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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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arm64 != M* hardware
Arm on Linux is fine. Supporting all the other SoC parts will obviously vary by vendor. I believe there are still many things broken with Apple's M* platform, but I'm pretty sure it boots. If you really want an Arm laptop, get one the new Qualcomm setups.
https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki
Things are progressing really fast actually! Take a look at the feature support page
Well, I guess that's subjective heh. The very rudimentary basics work on M3, but it's not in any way capable of daily driving. M1 looks to be the safest if you really need to go with Apple, but it seems you'd be much better off with the Qualcomm as it has native support.
The Qualcomm Elite x has still very little support. I would not recommend it as of yet.
Im using arch linux to respond to you right now from my dualboot Oneplus 6. Yeah linux on phones is cool. Recommended. 4.9 stars
All Raspberry Pis (~~except~~ even the Pico) are ARM devices so... yes I've been using Linux on ARM for years. It's been smooth sailing both as desktop or 24/7 home servers except for few very rare packages that aren't build for that architecture and then themselves have dependencies making it hard but overall as time passes and there are ARM processors everywhere it's only getting easier. I have not tried on Apple Silicon but here also support only seems to get better.
PS: also been using the PineTab 2 nearly daily and less frequently PinePhone and PinePhone Pro, all on ARM, also only Linux, all good.
Actually, the Pico is also an arm device, just the M0 variant which admittedly barely counts as a computer.
How has your experience been with Pi as a desktop? I've recently ordered a Pi 5 and intend to use it as my desktop, only using my more powerful desktop for heavier games.
Well I'm not. I have a different setup due to working in VR. I did use for myself and others a RPi as a desktop for few tools and as long as you stick within what's acceptable for its performance, it's really nice, such a compact setup. The RPi I use at home and at work are headless servers for e.g DLNA, IoT, backups.
If I didn't work in XR or play (BG3, EldenRing, etc) then I imagine I would find a RPi 4 sufficient for most of my tasks.
I'm typing this reply on an M1 Macbook Air running Asahi. My experience is very positive, but with some caveats. Some positives, some background to contextualize the positives, and some negatives.
Positives: Great screen, nice battery life when in use, fast, runs the programs that I use on a daily basis for work. Good support for the specific hardware that I have. I enjoy using it as my go-to laptop. Fedora isn't something that I use on any of my other linux boxes, but I didn't have much trouble setting it up and it works well with my other devices. Libreoffice, Firefox, Chromium, every DE and window manager that I've bothered to test - they work fine. I'm currently running Sway with no issues, KDE worked fine too. Sound, bluetooth, camera all work. Again, my 9-to-5 day job is fully doable from this computer and I enjoy using it.
Background: I've been tinkering with Raspberry Pi devices for years and I made do with a PI 4 as a daily driver for a few months once. That experience helped me to focus on native linux solutions that didn't depend on WINE or x86-specific programs. I can't remember every decision that I made during that time, but I definitely changed my workflow a bit, started doing more in the terminal, and started using programs that were less resource-heavy. That carried over to how I use other devices. I also don't game much.
Negatives: Gaming is limited on this hardware. I can play minetest, tuxkart, and some light emulation. That's about it, but I don't mind. If you're trying to run windows programs, you'll be out of luck. My linux experience on this laptop prior to the Asahi shift to Fedora was a bit buggy because it was a beta version and sound wasn't supported(other than bluetooth). Everything works fine now, but my understanding is that this is very model-specific. I would probably be having a bad time on newer mac hardware. Power management is so-so and it depends heavily on your choice of desktop environment. If you close your lid and don't plug in the laptop, you might find out that the battery is dead when you try to use it a day later. No multimonitor support - the USB-C ports are more limited in function than they are when running MacOS.
Also, my only experience is with a niche distribution, so bear that in mind. For me, Asahi has been excellent but don't expect to be able to run your favorite distro on the hardware. Time will tell if the progress made by Asahi will lead to greater support for Apple Silicon by other distributions, and time will tell how long Asahi will exist as an active project. I preferred the Arch version, but I had no real choice but to jump to Fedora when the developers did. Not a big deal for me.
time will tell how long Asahi will exist as an active project.
