What a joke. None of the drivers on x86 were open source, and there were literally thousands of devices that needed reverse engineering. The M1 instruction set is ARM which is already supported by Linux.

I am talking about the CPU not other hardware. Comparing Apple’s apples with apples.

Hmm, well the CPU in the M1 is ARM64 which is already open. But the M1 is a system on a chip that includes many proprietary components besides the CPU, such as GPU. So it's not apples to apples with 90's x86, which was a CPU only, not system-on-a-chip.