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
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
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
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
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.
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?
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).
