@icedquinn rms cold emailed me this week asking me why i'm still running macOS. questions like this are some of the things i raised in my open letter response draft.

@sneak @thor i actually have done some of these steps before but with 3d printers, not CNC's.

it's mostly uh. designing some nice concepts (quinn is bad at art ), getting the clearances for parts and zooping it over to CAD files, and then getting some crazy people to run the milling/cutting.

@icedquinn @thor the motherboard and battery need to be designed at the same time as the case. the keyboard as well; the unibody macs have the keyboard layout milled into the bottom case, so there are different bottom cases for the different keyboard layouts.

@sneak @thor i don't think pine does this

@sneak @thor a pine's mainboard is very smol actually. it's mostly a pine64 jammed in a case.

@sneak @thor huh. is the obsession with chicklet keys because they can just recycle the metal from when they drill out the key holes to use as the caps as well?

@icedquinn @thor i am willing to bet this m1 air is somewhere between 3 and 10 times faster than it, not even counting the GPU.

@sneak @thor i'm sure it is, but this is something i can make happen.

i can't make apple stop being evil.

@icedquinn @thor no but we can disable the signing on the root, remount it rw in recovery, and remove a bunch of the trash

@sneak @thor we ultimately need to play our own games, and stop playing theirs.

@paoloredaelli GNU/Darwin might be possible actually if you reuse their signed kernel. i just got mine yesterday and haven't tampered with the OS yet, but bputil's manpage suggests you can disable the signed system volume verification.

@sneak signed kernel and signed binaries always scares me and reminds of the distopian tale "The right to read" 😥 we're already there

@paoloredaelli

you're late to the "referencing the right to read" party.

https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/

signed kernel and signed binaries means that malware that gains root can't overwrite them. this is largely a good thing, and great for platform security. the question is as always: who owns the keys?

@sneak I agree. It would be a good thing to be able to get keys to sign my own binaries and kernels. Is it possible with Apple? My last hw from Apple is an iBook-Se G3 clamshell (I know, it's Jurassic)

@paoloredaelli

no but you can use bputil to disable the signature checks on the readonly root partition (but only if you're not using disk encryption). replacing the kernel is not possible at this time afaik but also there's no real reason you'd need to do that. all of the objectionable apple stuff is in userspace.