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0 pointsoblio5y ago0 comments

I'm skeptical. Linux is reasonably popular for "Windows" hardware, most statistics put it at about 0.5% market share. I've never seen anyone running Linux on Intel Macs.

Why would ARM Macs, which seem quite a bit more locked down, ever become a better supported and more popular Linux hardware platform?

I wish they would become one, but I don't see how we can make this leap.

0 comments

27thPW5y ago

Anecdotally, I just bought my first Mac just because of the M1. It's an absolute game-changer and at least 5 years ahead of the competition. If macOS becomes too burdensome or heavy-handed, I anticipate I'll move to some Linux distribution assuming there's support (and would help fund its development). I'm guessing there are at least a few people like me who will constitute a market for developers to cater to.

marcan_425y ago

Hi from Linux on an Intel Mac.

(I've got fixing up amdgpu to work on this 2015 iMac on my TODO list too... might even do that as a bonus warm-up if this takes off, while I get my hands on an M1 mac)

oblioOP5y ago

I admire the work but you have to admit that even after all this time it's easier to install Ubuntu, say, on a random PC :-)

marcan_425y ago

To be honest, the only problems on this iMac are audio (fair to say Apple's fault), the screen only running at 4K max (Apple custom stuff involved for 5K, but hey, not complaining about 4K, go find me an AiO PC with a 5K screem), the amdgpu issue (not really an Apple problem, it's just a rarer chip and probably a dumb bugfix and the older radeon driver works fine), and the Ethernet and SD card reader being problematic (that's a Broadcom chip and their silicon is universally buggy; not Apple's fault, these chips have issues on PCs too)

So really just audio is the one thing that jumps out as broken and specific to this being a Mac. I personally happen not to care as I use an external audio interface anyway :-)

Actual installation is trivial, it's just standard UEFI pretty much. As long as the right GPU driver loads you're fine. Thunderbolt and all that works out of the box.

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psanford5y ago

I ran linux on a MBP as my primary machine from 2009 - 2015 (on 3 different hardware revs). The late 2015 MBPs moved a bunch of peripherals off of the USB bus making them harder to use with linux at the time. In the years since, support has been added for all those peripherals.

I still use my late 2013 MBP running nixos. That machine was a great piece of hardware at the time and still works fantastically well even today. (Its really sad how terrible most most non-Apple speakers are in laptops).

I would buy an M1 Macbook Air if it could run linux and had good power management. (I'll say the same about an M1 MBP in the generation where they give up on the touchbar and go back to hardware buttons.)

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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27thPW5y ago

marcan_425y ago

Hi from Linux on an Intel Mac.

(I've got fixing up amdgpu to work on this 2015 iMac on my TODO list too... might even do that as a bonus warm-up if this takes off, while I get my hands on an M1 mac)

oblioOP5y ago

I admire the work but you have to admit that even after all this time it's easier to install Ubuntu, say, on a random PC :-)

marcan_425y ago

So really just audio is the one thing that jumps out as broken and specific to this being a Mac. I personally happen not to care as I use an external audio interface anyway :-)

Actual installation is trivial, it's just standard UEFI pretty much. As long as the right GPU driver loads you're fine. Thunderbolt and all that works out of the box.

1 more reply

psanford5y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse