20 ms·

I hope Apple allows us to install the OS of our choice. The battery life is impressive but I refuse to not use Linux.

sabana 6y ago
Why?
bstar77 6y ago
And that's your choice. I would start looking at AMD's Ryzen offerings because supporting Linux is not going to be high on Apple's list going forward.
- JAlexoid 6y ago
  has it ever been?
  - bstar77 6y ago
    I ran linux for years on my MacBook via Bootcamp. I'd be surprised if Bootcamp ever comes back.
jdlyga 6y ago
I wouldn't pay for Apple hardware unless I wanted to use MacOS.
- OJFord 6y ago
  Why? The hardware's the nice bit.
  - Aperocky 6y ago
    Yeah this. Imagine if we had the same hardware but designed for linux, I'd pay a premium for that. Although hardware specific software from Apple is probably a big part of that draw too. I don't think we're ever going to see Linux prioritize a certain hardware and put in the effort to make it integrate as well as macs does.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      I don't really get this. I switched to MacOS because it's fundamentally BSD with a nice/ well integrated GUI. Almost all of the good OSS I love is supported nearly perfectly. Perhaps I'm a bit jaded after running into too much bullshit trying to get Linux running well on laptops in the 90s and 00s. Since I made the move I never wax nostalgic for the "Good Ole Days" of fighting for hours to get Wifi working properly. Even assuming Apple released the specs so you could port Linux to M1, on top of the usual laptop driver issues around the trackpad, wifi drivers, and video drivers, you also have to deal with the Secure Enclave. Without that, you are stuck with either a non-encrypted drive or running drive encryption on the CPU which is likely going to kill many of the performance gains from using the Mac hardware. Likewise, without the Secure Enclave, you lose fingerprint auth. Not anti-Linux by any means, but dropping Linux on the M1 isn't going to get you the same performance or battery life by any means. You are far better just going with a laptop which was designed to be Linux friendly to start with.
      - JAlexoid 6y ago
        Well... That's why I have a ThinkPad, that is certified on Linux. (So your prejudice is dated) I'm literally trying to figure out how to install Python 3.6 alongside 3.9 in MacOSX .... right now, and it's not a one line command. So... No. It has massive issues with developer friendliness. New OSX stalls with bluetooth mice and randomly locks my keyboard(MBP 2020). The only thing I can commend OSX on - battery life on a MacBook and nothing else
        rootusrootus 6y ago
        > install Python 3.6 alongside 3.9 in MacOSX .... right now, and it's not a one line command To be fair, that's not easy on any OS (well, maybe Windows). Certainly on CentOS it is a chore to get two versions of Python installed simultaneously.
        JAlexoid 6y ago
        I'm on Ubuntu - it's not as mindbogglingly hard as on MacOSX. Unsupported versions - harder, but still a few commands... Supported versions? sudo apt install python-3.6 and done.
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    Because the software is also the nice bit
    - OJFord 6y ago
      Well if you like both there's no problem is there. Comment I replied to was 'I wouldn't pay for Apple hardware if I didn't want the software' implying that would be a stupid thing to do. I prefer its hardware to anything else; I prefer Linux to macOS. So that's exactly what I'd want to pay for.
- rowanG077 6y ago
  The hardware is the only good part unfortunately. I would have clicked buy faster then the flash could if the M1 could run Linux.
  - foldr 6y ago
    Isn't this pretty much an impossible ask, though? The hardware is great largely because Apple have invested so much in developing a custom SoC. But as a result, you can't easily run a generic OS on it. It's not like Apple just need to bridge the Linux jumper on the motherboard. Supporting Linux would require Apple to maintain millions of additional lines of code, and either hold themselves hostage to decisions made by the Linux kernel team, or maintain their own fork of Linux (which, aside from being based on BSD, is essentially how we got to Mac OS in the first place!)