You can support the Asahi project on Patreon if you like. I don't five bucks a month even though I prefer MacOS just because it's a cool project.
Thank for the great reply!
What do you mean when you say light emulation? GameCube, PlayStation 2 type of light emulation you mean?
What other consoles have you tested? Any luck with ps3, ps4 and switch titles?
I've never tried anything beyond DOS or the SNES/Genesis era, honestly.
Don’t ditch macOS on the m1. Asahi has some critical features missing and you’ll want to be able to switch back.
Ran Asahi for several months, tried it out again recently. It’s good/fine, I just don’t love fedora.
There’s some funkiness with the more complicated install, the AI acceleration doesn’t work, no thunderbolt / docking station.
MacBooks are great hardware but I don’t think they’re the best option for Linux right now. If you’re never going to boot into macOS then I’d look for x13, new Qualcomm, isn’t there a framework arm64 option now or was that a RISC module?
I’m also assuming you’re not looking to do any gaming? Because gaming on ARM is not really a thing right now and doesn’t feel like it will be for a long while.
You aren't stuck to Fedora with Asahi, I'm running Debian on my M1 Pro MBP
I think the neural engine works, but you need an out-of-tree kernel module. The asahi wiki talks about that, they say it is yet to be merged on mainline.
Gaming on arm is absolutely a thing... But not on the M's... About the other chips it's just on its infancy right now, fex-emu(https://github.com/szllzs/FEXEMU) and box64(https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64) are both capable of running wine, and of course steam. Games work, I don't think its 100% of native speed, and the compatibility must not be perfect, but like wine/proton I'm sure it's only going to get better.
The apple silicon devices have 16k pages kernels, while x86 is 4k pages, that would not be a problem if we had 4k page emulation/simulation on Linux, but we don't, seems like macOS's way of emulating 4k pages is wasteful to performance, and the contributors do not wish to make a similar implementation, so we don't get one for now.
For at least 3 years, I’ve been wanting to get an apple silicon mac to daily drive Linux on
Can you tell us why?
Since the first release of apple silicon I was quite a bit impressed with the hardware, of course im not really an apple guy, and so I initially thought "cool, but that's not for me"
And then came asahi linux, and it changed everything, in a very short period they got the GPU working, and then came vulkan, opengl 4 and 4.2, most stuff seems to be working already, either on the bleeding edge kernel or the mainline; https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki Take a look at the feature support page, it's really impressive.
I started to study more and more the development of Linux on apple silicon, and even more so after my laptop's hinge has broken(tldr: I don't have a laptop anymore, it's just a PC); recently I've been wanting to buy a new laptop, so I can actually use it as one, of course, as any Latin American, I wish to buy for the long run, and all the options seem to be:
1 - Qualcomm laptops designed for windows ridden with shitware, useless AI, and a ducking copilot key( also I have terrible experience with the firmware of my current windows first laptop, I do not wish for more)
2 - Recent or older terribly power inefficient X86 laptops(mine is from 2021, the battery life sucked, even in windows, and it just heats up so easily, I don't think it can even maintain maximum clock for 5 minutes straight)
3 - Apple silicon macs designed for macOS first that have a decent compatibility with linux, that will only get better with time.
Of course, I do believe X86 will get better with time, as it has already gotten, but until then, I either stick with my current deplorable hardware and wait until the improvements get actually mainstream, or buy another older x86 laptop, just to retire it later on.
Linux on Qualcomm laptops really that bad? I've been considering a purchase of a 1st gen once the 2nd gen comes out (probably grab an ex display model on the cheap).
I've not been following developments closely enough, but I know the battery life (in windows at least) is tiers better than my current 4800hs / 1650 with 65% battery health.
