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M1 Pro 14“ MacBook Pro Running KDE Plasma 5 on Arch Linux ARM
- mark_l_watson 5y agoI just had a crazy idea: Apple selling systems with a nice Linux distribution that included full support for iCloud. Apple would lose money of App Store sales, but opening up to a slightly larger market might work. I would also be interested if they got into selling M1 racked systems for data centers. Why leave money on the table.
- zerr 5y agoWhat's Win10/11 story on m1 macs?
- trollitarantula 5y agono such story
- mixmastamyk 5y ago"The End."
- viktorcode 5y agoWholly dependent on Microsoft. So far, they didn't say anything apart from indicating last year that they don't have immediate plans to do it.
- DHowett 5y ago> Wholly dependent on Microsoft. Not wholly, surely? As an OEM, Apple would need to provide drivers. Given that their system isn’t an off-the-shelf SBBR/ServerReady ARM64 device, that’s going to be a not-insignificant amount of work that isn’t Microsoft’s responsibility. Seeing as the Asahi Linux project has had to reverse-engineer pretty much everything, I don’t see how Microsoft could be totally on the hook.
- NobodyNada 5y agoApple has publicly stated that they’re willing to do that, but Microsoft refuses to license Windows for the M1: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/20/craig-federighi-on-windows-for-m1-macs/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/20/craig-federighi-on-wind...
- Isthatablackgsd 5y agoI'm surprised Apple stated that as macOS (ARM) have stretchy support for dual booting, even with two macOS version installed. So how could Apple be willing to do that if they haven't flesh out the dual-booting for Apple Silicon? Strange they passes the ball to Microsoft (deflecting to their competitor) whereas Apple should be holding the ball until it is capable enough.
- marcan_42 5y agoIt's precisely it not being a SystemReady ARM64 device that makes it Microsoft's responsibility. The Windows kernel requires core changes to support this hardware; it cannot be done with just drivers. Nobody can make Windows work on this without Microsoft's help. Same reason we had to make a few changes to core Linux plumbing, besides adding drivers.
- DHowett 5y agoAh, thanks for the explanation! That makes sense.
- wolpoli 5y agoMicrosoft doesn't offer Windows 11 unless it is bundled with hardware. I am sure that if Apple wishes to sell Macbook Pro with Windows, Apple could reach out and Microsoft would be interested. But I really doubt that Apple would want to go down this route.
- blue_cookeh 5y agoEh? You can go out and buy a retail copy of Windows 11 from loads of places without hardware. E.g. here in the UK Scan, Ebuyer, Insight, etc. All major software/hardware sellers.
- wolpoli 5y agoMy bad. I should have specified Windows 11 ARM.
- Tsiklon 5y agoBare metal Win10/11 ARM is non functional on the M1 machines, Virtualised is officially unsupported [1], there is no apparent talk of official support for either in the rumour mill. However it wouldn't surprise me if there was a working dev build in Redmond somewhere. [1] - https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/10/windows_11_m1/ https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/10/windows_11_m1/
- k8sToGo 5y agoWon't happen because it would work against their Surface efforts, I think
- _fzslm 5y agofor a software-focussed company like Microsoft to deny running Windows on the M1 seems very strange to me… if MSFT is serious about (eventually) transitioning to ARM for the majority of consumer-oriented Windows machines, it surely makes sense for them to provide support for the most adopted ARM-based laptop and desktop platform out there… to bolster development of ARM-native applications for Windows on ARM, if nothing else. i don’t own either machine — but i imagine the ARM-based Surface Pro X would make a miserable development experience, especially compared to a hypothetical Windows on M1(X) MacBooks. we shall see i suppose, but i would be very surprised if we never see it happen.
- TillE 5y agoBuy a copy of Parallels, run the Windows 11 ARM64 insider preview in a VM. Works pretty great for everything but gaming. If you want to activate it, use slmgr with some sketchy third party KMS server.
- saint_angels 5y agogreat news, the progress is much faster than I expected!
- oblio 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function
- varispeed 5y agoEven if you run Linux, how to you ensure that the SoC does not e.g. scan memory and send telemetry to Apple independently of the installed operating system?
