shamino

So Epic is claiming that if you develop a popular app for your own platform, you have some legal obligation to port it to your competitor's platforms?  And give it away for free?

Well that cuts both ways.  Why can't I buy Fortnite for Linux?  How about for my Raspberry Pi?  Or my SGI Indy workstation?

If they don't immediately do this right now, then they are being anti-competitive and need to be punished to the full extent of the law.

That's complete nonsense.  Nobody expects Apple or any other computer company to do the impossible.

You can't run PowerPC or ARM or SPARC or any other non-x86 system software on a PC without an emulator.  And you can't run any non-ARM system software on Apple Silicon without an emulator.

As for deciphering the boot sequence to let ARM-based Linux run on a Mac, this is no different from earlier generations of Macs (68K, PPC and Intel) being able to run system software not approved by Apple.  Apple has never supported this, but they have never explcitly tried to prevent it either.  It's up to third parties to figure out how, and as we're seeing right now, the Linux community is coming pretty close to figuring that out.

The x86 PC is a unique example in the history of computing.  It can run a variety of operating systems from a variety of sources because the hardware designers do not (in general) develop any system software, so they need to make sure their product are compatible with what others invent.   But this is not and has not been the case for most other computer architectures.  Nearly all other computers/workstations, current and historic (not just from Apple, but IBM, SGI, Sun, DEC, HP and others), are designed in conjunction with their system software and the manufacturers do not support the use of any third-party system software running on their hardware.

Very few people would consider all these computers to not be "general purpose" simply because they can't run x86 PC system software.

Your problem will exist whether or not the Linux community figures out how to write a boot-loader for M1 Macs.

if you need to run x86 code without emulation, then you need an x86-based computer.  Right now, you can still get x86 laptops from Apple - two model MacBook Pros (one 13" and one 16") and one MacBook Air are still Intel-based.  When Apple stops selling these, you'll need to buy your computer from someone else.  But Apple's M1 boot-loader architecture has nothing to do with this.

But, of course, you don't have to run Windows as a result of this.  That x86 laptop can run Linux natively, which can host your VMs.  If you think the computer will only be used for VM hosting, you can also install something like vSphere ( https://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor.html ) and avoid having anything other than a thin hypervisor between your VMs and the hardware.