Bare metal Apple M1 Debian at 4K 60
twitter.com
twitter.com
On the economic/$$ perspective: the Linux in M1 projects are probably targeted at Mac Minis and given that when you pay for a Mac Mini you are paying for hardware and Apple software. Does this make sense economically, comparing other bare bone systems with a Mac Mini style form factor?
I've got a Mac Mini (2014?) that I bought for a Mac/Windows contract. Contract is long over so I wiped Windows and now dual-boot MacOS and Pop!_OS (a terrible name). Works fine. The machine is tolerably fast/quiet.
I'd scrub the MacOS entirely as I'm not a huge fan but still like to mess with Rocksmith now and again.
Every single time I've found it sufficiently cumbersome and glitchy that I moved back off of it within a few weeks. Last fall–needing a new computer, frustrated with the slow iOSification of MacOS, and anticipating months to years of compatibility issues with developer tools on the M1–I built a desktop PC and installed Ubuntu.
I figured if running Linux was as annoying as it had been on my Macs I'd just install windows and run a VM like I'd done for years on Mac, but it has been way smoother than I expected. There are still a few driver issues now and then, but I mostly just bought the newest hardware and didn't make much of an effort to ensure compatibility. I'm not sure I'll buy another Mac at this point, but if I do I'm not going to bother with Linux.
The Linux software-side support is... a bit of a mess though.
https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/
It doesn't have the performance of a MacBook, but it's also just $220 (when it's back in stock).
But, if your requirement is for a "high performance" ARM based machine, suddenly the M1 macs become very appealing.
Many of the other solutions are ARM dev boards that have a tenth of the performance and very limited RAM. There are some half decent Snapdragon based laptops, but that only gets you about 50% of the way to M1 performance.
Care to elaborate, or at least some names/models and opinions? I might be in the market for a fanless home server in that form factor. I might end up just buying a Synology but I would like to run HomeAssistant on it as well (although currently it just works fine on a Raspberry Pi4)
They still make products in that line although I’m not very familiar with the newer offerings.
To be fair, it is really hard to get the fan to speed up and make more noise.
It's a little larger, but the only fan is the CPU fan and that generally stays slow and quiet. It's time to update it with a new motherboard and put a 5700G to get 8 cores. The one shown in the pics is my software development machine and it's a dream for that.
I replaced one with an M1 mac mini and the mac mini is faster and near silent - I have literally never heard the fan over the room’s background noise, and I’ve thrashed the thing.
Although practically I am interested in running Linux on an appleM1, my conscious will no longer allow me to fund the company producing it, so I can never own one.
Additionally, being seen with Apple hardware supports Apple's legitimacy.
Perhaps it's over principled, I know I'm an insignificant spec in the market. However I cannot tolerate the idea of them obtaining monetary support from me - because then i'd be complicit in their immoral behaviour.
What would be wonderful is if the M1 was an effort independent of Apple. But the capitalist world is moving in a direction of more merging and vertical integration which makes it difficult to vote with your money when it gets redistributed into one enormous corporation... so the only remaining option is to not vote.
- They have doubled down on "build it in China" for everything, including labor practices that are... not ideal, at a minimum. "Dying for an iPhone" details their last decade or so of labor abuses, or at least "looking the other way while China abuses labor for them."
- As a result of that, and their desire to sell into the Chinese market, they have bowed before the CCP regarding data storage, encryption, etc. For a company that has held a hard line regarding privacy of user information, to see them bow to a rather hostile government like that is very concerning.
- The on-device CSAM scanning, similarly, reflects what can most reasonably be described as "bowing to another government." I know the tech news has abandoned that bit of bad news, forgotten, and moved on to satellite phone stuff, but I consider it turning my own device and resources against me in ways I cannot support.
In the past year or so, Apple has demonstrated that they say one thing out one side of their mouth ("Privacy! Your data is your data! Ethical labor!") while doing other things in practice. So, I'm no longer comfortable supporting them, and am trying not to.
