Hacker News Reader

Comment by buu700 | Hacker News Reader

I did some investigation into this the other day. The short answer seems to be that if you like MacBooks, you aren't willing to accept a downgrade along any axis, and you really want to use Linux, your best bet today is an M2 machine. But you'll still be sacrificing a few hours of battery life, Touch ID support (likely unfixable), and a handful of hardware support edge cases. Apple made M3s and M4s harder to support, so Linux is still playing catch-up on getting those usable.

Beyond that, Lunar Lake chips are evidently really really good. The Dell XPS line in particular shows a lot of promise for becoming a strict upgrade or sidegrade to the M2 line within a few years, assuming the haptic touchpad works as well as claimed. In the meantime, I'm sure the XPS is still great if you can live with some compromises, and it even has official Linux support.

View on HN

> Linux is still playing catch-up on getting those usable

This is an understatement. It is completely impossible to even attempt to install Linux at all on an M3 or M4, and AFAIK there have been no public reports of any progress or anyone working on it. (Maybe there are people working on it, I don’t know).

In his talk a few days ago, one of the main Asahi developers (Sven) shared that there is someone working on M3 support. There are screenshots of an M3 machine running Linux and playing DOOM at around 31:34 here: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...

Sounds like the GPU architecture changed significantly with M3. With M4 and M5, the technique for efficiently reverse-engineering drivers using a hypervisor no longer works.

> In his talk a few days ago, one of the main Asahi developers (Sven) shared that there is someone working on M3 support.

Thanks, I guess I stand corrected.

> There are screenshots of an M3 machine running Linux and playing DOOM at around 31:34 here

That is encouraging! Still, there is no way for a normal to user to try to install it, unless something changed very recently.

Can't one use MacOS only as an hypervisor and do everything else in a linux VM.

Yes, this is what I do. The main pain point is that the touchpad is emulated as a scroll wheel so you don’t get pixel-perfect scrolling.

No hd scroll wheel?

I don’t exactly understand this setup. What’s the vm tech?

What I mean is: on a normal laptop, when you scroll with two fingers on the scroll wheel, the distance you scroll is nearly a continuous function of how much you move your fingers; that is, if you only move your fingers a tiny bit, you will only scroll a few pixels or just one.

Most VM software (at least all of it that I've tried) doesn't properly emulate this. Instead, after you've moved your fingers some distance, it's translated to one discrete "tick" of a mouse scroll wheel, which causes the document to scroll a few lines.

The VM software I use is UTM, which is a frontend to QEMU or Apple Virtualization framework depending on which setting you pick when setting up the VM.

Yeah OK. Googling and LLMing around, it sounds like you’d need to use the proprietary Parallels to get hd scroll on a mac from the touchpad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com