Unleash Apple Silicon... with LINUX!

[@meddlin]

Linux on the M1 is happening a LOT faster than I assumed it would when I got the M1 Macbook Air. Super excited for what this project could be in a short while.

[@ebouwman034]

I wasn't expecting it to be at this point for another year.

[@gpturismo]

As for the ARM cores I am not shocked to be honest as it was going to be primarily driver discovery/reverse engineering. Here is hoping they get the GPU cores unlocked in Asahi. I really want to find an old m1 mac mini just to play with it. I already miss Mac OS X so it might be on the future buy list anyway.

[@catchnkill]

It is expected. If not faster, it is unusual. Linux uses a monolithic kernel while the macOS uses a hybrid kernel. There is part micro-kernel in the macOS kernel. Linux chooses monolithic kernel because it is faster.

[@catchnkill]

By the way, macOS and windows NT use the hybrid kernel approach because they found out that pure micro-kernel is just too slow, unacceptable.

[@gpturismo]

@@catchnkill I like Mac os x. I used A lot of nix learning 3d in the 90s and moving to Mac OS X from next was nice. I quit using Mac around 2012 when they started making weird hardware decisions (like non removable cable on studio display.) At a meeting in 2004 (at awdc) they said they were leaving ppc not due to inferior design but pr esp. IBMs next ppc concept based on power5 was smt3 but ran at a lower clock. Most consumers didn't understand cycle to cycle comparisons. They promised this was a stopgap as future mobile devices were to be arm and there was promising Risc Tech being developed. Later this turned out to be phones with arm, and risc v starting development in 2010. Jobs death in 2011 really altered the companies road map. I would like a Mac os x machine but I do to much to get locked into their hardware. Art, coding, gaming, vms, etc. I am hoping to find a cheap Mac mini m1 lol

[@martinrocket1436]

If even Jeff Geerling uses an Apple M1 to have ARM-Linux at hand, then the Raspberry Pi shortage seems to be serious.

[@JeffGeerling]

Heh, it's cheaper to buy a $699 Mac mini than a Raspberry Pi if you can't buy a Raspberry Pi to begin with!

[@DankoStojanovic]

$200-$250 for rpi4... Yeah, I'm not paying that

[@monad_tcp]

@@JeffGeerling I can't wait for cheap PC clones using the Samsung clone of the Apple M1 that I'm sure they are developing. Imagine for $300 instead !

[@johnbuscher]

@@monad_tcp The SQ2 is basically the current competitor, and it’s really not that great since it’s so hard to develop for from what I can see. Windows is sluggish, and I don’t think Linux boots (but I haven’t checked).

[@Randrew]

@@JeffGeerling An Odroid-XU4 SBC from Hardkernel outruns an RPi4, costs $53 and is in-stock. Makes your $750 ARM dev board comparison seem a little... off.

[@benjaminshropshire2900]

Side note to software vendors considering (not) porting to ARM: getting software running on a new arch is a great way to tease out hidden bugs with already supported arches. In particular, places where the existing code is depending on either undefined or implementation defined behaviors and only works by luck rather then by design.

[@j777111able]

That’s the beauty of version control and separate code bases for each architecture. But what you said was true none the less.

[@benjaminshropshire2900]

@@j777111able Could you elaborate? I've yet to see any advantage, or beauty, from separate arch specific code bases (for anything where it's feasible to avoid).

[@spicynoodle7419]

Very optimistic to think software vendors care about software correctness

[@benjaminshropshire2900]

@@spicynoodle7419 I've worked for one that does, or at least care about fixing bugs before they cause users problems. (Including the problem of not getting new features in time because a latent bug started to break things.)

[@johnmackay13]

From day 1 Craig Federighi has stated that they're open to dual booting, even going as far as tossing the ball on Microsoft to license a version of Windows for ARM, saying that the M1 is capable of running Windows. Not a surprise to me they're not locking the bootloader, and it's likely to prepare for the possibility of Windows on ARM becoming a licensed product.

[@WarrenGarabrandt]

I hate MacOS, but I love how fast and power efficient the M1 is. I would love to see a Windows on Arm running on Apple Silicon become a thing. I know quite a few people who can't yet upgrade to Apple Silicon devices because they need the dual boot to Windows functionality that their current computer offers.

