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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

No one should be purchasing a brand new M1 Mac with the expectation of perfect Linux support any time soon.

However, I’m optimistic that these will be mostly usable on Linux before they’re too obsolete or outdated. The platform is so popular and iconic that it’s drawing a lot of attention from Linux devs and reverse engineering crowds.

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> No one should be purchasing a brand new M1 Mac with the expectation of perfect Linux support any time soon.

That's sound advice.

As someone who doesn't use Linux as their daily driver, can I expect Linux to run perfectly in a VM on an M1 Mac?

I was able to install an ARM build of Ubuntu Server using the Parallels beta, and it works fine.

Good to hear this. I am waiting for my M1 Mac, and if I can get Linux arm64 virtual machines running for development purposes, I can hack the rest.

It doesn’t work fine, UI resolution restricted, sticking cursor issues, no parallel tools available

I'm also interested on this. I usually run Ubuntu via Vagrant + Virtualbox on my Mac.

I'm not at all as optimistic as you are. You still need out-of-tree drivers to run Linux on a 2017 MacBook Pro, and various things don't work at all on Intel Macs from 2016 (possibly earlier) to the present.

Sure the M1 is the new shiny, and people will be attracted to it in the short term, which might boost reverse-engineering efforts. But I expect that to die down as people get frustrated, and we'll have the same (or worse) situation as we do running Linux on Intel Macs.

Right. And by the time there is halfway decent support for first gen M1s a new generation will come out with a ton of new breakages.

So the advice is to buy a second hand one 5 years from now?

Maybe. But consider that a non-touchbar 2016 MacBook Pro, which is turning 5 years old this year, still doesn't flawlessly run Linux. And that doesn't even have the custom Apple T1/T2 chip. The ARM hardware will be much harder to deal with.

Macbooks almost never have seamless wifi experiences on linux. At best you will have to manually install a wifi blob and for the newer ones the advice is to just get a wifi usb.

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