6 ms·

I 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 amaz

I 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 ago
It'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 ago
  What makes you say that?
  - davidatbu 5y ago
    No 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 ago
    They 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 ago
      I 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.
      - LASR 5y ago
        > I don't understand apple why don't they provide docs so thousands of Dev don't waste time reversing their api. It's exactly because they don't want thousands of Devs wasting time at all. Why reimplement something that already works well as a computing platform? There is no good reason why they would want to do this. But it's not like they're blocking everything and locking it down. They just haven't published docs etc - which can carry a significant maintenance cost.
        ladyanita22 5y ago
        Shitty explanation. If they don't want people to waste time, give them what you already know.
      - oblio 5y ago
        Playing devil's advocate: Apple provides the complete package. If you're homebrewing on top of their PCs, that's your problem and you're actually more of a nuisance to them. They don't actually get any benefit from you and you, being an advanced user, are very likely to have demands that are not representative of the general population and that also risk being difficult to accommodate. What could you possibly do that the All Mighty Apple™ can't do better?
        technobabbler 5y ago
        Playing devil's advocate's devil's advocate: Maybe Apple is trying to cater to advanced users again? In the last decade or so, we've seen Apple flip-flop their designs and priorities between content creators and content consumers. If you can remember back to the 2000s, with the first-gen Mac(book) Pros, those were actually pretty remarkable computers, albeit very expensive and arguably overpriced from a performance per dollar standpoint. They were proper workstations -- if you could afford them. They also ran Windows via Boot Camp, with first-party drivers. Apple recognized the incremental value of supporting "advanced users" then, even if it was just a small niche. Then the iPhone and iPad came on the scene, and quickly overtook not only the Mac market but the computing market in general. Content consumption, and App Store profits, thus became most of Apple's revenue, and their priorities shifted accordingly. Once Jobs died and Jony Ive took over, they tried to refactor their computing devices to be more like their consumption devices, changing the Macs from workstations to, I don't know what, designer furniture with screens? The Mac Pro (trash can) was obsolete within a year, the Macbook Pros went from fantastic workstations to experimental art featuring terrible keyboards and no ports and broken-by-design cooling. Enter the present day. Jony Ive left (good riddance!) and they are again free to pursue the content creator market and cater to user demands, not the holier-than-thou vision of their annoying designer. The Macbook Pro is back with a vengeance (hopefully the desktop Pro soon), now featuring a vastly superior chipset, with a powerful & efficient CPU/GPU, ML chips, hardware encoders, etc. If only it had a USB-A port. Anyway, those are all signals Apple is starting to take the workstation market more seriously again. The market has also changed in the intervening years. Any ol' laptop will suffice for most users. For some, iPads with a keyboard or Chromebooks are more than enough. For the remaining power users, what are their options? Surface, ThinkPad, Latitude, and now Macbooks again, finally. But that requires accommodations for "pro" workflows and tooling, and these early signs are encouraging, or they wouldn't have bothered much past the Macbook Air. If Apple was able to support Boot Camp for Windows, there's no reason they can't provide similar support for other ARM operating systems, whether that's Linux or Windows for ARM. Parallels can already run Windows on a M1. Adobe has ported much of their stuff over to M1, Unity is halfway there, Unreal is thinking about it, Docker works... which is to say, the industry is excited about the possibility that Apple is going to start caring again. Hopefully. Maybe. Personally, I'm also intrigued by the possibility of M1 in data centers, in rack mounts, with amazing performance/watt metrics. If that happens, surely Linux development on M1 will pick up alongside, and that may trickle back down to desktop users? One can hope. I don't think Apple has ever been in this situation before: where its own chips (as opposed to integration and design) risk disrupting the status quo. It's an exciting time. We'll see if it lasts...
moonchrome 5y ago
I don't get this. The only reason I feel Apple has an advantage compared to competition is software integration. M1 performance in laptops is great but that's only been true for a year or so, for the last 5 years Apple laptops have been hot garbage. As an owner of fully loaded 2018 mbp (i9/upgraded GPU, 32 GB ram) I can without a doubt say it's the worst premium device I've ever owned. The battery runs out on me after 1 hour meeting - and I have >100 cycles on it. The amount of heat and noise it produces is surreal, and that's after I opened it and cleaned up the vents (which clog easily) and added thermal pads to connect VRM to chassis (which helped significantly, prior to that the CPU would downclock so bad I couldn't use anything on my device after 15 mins in a Google meet connected to a 5k monitor). Not to mention all the bugs I had to go through with it - wasn't untill 6 months after I purchased the device that I could actually use my 5k on my USBC monitor on full resolution - only started working after an OS upgrade. And the keyboards failing being a known problem they replace out of warranty because they recognise their design sucks (luckily I use external keyboard 95% of the time). Apple hardware was mediocre at best for the price they charge, up until M1. In the mobile space, they are faster but as someone who switched from an iPhone to Samsung - I can't really say it matters. Phones are good and well rounded but nothing spectacular, hardware is on par with Samsung. Again using the Mac/iOS combo is really nice so the software integration is next level, but considering their business practices I refuse to get locked in to the ecosystem, it's just too limiting. And Linux on M1 would likely be subpar to any premium x86 device, Linux support sucked even on x86 Macs.
- sys_64738 5y ago
  This is why Apple went to their own CPUs due to the poor thermal dynamics of the recent x86 chips. The recent chips are like the PowerPC chips of 2005.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Do you have any 5nm x86 chips that you could compare it to?
- kule 5y ago
  I understand the frustration, especially if your first impression of Apple is a MacBook Pro is in the 2016-2019 era - you've probably seen the worst MacBooks available and not the best of Apple. There were some good things, the displays were excellent, the touchpad is still the best in class, and the size/weight were excellent. But usb-c only was step too far, the Touch Bar wasn't the right move for a Pro audience (i), there wasn't enough room for cooling the intel chips and the keyboard situation was farcical - it's the primary interface to a Mac (can you imagine the outcry if iPhones had touch displays randomly not working, doing extra touches etc?!). I think Apple gets a lot of leeway because the 2008-2015 MacBook Pros were probably the best laptops you could buy. Having owned a 2009 MacBook Pro which in my opinion was the best laptop I'd ever owned and never made me question the amount of money I spent on it. The 2016 MacBook Pro was the exact opposite (mainly due to the keyboard being so bad). I'm glad Apple have come to their senses and course corrected. I do wonder though for people that have only seen the 2016-2019 era if they will bother to try Apple again... (i) I understand it probably would've made it too expensive to produce but I think the Touch Bar would've gone down well on a MacBook Air where I would imagine there's a lot more hunt-and-peck typists that'd appreciate and notice what's being displayed on the Touch Bar. As a touch typist I never looked down to see the Touch Bar so it was a mostly wasted on me.
flatiron 5y ago
Honestly I use Linux on a MacBook Air 2013. 4 gigs of ram and haswell i5 and it’s an amazing machine. It’s not my work machine for compiling and running a ton of apps but it’s super solid. Great battery life. Runs chrome amazing and Stardew valley great.
viktorcode 5y ago
You can run it in a VM