[@csring2278]

@@WarrenGarabrandt I think the main problem with windows on arm is Microsoft, they even don't have a native Visual Studio arm or other professional application for the windows on arm, and it's runs 64 bits program so slow I even didn't want to use it at all

[@WarrenGarabrandt]

@@csring2278 that can't be true, because the surface pro x is custom arm silicon, and windows and office both run on it just fine. Also, there's a version of Windows 10 iot that runs on arm, it's even available for raspberry pi.

[@csring2278]

@@WarrenGarabrandt if you try to do something really need some performance on surface Pro x you will get what I mean, remember a fact is that Windows RT also can run office and some Microsoft X86 app too

[@N1lav]

But I am guessing when the M1 based Macs get a few refreshes they wil lock down the older ones to force you to buy new ones.

[@GSBarlev]

What I'm hearing from this video is that at $999, and with the efficiency of ARM chips, the MacBook Air might just be the cheapest and most power-friendly Linux ultrabook out right now.

[@JeffGeerling]

Somewhat... if you don't need any of the missing features it's not bad at all. I mean, even the sleep issues are par for the course with Linux on many laptops 🤪

[@spicynoodle7419]

Open software on closed hardware, why would you do this to yourself?

[@Get-Rekt]

@@JeffGeerling Do you mean that laptops have sleep issues or their owners do? xD

[@KentSpain85]

@@spicynoodle7419 on top of that, hardware that's locked to have 0 repairabilty. I guess it could be a fun little project, but I'd never run this in a serious way.

[@spicynoodle7419]

@@KentSpain85 yea exactly

[@keithmiller9665]

Very interesting. A comment you made at the end has got me thinking. I have an old Intel mac mini that has just been sitting in a drawer. Repurposing it as a Ubuntu server would bring it back to life as I could use it as a media server. Oh well that is this weekend gone already on another Linux project. Thanks Jeff!

[@JeffGeerling]

Any weekend spent on building a new server is a good weekend :D

[@fmlazar]

If it has a T2 chip, Linux can’t access internal storage.

[@nichijoufan]

It's amazing how far ARM is going. The only problems left right now is cross-OS and x86 compatibility. 8:35 ARM has already entered the enterprise compute sector long ago, even Oracle in its always-free plan offers a 4-core 24GB of ram VM running on Ampere ARM processors. I also had this problem with Bitwarden and SRCDS (Source Dedicated Server). I used Vaultwarden instead but for SRCDS I'm trying to run it via Box86...

[@morta5788]

What is the difference between Vaulwarden and Bitwarden? I thought the only difference is that Vaulwarden is maintained by the community

[@affieuk]

@@morta5788 It's written in Rust, the API is compatible with Bitwarden, but since it's written from scratch and I'm guessing Rust made it easy to run / compile on ARM.

[@MarbsMusic]

Is that Oracle cloud? If so how is security on those? I believe the Amazon ARM chips have issues with TLS. FAST just not read for certain programs.

[@kreuner11]

You can try qemu-user-x86_64, which works the same way as Rosetta, except you don't get the translation acceleration, albeit it has a lot of incompatiblilities

[@NiekNooijens]

Box86 is what you're looking for....

[@Toxicity1987]

Asahi Linux is the lovechild of marcan, a you could say legendary hacker who also was involved in the Hacking of the PS3, PS4, Wii, Wii U and Switch.

[@ateyaba7253]

That geohot guy?

[@SoundToxin]

@@ateyaba7253 No. Different person.

[@TeenieTinyTina]

I didn’t know marcan had anything to do with the switch. I remember him from the Wii days tho… exciting times as a teen

[@duke_ferdinand3758]

Dang this is going to be huge in a few years when the M1 macs reach the end of their update support. I already run k3s on a pi4 cluster, now I'm imagining a super powerful cluster of used M1 mac minis in not much bigger of a footprint! :)

[@UncleKennysPlace]

Won't be that "super powerful" in a decade.

[@duke_ferdinand3758]

@@UncleKennysPlace compared to my raspberry pi 4 cluster everything is super powerful :)

[@MegaManNeo]

@@UncleKennysPlace Depends on what you do with it. As Jeff pointed out in the video, many home server tasks will do just fine and the average user should be okay as well given the most brutal software to run on consumer PCs these days often is a web browser with heavy websites like KZbin, any online office suite, Discord and the likes.

