Meanwhile at Apple...
[CTO] OMG! Asahi Linux are reverse engineering our hardware!
[Chief Legal Counsel] Let's sue them!
[Tim Cook] What's Linux?
The Asahi Linux team has followed up the release of Fedora Asahi Remix with a post detailing the progress of the project to bring Linux to Apple silicon. First up is HDMI support and the chore of supporting Apple's M1 and M2 chips, including the Pro, Max, and Ultra variants. Apple tends to reuse most of the hardware logic …
From a software engineering/tinkering point of view... bravo. That's quite an achievement to add support for quite radically different processors.
From a practical point of view... how many people are going to want to pay the apple hardware premium but not want the apple software stack?? It strikes me as having a real-world (i.e. not just for tinkering) market of 2, maybe 3 people. (and I use linux daily, on several devices, albeit relatively cheap devices)
I have older Apple hardware running Linux, hand me downs from graphic designers and other users who need macOS to run certain apps. I expect at some point the ARM based stuff will start trickling down to me as well.
Being able to run Linux means I won't be stuck with out of support macOS versions as I suspect the OpenCore Legacy Patcher will struggle to adapt to the M* based stuff.
I know I'm not alone, as I see fellow developers running Linux on the x86 based Apple kit all the time at conferences, training courses, etc.
The battery life and the ability to run Mac OS and Linux on the same machine would be pretty convincing reasons for someone who uses some Mac OS stuff but prefers Linux to buy one. That is if they didn't still have bugs. What this project has accomplished is impressive, but unfortunately I'd be pretty worried about stuff breaking or simply not being available for years to rely on it for something important.
"What this project has accomplished is impressive, but unfortunately I'd be pretty worried about stuff breaking or simply not being available for years to rely on it for something important."
Doesn't that describe the majority of Linux distributions? How many people are running a commercially-supported (i.e. paid) version of Linux on a laptop?
I don't need commercial support. I can run Linux on my laptop with support for basically everything. I am not worried about the manufacturer releasing some new firmware that breaks things, nor do I often need to be concerned that the next laptop I get won't be capable of running it. Maybe I have to work a bit to get a driver working, but it's usually mostly functional out of the box. That is currently not the case for Apple silicon.
How would the hw change and become unsupported? Sure a new firmware, but isn’t that unlikely if Apple have put it into unsupported. I has super glad that there will an alternative to macOS when my m1 is not longer supported by macOS. I have a 2012 retina which is running olcp, but I are not sure that will come to m series
From a practical point of view... how many people are going to want to pay the apple hardware premium but not want the apple software stack??
Linus, for one. He is using an M2 Macbook Air for his day to work administrative work on the kernel (email, checking patches etc.) and it is his travel laptop as well. But granted, there aren't many who are looking to buy a NEW Apple Silicon Mac to run Linux on it. But as the prices of used ones drop (the oldest M1s are now 3 1/2 years old) it becomes more reasonable.
I've worked with extremely talented developers for decades, from the UK, US and all over the world. I specialized in operating systems and have tremendous respect for the people I've worked with. The skill and experience of Marcan and his team is very impressive. And they're submitting fixes all over the Linux ecosystem for Aarch64 and sometimes AMD64. Anyone who has a care for Linux should celebrate the work of these incredible engineers.