- hmottestad 5y agoIf you're worried about these sorts of situations then there aren't going to be very many choices for you. You can't choose Intel because they have their management engine, you can't choose AMD because they don't own their own fabs. You could go full air-gapped and get a machine without any network cards. Would still recommend a nice bunker deep inside a mountain just to be on the safe side.
- avhception 5y agoWell, there still is https://raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html https://raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html if you're not dependent on x86-64... You'd still be relying on other peoples fabs, of course. But it's a step up.
- markb139 5y agoI wonder if you could get around this by having a multi CPU machine setup (many vendors silicon) and have a "Generals problem" algorithm ?
- varispeed 5y agoOk, so because other companies do that it should be acceptable? I don't understand your patronising tone. How is that helpful?
- hmottestad 5y agoI don't think Apple does this.
- nindalf 5y agoYour concerns mean theres no modern device you could possibly be using. So either you’re bringing up something that no one, including you, actually cares about. Or you’re commenting on Hacker news using the butterfly method on HN servers (https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/)
- jeroenhd 5y agoI was surprised by glxgears/OpenGL running, but in a later tweet I read this: > It's been running the glxgears demo (60% all-core CPU usage) Looks like it'll be a while before this thing runs Linux with anywhere near acceptable performance if glxgears still runs in software at 60% CPU.
- kaladin-jasnah 5y agoIf networking and KVM suport exist for this (I think it does), then these would make great servers as well.
- JustFinishedBSG 5y agoThe % usage is not indicative of anything considering it will use as much CPU as possible to reach as high a frame rate as possible
- rowanG077 5y agoI think by default glxgears has vsync enabled. But it's trivially possible to disable it with an env var. Considering the CPU usage I assume that is what was done. 60% CPU usage for running glxgears at 120Hz seems excessive.
- e_proxus 5y agoI always remember glxgears running at hundreds of FPS and it being used as a poor man’s benchmark. Perhaps this has changed of late though…
- rowanG077 5y agoI always have had to set `vblank_mode=0` to get it to run as fast as possible.
- marcan_42 5y agoThere is no vsync with the dumb framebuffer backend I'm using. We have a real display driver, but it needs rebasing and adapting to work on these laptops (it was developed on the Mac Mini).
- hyproxia 5y agoI really hope that all of these efforts end up failing miserably. Their only purpose is to encourage customers to buy from these companies. It'll be entertaining to watch them engage with their sisyphean mental gymnastics once Apple releases a new product with extra wrenches for their pleasure.
- saagarjha 5y ago> It'll be entertaining to watch them engage with their sisyphean mental gymnastics once Apple releases a new product with extra wrenches for their pleasure. I mean, you're looking at the new Apple product. This project started on M1 and now it's being extended to work on M1 Pro.
- marcan_42 5y agoWrenches found so far: they changed some hardware blocks to scale up to ~2TB of RAM (up from 32GB theoretical max on the M1) and better support more CPU cores and multi-die setups (future product?). And they moved some fuse bits around. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
- simonh 5y ago>I really hope that all of these efforts end up failing miserably. Deep breaths my friend. Maybe time for a walk in the sunshine.
- danlugo92 5y agoApple seems to draw so much actual pure hate... It's like, I can understand hating an oil company or something like that, but Apple? Geez.
- simonh 5y agoI think it's a product of cognitive dissonance. These people believe in freedom, as in free and open systems. But Apple freely chooses to make closed systems. But that's cheating, so they want to promote freedom by coercing Apple by law into making the products the way they want them to be. Except that meanwhile billions of people all over the world don't give a fig about all that and quite happily buy these products as Apple designs them. So huge numbers of people are freely choosing to buy things that are closed, and they shouldn't be allowed to do that. It must be stopped, because of freedom. Plus of course "Open wins every time" tuned out not to be true, which is impossible, so clearly Apple must have cheated. If I had to hold all that in my head, I'd go a bit bananas too.