I'm aware that most of this can be applied to the bulk of the consumer tech industry at large, which is another problem, and one I'm certainly trying to ponder through. The main conclusion, I think, is that one ought not buy any new/recent hardware, and figure out ways to work with less. I've been moving over to small ARM computers as I try to find less-hostile devices, but the supply chains upstream there are less-known and a bit of a mystery, so I'm not sure I can make strong claims one way or another. However, I know at this point that Apple hasn't gone about really improving things, instead just looking the other way as Foxconn continues the same tricks.
It's perfectly fine to not care about any of that, and prefer the shiny integrated computer, and I've certainly done that for the past 18 years of my life. But I'm no longer OK with that, and am trying to get clear of it.
There aren't any anymore. Everything is out of China.
I've been using some cheaper ARM stuff, but I can't verify Pine's supply chains either, beyond "Erratic." So unlikely to be as close to forced labor as Apple's are, especially during new product season.
You know about the bad conditions in the Foxconn factory because of the notoriety of the companies (Apple and Google) that get their products assembled there. However, it's likely that the conditions at Foxconn are better than those at the fly-by-night operators employed by Pine, which are subject to less scrutiny. Companies like Pine also have less ability (and incentive) to press for better conditions.
If you really wanted to use products with the least manufacturing footprint in China, you'd be looking at Samsung and Sony devices, but I guess they're not edgy enough for you.
- Sustained push towards non-repairability of their devices. Solder/glue everything, prevent 3rd party replacements.
- Monopolistic behavior where they can get away with it. The CEO blatantly lying to congress [1].
[1] https://medium.com/hyperlinked/all-the-times-tim-cook-lied-i...
Edit: worth noting that the Air is more likely to thermal throttle the Pro, which would be a major reason to go for the Pro. I support it'll be alright if it's mostly connected to a keyboard.
As for thermal throttle on the Air, you can spend $10 and 10 minutes installing thermal pads to bridge the CPU and the aluminum backplate. This will cause the backplate to heat up more, but nearly eliminates any thermal throttling even under sustained load.
We're going to support the Touch Bar to make those machines useful, but given it's likely to be dead in the next generation, it's unlikely Linux will get any kind of ecosystem for it unless someone is really dedicated. I can only promise basic function key emulation (same kind of thing you get on T2 Macs with Windows/Linux), and it will take some time since that needs a couple bespoke drivers and we have bigger fish to fry first.
Then again, you could also wait for the next generation. As long as M1X didn't redo the GPU, which seems unlikely, I don't expect support for that chip to lag much behind M1.
You can get the most recent Ubuntu LTS to run on a ten year old Thinkpad without issue. The performance may be limited bytthe hardware, but the software isn't the problem here.
Honestly, if I were to pay the premium prices Apple asks for their products, I'd expect them to outsupport a bunch of hackers that had nothing to do with the hardware.
I have money to spend on computers but I still use a 10 years old laptop running windows and Linux (both supported) and with absolutely no desire to upgrade it as it runs better than when I bought it (after a ssd swap and more memory). There’s nothing that I do on my personal computer that would be improved by purchasing a new machine. Same goes with most people I know.
For Windows that will stop in 2025(EOS for Windows 10 and Windows 11 has requirements that basically require <3-4 year old machine)
Linux and BSDs happily support decade+ hardware, and sibling comments say similar things for Windows, so not really.
I'm not sure that's true. What the M1 gives you is an incredibly powerful processor that's also very power efficient. That gives you a spectacularly performing laptop with good battery life, making the M1 laptops compelling even if you want to run Linux.
If you're plugged into the wall the M1s are still quick, but there are other options to get you into the same ballpark. There are no other options that use as little power.
Power draw problems usually arise because the drivers are half baked and don't know how to turn the peripherals off when they're not being used.
It might not be native power efficiency, but if non-M1 Mac linux experience is anything to go by then it's still plausible that it can run circles around x86 based laptops with good Linux driver support.
