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

[Viki Ai]

1) Why is that laughable? I plan on buying an M1 macbook air and putting Linux on it. You can laugh all you want....but have you actually used macOS before?! I'm forced by my company to develop on a macbook pro, and it's just a horrible OS. You can't do basic things like dragging and snapping windows. There's no decent terminal emulators. The default terminal emulator + iterm2 suck balls. I never appreciated gnome-terminal until I used a mac. Homebrew is horrible package manager, the filesystem isn't logically laid out. I hate the bouncing docks icons, and why am I constantly being asked to create an apple id. I could go on and on. Most of what I do on that macbook is via the command line. I never login to it directly (after the first boot) I just ssh in from my Linux machine. I also use my Linux file manager to connect to a few directories via sftp --so I can modify files using a (Linux) editor if I need to. To each their own. Everyone's got their own thing going on. But I certainly wouldn't find the idea that someone would want a usable OS to develop on laughable.

2) What!? The fact that Linux can run fine using less resources sounds like a win to me. Never much cared for bloated, resource intensive operating systems.
It could also be a testament to how well the M1 SOC performs. Maybe, it's just a really well-designed SOC that performs exceptionally well.

3) I agree with you on that one ; )

Heh, I work in an art school and am the only PC user there. Two refresh cycles ago central-IT put a Mac on my desk because they just assumed, because of my department, I would insist on one anyway. I let them because I figured, so what? it's just an OS+GUI, not like it really matters exactly what the window-dressing looks like. GODS was I wrong! I had them swap in a PC within 2 weeks (running Win7, but I don't actually mind 7's UI, though I wouldn't use it if I wasn't being paid by the hour! Post-Win7 it has been a somewhat downhill trend so far, though! I have been working from home on my Debian box for 3 of 4 days the past several months. I wonder if they noticed my productivity go up?!)

Like the new ARM-M1 hardware design, though. Pity about the OS presently on top of it!

[Sonadow]

Can you give an example of this? FreeBSD most conforms to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) as do most Linux distributions.
But hey, maybe I'm missing something.
https://docs.freebsd.org/doc/6.1-REL...structure.html

UNlike Linux, FreeBSD actually makes proper use of /usr/local. Core system files critical to the running of FreeBSD goes in /lib, /bin, /usr/lib/, usr/bin, etc etc.

Everything else like X, gtk3, applications and other crap are placed in /usr/local/ where they should be. Clear seperation between operating system and userland.

[mdedetrich]

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

Sure, just stating that Mac's M1 is in a league of its own. Note only is it a full node ahead of AMD (TSMC always gives Apple the preference for the newest node), ARM is also a more power efficient design compared to X86/64

[jo-erlend]

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

If I wanted to use OS X, I would've bought a Mac. We have been in desperate need for a really good ARM desktop with Linux support, because we really need developers to optimize our ARM software stacks. The M1 is a really good ARM desktop machine and could be a game changer for things like Linux phones, which absolutely must have those optimizations. My current Linux phone runs out of battery in five hours. That's just not ok.

[jo-erlend]

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.

Well, in the context of Linux, there is a very big difference between a corporation like Apple and one like Nvidia. Nvidia is using Linux for their benefit, while actively causing problems for Linux. Apple is just ignoring Linux.

Also, this context is not about Apple, but about open source Linux driver development for a really awesome machine that we _really_ want access to in the Linux world to solve the-chicken-and-the-egg problem of lacking ARM optimizations causing developers to not run ARM desktops, which causes them to not work on optimizing the code.

[birdie]

Well, in the context of Linux, there is a very big difference between a corporation like Apple and one like Nvidia. Nvidia is using Linux for their benefit, while actively causing problems for Linux. Apple is just ignoring Linux.

Also, this context is not about Apple, but about open source Linux driver development for a really awesome machine that we _really_ want access to in the Linux world to solve the-chicken-and-the-egg problem of lacking ARM optimizations causing developers to not run ARM desktops, which causes them to not work on optimizing the code.

Any proofs of that?

[sophisticles]

Well, in the context of Linux, there is a very big difference between a corporation like Apple and one like Nvidia. Nvidia is using Linux for their benefit, while actively causing problems for Linux. Apple is just ignoring Linux.

Apple is ignoring Linux because Apple already has a full featured, robust, stable, capable OS and Linux, despite what the Linux faithful think, can't compete.

As for "Nvidia is using Linux for their benefit", I have no idea what this even means. "Using" in what way? Nvidia is one of the most innovative and richest tech companies in the world, worth billions, it's certainly not because of Linux.

[Developer12]

Any proofs of that?

Proof? "Hey nvidia, Fuck You!" -Linus Torvalds

As the head honcho said himself, they'd love to be selling chips into the android market. But they simply don't want to work with the linux kernel devs and insist on shipping their own complete, fully closed, graphics stack.

[Developer12]

Apple is ignoring Linux because Apple already has a full featured, robust, stable, capable OS and Linux, despite what the Linux faithful think, can't compete.

As for "Nvidia is using Linux for their benefit", I have no idea what this even means. "Using" in what way? Nvidia is one of the most innovative and richest tech companies in the world, worth billions, it's certainly not because of Linux.

Apple doesn't care because whether you run macOS or Linux, they still make a hardware sale. Contrast that to people running hackintoshes with macOS on commodity hardware, where apple gets nothing.

Nvidia uses linux as a platform to run their GPUs on. You don't see any of the top supercomputers (all with nvidia GPUs) running on windows. I don't 100% agree with this point because Linux is equally free to use for everyone, but it's definitely true that nvidia has a huge reliance on linux. Hell, I don't think they even bother making windows drivers for their extremely lucrative datacenter-focused products.

[jo-erlend]

Apple is ignoring Linux because Apple already has a full featured, robust, stable, capable OS and Linux, despite what the Linux faithful think, can't compete.

Linux can certainly compete, particularly on gaming.

As for "Nvidia is using Linux for their benefit", I have no idea what this even means. "Using" in what way? Nvidia is one of the most innovative and richest tech companies in the world, worth billions, it's certainly not because of Linux.

I know you think that video editing is the only valid use of computers, but Nvidia makes billions selling GPUs to the high-end server-market, not to mention super-computers; all of which run Linux. And that's a great thing, but the question was why we care more about Nvidia being difficult to Linux than Apple being difficult. And that's because Nvidia is supposed to be on our side. Apple isn't.

By the way; I find it very puzzling that you're here.