When will macOS stop x86 support?

[c-o-pr]

It is good for users like us to support them with money and in return, they provide us periodical software security updates and technical support.

Otherwise, there is no fund to counter-balance Windows and Apple.

Dear HK, I dig your enthusiasm, but the world is somewhat more complex than your view... Certainly do support what you love, but there's no need for grass-roots evangelism of Ubuntu. It's a big company in a complex industrial SW ecology.

Ubuntu, like other companies, generates an enormous amount of value by providing access to paid support.

We are in an age where ordinary users pay rent, both overtly, and in shadow forms just by operating a SW system. It's so lucrative that fortunes are made and lost on merely having access to large numbers of users. These fortunes generate a lot of development and production energy behind the scenes. The process is colloquially known as "monetization".

Canonical is a significant company, like Red Hat, that prospers by carefully controlling development, construction and release of Linux for large organizations with budgets for service.

Canonical, unlike Red Hat, also puts a lot of effort into a desktop presentation that's easy to get going and looks approachable to regular users, a phone, and a vertical integration.

(I suggest an Ubuntu variant called Linux Mint if you want an even more approachable user experience)

But the ecology of Linux is vast beyond reckoning, take your pick:

View attachment IMG_5434.png

Some important Linux variants by name, according to Red Hat:

• Android
• Arch Linux
• Centos
• Debian
• Elementary OS
• Fedora Linux
• Gentoo Linux
• Kali Linux
• Linux Lite
• Linux Mint
• Manjaro Linux
• MX Linux
• openSUSE
• Pop!_OS
• Puppy Linux
• Slackware
• Solus
• SUSE
• Ubuntu and all its versions (Gnome, Kubuntu using KDE Plasma Desktop, Ubuntu mate, Xubuntu, and Lubuntu—just to name a few)
• Zorin OS

I did a quick search for you to give you more of an idea of the adoption and use of Linux:

An overview of major Linux distributions and FreeBSD

DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

News and feature lists of Linux and BSD distributions.

distrowatch.com

Linux Statistics – 2023

Linux Statistics 2023 - TrueList

Read on to discover the most relevant Linux statistics and learn about its user demographics, market share and adoption, usage data, and more!

truelist.co

My favorite stat:

Steam (gaming) on Linux in 2022 managed 1.96 percent, while macOS accounted for 1.84 percent of machines.

Please enjoy and know that your support can be meaningful without a need to fork personal $$ over to Canonical. They succeed if you merely adopt an installation.

 

[c-o-pr]

One last thought on the messiness of history...

While Linus Torvalds is rightly heralded for Linux kernel, he did something just as insanely great, which has enormous positive impact on hackintosh:

He created Git!

This except from a 2004 Eric Raymond review of a book that impugned Torvalds of not inventing his own work on the Linux kernel captures a key idea: version control as a source of trust:

Samizdat: Stinks on Ice

From Raymond's 2004 review:

This had to be the tome promised to us in a press release ten days previously, titled Torvalds claim to "invent" Linux probably false, says new study. ADTI's claims had already been addressed with withering sarcasm by Linus Torvalds and blasted by Andy Tanenbaum, the man from whom ADTI alleges that Linus stole Linux.
Your [the book's] claim that we know nothing about the origins of most of what you call "hybrid" code is false. We use version-control systems; many projects have change logs clear back to the single empty file they started with. These histories can be tracked, and changes attributed to individuals.

The most distinguishing feature of git is the use of a cryptographic chain of hashes to ensure that for any given instance of a codebase no previous commit (code check-in) has since been tampered with. This is an organic characteristic of git, no special actions are needed to make it work.

Git was first released by Linus in 2005.

A similar approach is used today by Apple to ensure the OS installation has not been tampered with when it's delivered to your device.