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Comment by trustingtrust | Hacker News Reader

Liberating an M1 MacBook Air in another 4-5 years is going to be quite something. Asahi is making really good progress and in a couple of years maybe you may be able to hand out M1 MBAs with Linux like candy. My M1 MBA is already so fast compared to my intel DESKTOP from 2018 that I can’t wait to daily drive Linux on it.

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I would really like this. I opened up my 2018 t480 thinkpad with arch and xfce on it today, after half a year of using the M1 MBA exclusively, and I realized how much I truly miss using Linux. I don't get a good computingfeel out of macOS -- the last time I did was circa snow leopard. It's someone else's system that I'm allowed to use.

The t480 is really noticeably slower than the MBA though it has twice the RAM. I didn't think there was anything wrong with that at the time, though. I have got a more powerful computer now -- but how much of that power is for me to wield?

I wish I could be as optimistic as you when people here mention that their 8 year old Mac laptops still don't work as well with Linux and some other people mention that their 15 year old Mac laptops do work well.

I mean, if you can wait 15 years for something, more power to you :-)

My 8 year old Mac laptop works great with Linux! :D

If it's ok to run graphics on CPU (it supposedly is good enough) then we might have Mx MBAs running linux fairly soon. Hopefully not in 4-5 years anyway!

FYI, "liberating" Intel macbooks has been possible for years, my 2015 mbp has been running Linux since 2019.

The GPU driver is already available.

But it's an alpha, right? ARM is a architecture, so it's much easier to get working while maturing the GPU driver will take time.

EDIT: Nevermind, development status summarized here https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support

I mean the whole of Asahi is still quite immature, but my understanding is that the GPU driver has hit usable status.

The T2 models don't run Linux well still and probably never reach amazing levels. I don't think the keyboard/mouse driver is in the kernel yet still despite it being 5 years on for those models.

There is just not as much invest in the T2 models because otherwise they are just boring old x86 machines.

Presumably the M1 Linux distro won't have access to the Rosetta translation layer to run X86 programs? Or will that work anyway?

In 5 years it might not be that big of a deal

Linux app ARM support is generally better since they're open source

Being open source doesn't magically make them better at ARM support.

Someone still has to do the work of actually adding ARM support.

For most applications ARM support should just be a recompile.

ARM has been a mainstream target for Linux years before Asahi linux. See Raspberry Pi for example.

I tried to use RaspberryPi last year. Quite a few apps weren't available for it because there are no ARM versions.

Can't remember which (calibre was one of them, maybe?), but it was enough for me to reconsider using it

IIRC Calibre supports ARM architecture since 6.0 release, which was July 2022

It was probably not available at the time I needed it :)

If the source is available, how much work is there to add ARM support, other than compile it for ARM? Some package managers compile from source at install time anyway. I'm sure there are various "I-think-you'll-find-it's-a-bit-more-complicated-than-that"s. I'm interested to learn what they are.

It depends heavily on the project. Maybe it's using a bespoke/old build system that doesn't support targeting arm, obviously any uses of assembly need translation, bugs/compilation issues regarding signed-ness of char in C/C++, or page size. Those are at least all the issues I've encountered.

When Itanium was new, HP contracted with Progeny Linux to help them port Linux software. Despite the fact that Alpha had paved the way for 64-bit support it was a long effort.

It practically makes them much better, no magic required.

https://wiki.debian.org/Arm64Port

> 98% of Debian is currently built [for arm64]

Rosetta binaries for linux are provided by Apple for use in VMs.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

Linux has a similar tech with the combo of binfmt_misc and qemu. It's pretty straightforward to setup and then any architecture can run any other architecture in an emulated manner. My ARM Android phone can actually run x86 (slowly) in its Termux Linux environment for example.

I tried running a Terraria server on my PowerPC Mac Mini running Void a few years ago with the user mode QEMU trick. I managed to get the server started but it crashed if a client tried to connect.

There is FEX emu which already works for Steam games

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