I 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 ago

It'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 ago
What makes you say that?
- davidatbu 5y ago
  No 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 ago
  They 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 ago
    I 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.
    - LASR 5y ago
      > I don't understand apple why don't they provide docs so thousands of Dev don't waste time reversing their api. It's exactly because they don't want thousands of Devs wasting time at all. Why reimplement something that already works well as a computing platform? There is no good reason why they would want to do this. But it's not like they're blocking everything and locking it down. They just haven't published docs etc - which can carry a significant maintenance cost.
      - ladyanita22 5y ago
        Shitty explanation. If they don't want people to waste time, give them what you already know.
    - oblio 5y ago
      Playing devil's advocate: Apple provides the complete package. If you're homebrewing on top of their PCs, that's your problem and you're actually more of a nuisance to them. They don't actually get any benefit from you and you, being an advanced user, are very likely to have demands that are not representative of the general population and that also risk being difficult to accommodate. What could you possibly do that the All Mighty Apple™ can't do better?
      - technobabbler 5y ago
        Playing devil's advocate's devil's advocate: Maybe Apple is trying to cater to advanced users again? In the last decade or so, we've seen Apple flip-flop their designs and priorities between content creators and content consumers. If you can remember back to the 2000s, with the first-gen Mac(book) Pros, those were actually pretty remarkable computers, albeit very expensive and arguably overpriced from a performance per dollar standpoint. They were proper workstations -- if you could afford them. They also ran Windows via Boot Camp, with first-party drivers. Apple recognized the incremental value of supporting "advanced users" then, even if it was just a small niche. Then the iPhone and iPad came on the scene, and quickly overtook not only the Mac market but the computing market in general. Content consumption, and App Store profits, thus became most of Apple's revenue, and their priorities shifted accordingly. Once Jobs died and Jony Ive took over, they tried to refactor their computing devices to be more like their consumption devices, changing the Macs from workstations to, I don't know what, designer furniture with screens? The Mac Pro (trash can) was obsolete within a year, the Macbook Pros went from fantastic workstations to experimental art featuring terrible keyboards and no ports and broken-by-design cooling. Enter the present day. Jony Ive left (good riddance!) and they are again free to pursue the content creator market and cater to user demands, not the holier-than-thou vision of their annoying designer. The Macbook Pro is back with a vengeance (hopefully the desktop Pro soon), now featuring a vastly superior chipset, with a powerful & efficient CPU/GPU, ML chips, hardware encoders, etc. If only it had a USB-A port. Anyway, those are all signals Apple is starting to take the workstation market more seriously again. The market has also changed in the intervening years. Any ol' laptop will suffice for most users. For some, iPads with a keyboard or Chromebooks are more than enough. For the remaining power users, what are their options? Surface, ThinkPad, Latitude, and now Macbooks again, finally. But that requires accommodations for "pro" workflows and tooling, and these early signs are encouraging, or they wouldn't have bothered much past the Macbook Air. If Apple was able to support Boot Camp for Windows, there's no reason they can't provide similar support for other ARM operating systems, whether that's Linux or Windows for ARM. Parallels can already run Windows on a M1. Adobe has ported much of their stuff over to M1, Unity is halfway there, Unreal is thinking about it, Docker works... which is to say, the industry is excited about the possibility that Apple is going to start caring again. Hopefully. Maybe. Personally, I'm also intrigued by the possibility of M1 in data centers, in rack mounts, with amazing performance/watt metrics. If that happens, surely Linux development on M1 will pick up alongside, and that may trickle back down to desktop users? One can hope. I don't think Apple has ever been in this situation before: where its own chips (as opposed to integration and design) risk disrupting the status quo. It's an exciting time. We'll see if it lasts...