[@edwardallenthree]

hell yeah!

[@edwardallenthree]

@@MegaManNeo Jeff said in a recent video about K8s on a pi that, "if you can make it run fast on a pi, it will run fast on anything." I have found this to be very true. I am thinking of getting a Mac mini just to use as a build computer now. cross compile for rpi on amd64 is painfully slow.

[@kode54]

Incidentally, in case you never heard, the security settings you change after the first reboot only affect the Asahi partition, not your macOS partition.

[@BWGPEI]

Man, you had a very good day and thanks for sharing that with us. A giggle for you - after a couple of years of using Linux desktops, I repaired a MS Windows 10 laptop. Windows 10 had me frothing-at-the-mouth frustrated! Guess that confirms me being a Linux person now.

[@ST-ry7lr]

Apple has never said they had locked down the M1. In fact, they said at launch that if Microsoft wanted to move Windows to the M1, there's nothing they would do to stop it.

[@RPEpsilon-lc4vm]

So, it's Microsoft that stopped supporting windows on Mac?

[@ST-ry7lr]

@@RPEpsilon-lc4vm Actually, yes. If Microsoft wants to port Windows to run native on Apple silicon the can do it. Apple has not done anything to prohibit this. There are already Linux distributions running on Apple silicon, but obviously a lot of work needs to happen to make this usable for the average end user.

[@RPEpsilon-lc4vm]

@@ST-ry7lr Do you think that will ever happen? And in less than 10 years?

[@ST-ry7lr]

@@RPEpsilon-lc4vm You can easily run Windows ARM on Apple silicon with Parallels right now, so we know the binaries run without any recompiling. The only thing Parallels has done is emulate the bios and write the driver interfaces. And the apps actually run faster and the experience is quite acceptable, unlike running the OS on the current native chips from Microsoft/Qualcomm. I’m reasonably sure that Microsoft engineers already have Windows running on Apple silicon in their labs. But I think they are so determined compete with Apple and make their own chips they won’t ever make it available. Thankfully, for the consumer, Microsoft’s strategy of moving everything to the cloud greatly diminishes the need to be running Windows for most users, so it might ultimately become a moot issue.

[@sasch2307]

@@ST-ry7lr The only problem I have with Parallels, is the cost (as a casual civilian it‘s bot that cheap). It got myself an old Thinkpad T430s to dual boot Win10 and Mint for the most urgent stuff next to my daily MBA M1. However I can imagine more and more people leaving Windows entirely (as I did) as their daily driver for Linux or Mac, as Win11 does alienate a lot of people I know.

[@raygoble274]

I've had an old iMac sitting in the corner for years. So old that it doesn't get updates, and is just unusable. After watching this, I decided to try Linux on it. I had the latest Mint on a bootable thumb drive, so why not. It works great! The only issue was that Linux couldn't deal with the WiFi adapter. I had a tiny USB WiFi that I'd never used and as soon as I plugged it in, I got the pop up "WiFi networks available." Linux runs just fine on it, and now I have another perfectly useful desktop at no cost. I didn't even bother with trying it via dual boot first. I just wiped it clean.

[@joeg3950]

I previously installed Linux on Mac. It ran better in most circumstances except in a very few instances. However, since I don’t have to do it anymore, I stopped OS hopping. However, I always try new things with my Pi setups; it’s fun. Thank you for the video!

[@joecan]

Jeff, you hit it right on the nose with the last bit in this vid. My 2009 iMac lives on its useful life with Linux mint XFCE. In 4 or 5 years when Apple deems these 1st gen M1 no longer useful or supported, they'll live on with a modern, current OS.

[@papervws]

More like 9-10 years of updates, especially for the upgraded M1 editions like M1 Pro which might get even more, but I do agree

[@joecan]

@@papervws yes that would be a nice change from apple

[@papervws]

@@joecan I think you're thinking about their iOS devices which tend to get 5-6 years (although latest iOS 15 supports 7 year old devices). However Catalina was compatible with 8 year old macbooks and that was generally what was to be expected in terms of software update lifetime even in 2012.

