Live data from Hacker News

Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

gist.github.com

21–30 of 149 posts

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#21
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus Torvalds: ARM has a lot to learn from the PC : "I think ARM is a very promising platform," he said. "At the same time, the ARM community has never had the notion of a standard platform. ARM never had the PC." https://www.networkworld.com/article/2220438/linus-torvalds-...

We did actually but Acorn canned it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebe_(computer)

Very interesting, the reason for cancelling seems to largely hold true today.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#22
post #18

Can’t you just run X11 on the Mac and Linux in a vm?

Xquartz doesn't have hidpi support (or if it has, please tell me how to enable it!)

It's a total PITA, but it can be done as long as you are ok with full screen. I use it to run PixInsight on FreeBSD and view it on macOS: https://xw.is/wiki/HiDPI_XQuartz

/edit: oh, and yeah, if you patch xrandr not to return, I suspect that the resolution change will persist on switching between macOS and the unix desktop, though I haven't tested that yet.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#25

Awesome achievement, but like most OpenGL bridge techniques, 15fps with artifacts is not usable.

The demos run from the terminal seem to run at a much higher frame rate. Firefox webgl demo slowdown may be due to other factors.

Right. Frame rate heavily depends on workload.

For me, it is completely fine. I just develop some softwares with little graphics load, and use Web applications and watch some videos.

You have no luck here if you are going to play modern games, but modern proprietary game engines do not support AArch64 Linux anyway. It would be difficult time for Linux desktop if other PC vendors migrate to AArch64.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#26
post #24
post #3

I imagine memory will be quite constrained here for a lot of M1 systems.

Indeed, it is. 16GB is too constrained even for native Linux desktop environment.

Running Fedora/GNOME on an i5/8gb laptop, never ever felt memory constrained.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop environments on Linux basically just draw into a full-screen X window, don't they? (And then the programs you run are children of that root window.) I wonder how hard it would be to hack up XQuartz to support that...

You wouldn't even have to hack it up. There's an option in XQuartz to make it run full-screen, at which point you can run a standard X11 DE. The main issue with XQuartz nowadays is that it doesn't support Retina displays in windowed mode. Everything runs pixel-doubled by default.

I haven't tried XQuartz at all because I didn't think that kind of software has plenty of resource and is well maintained. Retina support is just one problem caused by lack of maintenance.

There are only two options: hack Virgil 3D or hack XQuartz. You cannot "just" run XQuartz and solve problems. And I choose hacking Virgil 3D because it should have less communication overhead and work with Wayland.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#29
post #24
post #3

I imagine memory will be quite constrained here for a lot of M1 systems.

Indeed, it is. 16GB is too constrained even for native Linux desktop environment.

I suppose it's what you do with it. I use about 6GB of an 8GB system, with the rest allocated to buffer cache. Firefox, VS Code, terminals, mapping software...I can't use 16GB unless I spin up a VM.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#30
post #24
post #3

I imagine memory will be quite constrained here for a lot of M1 systems.

Indeed, it is. 16GB is too constrained even for native Linux desktop environment.

What the hell, enough with this! My main dev machine until a few months ago was a Dell laptop with 8 GB of RAM on Ubuntu. I ran RubyMine on it all day, some Sublime, Spotify, Slack, MariaDB, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, and I had no problems whatsoever. The only reason it ever ran out of RAM was a memory leak in Firefox.
Post reply on HN