    - rowanG077 6y ago
      Actually it would only require Apple to release internal documentation. There are enough Linux nerds to write all the drivers. Graphics will probably be the hardest.
      - foldr 6y ago
        "Only". It would probably be easier for them to maintain the Linux drivers themselves than to thoroughly document every feature of the SoC. It's not just about individual drivers though, it's about the surrounding kernel infrastructure and the whole desktop experience. For example, getting instant suspend/resume working on Linux is not (I'm fairly sure) just a matter of writing a driver for a particular bit of hardware.
        rowanG077 6y ago
        They don't need to anything new. What they already have is enough. Their own software engineers could handle it fine. It's good enough for people who want this. There are people who have clean room implemented entire nvidia drivers. Without doc. We can manage fine with whatever incomplete doc Apple allready has.
simonh 6y ago
You’re likely to hit the common problems porters face with putting Linux on an arbitrary ARM SoC. These chips have lots of integrated components on them, requiring device drivers that may not exist for Linux. Take the custom Apple developed in house GPUs for example. Good luck finding any kind of Linux device driver for those, open source or not. It gets even worse for things there isn’t even an external equivalent of, like the neural engines. Even if Apple does nothing to stop you running whatever software you like on the device, you’re still likely to be out of luck. I wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising folks have a good run at it, but it’s likely to be a massive undertaking.
ucha 6y ago
You can't run Linux on Macbook Pros released after 2016 in any meaningful sense anyways...
ghaff 6y ago
I can pretty much guarantee you that trying to run anything other than macOS on Apple's silicon is going to be an exercise in frustration. You will presumably be able to run an Arm build of Linux in a VM--given that Apple has demoed this--but if you want native Linux, I'm not sure why you would pay a premium to possibly get a bit more performance on a laptop while probably having various support issues.
tinus_hn 6y ago
They have already stated they won’t: “We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. “Purely virtualization is the route. [...]” https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/24/21302213/apple-silicon-mac-arm-windows-support-boot-camp https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/24/21302213/apple-silicon-ma...
- qz2 6y ago
  Another item added to the list of why I'm not buying one of these.
  - foldr 6y ago
    It doesn't make a huge amount of sense to buy a Mac if you're not going to use Mac OS as your daily driver. A lot of the benefits (e.g. battery life, touchpad quality) are dependent on software as well as hardware, and are greatly diminished on Windows or Linux.
    - abainbridge 6y ago
      I've never been that impressed with the Mac Mini's battery life or touchpad :-)
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - qz2 6y ago
        Actually I had a Mac mini with the touchpad and the damn thing disconnected three times a day. All my input devices have wires now and the stick out of the right places.
      - foldr 6y ago
        Touché. But seriously, most people who want to run Linux on Mac want to do it because they like Apple's laptop hardware. If you want a compact Linux desktop then a NUC should probably serve you just as well. Or at least, this was the case while Apple was still using Intel chips. If Apple Silicon lives up to expectations then I suppose there could finally be a compelling reason for running Linux on a Mac desktop. To be clear, I'm not saying that there couldn't possibly be any good reason for wanting to run Linux on a Mac desktop. But desktops are already a niche product for Apple, and people who want to run Linux on Mac desktops are arguably a tiny niche within a niche.