I've too considered a MacBook, but their never within my budget for the spec that I want, guess I was too hopeful about Qualcomm laptops 😞
I don't think its that "bad" current, but I'm sure you will have to wait for a bit, Qualcomm's Linux kernel work is really not complete, and currently the only laptops you can get working with Linux are the thinkpad x13s and (maybe?) some other older models.
Not sure how unbothered your experience is going to be on any of these, and they're all just as expensive as macs
Ahh yeah the price is a waiting game for me, Apple products hold onto their value and for me having the bleeding edge isn't what I'm chasing these days.
Guess I'll wait and see how the Qualcomm products go on the used market for their price.
I got my 4800hs for a steal; maybe I need to aim lower.
From experience, most apps/packages that are compiled for Linux are compiled for both x86 and arm. I've had no real issues getting software on my OnePlus 6 running on postmarket os (full Linux os on a phone basically). This is very likely because ARM is a thing in the server space, so most packages in your distros repositories will be compiled for all architectures (and that's if it's not required by the distro's repos to have the two supported).
Other software ftom outside the repos where linux was already a second class citizen like discord or Spotify may be troublesome though
I installed Asahi Linux on my M1 Air just to kick the tires. It worked great in my limited testing. I didn't stay on it (never intended to), so I can only say that my initial testing was positive.
I was using the pinebook pro ARM laptop with manjaro linux as a semi-daily driver for a while. It is fine for simple tasks and web browsing, but you cannot expect the hardware to be quick or snappy. I had consistent issues with wifi, and eventually I got fed up with the weak performance and switched back to an x86-64 architecture laptop. In terms of software and support, besides the wifi issues, it was fine
Ditto, except mine just died one day. I put it away for bed, woke up, flipped it open, Nada. Brick. I felt it was a bit slower than I'd like, but got pretty good battery life.
Really tempted to try a Musebook, based on Risc-V, because apparently I'm a sucker for punishment.
We do no kink shaming on this household
I dunno if that counts, but I was given a Macbook Air M2 from work that I didn't need and I've been happily running macOs on it for simple daily use.
Whenever the situation requires Linux I fire up one of 3 distros I have as a VM and they work like a charm. I pass-through one of the USB ports to the VM and it's basically an M1 with Linux at that point in terms of performance (well not really, but it's very smooth, no complaints).
Might wanna go that route instead, just run macOs natively and your favorite distro as a VM.
What do you use as a vm on an arm mac? I was looking into this a while back to run linux on my work m3 macbook but i couldnt find any good options
Mainly Kali for my needs, completely hassle-free on VMware but any ARM version should work.
Want me to try a particular distro as a test?
I daily drive m2 max on NixOS, all software just works (hyprland, keepassxc, etc. except discord).
opengl works well, vulkan won't be stable and shipped by default for at least 6 months tho.
no wine, gaming, etc. no external monitor, only non-thunderbolt hubs work, no internal mic, quick battery drain while suspended, if all of that is fine for you, it's a great dev machine.
That is quite interesting, have you tried the edge kernel?
Torvalds is using an apple Silicon now. He has some talks about how it is.
With macOS or Asahi?
He is on another level, so I imagine he can solve issues that arise compared to the average person 😁
With Linux, a custom Fedora install afaik
I run debian on an x13s. I would not recommend it if you are an average tux member.
My recommendation would be to wait for the first devices from manufactures like tuxedo and the snapdragon elite x. And every device may have its own quirks, so wait for reviews.
It was a hard time. I daily drive it but it still remains unpolished.
A beginner linux friend of mine had an apple air m1. He ran linux on it but decided to ditch it for a framework. So i assume milage depends on your capabilities. I wouldn't go that route and instead opted one and a half years ago for that lenovo device.
It has the best chassis I ever owned but the usability is limited. E.g.: Since Kernel 6.8 I now have to issue su -c "echo start > /some/module/thingy/mode" after each start to get external monitor, sound and battery working. Had to manually research this in IRC logs.
My two cents.
I used my Chromebook Duet 3 from Lenovo which has a Snapdragon ARM chip.
I installed a custom compiled Kernel with some weird distro iso maker from a dude for such devices. It adds a few drivers to make various things work.
