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Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

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Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#121

Post by tachyonbeam »

lars-b2018 wrote: post #99
mark_l_watson wrote: post #70

I 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…

I use Common Lisp daily on macOS and Linux, but use SBCL and Emacs with Sly. Never tried out a commercial implementation so I cannot compare to Emacs and SBCL. Are they worth the money vs. the open source tools?

How could they be worth it? Vendor lock-in has a huge cost IMO. You're going to have to keep paying for these insanely expensive licenses for years, maybe decades?

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#122

Post by skohan »

emilecantin wrote: post #117
stjohnswarts wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine, it's not like it keeps them all open, i've had a couple hundred tabs open in Firefox while researching a project using tree style tab to organize them. Modern browsers cache pages to disk after a certain high water mark. People actually seem to think all those tabs stay in memory.

It was meant slightly in jest; but looking at Activity Monitor on my 32GB RAM Macbook Pro, it looks like I'm currently using ~28GB. I have Docker & a few Node.js processes (webpack builds, typescript compiler, language server, etc) taking about ~10GB between them, and then a sea of "Google Chrome Helper (Renderer)" processes each taking between 100 and 900MB. There are at least 20 of these, and then also the usual su…

re. the "usual suspects", I got an M1 air late last year, and I've decided to keep it completely separate from my work laptop, so all it has installed is basically firefox, a couple of code editors, and whatever came with it. It absolutely screams compared to my other laptop, but I wonder how much of that is the M1 processor, and how much of it is because I don't have all this garbage running all the time.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#123

Post by smoldesu »

Sigh. I wish Apple would just release these drivers as a sign of goodwill to the rest of the community. I think these machines could make decent development workstations if they had an M.2 port and native Linux support on day 1. It really feels like the least they can do considering their transgressions against the open source community over the past few years...

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#124

Post by tinus_hn »

skohan wrote: post #57
_gqhf wrote: post #48

Earlier 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.

Somehow if you have that kind of memory it tends to fill up.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#125

Post by dr_zoidberg »

smoldesu wrote: post #123

Sigh. I wish Apple would just release these drivers as a sign of goodwill to the rest of the community. I think these machines could make decent development workstations if they had an M.2 port and native Linux support on day 1. It really feels like the least they can do considering their transgressions against the open source community over the past few years...

This is way beyond wishful thinking. Apple will do what it makes most sense in their business strategy. Due to their past transgressions against the open source community, what makes you think that community fits in their business strategy?

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#127

Post by kllrnohj »

OldHand2018 wrote: post #64
skohan wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you need 32GB for? Video editing? ML training on CPU? I have to imagine this is a minority.

If someone needs 32GB then they need 32GB. The M1 is Apple’s low-end chip, currently available only on their cheapest computers. It’s like complaining that a Corolla can’t keep up with a Ferrari on a race track. The most charitable interpretation is that the person doesn’t understand the market position of the two items.

Apple brands one of these machines as a "Pro" system and previously offered 32Gb in that model's option range.

The person isn't the one that's failing to understand the market position of the two items, Apple is the one that failed to brand it appropriately. It should have been a Macbook Air & Macbook, not a Macbook Pro.

Although realistically at this point "Pro" has lost nearly all meaning in Apple's lineup. It's like an R badge on a car. Used to mean something specific, now just means a generically higher premium option.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#128

Post by ianlevesque »

smoldesu wrote: post #123

Sigh. I wish Apple would just release these drivers as a sign of goodwill to the rest of the community. I think these machines could make decent development workstations if they had an M.2 port and native Linux support on day 1. It really feels like the least they can do considering their transgressions against the open source community over the past few years...

I'm not sure what transgressions you're referring to, but releasing some specs would be nice, or updating the open source copy of XNU to a version with M1 in there.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#129

Post by fulafel »

thoughtsimple wrote: post #126
wayneftw wrote: post #79

Would any of this work be useful to run Linux on an iPad?

The A12x and A12z don’t have hypervisor support. So the hvf accelerator isn’t going to work.

Basic ARM can run VMs under paravirtualization, ala https://community.arm.com/developer/ip-products/processors/b...

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#130

Post by GeekyBear »

skohan wrote: post #104
GeekyBear wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M1x benchmarks that recently leaked show that it supports 32 Gigs of RAM, has twice the number of big CPU cores, and twice the GPU cores. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/macbook-pro-m1x-benchmarks-ju... It should be adequate for a non-entry level laptop. One of the fairly accurate Apple leakers, Jon Prosser, has said that one of his proven sources has informed him that the leak is legit.

How does the current M1's graphics performance compare to, say, a mid-range NVIDIA laptop GPU?

The Apples to Apples comparison (if you will) is to other integrated GPUs.

>The first Apple-built GPU for a Mac is significantly faster than any integrated GPU we’ve been able to get our hands on, and will no doubt set a new high bar for GPU performance in a laptop. Based on Apple’s own die shots, it’s clear that they spent a sizable portion of the M1’s die on the GPU and associated hardware, and the payoff is a GPU that can rival even low-end discrete GPUs.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

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