- _ph_ 5y agoI am so happy to see the quick progress of Linux on the ARM-Macs. In the 80ies and 90ies, there were several competing processor architectures on the market, but for the last 20 years for PCs it was x86 only. With the Apple Silicon, there is now a real contender, actually surpassing the current x86 offerings in many aspects. And that is, why competition between architectures is so important. And of course just interesting from a software development perspective. With Linux becoming a viable option on those machines, they become interesting for a far wider audience than just the MacOS users. Thanks to the great work by Alyssa, GPU acceleration should be close too. Then lets see when Linus gets himself a Mac, he already indicated that he would be interested to do so as long as he doesn't have to port Linux himself.
- Y_Y 5y agoI often find myself using ARM on the desktop nowadays. I use android phones, Nvidia devices, SoCs (most famously raspi).
- GekkePrutser 5y ago20 years ago IBM PowerPC was still a contender too. With Apple no less. The x86/64 solo reign was more like 15 years. But I miss it too. The 90s with all its amazing architectures. SPARC, Alpha, MIPS, PA-RISC, PowerPC. I still have several of those here at home :) Computers have become boring and it's nice ARM is shaking things up. I wonder if M1 will ever be fully supported though. With full unrestricted video, 3D and AI acceleration. There seems to be a lot of Apple secret sauce in these processors.
- oblio 5y ago> The x86/64 solo reign was more like 15 years. Solo, yes, probably 15 years. But domination? Probably starting with the IBM PC in 1981 (ok, make that 1982 or 1983 to allow for the sales ramp up) until 2020. That's a very long run for a computer architecture. I expect that the next architectures to rise to the top will be even more entrenched. We're way past computing's early years, childhood and adolescence.
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- darthrupert 5y agoI love Linux but after 5 years of using Apple products exclusively, I have learned to hate everything except Apple hardware. Linux on macbooks would be an amazing dream.
- oblio 5y agoIt's probably going to be a cool toy, but being able to use the hardware to its full potential and also having Linux on ARM Macs be your daily work driver is going to be a humongous challenge. I wonder if it will ever happen outside of very limited use cases.
- sirwitti 5y agoWhat makes you say that?
- davidatbu 5y agoNo OP, But its most likely that Apple's software is designed to take full advantage of the hardware, but to do that with Linux software would require (1) a lot of funding, and (2) documentation of the hardware, which as I understand it, Apple is currently not willing to provide. So the folks who work on this have to do a lot of reverse engineering.
- oblio 5y agoThey need to reverse engineer the GPU, the ML cores, the security chips. They need to figure out power management and use it as well as MacOS. Apple will just throw some crap random docs at them, best case scenario. They won't discourage it actively but they won't help them either. The time budget for high quality engineers working on this will also be limited as there's no market that I think of, only itch scratching. Which generally takes you to "good enough/mediocre" not to "awesome for the general public".
- cute_boi 5y agoI don't understand apple why don't they provide docs so thousands of Dev don't waste time reversing their api. It will also help to bring some PR stuff to apple. But it seems they are too concerned and doesn't their user to use other os.
- perihelions 5y ago>"So it basically ran for a whole day off of battery doing hardware experiments. Still had 30% left." Are there metrics comparing efficiency / battery life of ARM linux and OS X, on the same hardware? This sounds promising.
- viraptor 5y agoThis wouldn't be representative yet. Software rendering will kill the efficiency. We'll need to wait for the GPU to be properly supported.
- geerlingguy 5y agoEven without the GPU, it sounds like the M1 is quiet and efficient, more so than any HP/Dell/Lenovo laptop I've used. Most heat up quite quickly doing anything, and the battery life quickly drops once you go past "light web browsing". If someone can pull off the GPU in Linux on these, I have a feeling they'll be some beastly Linux dev workstations too.
- selectodude 5y agoI just picked one up yesterday, I pulled it out of the box at 70 percent, installed all my crap, set it up to my liking, used it all afternoon and evening, closed the lid, went to bed, and now I'm using it to type this comment and the charger is still in the box. It's frankly incredible.
- londons_explore 5y agoIt seems they're at the stage where they could do with more development help... For example, bringup of the wifi can probably happen in parallel with GPU work...