[@joecan]

@@papervws Yes, I agree. Also, another unintended side effect of Linux on the M? Apple platform "might" be the exploration of an ARM line from the likes AMD and Intel. It would be interesting to see for sure.

Jeff: "Linux is faster on Apple silicon? That can't be right?!" Me: Why the surprise? It's exactly what I expected...

[@ronaldgadget]

Yeah, I've run Fedora on an older macbook for years, and it is much faster then iOS

[@shahinaskerov2858]

Mac os doesn't let u use all power of these chips

[@RunForPeace-hk1cu]

@@ronaldgadget you can’t run iOS native on MacBooks

[@jamesbond_007]

I too have run and right now run Linux (Ubuntu in my case) on MacBook pros and Minis. Definitely faster in my case for both Macs.

[@Carewolf]

The difference was much bigger a few years ago, before Apple updated their filesystem. It is okay now, where 5 years ago, it was just terrible.

[@SomeTechGuy666]

I love your interest in ARM. I can't wait for GPU support. I agree that the M1s have a ton of potential with Linux.

[@danny_the_K]

Nice work Jeff... I am glad Asahi is going well in it's fledgling version. Can't wait to see where this takes us.

[@zero.the.prototype]

You have been popping onto my feed lately and I have casually dipped in and been enjoying. This one got me to sub. Got me dredging up YellowDog memories too ♡

[@JeffGeerling]

YellowDog! Those were the days.

[@sergeiepatov7683]

There's nothing to be afraid of as soon as your data folders are backed up to the external storage. If you run your M-mac to unbootable state it's always possible to DFU-restore it via USB cable like an iPhone or iPad.

[@Echobar]

I don't comment often but Jeff this video was great and much enjoyed. Keep up the great work

[@JeffGeerling]

Well, thanks for taking the time :)

[@JMacalinao]

8:52 Missed opportunity for a Sosumi joke right there. 😝

[@JeffGeerling]

D'oh! You're right.

[@RaidOwl]

I'd love to be able to try this on my iPad Pro M1...

[@JeffGeerling]

I wish Apple allowed us to control our iPads too... would be awesome to be able to boot iPad OS when I need a tablet for watching Netflix or browsing the web, then macOS when I want to do actual work.

[@AlexZanderMuro]

@@leocompany sure do. look up postmarketOS. dual booting linux and android on the same device, or completely replacing the main OS with linux. several other linux distros out there that would likely work as well.

[@martinrocket1436]

@@leocompany you can even run Linux in Android.

[@j3y445]

​@@JeffGeerling Im sure that when a need arises for it, some dude who is far smarter than I, can figure out a safe way to boot other OSs on ipads without bricking it. Asahi linux should work fairly well out of the box in terms of performance and the display itself, so the only hardware drivers that would need to be worked out are the single port, speakers, camera, mic, powerbutton and volume buttons. Dont forget about touch either!

[@nsg650]

Its amazing to see how performant linux is on the m1 chips. Considering most of the work is done via reverse engineering.

[@jyvben1520]

but i expect that adding the now missing drivers will slow the system down ... by how much ... however for server use great ...

[@slebetman]

I run my AWS servers on their Graviton ARM CPUs. Almost all the apps I need for my server already run on high-end ARM. The one issue I've had is with React projects which requires node-sass which I had problems compiling on the ARM server. However that could easily be solved by replacing it with the pure javascript sass module

[@douggale5962]

You can force it to use all x86 stuff, and the arm problem disappears, but you probably lose some performance. Your build performance was all thrown away by npm already, so you have nothing to lose.

[@ajaychawla7735]

Dude we are on the same level. I love your channel! Thank you for existing friend! Atleast i dont feel alone anymore haha

[@chandywerks]

I've been waiting for Asahi. I think it's time to get myself an M1 machine now.

[@happilicious]

Finally an Asahi Linux video! It really is quite refreshing that an Apple product could be this open (without jailbreaking etc). Thank you for the hard work Jeff :)

[@ronaldgadget]

Fantastic - this is what I had been waiting for - going to order an M1 mac now!

[@ronaldgadget]

Ordered one...!

[@axethepenguin]

@@ronaldgadget good luck! 👍

[@ronaldgadget]

It shipped

[@ronaldgadget]

it is now sitting on my desk...

