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Linux Running on Apple M1

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Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#241

Post by kiwijamo »

na85 wrote: post #132
midrus wrote: post #84

Linux might run, but good luck with the drivers. And good luck with it keeping working with future upgrades of both, hardware and software. Heck, even today it is pretty difficult to get things working reliably unless it is a thinkpad or some other Linux friendly brand. A Mac with subpar support for a webcam, energy saving, suspend/resume, the trackpad, brightness/volume controls, etc is not a laptop, it's an expensi…

>subpar support for a webcam, energy saving, suspend/resume, the trackpad, brightness/volume controls Honestly this sounds exactly like my experience with linux on any laptop, including three thinkpads. Linux is a great desktop and server OS but the UX of a laptop actually demands a certain level of polish/fit-and-finish that linux desktop environments just don't have, otherwise it's constantly getting in your way.

Suprisely to me even, all these work work fine on Debian. Debian needed me to slide load the intel wireless drivers (a disappointing aspect I grant) but otherwise everything just worked right out of the box. Lenovo X1 Carbon 5th Generation.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#242

Post by Geminidog »

saagarjha wrote: post #218
Geminidog wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not talking about health. Competition and the cred received for for being first to market will drive people to compete and therefore innovate. Whether that's healthy or not is not only a big convoluted topic, but a separate topic. Either way you're citing singular examples and calling it "seemingly unhealthy." It's a weak argument against my example of the entire modern world as a competitive arena.

We are talking about health because I started this thread with a discussion about the healthiness of the situation. Bringing up jailbreaking is an extremely strong argument because many of the same people are involved, rather than whatever vague "competition the real world" example you have shows. And I know that the currently situation has already turned off some very capable people from contributing to either "side…

But of course many people who are working on this are driven by the competition as well. Both collaboration and competition have their place, but make no doubt, the world itself is proof that competition is likely the primary driver behind why Linux was up and running on the M1 so quickly.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#243

Post by fomine3 »

floatboth wrote: post #227
plauribre wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's poor support for Linux on Mac hardware may reverse if the company gains data center ambition for the M1. Partnering with a cloud provider (maybe Microsoft?) to deliver seamless Linux deployment on M1 would be significant...

Microsoft already has a good partner in Ampere, a company fully dedicated to servers and standards. Apple clearly doesn't seem interested. The M1 is just a scaled-up version of the iDevice SoCs. From the reverse engineering we've seen so far, it is extremely clear that not even a single step towards any standardization was taken. It's very much the ad-hoc hodgepodge of embedded crap companies build when they only car…

Interesting details. Is using Synopsys DesignWare problem?

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#244

Post by matheusmoreira »

arghwhat wrote: post #102
midrus wrote: post #84

Linux might run, but good luck with the drivers. And good luck with it keeping working with future upgrades of both, hardware and software. Heck, even today it is pretty difficult to get things working reliably unless it is a thinkpad or some other Linux friendly brand. A Mac with subpar support for a webcam, energy saving, suspend/resume, the trackpad, brightness/volume controls, etc is not a laptop, it's an expensi…

Funny, that's how I feel with Windows and Mac. I grab a machine and install Linux, and it works more or less out of the box. Maybe a few fixable quirks. And I don't use Thinkpads. I try to use Windows or macos, and it's a coin toss. Windows handling USB like hot garbage (hub balancing/buffer sizes leading to devices unable to activate, webcams glitching, input lagging at random intervals), display issues (macos doesn…

> having been a proprietary kernel driver developer for Windows, FreeBSD and Linux

May I ask how you learned how to do this? I'd like to learn too! I had a great experience developing a Linux user space driver for my own laptop's LEDs. Couldn't figure out how to control the fans though.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#245

Post by fomine3 »

rowanG077 wrote: post #122
midrus wrote: post #84

Linux might run, but good luck with the drivers. And good luck with it keeping working with future upgrades of both, hardware and software. Heck, even today it is pretty difficult to get things working reliably unless it is a thinkpad or some other Linux friendly brand. A Mac with subpar support for a webcam, energy saving, suspend/resume, the trackpad, brightness/volume controls, etc is not a laptop, it's an expensi…

I'm not sure why you are so pessimistic. There are many community supported linux devices that work fine. The Microsoft Surface line being a prominent example. There are patches available for all recent kernels. And afaik all generations are supported. Here custom drivers have also been written.

Microsoft Surface don't use special hardware as much as Apple's laptop. Especially for M1, they uses original GPU, boot system, power management, etcetc...

