I imagine memory will be quite constrained here for a lot of M1 systems.
zswap helps a lot. One can get ~30% compression rates with a not-too-big performance impact.
Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
81–90 of 149 posts
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's good for you and I'm glad you're happy but for some of us, considering the work with are doing, sometimes even 32GB is not really enough. Different people, different needs.
What do you need 32GB for? Video editing? ML training on CPU? I have to imagine this is a minority.
>> What do you need 32GB for?
Massive projects. Or a couple VM's.
The first laptop I saw running a VM was a Dell Precision M50 (?), it was 2" thick and almost 10lbs. It had something ridiculous (at the the time) like 1 or 1.5GB of RAM.
A sales guy was demoing a product to us, and it spun up a Windows 2000 VM for IIS and another for SQL server, it probably took 10 minutes to get started but he could then demo the app through the browser. Sounds silly but it worked.
"But can't you just run it on a server somewhere"
Yes. That'd be cheaper and faster. But at this high end of the market, it might make more sense for some people.
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a regular user, probably not. Contemporary dev work with spurious containerization on the other hand… Maybe some companies should give their employees two systems. Your average way too expensive bragging rights laptop, and a smaller older one which is the only one you're allowed to do your code review/productive commits on.
How about an undersized laptop for testing and coding. But a personal server for under their desk with k8s already installed.
People, for some kind of reason, really like their laptops. They also have more brand recognition, thus the "bragging right" part, when you get your new X1/Macbook every 2 years.
And if you still work on your laptop but have your personal server box as a CPU slave, that still leaves some issues. You might be able to do your build steps on the machine, but your IDE still runs on your laptop, so that needs to be beefy enough -- never mind auxiliary applications like browsers, Photoshop, CAD etc. Also, it's quite hard to get a slow laptop with decent ergonomics, unless you buy used (not that much an option for companies).
Also, once you go headless server, it's better to just put it online anyway, as you don't need 24/7 access
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing else ever had the PC. And IBM wasn't too happy that it happened to them, either.
It definitely makes Apple's decision to never allow generics seem wise in retrospect.
In a way, they themselves started becoming a manufacturer of "IBM compatibles", they just locked their OS to them.
A Jobs-less alternate Apple universe might've been interesting though. He both canned the licensed Apple clones and made OpenStep into the next major MacOS revision. If Copland would've been OS 8 or BeOS as OS X, there could be viable clones, and thus maybe enough critical mass to keep PowerPC alive a bit longer.
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing else ever had the PC. And IBM wasn't too happy that it happened to them, either.
It definitely makes Apple's decision to never allow generics seem wise in retrospect.
But they did at one point in the late 90’s. I wouldn’t say that was the only reason why they nearly went bankrupt, but it certainly didn’t help.
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
We did actually but Acorn canned it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebe_(computer)
That's not what he means by PC. He means an open standard that anyone can build against with comparability between products.
That’s exactly what it was. Two other vendors were going to launch as well.
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#87I like the attitude of author of this gist. Just make it work. My own practical practice is to use both a very fine System76 Linux laptop and also a super fast, if constrained, M1 MacBook Pro. Depends on what I am doing, or sometimes just what I feel like using. To be perfectly open though, I had considered switching to just using Linux until the M1 was released. The thing that held me back was spending $3500 on a co…
Out of curiosity, which commercial CL implementation would that be? LispWorks? Allegro?
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the people who claim that 16 GB isn't enough are insane, but it should be said: at 4 GB it does become a bit problematic to both keep browsers with a bunch of tabs open and do other things smoothly. If we keep modern website hogs out of the picture, I completely agree with you. I tally about 500-1000 MB doing my job – if I can close the browsers that I do admittedly need to read documentation.
> I think the people who claim that 16 GB isn't enough are insane The problem is containers. Some development workflows appear to require running a container for every piece of software needed, and that adds up (and feels incredibly wasteful). None of my development workflow requires containers locally, so I get by just fine with 16gb.
Why would containers do anything to memory requirements? I guess you can't share libraries, but otherwise I don't see why memory use should be any different running the same process in a container or not.
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
It definitely makes Apple's decision to never allow generics seem wise in retrospect.
But they did at one point in the late 90’s. I wouldn’t say that was the only reason why they nearly went bankrupt, but it certainly didn’t help.
Yeah, "never" was the wrong word. I forgot about that.
Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It’s still a really large discrepancy. I would guess something is broken somewhere. What is the webgl frame rate on native Mac? Have you tried running those webgl demos with chromium?