[@ronaldgadget]

after only 90 minutes: running Asahi! The only snag: I needed to update MacOs first to 12.3 before the Asahi installer would work

[@toushi100]

Good video man. Although I think it was a little premature I would like to watch you revisit it again

[@digitalspecter]

It's great seeing this progress. PC parts cost a lot now and they're still announcing ever more power-hungry parts (like a 600W GPU!!!) and I don't need extra heating elements in my apartment.. I'm really considering something like Mac Studio for my next upgrade.. GPU drivers can be a tough nut to crack but the M1 GPUs ditched a lot of old baggage and are much simpler than legacy GPUs... so I'm hopeful they're going to deliver usable GPU drivers for Linux say within a year..

[@uis246]

Someone announce 600W GPU and you go buy 3W GPU. This is point of PC.

[@theloniousMac]

I use an M1 MAX MacBook Pro as my primary computer. I have a 13" M1 MacBook Pro as my stand by and I often use them together. I use Parallels Version 17 on both of them. You would be surprised how fast you can create a LINUX VM on your M1 Mac with Parallels and how fast it is. Last night I brought up Kali Linux because I need it for a job next week. I downloaded it and had it running in 6 minutes. The speed is so fast when using it that I do not perceive that I am running in a VM. It is SUPER convenient. My entire Mac directory structure is available under the Parallels VM, whether I'm running LINUX or Windows. I typically have multiple VMs running simultaneously. When in my MacOS desktop, I swipe left once on the trackpad and I'm in Windows 11. I swipe left again and I'm in Ubuntu Linux. I swipe left again and I'm in Kali Linux and EVERYTHING works. All of the hardware. If you need to get work done in multiple environments this is a hell of a setup. I've got plenty of older hardware that I can run native LINUX on and I can't wait to try Asahi, but for now functionality trumps experimental joy.

[@JeffGeerling]

Yeah, virtualization (via Parallels, QEMU, etc) is definitely the most handy when you need to use multiple environments.

[@ernon69]

its interesting to see an Alpha OS based on Linux Kernel beating in many occasions operating system that is built for the hardware and "optimized" xD I think it only shows that dedication to specific interest is way overpowered :D what I mean is that ppl who really like certain stuff perform better doing it than paid professionals who don't care about the project

[@DankoStojanovic]

Apple engineers most likely love their product, but then there is the marketing department, the sales department...

[@MaxUgly]

@@DankoStojanovic As far as I know Apple has always been surprisingly open to other OSes on its computers. I mean, it makes sense if you get customers that would have never bought a Mac for the OS. As much as I dislike the company their new ARM stuff is really exciting, as long as they don't try to lock it down.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

The engineers at Apple might find it cool to see hackers doing unusual things with their hardware, and even try to help, in various official or unofficial ways. But then word gets through to upper-level beancounters or lawyers or somebody in management who reckons “this does not fit in with our corporate vision for the product”. And so the banhammer comes down.

[@RunForPeace-hk1cu]

That’s pretty arrogant to think that Apple engineers are somehow “2nd tier developers”. The OSes support way more stuff that Linux supports. Btw, the Apple Silicon team and Rosetta2 team sure seems pretty motivated to me

[@DankoStojanovic]

@@RunForPeace-hk1cu No one here implied Apple engineers are 2nd tier. Some comments assume they are less motivated, not less capable.

[@RicardoVargas03]

Amazing video Jeff. Nice to meet you!

[@zachswy]

As a daily KDE Neon user, I'm not at all surprised that it's snappy in day-to-day use. KDE is just so damn good these days. It's what I run on all of my personal machines, including my old Core2 Duo Toughbook, and it still feels so fast.

[@ronaldgadget]

Prefer kde over gnome

[@ravagingwolverine]

This is good to hear, especially how it sounds like it works well on older hardware. I know people say that KDE is lighter these days, but the old reputation of being one of the heavier desktops takes time to shake. I started on KDE back with OpenSUSE about a decade ago, but since moved to other DEs. I have been curious to try KDE again after hearing experiences like yours and seeing some of the features included. So far, I've just played around in Distrotest, but I want to try a proper install when I get the chance.

