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Comment by ogre_codes | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't be so sure, there are a fair number of people who want a machine that will run x86 for various reasons. Windows support/ Linux support. Even considering how impressive x86 VMs looked in the demo, lots of people will prefer using intel silicon for guaranteed compatibility.

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I could see the "final Intel Macs" having a value to folks; somewhat similar to the 2015 Macbook Pros which many considered the "last good Macbooks" before Apple fumbled things with the 2016-onward Macs and their gimpy keyboards.

In this case, I don't think the first ARM Macs will have undesirable hardware ala the first few years of Touchbar Macs, but there will be some straggler software whose ARM ports will be delayed or will never happen. For those who depend upon that software, the final Intel Macs will be invaluable.

I still have my dual G5 PowerMac. Right now it runs Lubuntu.

Did they say the Linux VMs in the demo were x86? They said "virtualization", which to me, implies ARM Linux.

Yeah, the fact that they didn't show off Windows, but instead Debian of all things, was very telling.

And strange - Windows already runs on ARM doesn’t it?

I don't think there's a way to have a licensed Windows ARM copy right now on arbitrary hardware. I thought they only provided OEM versions on certified hardware.

> Yeah, the fact that they didn't show off Windows, but instead Debian of all things, was very telling.

I suspect developers running VMs with Linux on them is far more common than developers running Windows VMs. Likely by an order of magnitude. Web developers want Linux VMs, Windows developer have Windows laptops.

You'd be surprised. It was the only option for those writing native apps to have a platform that could legally run all of your tooling if you shipped Mac/Windows/Linux.

> It was the only option for those writing native apps to have a platform that could legally run all of your tooling if you shipped Mac/Windows/Linux.

Sure, but the number of people writing cross platform apps is a small fraction of the number of web developers out there.

But given the amount of time they talked about how large a part native apps play into the transitions, an extremely strategically important segment for them.

Additionally, there's the Android/iOS crowd in the same boat, where emulation of non x86 in Android dev is pretty limited (but I can see that being rectified with the newer virtualization extensions).

MacOS Subsystem for Linux

This is true, it might just be virtualizing ARM, I think I just assumed it was x86 emulation based on the context.

Since arm has a more relaxed memory model they will likely never be able to emulate x86 with multithreading well.

>how impressive x86 VMs looked

You mean that they opened and could run a command line app? I'm not actually sure they implied it was x86.

I guess it's not a VM, but they were running Maya with Rosetta2 weren't they?

Linux and Windows have both supported ARM for a while now.

The end goal isn't just using Windows for Windows sake, the reason people use Windows on mac hardware is to get access to apps that run on Windows. And most of those apps still run like garbage (if at all) on the ARM versions of Windows.

They showed Maya (x86 binary) running on their Chip. It has some ability to run intel binaries on Apple silicon through at least two options-emulation and something that sounds like “jit interpretations”-lack of a better word.

I think that is a slightly different use case, though. That demo was an x86 binary running on ARM MacOS via a translation layer. So if there is a MacOS x86 version of the app you want to run, that might be an option.

But I know a lot of people still run Windows because they want the Windows version of an app, either because it isn't available at all on Mac or just because the Windows version runs better (Excel was a classic example of this for a long time, might still be). In that case, I don't know if that same translation layer will have the same performance (if it can run at all outside of MacOS) when running an entirely different OS.

FWIW I remember running PowerPC binaries on Intel macs via Rosetta was pretty painless. They mentioned explicit support for linux/windows emulation so they know it’s an important use case.

They did not mention windows emulation, only Linux/docker.

I don't believe Rosetta will work for linux/windows VMs.

> “jit interpretations”-lack of a better word.

I think this is called "transpiling" -- a version of compiling that's mainly translating from another architecture. And it didn't sound from their description like it was JIT -- it sounded like it would do the transpile when you first installed it (or maybe first ran it?) and keep the results.

Transpiling (as much as I hate that word, because the more you know about compilers, the more meaningless it is), is about source to source translations, not binary translation.

And they have a first pass AOT, with a JIT backup from the sounds of it to support JITs like browsers, node, and java.

Like, a joke version of Windows, yes. As a developer, if my machine can't run Visual Studio then it's not interesting to me at all. I can see it being acceptable to people who work predominantly with tools that have an ARM binary though.

Windows on ARM can run vsCode fine now. Traditional VS is on the way, but you can run x64 Windows apps on ARM.

Source?