crazygringo 6y ago
If you want to use Linux for the tools, then just use a VM. But if you want full control over your hardware... Apple isn't the way to go. I'm not even sure what the "OS of our choice" means when we're talking about a custom-designed SoC. The amount of reverse-engineering required to get any other OS to work would be staggering, no? If you want to run a custom OS natively, you need to buy a laptop with a commodity chip, not a custom one. Fortunately, there are tons of them.
- josteink 6y ago
  ARM actually has a defined architecture and UEFI equivalent, which would have worked wonders here. If Apple had decided to support it, that is.
alwillis 6y ago
I hope Apple allows us to install the OS of our choice. The battery life is impressive but I refuse to not use Linux. Apple's hypervisor technology runs natively on the M1; Linux running on that will be faster than Linux running on anything else you can buy for the same amount of money. They showed Debian running on Apple Silicon during the WWDC keynote nearly 6 months ago.
- lhl 6y ago
  Tuxedo Computing and Slimbook both sell Ryzen 4800H computers that will outperform the M1 in heavy multithreaded workloads and come with Linux preinstalled. These laptops aren’t quite as slick as the MBP but weigh in at 1.5kg, have huge 91Wh batteries, and have a better keyboard (I have one from a different OEM, but same ODM design). They also have user upgradable memory and storage - I am running with 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD at a total cost (with upgrades) of less than what Apple is charging for their base 8GB/256GB MacBook Pro. I expect a future “M2” to maybe take the performance crown, but AMD isn’t standing still. Cezanne has Zen 3 cores, which should boost IPC by about 20%, and Rembrandt should get to 5nm and have RDNA2 graphics.
  - alwillis 6y ago
    Tuxedo Computing and Slimbook both sell Ryzen 4800H computers that will outperform the M1 in heavy multithreaded workloads and come with Linux preinstalled. These laptops aren’t quite as slick as the MBP but weigh in at 1.5kg, have huge 91Wh batteries… 1. You're not going to get 20 hours of battery life. 2. Don't forget it's not just the M1—it's the unified memory, the 8 GPU cores and the 16-core Neural Engine. Most CPU and GPU-intensive apps are going to run faster on the M1 than on your machine. Even x86-64 apps using Rosetta 2 on an M1 Mac may run faster, since those apps are translated to native code on the M1. 3. Mac's SSD is probably faster; it's essentially a 256GB cache for the processor. 4. The Mac can run iOS/iPadOS apps too. 5. If done right, Linux compiled for the M1 will likely run faster on an M1 Mac than it does on a machine like yours, especially if Apple provides a way to access certain hardware features. We’ll have to see what happens but expect these machines to be pretty popular with users, even those who need to run Linux when that the distros are updated. We shouldn't forget that the underpinnings to all of this is Darwin, the BSD-derived Unix layer which is already running natively on M1, including the compiler and the rest of the toolchain.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
k2enemy 6y ago
You can, but need to sign the OS image.
criddell 6y ago
What can you do on Linux that you can't do on macOS?
- choward 6y ago
  Automate the entire set up of my computer using a declarative language. I use NixOS. Mac OS isn't even close.
- toast0 6y ago
  Have a TCP stack with synflood protection? (The mac stack was copied from FreeBSD in 2001, before syncookies/syncache were added, and not meaningfully pulled since)