- marcan_42 5y agoWiFi already works, but the existing patch (which was written by Corellium as part of their throwaway M1 Linux PR stunt earlier this year) needs a complete rewrite, among other things because the way it handles firmware is completely backwards. I know how I want to do it, just need to spend a day or so on that one, maybe another day on hooking up firmware copying into the installer :)
- mootzville 5y agoI don't understand why you'd want a Mac unless you intended to run it's provided OS. With Linux you can get the same hardware for half the price from other manufacturers. EDIT: By 'same hardware' I mean 'hardware with comparable / equivalent performance'
- kaladin-jasnah 5y agoMaybe because the M1 is a powerful, low-power-consumption CPU and it is very hard to get powerful aarch64 CPUs outside of this? Not everyone likes macOS.
- dagw 5y agoWith Linux you can get the same hardware for half the price from other manufacturers. That might have been true before, but today no one else is selling ARM laptops that can match the M1 Pro in performance and efficiency.
- mootzville 5y agoAgreed, but who will better take advantage of the CPI's architecture to utilize those gains, the same people making the hardware and native OS, or a Linux distro? Just because a CPU can do something does not mean every OS / kernel is going to use it. What I was getting at is if you want Linux, you can get a good Lenovo or Dell for about $1000-1200 that would seem / feel compararble to a $2000 macbook.
- saagarjha 5y agoSome people just want Linux. Running it on Apple silicon (that is, aarch64) is exactly what they want–performance wise, it'll run circles around anything else in that price race.
- danlugo92 5y agoNo one else is selling laptops period that can match the M1 Pro in performance and efficiency. Much less the M1 Max.
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- sys_64738 5y agoA static image with no example videos of software rendering?
- flakiness 5y agoWondering how GPU is enabled. I thought Apple silicon GPU is largely a black box. Or is it already reverse engineered in a certain level?
- nicoburns 5y ago> Wondering how GPU is enabled For this demo it's not. It's doing CPU rendering, which the M1 is apparently fast enough to do while providing decent UI performance (albeit while using 60% all-core CPU to do it). > it already reverse engineered in a certain level? It is. See: - https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-1.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-1.html - https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-2.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-2.html - https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-3.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-3.html - https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-4.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-4.html
- kzrdude 5y agoSerious question since i don't know much, how can the display be used without the gpu?
- flakiness 5y agoThe frame buffer doesn't have to be on the GPU side (and for M1, it's unified memory architecture.) So the role of the GPU is just to make the graphic related computation faster. Things like composition and display output is kinda orthogonal.
- flakiness 5y agoWow, things like this blog series are exactly what I'm interested in! Thanks a lot!
- prike 5y agoI've been watching macran's stream on youtube in the last couple of days, where he had to fix a lot of stuff so this notebook can come to life. If you are intrested in ARM/bootloader/linux/drivers, I highly recommend the stream recordings.
- packetlost 5y agoMind linking me to their channel?
- anirudh24seven 5y agoI had the same question and I found this: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxS98ISZNcuaJRCvy6JV6Fw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxS98ISZNcuaJRCvy6JV6Fw
- runnerup 5y agoLooks like: https://www.youtube.com/c/marcan42/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/marcan42/videos
- pndy 5y agoI guess the global menu ignores notch in the middle and displays sections anyway? The difference in fonts between KDE and macOS is visible here at first sight (ofc I know it's not surprising...). And maybe that's what Apple should do - tweak GUI a bit? Because from what I've read, people complain that menus are getting cut out.
- smoldesu 5y ago> I guess the global menu ignores notch in the middle and displays sections anyway? Yep, but that's not really an issue on KDE since most widgets will avoid the center of your bar unless you explicitly tell something to display there. I'm sure some frustrated MBP owner will push a fix for it in the future though, it's just a matter of time. > The difference in fonts between KDE and macOS is visible here at first sight Well, in this screenshot it is. As you can see, there's no GPU acceleration on anything here, which means they've probably got subpixel AA disabled (and obviously aren't running San Francisco system-wide). You can configure the two to be frighteningly similar though, in my experience.
- marcan_42 5y agoSubpixel AA has nothing to do with the GPU; not sure if it's enabled by default or not though, I didn't touch it, but it is pretty irrelevant with high-DPI screens. Apple does not use subpixel AA by default any more for this reason (and because they often use scaled non-native resolutions the way their UI scaling is designed).
- rpmisms 5y agoNot a technical comment, but wow, Plasma 5 looks great on that hardware.
