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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

#51

What's the story with OpenGL on macOS? I know it is abandonware in favor of Metal but are there reasons Apple will at least keep it in the OS / drivers for foreseeable future? Do any of the ANGLE type things help when they finally take it away?

It still works and at least somebody still seems to work on it going by the somewhat random GL-related fixes and regressions in macOS Betas since GL was declared deprecated.

AFAIK ANGLE (and MoltenGL) only provide GLES2.x and GLES3.x over Metal, so out of the box those wouldn't be very useful for providing desktop-GL compatibility.

Apparently Zink on top of MoltenVk on top of Metal works, but that looks like a Jenga tower of emulation layers.

Ideally, Apple would rewrite their OpenGL framework on top of Metal (if it hasn't happened yet), and keep that working at least into the 2030s.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#52
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Linux desktop environment runs fine with 4GB.

Can confirm, my VMs default to 4GB of memory and run just fine.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#53
post #35
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I mean, Android Studio eats memory too much.

I run KDE with other JetBrain's IDEs and a 2 GB VM in the backround every day and the maximum memory usage was 14 GB.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#54
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux desktop environment runs fine with 4GB.

Good luck compiling large sources on 4gb

Since when compiling large sources is a desktop environment?

There are projects that you cannot link if you have under 32 GB; but that is not enough to say that desktop environment you use while compiling is unusable under 32 GB.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#55
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

That's fine, but people like these are mostly outliers in the dev community, they exist on Linux, Windows and even macOS and they definitely KNOW perfectly well what their requirements are and why.

The post I was replying to said something very different and much weirder.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#57
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#58
post #38
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#59

What's the story with OpenGL on macOS? I know it is abandonware in favor of Metal but are there reasons Apple will at least keep it in the OS / drivers for foreseeable future? Do any of the ANGLE type things help when they finally take it away?

It still works and at least somebody still seems to work on it going by the somewhat random GL-related fixes and regressions in macOS Betas since GL was declared deprecated. AFAIK ANGLE (and MoltenGL) only provide GLES2.x and GLES3.x over Metal, so out of the box those wouldn't be very useful for providing desktop-GL compatibility. Apparently Zink on top of MoltenVk on top of Metal works, but that looks like a Jenga…

>> AFAIK ANGLE (and MoltenGL) only provide GLES2.x and GLES3.x over Metal, so out of the box those wouldn't be very useful for providing desktop-GL compatibility.

I thought Wayland implementations considered one of those a base requirement.

Re: Linux Desktop on Apple Silicon/M1 in Practice

#60

What's the story with OpenGL on macOS? I know it is abandonware in favor of Metal but are there reasons Apple will at least keep it in the OS / drivers for foreseeable future? Do any of the ANGLE type things help when they finally take it away?

It still works and at least somebody still seems to work on it going by the somewhat random GL-related fixes and regressions in macOS Betas since GL was declared deprecated. AFAIK ANGLE (and MoltenGL) only provide GLES2.x and GLES3.x over Metal, so out of the box those wouldn't be very useful for providing desktop-GL compatibility. Apparently Zink on top of MoltenVk on top of Metal works, but that looks like a Jenga…

In fact, OpenGL on Apple M1 is implemented through AppleMetalOpenGLRenderer.
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