No, android does not count.
Is there anyone who daily drives Linux on apple silicon or other ARM hardware? If so, then how is your experience, would you recommend it?
For at least 3 years, I’ve been wanting to get an apple silicon mac to daily drive Linux on, lately I’ve been seriously considering getting one of these machines, or even other ARM hardware, like the thinkpad x13s or even the new Qualcomm laptops.
I’m pretty much sold on a used macbook air m1 at this point, but I still wish to hear what other people have to say
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
Don’t ditch macOS on the m1. Asahi has some critical features missing and you’ll want to be able to switch back.
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).
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.
Aww, that sucks.
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.
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 is just work mandated.
I can’t move the close maximize minimize buttons to the top right so MacOS is dead to me on arrival.
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.
The Qualcomm Elite x has still very little support. I would not recommend it as of yet.
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.
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
Android doesn’t count, but what about my PinePhone?
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
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
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 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?
Have you ever tried Box86/Box64 for Wine? I was wondering what the experience is like these days.