- 1024core 5y agoAre there any comparable non-Apple laptops which are well supported by Linux? I'd hate to pay the Apple tax, only to run Linux on the bare metal. Plus, I'm assuming "Apple care" goes out the window once you wipe out MacOS?
- nacs 5y agoApple Care covers hardware issues so installing Linux shouldn't void that unless you physically open up the laptop to do some weird thing.
- marcan_42 5y agoI'm not aware of any machines with comparable performance/efficiency from any other vendor. Apple officially supports running your own kernels on these machines. This isn't a jailbreak, it's an official feature of the hardware and firmware design that Apple added, and which their EULA allows you to use in this way. These machines are also not brickable, you can always do a DFU restore from macOS or (soon; Monterey needs some stuff I already figured out but haven't implemented yet, but it works for older versions on the M1s) Linux using idevicerestore, no matter how much you wipe or screw up. (That said, I wouldn't recommend wiping macOS at this stage; we expect most users to have a dual-boot setup.)
- pqb 5y agoFrom my experience - a notable percent of all Dell laptops (especially Precision and Latitude series) has a decent Linux support. I have never been an owner of laptop from System76 or any other brand that is targeting Linux users. However, I am really interested in getting a Framework Laptop [0] for myself, which looks nice and I have already read good opinions about it. [0]: https://frame.work/ https://frame.work/
- caymanjim 5y agoI used to rant about paying so much extra for Apple hardware and call it the "Apple tax" too, but the truth is, no one else makes good laptops. You're paying for more than simply the brand. I spent a fortune on a Lenovo X1 Extreme, and the thing bricked itself three times in 14 months, the last of which was outside the warranty window, and it's now basically impossible to get repaired (I couldn't even get anyone to look at it, and Lenovo is no help at all). Even if it weren't bricked, the shitty plastic case is already getting loose (the display hinge is loose/wobbly and squeaky); the speakers sound terrible; it's loud; it gets unbearably hot. Dell laptops are pretty good with Linux, but the build quality is similarly poor. Linux-first laptops like System 76's are clunky and inferior. It's really hard to beat MacBooks on a hardware level. I'd love to run Linux on one.
- coding123 5y agoThe only thing that would make it better is the M2 Pro where the Notch will be directly in the middle of the screen so that we can optimize zoom calls even more.
- nbzso 5y agoThe only motivation for me to own Apple hardware in 2021 is the ability to use FOSS software in the natural habitat of Linux. I don't trust Apple's software and "ideas" of computing at all. Just another big company with data gathering ambitions. After Catalina MacOs is a total joke. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce... So let's hope that running Linux on M cips will be possible, soon.
- jmnicolas 5y agoBut if you don't want MacOS why wouldn't you buy a $800 laptop and don't have to worry about ARM compatibility?
- MiguelX413 5y agoBecause it's not a huge concern and compatibility has been making extremely fast progress.
- nomel 5y ago> After Catalina MacOs is a total joke I'm running Monterey now, and nothing has changed for me between Catalina and Monterey. The security changes (like kernel extensions, some paths, etc) and deprecations (32-bit apps), that broke some of the software/devices I had, were already present in Catalina. What damning difference do you see in Big Sur and Monterey?
- andrekandre 5y ago> What damning difference do you see in Big Sur and Monterey? the ui/ux i presume
- nomel 5y agoI must "OS" differently than GP. The changes were subtle and inconsequential, from my perspective. In fact, it made some window management software I had obsolete!
- MuffinFlavored 5y agoDoes Bluetooth work? Does the built in keyboard work? Trackpad? WiFi?
- jaggirs 5y agoNo
- marcan_42 5y agoYes to all of the above, with out-of-tree patches that need cleanup/rewrites. I'm not running them myself for that reason (I keep my tree to upstreamable things or nearly so), and doing so is on my list for the next week or two. WiFi also needs some installer plumbing to copy the firmware to the right place. I already have it all planned out, just need to sit down and write it.
- vivab0rg 5y agoIt never fails to boggle my mind. The sheer amount of work, time and money that goes into "freeing" this hardware from the clutches of Apple's walled garden. Truly remarkable, but maybe it's just a first-world problem.