[@oliverpolden]

Always been KDE for me. Occasionally I’ll try Gnome etc. but it just never sticks and actually I’ve found KDE to be far more performant. Often it goes something like this: I’ll install KDE out of preference, find I want more performance so I try Gnome and find it’s worse!

[@ZachemVoina]

Thank you, Jeff. Thanks to Asahi.

[@eccodreams]

This is absolutely massive. The work being put into Asahi is genuinely groundbreaking and extremely exciting. I can see myself buying a used M1 Mac mini in a couple years to do exactly as you suggested: a quiet, fast server for messing around with.

[@zorro315754442]

The only scenario in which I would buy and use an Apple Silicone powered machine is when there is full Linux support on it or better put it the other way around: if Linux does fully support and make use of the Apple hardware. Great video Jeff, please keep it up! All the other reviews of Apple Silicone only focus on what Apple is already advertising. But there is a big demand for reviews that focus on what Apple is NOT advertising!

[@EER0000]

Thanks for the video Jeff, great to see some real experience! Let’s hope the development keeps moving and will support more hardware soon :D

[@codelinx]

For the same price as the Mac mini you can get beelink or minis PC and it's x86 64 bit plus you can upgrade the drives and ram and wifi etc.

[@alliejr]

This is cool, but I wish you did a deeper dive on the performance differences in kernel recompiles- is it CPU bound? I/O (disk access/ file system ) bound? Also, MacOS and Linux are both POSIX “Unix” and you can recompile any “Linux” source on MacOS and run it. So, beyond “this is fun to try”, I have to ask, “Why?”

[@monad_tcp]

why not. The problem with MacOS is that its kernel is a Two Headed monster of XNU Unix and NextStep that does POSIX and XNU at the same time, lots of data structures that have to be maintained synchronized because duplication and indirection.

[@monad_tcp]

Other problem is that Linux already had support for ARM for a long time, so there's more optimization, which is one of the reasons.

[@monad_tcp]

Linux is overall faster because its stack depth inside the kernel is very tight, while Windows uses a lot of indirections and virtual calls, which makes it more or less always 10% slower than Linux on the same machine. Which usually doesn't matter much for I/O bound tasks either way, for ex, moving tons of data by shared paging which uses the hardware directly have almost the same performance (I don't get where people say that Linux is so much faster, must be the User Interface). Windows is like a Cake of 3 operating systems on top of each other, if you tap to the inner ones, they are amazingly fast (IO completion ports, for ex), but the user interface usually runs on top of lots of abstractions. I bet the same happens with OSX, lots of abstractions and indirections and virtual calls which takes some computing time (the x86 is really, really good at predicting those, which makes the performance of those cakes of abstractions a bit better, while ARM needs a good compiler infrastructure to take care of it)

[@dexternepo]

Because there are people who prefer Linux over both Windows and MacOS.

[@josiahspackman8754]

The graphs were slick Jeff, real nice work there. I've also been running Asahi for a week now and am also blown away by the speed of things. Sure, it's not without it's limitations being Alpha as you so rightfully pointed out, but the amount of work + progress Hector Martin, Alyssa Rosenzweig and the rest of the crew have been doing is amazing! Can't wait to see more videos around this from you 😀

[@isso013]

Updated video soon?

[@GeloRTM]

awesome work and nice work Jeff

[@beauslim]

I've found some things faster under linux in a VM on my m1 mac than native. I think it mostly has to do with compile-time flags given to the built-in tools.

[@petemisc4291]

Ok, glad you clarified id, “runs faster in some instances”

[@NonsensicalSpudz]

if they can get gpu working well everything then it opens gaming back up a bit for macs which would be interesting

[@aravindpallippara1577]

Unfortunately the vulkan api support could be very flaky

[@TylersTechNow]

Nice! This project is moving along much faster than I expected (:

[@eijentwun5509]

Linux is almost ALWAYS Faster than any native OS because it is not major bloat.

[@ApurvaSukant]

ur enthusiasm gets my like brother

[@jonesing4fame922]

WOW Jeff, thanks for always commanding my attention and heightening my awareness! I sure do hope that Tim Cook continues to have a blasé attitude toward the Mac OS X and doesn't meddle with this backdoor capability that the Mac OS X Development team continues to provide to the hackintosh community with each new OS X release/update! Along with Alpine Linux for iPad OS, this is going continue to keep Apple computer hardware quite interesting for hobbyists!