While true, the benchmarks show that recent AMD CPUs have comparable power efficiency, even on single-core loads.
And it might be that a significant part of M1's advantage lives in some (proprietary) scheduling software, so the Asahi Linux effort might not reach the same numbers even with a few years of work.
But then again, some companies just standardize on Apple hardware for their employees, so this can at least allow people to run GNU/Linux in those situations. Someday.
https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect
And if you are on Android, you can also use the Fritter client without a Twitter account:
That said, we know at least the VMkernel is likely to work on other ARMs, though userspace might not like it if you don't have things like AMX in your CPU, or the SPRR stuff. Rosetta is also unlikely to work without Apple's custom extensions, though some are headed for standardization. And the GPU is still an issue. If you try really hard (e.g. sticking the OS in a VM and emulating a bunch of stuff) it can hypothetically work... but it's orders of magnitude harder than a Hackintosh.
Presuming those other 2025-era ARM CPUs have standardized virtualization extensions, macOS would probably be best run through a hardware-accelerated hybrid emulator that interprets, rather than executes, the non-supported instructions. (Think Linux-aarch64 running qemu-kvm.)
“Hackintoshing” in the sense of needing to write macOS drivers for Apple-unsupported hardware/peripherals would still exist in that world, as people would want to pass hardware (like the GPU!) through to the VM for performance. Though the construction of these drivers might be easier than today, as for peripherals that are just too hard to get macOS itself to support, hardware-abstracted peripheral drivers could be written instead (or even reused from VM software like VMWare Fusion!)
If only ARM virtualization could do that - it would've made my life much easier when writing the m1n1 hypervisor.
There is no facility for intercepting and trapping unsupported instructions in EL0/1 into EL2. The undefined instruction exception goes straight to the guest. I had to hijack this for early bringup debugging and ended up patching the guest's exception table, but needless to say that isn't terribly nice...
ARM macOS requires a GPU (WindowServer won't run without one), which means supporting Metal. So not only do you need to write a GPU driver, you need to write a GPU driver that supports Metal. Apple support paravirtualized GPUs... by passing through Metal, as I understand it. That's only easy if your host OS is macOS.
> That said, we know at least the VMkernel is likely to work on other ARMs, though userspace might not like it if you don't have things like AMX in your CPU, or the SPRR stuff
Open-source XNU doesn't support Apple's CPU extensions, but macOS still runs just fine on it. (but no Rosetta of course)
> by passing through Metal, as I understand it
See ParavirtualizedGraphics.framework, which uses MetalSerializer.framework under the hood.
There is no one dominant firm/distro. This is an OS that can’t agree on a way of distributing applications across distributions: flatpack, snap…
It interesting That every M1 machine comes with an OS these people people are enthusiastically looking to replace with something better.
I think the issue for me with this is that it’s a lot of volunteer effort going to support a single machine vendor that is very wealthy and seems disinclined to help out.
Of course it's like working in front of an armed cannon that can be fired at you at any moment. Apple can very easily perform a lock in the seriousness of which no desktop computer has ever seen before, given they control the hardware down to the transistor level.
- I hope we can agree that supporting bare metal Linux shouldn’t be that bar.
- T2 is about securing the OS and functionality that they do offer as part of the product and its value proposition. That it makes installing Linux more difficult doesn’t establish intent to make it more difficult. It could just as well be they don’t care. Given they’ve showcased Linux in a VM, I find the latter more likely.
- They have a track record of ignoring efforts support non-Mac OSes, but embracing them as they become viable (Bootcamp).
- Even if they outright blocked these efforts, Linux will still work on non-Apple hardware (which surely represents the majority of current installations), and in a VM on Macs. So it’s hard to see how this affects the future of Linux.
I really wish there was some effort on the part of the broader (F)OSS community to better understand the nature of the subject of their ire. Apple’s position here may warrant some criticism. I certainly wish they were more transparent and provided better documentation across the board, including their hardware. But there is a wide range of disposition between fully embracing and supporting these efforts and “overt hostility”.