No, android does not count.
Is there anyone who daily drives Linux on apple silicon or other ARM hardware? If so, then how is your experience, would you recommend it?
For at least 3 years, I’ve been wanting to get an apple silicon mac to daily drive Linux on, lately I’ve been seriously considering getting one of these machines, or even other ARM hardware, like the thinkpad x13s or even the new Qualcomm laptops.
I’m pretty much sold on a used macbook air m1 at this point, but I still wish to hear what other people have to say
Im using arch linux to respond to you right now from my dualboot Oneplus 6. Yeah linux on phones is cool. Recommended. 4.9 stars
arm64 != M* hardware
Arm on Linux is fine. Supporting all the other SoC parts will obviously vary by vendor. I believe there are still many things broken with Apple’s M* platform, but I’m pretty sure it boots. If you really want an Arm laptop, get one the new Qualcomm setups.
https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki
Things are progressing really fast actually! Take a look at the feature support page
Well, I guess that’s subjective heh. The very rudimentary basics work on M3, but it’s not in any way capable of daily driving. M1 looks to be the safest if you really need to go with Apple, but it seems you’d be much better off with the Qualcomm as it has native support.
The Qualcomm Elite x has still very little support. I would not recommend it as of yet.
Don’t ditch macOS on the m1. Asahi has some critical features missing and you’ll want to be able to switch back.
Ran Asahi for several months, tried it out again recently. It’s good/fine, I just don’t love fedora.
There’s some funkiness with the more complicated install, the AI acceleration doesn’t work, no thunderbolt / docking station.
MacBooks are great hardware but I don’t think they’re the best option for Linux right now. If you’re never going to boot into macOS then I’d look for x13, new Qualcomm, isn’t there a framework arm64 option now or was that a RISC module?
I’m also assuming you’re not looking to do any gaming? Because gaming on ARM is not really a thing right now and doesn’t feel like it will be for a long while.
I think the neural engine works, but you need an out-of-tree kernel module. The asahi wiki talks about that, they say it is yet to be merged on mainline.
Gaming on arm is absolutely a thing… But not on the M’s… About the other chips it’s just on its infancy right now, fex-emu(https://github.com/szllzs/FEXEMU) and box64(https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64) are both capable of running wine, and of course steam. Games work, I don’t think its 100% of native speed, and the compatibility must not be perfect, but like wine/proton I’m sure it’s only going to get better.
The apple silicon devices have 16k pages kernels, while x86 is 4k pages, that would not be a problem if we had 4k page emulation/simulation on Linux, but we don’t, seems like macOS’s way of emulating 4k pages is wasteful to performance, and the contributors do not wish to make a similar implementation, so we don’t get one for now.
All Raspberry Pis (
excepteven the Pico) are ARM devices so… yes I’ve been using Linux on ARM for years. It’s been smooth sailing both as desktop or 24/7 home servers except for few very rare packages that aren’t build for that architecture and then themselves have dependencies making it hard but overall as time passes and there are ARM processors everywhere it’s only getting easier. I have not tried on Apple Silicon but here also support only seems to get better.PS: also been using the PineTab 2 nearly daily and less frequently PinePhone and PinePhone Pro, all on ARM, also only Linux, all good.
How has your experience been with Pi as a desktop? I’ve recently ordered a Pi 5 and intend to use it as my desktop, only using my more powerful desktop for heavier games.
Well I’m not. I have a different setup due to working in VR. I did use for myself and others a RPi as a desktop for few tools and as long as you stick within what’s acceptable for its performance, it’s really nice, such a compact setup. The RPi I use at home and at work are headless servers for e.g DLNA, IoT, backups.
If I didn’t work in XR or play (BG3, EldenRing, etc) then I imagine I would find a RPi 4 sufficient for most of my tasks.
I dunno if that counts, but I was given a Macbook Air M2 from work that I didn’t need and I’ve been happily running macOs on it for simple daily use.
Whenever the situation requires Linux I fire up one of 3 distros I have as a VM and they work like a charm. I pass-through one of the USB ports to the VM and it’s basically an M1 with Linux at that point in terms of performance (well not really, but it’s very smooth, no complaints).
Might wanna go that route instead, just run macOs natively and your favorite distro as a VM.
What do you use as a vm on an arm mac? I was looking into this a while back to run linux on my work m3 macbook but i couldnt find any good options
Mainly Kali for my needs, completely hassle-free on VMware but any ARM version should work.
Want me to try a particular distro as a test?