Why?

And that's your choice. I would start looking at AMD's Ryzen offerings because supporting Linux is not going to be high on Apple's list going forward.

JAlexoid 6y ago
has it ever been?
- bstar77 6y ago
  I ran linux for years on my MacBook via Bootcamp. I'd be surprised if Bootcamp ever comes back.

jdlyga 6y ago

I wouldn't pay for Apple hardware unless I wanted to use MacOS.

OJFord 6y ago
Why? The hardware's the nice bit.
- Aperocky 6y ago
  Yeah this. Imagine if we had the same hardware but designed for linux, I'd pay a premium for that. Although hardware specific software from Apple is probably a big part of that draw too. I don't think we're ever going to see Linux prioritize a certain hardware and put in the effort to make it integrate as well as macs does.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    I don't really get this. I switched to MacOS because it's fundamentally BSD with a nice/ well integrated GUI. Almost all of the good OSS I love is supported nearly perfectly. Perhaps I'm a bit jaded after running into too much bullshit trying to get Linux running well on laptops in the 90s and 00s. Since I made the move I never wax nostalgic for the "Good Ole Days" of fighting for hours to get Wifi working properly. Even assuming Apple released the specs so you could port Linux to M1, on top of the usual laptop driver issues around the trackpad, wifi drivers, and video drivers, you also have to deal with the Secure Enclave. Without that, you are stuck with either a non-encrypted drive or running drive encryption on the CPU which is likely going to kill many of the performance gains from using the Mac hardware. Likewise, without the Secure Enclave, you lose fingerprint auth. Not anti-Linux by any means, but dropping Linux on the M1 isn't going to get you the same performance or battery life by any means. You are far better just going with a laptop which was designed to be Linux friendly to start with.
    - JAlexoid 6y ago
      Well... That's why I have a ThinkPad, that is certified on Linux. (So your prejudice is dated) I'm literally trying to figure out how to install Python 3.6 alongside 3.9 in MacOSX .... right now, and it's not a one line command. So... No. It has massive issues with developer friendliness. New OSX stalls with bluetooth mice and randomly locks my keyboard(MBP 2020). The only thing I can commend OSX on - battery life on a MacBook and nothing else
      - rootusrootus 6y ago
        > install Python 3.6 alongside 3.9 in MacOSX .... right now, and it's not a one line command To be fair, that's not easy on any OS (well, maybe Windows). Certainly on CentOS it is a chore to get two versions of Python installed simultaneously.
        JAlexoid 6y ago
        I'm on Ubuntu - it's not as mindbogglingly hard as on MacOSX. Unsupported versions - harder, but still a few commands... Supported versions? sudo apt install python-3.6 and done.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  Because the software is also the nice bit
  - OJFord 6y ago
    Well if you like both there's no problem is there. Comment I replied to was 'I wouldn't pay for Apple hardware if I didn't want the software' implying that would be a stupid thing to do. I prefer its hardware to anything else; I prefer Linux to macOS. So that's exactly what I'd want to pay for.
rowanG077 6y ago
The hardware is the only good part unfortunately. I would have clicked buy faster then the flash could if the M1 could run Linux.
- foldr 6y ago
  Isn't this pretty much an impossible ask, though? The hardware is great largely because Apple have invested so much in developing a custom SoC. But as a result, you can't easily run a generic OS on it. It's not like Apple just need to bridge the Linux jumper on the motherboard. Supporting Linux would require Apple to maintain millions of additional lines of code, and either hold themselves hostage to decisions made by the Linux kernel team, or maintain their own fork of Linux (which, aside from being based on BSD, is essentially how we got to Mac OS in the first place!)
  - rowanG077 6y ago
    Actually it would only require Apple to release internal documentation. There are enough Linux nerds to write all the drivers. Graphics will probably be the hardest.
    - foldr 6y ago
      "Only". It would probably be easier for them to maintain the Linux drivers themselves than to thoroughly document every feature of the SoC. It's not just about individual drivers though, it's about the surrounding kernel infrastructure and the whole desktop experience. For example, getting instant suspend/resume working on Linux is not (I'm fairly sure) just a matter of writing a driver for a particular bit of hardware.
      - rowanG077 6y ago
        They don't need to anything new. What they already have is enough. Their own software engineers could handle it fine. It's good enough for people who want this. There are people who have clean room implemented entire nvidia drivers. Without doc. We can manage fine with whatever incomplete doc Apple allready has.

simonh 6y ago

You’re likely to hit the common problems porters face with putting Linux on an arbitrary ARM SoC. These chips have lots of integrated components on them, requiring device drivers that may not exist for Linux. Take the custom Apple developed in house GPUs for example. Good luck finding any kind of Linux device driver for those, open source or not. It gets even worse for things there isn’t even an external equivalent of, like the neural engines. Even if Apple does nothing to stop you running whatever software you like on the device, you’re still likely to be out of luck. I wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising folks have a good run at it, but it’s likely to be a massive undertaking.

ucha 6y ago

You can't run Linux on Macbook Pros released after 2016 in any meaningful sense anyways...

ghaff 6y ago

I can pretty much guarantee you that trying to run anything other than macOS on Apple's silicon is going to be an exercise in frustration. You will presumably be able to run an Arm build of Linux in a VM--given that Apple has demoed this--but if you want native Linux, I'm not sure why you would pay a premium to possibly get a bit more performance on a laptop while probably having various support issues.

tinus_hn 6y ago

They have already stated they won’t: “We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. “Purely virtualization is the route. [...]” https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/24/21302213/apple-silicon-mac-arm-windows-support-boot-camp https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/24/21302213/apple-silicon-ma...

