Asahi Linux On The Apple M1: "Usable As A Basic Linux Desktop" Sans GPU Acceleration

[xcom]

But why you would install Linux on a Mac when you paid for the full-extra MacOS ?

[birdie]

I wonder why no one openly hates Apple in this thread while other companies which provide 100% functional yet closed drivers for Linux are loathed and ridiculed.

[akira128]

Its interesting but waste of Time and talents

I think it's the perfect use of talent. The more platforms that can run Linux, the better right? So if a vendor decides not to support Linux, then no one should develop Linux drivers for that platform/device/system? That's a pretty weak argument IMO. Linux would be pretty useless if that was the case. In any case, I'm pretty sure this is a labor of love for these developers in many respects. It's also pretty cool to able to run Linux on a platform that has zero vendor support. It just shows the resiliency and dedication of the open-source community to organize, analyze, document, develop, and to get s**t done. When you understand all of the blood, sweat, and tears that it took to get Linux running on the M1 platform, it makes it more meaningful in some respects --because you're directly benefiting from the work of world-class developers many of whom believe in the open-source ethos in some way or another. So, it becomes almost like a product of the community --by the people for the people sort of thing. I'm glad they didn't just throw up their hands and give up....

[Snaipersky]

I wonder why no one openly hates Apple in this thread while other companies which provide 100% functional yet closed drivers for Linux are loathed and ridiculed.

Apple is apathetic, Nvidia is actively hostile to open drivers on their hardware.

[mdedetrich]

But why you would install Linux on a Mac when you paid for the full-extra MacOS ?

Because Mac's with the new M1 chip have the best performance/power efficiency of any laptop/phone that you can buy. The chips are so power efficient that the Mac Air laptop with M1 chip doesn't even need a fan (which ironically makes it one of the most reliable laptops in its sector).

Also that extra cost you are talking about applied when Mac was using Intel chips, when they moved to M1 even if you look at bare hardware that cost can be arguably justified.

[xhustler]

Shout out to Alyssa Rosenzweig and the Asahi Linux team. Those complaining that this is a waste of talent and time have not done any projects on embedded boards. Their herculean efforts on panfrost and now the M1 ports are nothing short of a miracle.

[nsklaus]

Why so many negative posts? This is almost unbelievably fast progress on a very cool project.


To anyone super technical here: is there any chance Rosetta 2 would ever work on linux+M-chips?

yes there are projects that allows x86 / x86_64 code to run transparently on arm64/M1, just like rosetta2 does on macos, but on linux.
one such a project is 'fex-emu': https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/
i tried it myself some months ago and it was able to run game like dead cells for linux, SDL x86_64 for example.
i used parallels ( a virtualization software on macos) tu run ubuntu distribution (the arm64 flavor) and was able to run x86 software in it.
the lead dev of asahi, marcan, has expressed interest in having fex-emu to work on asahi.
fex should also allow us to run unmodified x86 / x86_64 wine on asahi, down the road at some point.

the M1 macs are fast, low power consumption, nice machines, i too think this project is progressing quickly and it will be nice to be able to use linux on these machines.
i salute the effort accomplished by the asahi linux team.

[birdie]

Apple is apathetic, Nvidia is actively hostile to open drivers on their hardware.

Hostile how? By providing full support sans support for some fancy graphics system which is broken in itself?

[xcom]

Because Mac's with the new M1 chip have the best performance/power efficiency of any laptop/phone that you can buy. The chips are so power efficient that the Mac Air laptop with M1 chip doesn't even need a fan (which ironically makes it one of the most reliable laptops in its sector).

Also that extra cost you are talking about applied when Mac was using Intel chips, when they moved to M1 even if you look at bare hardware that cost can be arguably justified.

I still wont buy Mac. Ryzen 4000 is also very power efficient.

[M@yeulC]

Nice progress.

that will make things like booting older distro installers possible on newer hardware

Older installers might have compatible drivers, but how is the newer devicetree going to be provided? Unless that device is not DT-based? (UEFI?). I wasn't under that impression from the blog post.