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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

If software is the issue, can't you run Linux on it?

I'm a Mac app developer, I'm stuck with Xcode.

But it's not all or nothing. For example I've started using Syncthing instead of iCloud Drive for some use cases and that works surprisingly well (Syncthing isn't without flaws either, but at least it shows exactly what it's doing making it a lot easier to debug).

AFAIR if you have Mac, you are legally allowed to run MacOS in VM on that computer.

Running macOS in a VM is okay for testing purposes, but in my experience it's not a great experience for productive work. There are a lot of graphics glitches because macOS assumes that you have hardware graphics acceleration, but no VM that I know supports that for macOS guests.

It doesn't help at all on notebooks which of course are the subject of this discussion, or even nearly any Apple hardware at all at this point. But FWIW on systems that can support multiple GPUs using PCIe passthrough to a macOS Guest VM will make it perform very well. Of course legally that means only the now highly mediocre multi-year old price-unchanged Mac Pro. But running a hackintosh virtualized can work quite nicely. While very unlikely, perhaps this will become an officially possible option again someday if Apple ever does another expandable system.

I'm not sure why a VM was supposed to help your situation but in regards to GPU in a VM Parallels can provide paravirtualized GPU to enable acceleration for macOS (metal), Windows (DX 9/10/11), and Linux (Virgil) guests.

Does anyone really think that running Linux on custom Apple hardware is actually going to make things _better_?

It certainly rescued my a1502 from the trash bin.

I have an M1 Air and can’t wait to install Linux on it. Backed marcan’s efforts and counting days until I go back to Linux again.

Same here. My M1 Air is good, and I use it for light purposes, but once Asahi becomes viable, OMG.

I don't know how it holds with the current M1s but I was much happier with Linux than macOS under my 2014 MBP, everything was incredibly much snappier.

The issue is that Linux isn’t running well enough on the apple silicon to be a viable option (yet).

Was playing around with it just this weekend. It's... not there yet. It will be, but it's a work in progress.

You could run it today if you wanted to, but there are a bunch of things that are missing.

Meh, every OS has its problems. The issues I have had with Linux have been consistently more annoying than those I have had with MacOS. I'm sure it's the opposite for some people.

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