Bluetooth, Audio, Usi pen, Touchscreen worked. It was nice.
The USI pen and touchscreen glitches sometimes out, which forces me to suspend this convertable for a second and wake it up to fix the issue.
I couldn't really install lunarvim or some other development tools because some things just are not compileable/installable. I didnt bither eith waydroid as It was too complex for me to really grasp how to install the header files and so on.
I did use KDE (5.25 I think), with Wayland and it was good actually. Xournalpp for writing and logseq for storing knowledge in patterns, which sometims had buggy graphics on Wayland for some reason.
Things like RNote couldn't work because the Mesa drivers weren't really installed or smth and kernel header files were needed here too I think.
Firefox with touch on wayland also was a nice experience that worked pretty great (but needs environment value to be set for Wayland).
I accepted that I will get a new device after 2 Years of using that tablet and replacing paper on school. Did work great for me. I prefer Penoval Pens. They have them for all devices. Usi and MPP and much more.
So I got the Starlite 5 (from starlabs.systems) which has a worse Battery lifetime than expected (I think but not stress tested. OS shows 3 to 6 hours sometimes but advertised was 14h) but at least I can even run some small Steam games on that n200 intel chip and install all Applications I want because its AMD64 Architecture cpu. It kinda overheats at the top right corner.
Note that both products are convertables, or rather Tablets with a detachable keyboard.
So at the end. I can use this Chromebook convertable for some narrow things but not for everything, like a Computer should be able to. But maybe all the skills you need are capable to be run on a slow Snapdragon with aarch64 Architecture. Unsure how Apple M1 is there compared to that.
I've done some embedded arm Linux dev work and use a raspberry pi 400 and an android phone. All work fine.
Honestly if you buy a Mac give macOS a try. It’s Unix based so you’ll feel at home in the command line. It doesn’t come with a command line package manager but there are two popular ones you can install (homebrew and macports).
I did this. Was a ThinkPad Linuxer for years and now I just use an M1 for sysadmin/programming/web/vids. Quite happy to just use Linux on my servers these days. MacOS does the job nicely on laptop. I suppose it depends on how FOSS you want to be.
It’s amazing. You press one button on a new out of box Mac and you’re in a zsh!
Also, sleep and suspend just work.
I think the thing I *adore* in MacOS is the fact that it comes with ZSH preconfigured.
No, the fact that it comes with ZSH (OOTB), period.
Mine sure doesn't. I send it to sleep (since you can't send it directly to hibernate like a normal OS), and the next day the battery is empty and it won't start. This happens about once a month, and I haven't found the common variable yet.
nix-darwin is kind of nice too, but only really for CLI tools. You can let nix-darwin manage your homebrew for GUI stuff, if you want.
I'd still take linux if I could though. macOS ist just work mandated.
Raspberry Pis are also ARM-based, and you can use them as desktops. Only problems are that they aren't very powerful for media usage (e.g. video editing, 4k video decoding on youtube, blender etc). If you're not into such high performance media production, then sure, they're fine for everyday usage.
I got Asahi working on M1, and everything works fine aside from the camera and hibernation. The second is a bit of a bummer cause the battery keeps draining fairly quickly even when you put it to sleep.
main issue with apple stuff is the ridiculous pricing for memory.
$500 to add just 8gb of ram and 128gb of SSD? What's that, the year 2012?
It's 2024 and it's ridiculous that a $1500 laptop comes with the same amount of memory of a $300 Motorola smartphone
I have a Libre LePotato, Pinebook and Pinephone. They're fine for most of my use cases, but they don't handle games too well. They are also not great for VMs or emulation, and no chance in hell would I use any for my home media server.
That being said, I'm starting to see ARM CPU desktops in my feeds, and I think one of those would be fine for everything but gaming (which is more an issue of the availability of native binaries and not necessarily outright performance). TBH at that price point, using off-chip memory and GPU, I don't see much reason to go with ARM; maybe the extra cores, but I can't imagine there is much in the way of electrical efficiency that SoCs entail.