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jjtheblunt

I'm running Asahi Linux on the M2 and it's great. Drivers are not all complete yet, but it's awesome.

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How is webcam and microphone support? Web conferencing always killed me running Linux even on well supported hardware

How is battery life?

What distro are you running?

Are you doing all ARM binaries or is there some translation layer that works?

Sorry to bombard you, but I’m really curious about the support

not the person you are responding to but i was looking into it today. webcam/mic/speakers don't work but bluetooth does. there is arm to x86/x86_64 translation tools akin to rosetta 2 but they have a lot of warts and are not well supported yet. the most promising one in my opinion is called fex.

I've not tried the webcam and microphone, which I guess i could from Firefox. Battery life is less than when the drivers further evolve, because I think it's imperfect in going into sleep mode.

The distro is Asahi Linux, which is ARM ArchLinux. All ARM binaries.

If you follow the Asahi Linux page, it updates super frequently, as drivers get tuned and so on.

If you buy hardware supported by Linux, Zoom works well on it, including screen sharing.

I've been using Zoom on my desktop with a USB camera for video calls and screen sharing for a while now.

I was pleasantly surprised it actually worked and worked well.

Edit: to clarify, this post is about Linux in general, I don't use M1 or M2 Macs with Linux.

Why are you answering a question specifically made about M1 and M2 with a generic answer about a Desktop computer?

What is the point?

Here's what the GP says and what I'm discussing:

> Web conferencing always killed me running Linux even on well supported hardware

This is a forum for discussion, and that's what I'm participating in, a discussion.

I am unsure why you believe that my reply must strictly address a question in manner that you deem suitable.

Does it have GPU acceleration yet?

EDIT: apparently it does!!! https://asahilinux.org/2022/07/july-2022-release/ Not perfect of course but this is surprisingly good progress in a short time.

OpenGL ES 2.0 could happen as early as the end of the year. Vulkan is a long way off.

Apparently some old OpenGL games are already playable!

https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-6.html

That is running in macOS not Linux.

> apparently it does!!!

Not in the public release yet. An experimental Mesa driver is running (https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-6.html), but the kernel driver is still a work in progress (though it's making quick progress!). The demo at the end of the article is a proof-of-concept with the M1 acting as an eGPU for another computer; not something usable for a desktop environment yet.

As your daily driver machine?

i've not switched over to try that yet.

in my case i could use it as a daily driver, since i'm just needing a fast browser and Linux with compilers etc. but i've been using macos as a daily driver despite loathing (since the dawn of time) its font rendering.

i'll switch at some point, probably.

>despite loathing (since the dawn of time) its font rendering.

Could you expand on that a little please? I've always found the Mac's fonts & font rendering to be most pleasing so I'm interested to hear a different opinion - what annoys you about it?

i've got super sharp vision fortunately, so i see the half shading and such, and it strains my eyes which, otherwise, "expect" to bring edges into sharp contrast.

My eyes love the rendering engine on Win11, or whatever trickery they're using for fonts, and similarly on ArchLinux.

Oh I see, I thought it was the actual font rendering you disliked, I hadn't considered the smoothing being an issue! Between Apple's high DPI displays and my own eyesight I don't notice it (although I do remember when I was younger hating subpixel anti-aliasing when it was still in use, because of the rainbow around characters)

For anyone who's interested, in macOS you can disable this font smoothing with:

    defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

It's great for you. But some of us are using Linux in industrial applications. You can't really put an Apple laptop inside e.g. an MRI machine. It may run highly specialized software, needs specific acceleration hardware, etc.

It's going to be a very sad day when consumer electronics win over industrial applications.

> can't really put an Apple laptop inside e.g. an MRI machine. It may run highly specialized software, needs specific acceleration hardware, etc.

This sounds more like a pitch for letting the MRI machine talk to the laptop than putting redundant chips in every device.

> letting the MRI machine talk to the laptop than putting redundant chips in every device

This sounds like a huge security risk.

While MRIs don't use ionizing radiation like the Therac-25 did, I can think of a few bad outcomes from someone finding a 0-day on anything that can control the machine. And of course if it's read only it still has sensitive medical info we wouldn't want leaked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

No. This is not a good universal solution. What if the machine needs more processing power than one laptop can provide?

Do you want to put a rack of laptops inside the machine, waste several screens and keyboards? Log into every laptop with your AppleID before you can start your machine? It's such an inelegant solution.

Instead, the x86/Linux environment lets you put multiple mainboards in a machine, or you can choose a mainboard with more processors; it is a much more flexible solution in industrial settings.

It would be a gimmick given that real-time workloads can't be offloaded via some serial connection to consumer laptops. You'd still need hardware and software capable of driving and operating the machines embedded in the machines themselves.

No. You want the computer running the thing to be as simple, known, and predictable as possible. So that is necessarily going to be a computer provided by true manufacturer, and not whatever a random doctor feels like using. Consumer devices are compeletely irrelevant or that use case.

Apple hardware has never been about non-consumer, server or industrial applications outside of some film, music and movie studios using mac pros and the Xserve long time ago.

And if your making an MRI machine or other industrial equipment that consumes a huge amount of power, the fact your attached computer uses 300W vs 600W doesn't really seem like much of a big deal.

Apple has a head start with their ARM machines, but I'm also not really worried that the rest of the industry won't catch up in a few years eventually. You can only really pull off the new architecture trick once or twice, and being a leader has a way of inspiring competitors.

Apple's software and OS is also horrible to use in server applications, you only do it if you need to do it, such as iOS CI, device testing and such. Otherwise you avoid it as much as you can.

It's not about the electrical power use. It's about one market player taking out the air from the market by integrating the entire supply chain.

You can only really pull off the new architecture trick once or twice

Apparently not.

The Mac has gone from Motorola 68000 to PowerPC to Intel to ARM.

And if needed, they could do it again.

I don’t think you need to worry about that, those are completely different use-cases and markets. ARM CPUs will be available and widespread in other applications soon enough, and Linux support is already strong in that regard.

What are you on about? A €5M MRI machine will have whatever computer its manufacturer will want to support. Which will probably be something like a Core 2 running Windows XP.

None of these machines have used Macs, ever. Why would anything Apple does affect this market?

> Why would anything Apple does affect this market?

Apple is gobbling up its supply chain and using precious fab slots. It affects others.

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