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#246

Post by mehrdada »

midrus wrote: post #84

Linux might run, but good luck with the drivers. And good luck with it keeping working with future upgrades of both, hardware and software. Heck, even today it is pretty difficult to get things working reliably unless it is a thinkpad or some other Linux friendly brand. A Mac with subpar support for a webcam, energy saving, suspend/resume, the trackpad, brightness/volume controls, etc is not a laptop, it's an expensi…

This is a depressing thought to hear on a site titled Hacker News. Looking back at the past 20 years, I am quite confident it is just a matter of time before people get a couple drivers working fine on M1 systems (esp. considering Apple does not seem to be actively fighting this). I am sure folks will make it work considering the relative popularity of the device compared to all the esoteric devices that no one uses and Linux still supports.

Sure, documentation helps, but it is overrated--people get lots of things working by reverse engineering.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#247

Post by arghwhat »

oblio wrote: post #127
arghwhat wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, that's how I feel with Windows and Mac. I grab a machine and install Linux, and it works more or less out of the box. Maybe a few fixable quirks. And I don't use Thinkpads. I try to use Windows or macos, and it's a coin toss. Windows handling USB like hot garbage (hub balancing/buffer sizes leading to devices unable to activate, webcams glitching, input lagging at random intervals), display issues (macos doesn…

The thing is, many more people are using Windows, than Macs and many more people are using Macs, than desktop Linuxes. So your anecdata goes against a mountain of anecdata from people using those platforms.

You are incorrectly assigning platform popularity as equal to driver maintenance.

First, non-desktop uses of Linux significantly outnumber uses of Windows and macOS in general, and a large majority of drivers and functionality is shared there.

Second, drivers not made by the usual giants are, as I mentioned earlier and experienced first hand, written and shipped once, maybe with a few updates for obvious issues, but this shit is harder than you think, with obscure uncaught bugs littered all over the place. Drivers need pretty much perpetual maintenance for all but the simplest blinkenlights.

Third, even "desktop" drivers are run through their places in server environments, through e.g. workloads like Stadia.

Fourth, proprietary drivers are not subject to any scrutiny whatsoever, whereas you won't get past the gatekeepers if you don't pull your shit together for the open source kernels.

Popularity does not fix unmaintained code. Giving even just one annoyed and skilled person the ability to change the code does. And sometimes, external companies like Collabora will decide to overhaul things, which they again can't do for a proprietary driver.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#248

Post by arghwhat »

danudey wrote: post #201
arghwhat wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, that's how I feel with Windows and Mac. I grab a machine and install Linux, and it works more or less out of the box. Maybe a few fixable quirks. And I don't use Thinkpads. I try to use Windows or macos, and it's a coin toss. Windows handling USB like hot garbage (hub balancing/buffer sizes leading to devices unable to activate, webcams glitching, input lagging at random intervals), display issues (macos doesn…

I'll do you one better: macOS does support MST! It actually does! But it only supports it for splitting one display image over multiple streams, to overcome bandwidth limits on Displayport streams. For providing a signal to very-high-pixel-count displays, macOS uses MST. For providing multiple displayport signals to multiple displays? Nope, not implemented. Imagine my frustration after a day of googling and finding o…

That is basically what happens when you don't support MST.

The screens light up from the same DP stream, which is also why you can have, say, 2x 4k@60hz monitors in this configuration where true MST would need to drop it to at least 30Hz, or lower res.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#249

Post by charsi »

floatboth wrote: post #223
danudey wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a huge apple fanboy, but there are still issues that crop up on macOS, like it or not. My favourite example is one that the OP mentioned - not supporting multiple stream transport on Displayport. For those who aren't familiar, Displayport MST is a feature that allows multiple streams over one Displayport cable. Some monitors support this directly, meaning you can have Macbook -> Display1 -> Display2 rather than M…

Huh, I've only ever heard of MST in the context of too-high-res displays o_0 Never heard of raw DP supporting daisy chaining, I thought only Thunderbolt does that.

Thunderbol/USB C use displayport signal to drive monitors. I have a apple "thunderbolt" display which happily runs from laptops that don't do thunderbolt.

Dell makes some Displayport monitors which support daisy chaining.

Re: Linux Running on Apple M1

#250

Post by charsi »

fortran77 wrote: post #199
tw04 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Funny, that's how I feel with Windows and Mac. Based on...? Apple is pretty straightforward: they support hardware until they don't. And they're quite explicit about ending support and it's almost always a major release. You might be able to hack support after that, but I've literally never had it be a "toss-up" about when Apple was or wasn't supporting their own hardware. As for Windows... I've got a 10 year old 26…

I run all three here. On Windows 10, if I say on the "happy path" everything "just works". I have a Lenovo laptop, and our desktops are Xeon boxes with Supermicro motherboards. No weird USB problems, etc. Linux, however, is another story. Bad sleep support, forget about printing, scanning, GPGPU computing, etc. We use it when we have to.

For fixing sleep look for an option in Lenovo's BIOS. I had it set to windows sleep mode by default. Switched it to Linux mode and it has been working reliably on my x13 AMD.

I upgraded from thinkpad x240 on which sleep worked perfectly too.

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