VS is not even 64-bit yet...

Visual studio code has an arm build now [0]. I don't know what regular VS is written on but assuming it's .NET framework I assume a build will show up as the framework itself improves on ARM.

[0]: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/releases/tag/1.46.1 (basically just MS source minus branding)

VS is not built on top of dotNET.

VS Code was expected to run on anything, being nothing more than Javascript & HTML wrapped via Electron.

I known in 2010 the Visual Studio UI was rewritten in WPF/CSharp, I don't know which UI system they are using in 2019. It is documented in the wiki entry and a few blog posts MS made.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio

VS Code is not what anyone means by Visual Studio in that context. No one uses Windows for VS Code.

Of course VS Code works on ARM, it's an electron app.

Visual Studio proper is a mix of C/C++, .NET, and COM.

VSCodium works great on ARM64, I was testing it last week when I tried doing some dev work from a Raspberry Pi running the beta 64-bit OS: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium

I use Visual Studio, but I could just as easily use JetBrain’s Rider and be just as content.

But you still need ARM specific binaries. If your software doesn’t support your specific flavor of ARM, then you’re out of luck.

(I recently tried to install Zoom on arm64 Debian and it didn’t go so well... Rstudio wasn’t even close to an option)

...and we need new, more hardware for CI/CD that's just dedicated for Apple OSes. Pretty sure we won't be able to use the 5 unused raspberry pi we have.

I found the same problem when I tried running off Pi OS 64-bit for a day—almost every app that _did_ have a Linux binary available was only able to run under x86_64, not on arm64... More here: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/i-replaced-my-macbook...

Zoom, Bluejeans, Dropbox, pretty much all the popular apps I used where I could find a Linux version for my Dell laptop, I couldn't find a way (though got close at least, with Dropbox) to run them on an ARM64 CPU.

Dropbox could run relatively well with qemu user mode.

For Dropbox, you could quite trivially get by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

Rclone is what I ended up using and it worked decently well.

Have you tried box86? https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86 Let's you run x86 (not x86_64 though) programs on ARM Linux. It does a neat thing where system library calls are converted to ARM system library calls rather than using x86 ones for better performance.

Lots of games work fine with it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-4aGNqZ724

Zoom does not release binaries for ARM linux.

No-one runs Linux on Apple laptops these days; it's completely impractical. On OS X, Zoom will obviously recompile their app for the new architecture.

I am – right now even – but I agree it's become impractical.

This announcement is the final nail in the coffin I suppose. I hope some company will come out with great quality, well-designed, minimal laptops. That run Linux perfectly.

If it ran Linux perfectly, it could only do so if the manufacturer maintained its own Linux distribution. Laptop hardware and power management is just too complicated these days for anything else to work well.

All the Linux users I know prefer to use Zoom in the browser.

Unless the new ARM chips can handle VirtualBox well, I’ll pick up the last intel model. I have to work with old ASP apps in IE VMs side-by-side with stuff on my Mac every day.

If it uses the virtualization kit, it shouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately only veertu, xhive, and part of parallels do so

Unless it only allows ARM VMs.

They demoed Parallels running an x86 Debian VM

Where did it say x86?

IE is dead and will be gone before Intel Macs are.

I know, that’s why I run it in compatibility mode in a VM. Just because it’s dead, doesn’t mean there aren’t organizations that have built mission critical web apps that only work in IE and those of us who have the burden of dealing with them.

You’ll be able to do that for so long that by then you can emulate the whole OS it runs on in a web browser. It’s obsolete after all.

What's the state of using cloud Windows images vs. local for this sort of testing?

Dunno. The free Windows VMs I have saved can be reloaded in VirtualBox and used pretty much forever. They can’t run any serious software very well (on my old MacBook anyway), but I’m just using them to support some legacy web apps.

Nobody cares about windows per se. People want to run legacy win32 x86 and x64 binaries.

Not necessarily. I'm working on some hard-core Excel spreadsheets, so the simplest solution was to run Office on Windows 10 in Parallels.

Sounds like you wanted to run office, not windows, which was exactly my point.

Ok, the lack of commas made it seem to me you were only talking about legacy software.

> Linux and Windows have both supported ARM for a while now.

Many people who want dual boot Windows/ Macs want them for games and gamers want the sort of performance you don't get with emulation.

Windows have both supported ARM for a while now

Windows has always been cross-platform, x86, MIPS, Alpha and PPC back in the day. There was even a SPARC build at one point.

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