it's
taken essentially a complete rewrite of every boodloader to support
UEFI computers. And enough things are different that even end user
interaction, documentation and troubleshooting have changed.

> If they'd
> simply followed the standards it would've worked. Granted they had to
> use something before uefi, but if they'd simply changed to uefi once
> this became available this wouldn't be necessary. But apple being apple,
> guess you can't really expect that.

Yeah I don't know why Apple doesn't give up Apple Special EFI Sauce in
favor of UEFI, in particular as it's become abundantly clear they need
Secure Boot at least as much as everyone else.

The thing is the UEFI spec doesn't disallow the way they do things.
And also doesn't define any UI/UX either. In Apple's ~3 decades of
experience with NVRAM, they learned early on about NVRAM
confusion/corruption, to the degree they've had a keyboard shortcut to
use at boot time for resetting it, something that doesn't seem to
exist on any non-Mac I've come across, yet still manage to end up with
corrupt or superflous and non-functioning boot entries.

So while I don't like the lack of Apple's documentation, the thing is
their implementation is metric tons better UX than what anyone else is
doing, standardized or not. The sad fact is, Apple have no incentive
to write their own standard or spec, to make it easier for other
manufacturers to replicate this UI/UX elsewhere. And the also sad fact
is that every PC firmware OEM feels it's their god given right, for
marketing purposes, to have completely different UI/UX per derived
instance anyway. Thus a standard would almost certainly be flaunted
anyway. Now we're actually at a net worse scenario on non-Macs with
UEFI because one user can't actually give detailed instructions to
another user because the UI's are sufficiently different that it's
pointless to do so.

Anyway, I'd like things to be different, but I don't know that Apple
is really any worse under the hood than anyone else. Certainly from
the outside the UI/UX seems a lot more sane though.


-- 
Chris Murphy