moonchrome 5y ago

I don't get this. The only reason I feel Apple has an advantage compared to competition is software integration. M1 performance in laptops is great but that's only been true for a year or so, for the last 5 years Apple laptops have been hot garbage. As an owner of fully loaded 2018 mbp (i9/upgraded GPU, 32 GB ram) I can without a doubt say it's the worst premium device I've ever owned. The battery runs out on me after 1 hour meeting - and I have >100 cycles on it. The amount of heat and noise it produces is surreal, and that's after I opened it and cleaned up the vents (which clog easily) and added thermal pads to connect VRM to chassis (which helped significantly, prior to that the CPU would downclock so bad I couldn't use anything on my device after 15 mins in a Google meet connected to a 5k monitor). Not to mention all the bugs I had to go through with it - wasn't untill 6 months after I purchased the device that I could actually use my 5k on my USBC monitor on full resolution - only started working after an OS upgrade. And the keyboards failing being a known problem they replace out of warranty because they recognise their design sucks (luckily I use external keyboard 95% of the time). Apple hardware was mediocre at best for the price they charge, up until M1. In the mobile space, they are faster but as someone who switched from an iPhone to Samsung - I can't really say it matters. Phones are good and well rounded but nothing spectacular, hardware is on par with Samsung. Again using the Mac/iOS combo is really nice so the software integration is next level, but considering their business practices I refuse to get locked in to the ecosystem, it's just too limiting. And Linux on M1 would likely be subpar to any premium x86 device, Linux support sucked even on x86 Macs.

sys_64738 5y ago
This is why Apple went to their own CPUs due to the poor thermal dynamics of the recent x86 chips. The recent chips are like the PowerPC chips of 2005.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Do you have any 5nm x86 chips that you could compare it to?
kule 5y ago
I understand the frustration, especially if your first impression of Apple is a MacBook Pro is in the 2016-2019 era - you've probably seen the worst MacBooks available and not the best of Apple. There were some good things, the displays were excellent, the touchpad is still the best in class, and the size/weight were excellent. But usb-c only was step too far, the Touch Bar wasn't the right move for a Pro audience (i), there wasn't enough room for cooling the intel chips and the keyboard situation was farcical - it's the primary interface to a Mac (can you imagine the outcry if iPhones had touch displays randomly not working, doing extra touches etc?!). I think Apple gets a lot of leeway because the 2008-2015 MacBook Pros were probably the best laptops you could buy. Having owned a 2009 MacBook Pro which in my opinion was the best laptop I'd ever owned and never made me question the amount of money I spent on it. The 2016 MacBook Pro was the exact opposite (mainly due to the keyboard being so bad). I'm glad Apple have come to their senses and course corrected. I do wonder though for people that have only seen the 2016-2019 era if they will bother to try Apple again... (i) I understand it probably would've made it too expensive to produce but I think the Touch Bar would've gone down well on a MacBook Air where I would imagine there's a lot more hunt-and-peck typists that'd appreciate and notice what's being displayed on the Touch Bar. As a touch typist I never looked down to see the Touch Bar so it was a mostly wasted on me.

flatiron 5y ago

Honestly I use Linux on a MacBook Air 2013. 4 gigs of ram and haswell i5 and it’s an amazing machine. It’s not my work machine for compiling and running a ton of apps but it’s super solid. Great battery life. Runs chrome amazing and Stardew valley great.

viktorcode 5y ago

You can run it in a VM