Update: This proposal has now been put into action.
Hi everyone, this is a proposed change for Fedora Release Criteria. It is related to a wide set of changes that Fedora Quality team need to perform this cycle, which are summarized here, so please feel free to read that for more background information and general overview, thanks.
Proposal: No longer consider dual-boot functionality on an Intel-based Macbook to be release-blocking.
You can see the current release criterion here, and (expand the footnotes sections) it reads:
The installer must be able to install into free space alongside an existing macOS installation, install and configure a bootloader that will boot Fedora.
This criterion only covers Mac devices with an Intel x86_64 processor.
This criterion is being obsoleted by time, because Apple stopped producing Intel-based Macs many years ago (replaced them by “Apple silicon” M* processors, which are not supported by Fedora at this moment). The last Macbooks which were reasonably usable with Fedora are 2017 models, which still contain the T1 security chip (newer models have a T2 chip, and their internal keyboard and touchpad don’t work with Fedora kernel). System updates support for 2017 models ends this year, older models are already obsolete. This means that users of pre-2017 models likely already switched to Fedora, if they wanted, users of 2017 models might do it this year, and there are no future users in this regard, because their hardware is not well supported by Fedora.
The Quality team used to test Intel-based Mac dual-boot regularly. We lost the test hardware eventually, but still asked our community to participate in this testing, and tried to help resolve any issues. But the era of Intel-based Macs (at least those supported by Fedora) has come to an end, and it no longer makes sense to keep it release-blocking and devote significant testing time to this, in our eyes. The importance of it is inevitably converging to zero. (Asahi Linux might change the story for Apple silicon Macs, but that’s a future discussion once Fedora can offer the same functionality).
Important note: If you’re not very familiar with the release criteria process, please read this. Removing a release criterion doesn’t mean removing the feature. Even after this change, dual-boot installation to an Intel-based Mac will still work. The difference is that if a problem is found, it will not be considered critical enough to block the release of the next upcoming Fedora. Instead, it will be resolved as any other standard bug.