Linux on the M1, with GPU Acceleration
shorez.de
shorez.de
The emulator specs are fine if you plan on using MacOS along side a few Linux apps. But if all you want is a Linux laptop, you could save a thousand dollars or more by buying something more appropriate.
Or at least wait to see how the native Linux performs once it is working sufficient enough to make the price of the laptop worthwhile.
That is indeed the entire point of this article unless I'm missing something.
I have played a bit with UTM as an emulator, to run x86_64 virtual machines. Emulation is a lot slower than hardware virtualization. No surprise.
UTM/QEMU can also run arm64 machines, but I don't know the best configuration for optimal performance.
The commercial virtualization product Parallels works great for me, but your virtual machines need to be arm64, not x86.
Its not 1998 anymore. The idea of building your own disk image to install an OS for general usage is a bit b0rked.
It's different if you're developing that OS or actively porting or something.
Edit: TO be clear, the line " However, MacBooks ship with macOS, an operating system several of us consider much less impressive." changes how the article reads for me. Something like "lets investigate linux performance on these machines" would make this read entirely differently
The full line is: "Those chips are really impressive. However, MacBooks ship with macOS, an operating system several of us consider much less impressive." That perfectly explains my personal feelings about the issue, which is why I was curious enough to click on this in the first place. If you don't feel the same way, that's a perfectly normal difference of opinion. I do feel this way and I think maybe if I get an M1 MacBook I'll use this post as a guide for how to install a usable OS on it ;)
As for:
> Its not 1998 anymore. The idea of building your own disk image to install an OS for general usage is a bit b0rked.
Installing Arch Linux on an M1 MacBook seems pretty far from "installing an OS for general usage". Arch in general isn't "an OS for general usage". Some people are hobbyists who are willing to do things the hard way. It's fine if you're not one of them. Oftentimes, I'm not one of them, either.
Considering the other threads going around in other posts today, it's clear that a lot of people on here consider desktop linux to be superior and more user friendly that macOS.
There's a lot of people who seem to think this kind of thing is a thing normal people would be willing to do with their time. Like they think the rest of the world is just like the target audience of hacker news.
How would you feel if people made disparaging comments about your hobbies being the sort of thing that "normal people" aren't "willing to do with their time"?
I mean, also, that seems to apply to almost every hobby, depending on how restrictively you define normal.
It sucks that even running Linux virtualised on macOS doesn't give it full access to the hardware on an M1. Even a paid app like Parallel's Desktop ($80+) virtualising software comes with the warning - If you have some graphics performance issues, or applications complaining about insufficient resources, changing video memory value can help but it can also make the situation even worse. - because of the Unified Memory Architecture of the M1 machines that utilise the same pool of memory for both RAM and graphics. And also because such virtualising software don't have direct access to the graphics processing unit (GPU) or the memory on M1 systems, and allow GPU access only indirectly through Metal / OpenGL / macOS API. (2)
(1) https://mac.getutm.app/ (2) https://kb.parallels.com/en/125351