Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon in Practice (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon in Practice (2022)

gist.github.com

36 pointsjakogut14 comments

Parts of this gist have been updated in May, but sections date back to 2022 and earlier. Some of the links I clicked are no longer relevant, such as the sections about upstreaming parts of code. Since they didn't link the actual patches (just a search query for their author name) I don't know exactly which patches they were referring to or what their status is.

Does anyone have a more up to date resource?

Asahi Linux totally has graphics acceleration on M1 and M2.

What about Thunderbolt or DisplayPort alt mode?

IIRC, those are not supported as of now.

I have been running Asahi on my M2 MacBook Air for the last ~9 months or so and actually really enjoy it. Showed me the world of aarch64. Battery life could be better but normal low level power usage ranges in the 6 to 7 hour mark. But nothing close to official Apple battery usage.

A gist is such a weird way to run a project like this!

Basically what this seems to be about is adding full native acceleration support for Mac OS hosts to QEMU (audio, GL, etc.), to enable running a desktop Linux guest effectively, but it's so hard to follow what's going on that I'm not certain what to actually do to get the Best Possible QEMU on OSX Host.

How does this compare to Asahi in 2025? In my experience, Asahi's been great

One of the problems is Asahi lacks significant support for the M3/M4, including any kind of graphics acceleration.

https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/#soc...

Asahi is useless to me, and I would assume many others, without USB-C display support.

Still no thunderbolt on M1

What does the Venn diagram look like for:

“Linux is too much work so that’s why I use Apple products”

AND

“I’m putting in the work to install partially working Linux on my Apple Mx laptop and loving it”?

Do they share members?

it's more like "Apple makes great hardware and I prefer Linux pain over macOS pain"

Apple Macbooks are still class leading in efficiency and build quality, so some Linux tinkerers may still be drawn towards them.

I would expect that to be the entire case for the 2nd group. My only Apple laptop is a one for work, and my IT department can’t pick a password manager without contracting an agency, so I’m definitely not allowed to install Linux.

More like, "Apple hardware is fantastic but I wish I had more control over the software."

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