qz2 6y ago
Another item added to the list of why I'm not buying one of these.
- foldr 6y ago
  It doesn't make a huge amount of sense to buy a Mac if you're not going to use Mac OS as your daily driver. A lot of the benefits (e.g. battery life, touchpad quality) are dependent on software as well as hardware, and are greatly diminished on Windows or Linux.
  - abainbridge 6y ago
    I've never been that impressed with the Mac Mini's battery life or touchpad :-)
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - qz2 6y ago
      Actually I had a Mac mini with the touchpad and the damn thing disconnected three times a day. All my input devices have wires now and the stick out of the right places.
    - foldr 6y ago
      Touché. But seriously, most people who want to run Linux on Mac want to do it because they like Apple's laptop hardware. If you want a compact Linux desktop then a NUC should probably serve you just as well. Or at least, this was the case while Apple was still using Intel chips. If Apple Silicon lives up to expectations then I suppose there could finally be a compelling reason for running Linux on a Mac desktop. To be clear, I'm not saying that there couldn't possibly be any good reason for wanting to run Linux on a Mac desktop. But desktops are already a niche product for Apple, and people who want to run Linux on Mac desktops are arguably a tiny niche within a niche.

crazygringo 6y ago

If you want to use Linux for the tools, then just use a VM. But if you want full control over your hardware... Apple isn't the way to go. I'm not even sure what the "OS of our choice" means when we're talking about a custom-designed SoC. The amount of reverse-engineering required to get any other OS to work would be staggering, no? If you want to run a custom OS natively, you need to buy a laptop with a commodity chip, not a custom one. Fortunately, there are tons of them.

josteink 6y ago
ARM actually has a defined architecture and UEFI equivalent, which would have worked wonders here. If Apple had decided to support it, that is.

alwillis 6y ago

I hope Apple allows us to install the OS of our choice. The battery life is impressive but I refuse to not use Linux. Apple's hypervisor technology runs natively on the M1; Linux running on that will be faster than Linux running on anything else you can buy for the same amount of money. They showed Debian running on Apple Silicon during the WWDC keynote nearly 6 months ago.

lhl 6y ago
Tuxedo Computing and Slimbook both sell Ryzen 4800H computers that will outperform the M1 in heavy multithreaded workloads and come with Linux preinstalled. These laptops aren’t quite as slick as the MBP but weigh in at 1.5kg, have huge 91Wh batteries, and have a better keyboard (I have one from a different OEM, but same ODM design). They also have user upgradable memory and storage - I am running with 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD at a total cost (with upgrades) of less than what Apple is charging for their base 8GB/256GB MacBook Pro. I expect a future “M2” to maybe take the performance crown, but AMD isn’t standing still. Cezanne has Zen 3 cores, which should boost IPC by about 20%, and Rembrandt should get to 5nm and have RDNA2 graphics.
- alwillis 6y ago
  Tuxedo Computing and Slimbook both sell Ryzen 4800H computers that will outperform the M1 in heavy multithreaded workloads and come with Linux preinstalled. These laptops aren’t quite as slick as the MBP but weigh in at 1.5kg, have huge 91Wh batteries… 1. You're not going to get 20 hours of battery life. 2. Don't forget it's not just the M1—it's the unified memory, the 8 GPU cores and the 16-core Neural Engine. Most CPU and GPU-intensive apps are going to run faster on the M1 than on your machine. Even x86-64 apps using Rosetta 2 on an M1 Mac may run faster, since those apps are translated to native code on the M1. 3. Mac's SSD is probably faster; it's essentially a 256GB cache for the processor. 4. The Mac can run iOS/iPadOS apps too. 5. If done right, Linux compiled for the M1 will likely run faster on an M1 Mac than it does on a machine like yours, especially if Apple provides a way to access certain hardware features. We’ll have to see what happens but expect these machines to be pretty popular with users, even those who need to run Linux when that the distros are updated. We shouldn't forget that the underpinnings to all of this is Darwin, the BSD-derived Unix layer which is already running natively on M1, including the compiler and the rest of the toolchain.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

k2enemy 6y ago

You can, but need to sign the OS image.

criddell 6y ago

What can you do on Linux that you can't do on macOS?

choward 6y ago
Automate the entire set up of my computer using a declarative language. I use NixOS. Mac OS isn't even close.
toast0 6y ago
Have a TCP stack with synflood protection? (The mac stack was copied from FreeBSD in 2001, before syncookies/syncache were added, and not meaningfully pulled since)