From experience, most apps/packages that are compiled for Linux are compiled for both x86 and arm. I’ve had no real issues getting software on my OnePlus 6 running on postmarket os (full Linux os on a phone basically). This is very likely because ARM is a thing in the server space, so most packages in your distros repositories will be compiled for all architectures (and that’s if it’s not required by the distro’s repos to have the two supported).
Other software ftom outside the repos where linux was already a second class citizen like discord or Spotify may be troublesome though
I used my Chromebook Duet 3 from Lenovo which has a Snapdragon ARM chip.
I installed a custom compiled Kernel with some weird distro iso maker from a dude for such devices. It adds a few drivers to make various things work.
Bluetooth, Audio, Usi pen, Touchscreen worked. It was nice.
The USI pen and touchscreen glitches sometimes out, which forces me to suspend this convertable for a second and wake it up to fix the issue.
I couldn’t really install lunarvim or some other development tools because some things just are not compileable/installable. I didnt bither eith waydroid as It was too complex for me to really grasp how to install the header files and so on.
I did use KDE (5.25 I think), with Wayland and it was good actually. Xournalpp for writing and logseq for storing knowledge in patterns, which sometims had buggy graphics on Wayland for some reason.
Things like RNote couldn’t work because the Mesa drivers weren’t really installed or smth and kernel header files were needed here too I think.
Firefox with touch on wayland also was a nice experience that worked pretty great (but needs environment value to be set for Wayland).
I accepted that I will get a new device after 2 Years of using that tablet and replacing paper on school. Did work great for me. I prefer Penoval Pens. They have them for all devices. Usi and MPP and much more.
So I got the Starlite 5 (from starlabs.systems) which has a worse Battery lifetime than expected (I think but not stress tested. OS shows 3 to 6 hours sometimes but advertised was 14h) but at least I can even run some small Steam games on that n200 intel chip and install all Applications I want because its AMD64 Architecture cpu. It kinda overheats at the top right corner.
Note that both products are convertables, or rather Tablets with a detachable keyboard.
So at the end. I can use this Chromebook convertable for some narrow things but not for everything, like a Computer should be able to. But maybe all the skills you need are capable to be run on a slow Snapdragon with aarch64 Architecture. Unsure how Apple M1 is there compared to that.
I was using the pinebook pro ARM laptop with manjaro linux as a semi-daily driver for a while. It is fine for simple tasks and web browsing, but you cannot expect the hardware to be quick or snappy. I had consistent issues with wifi, and eventually I got fed up with the weak performance and switched back to an x86-64 architecture laptop. In terms of software and support, besides the wifi issues, it was fine
I daily drive m2 max on NixOS, all software just works (hyprland, keepassxc, etc. except discord).
opengl works well, vulkan won’t be stable and shipped by default for at least 6 months tho.
no wine, gaming, etc. no external monitor, only non-thunderbolt hubs work, no internal mic, quick battery drain while suspended, if all of that is fine for you, it’s a great dev machine.
Have you ever tried Box86/Box64 for Wine? I was wondering what the experience is like these days.
That is quite interesting, have you tried the edge kernel?
Honestly if you buy a Mac give macOS a try. It’s Unix based so you’ll feel at home in the command line. It doesn’t come with a command line package manager but there are two popular ones you can install (homebrew and macports).
I can’t move the close maximize minimize buttons to the top right so MacOS is dead to me on arrival.
main issue with apple stuff is the ridiculous pricing for memory.
$500 to add just 8gb of ram and 128gb of SSD? What’s that, the year 2012?
It’s 2024 and it’s ridiculous that a $1500 laptop comes with the same amount of memory of a $300 Motorola smartphone
I’ve done some embedded arm Linux dev work and use a raspberry pi 400 and an android phone. All work fine.
Raspberry Pis are also ARM-based, and you can use them as desktops. Only problems are that they aren’t very powerful for media usage (e.g. video editing, 4k video decoding on youtube, blender etc). If you’re not into such high performance media production, then sure, they’re fine for everyday usage.
I have a Libre LePotato, Pinebook and Pinephone. They’re fine for most of my use cases, but they don’t handle games too well. They are also not great for VMs or emulation, and no chance in hell would I use any for my home media server.
That being said, I’m starting to see ARM CPU desktops in my feeds, and I think one of those would be fine for everything but gaming (which is more an issue of the availability of native binaries and not necessarily outright performance). TBH at that price point, using off-chip memory and GPU, I don’t see much reason to go with ARM; maybe the extra cores, but I can’t imagine there is much in the way of electrical efficiency that SoCs entail.