[@scroft469301]

I always poked fun of my brother who is a Mac guy… I run one laptop on windows (kinda still have to) and six others running various Linux distros… im starting to think I may have been wra wra wra wrong! Tho my Linux machines are my babies. Very informative Jeff!

[@oliverpolden]

People generally poke fun at Mac users without actually having used Mac, and the person using Mac has also used Windows in the past so actually it’s them that is better informed, not the other way round.

[@mendelsphotography]

Amazing Videos. Love them

[@Crewhudson-01]

Such a great video! Thanks for doing this!!

[@MayaYa]

m1 macbook would be so cool to have if it just ran linux properly so I hope the devs can do some magic to make everything somewhat good

[@warricksmythevideo]

Really appreciate the effort you put into your videos Jeff.

[@Krawurxus]

With that new EU regulation looming Apple better get real comfy with letting people install their own OS.

[@affieuk]

The already allow it on their Mac's, I'm really hoping this forces them to open the bootloader on mobile devices, not idea if that's in scope though.

[@Ghfvhvfg]

With a relockable booloader or custom os security policy on i phone probaly​@@affieuk

[@SpencerTech]

This channel deserves that 1 million subs. great information and content!

[@l0lmikel0l]

Interesting video Jeff! I was wondering since you switched from a Raspberry Pi (ARM) to an m1 macbook (ARM) and now a mac mini (ARM). Are you specifically looking to work on an ARM based system? And if so, why?

[@DominioSantos]

I think Jeff is both trying to use cutting edge technology but also ARM is a game changer for many hobbyist affairs. The architecture is more energy-efficient, making it both greater for environment, energy bills and also a lot quieter. Home servers and home labs can benefit greatly from that, cue why Jeff is so interested in running proxmox, for example, on Asahi. It would be great to have powerful home servers that costs almost nothing to run 24/7 and also don't need huge space and refrigeration to keep running for a long time.

[@swagmuffin9000]

got rid of osx for endeavoros on my imac two days ago. a lot smoother, and no problems installing and everything is working 👍 also, if you ruin your mac, turn it off, on and as soon as you turn it on, immediately press command r. reinstall mac, and you can try again as much as you want.

[@Prosper85]

These “expected growing pains” has been my entire experience running Linux the entire time it’s been out.

[@kuttispielt7801]

For Asahi it will be better. One Distro and only a few devices. So in not that much time we could see very good compatibility.

[@atarigames]

Jeff, you are seriously the coolest tech channel on KZbin.

[@vinnytube1001]

It'd be nice to know what SystemReady ARM developer boards or systems are even out there. They seem tough to find. That $750 one you mentioned... even if it's comparable performance to an M1, I might be tempted so I don't have to deal with alpha software or lack of support due to closed/proprietary systems that require reverse engineering.

[@JeffGeerling]

Solid-Run's boards all seem to be certified. I have an older MacchiatoBIN that I'm planning on testing soon, and I think it may be one of the earliest consumer-available certified boards.

[@Steamrick]

Solid Run seems to be using Cortex A-72 cores at relatively pedestrian 2GHz in most or all of their more powerful boards. Per Core, that's barely faster than a Raspberry Pi 4. Compared to the M1 that's going to be severely lacking in single-thread power and probably attain multithreaded parity at best despite double the number of cores.

[@danagoyette7932]

I've tried two different times to post a message with notes about the Honeycomb board (I have one), but each time the comment has vanished. How odd.

[@vinnytube1001]

@@Steamrick Well it does have 16 cores. I did some digging and found a benchmark that put it in Ryzen 2XXX or i5 territory on multithreaded load.

[@Steamrick]

@@vinnytube1001 Sure, but how many workloads actually use 16 cores? In most cases you'll be limited by the individual speed of one or a few cores.

[@niallmorrison3097]

Tremendous, cheers Jeff.

[@QuentinStephens]

Never mind Apple; have you got your hands on one of those Nvidia boards? :)

[@JeffGeerling]

Ha, no. I wish!

[@QuentinStephens]

@@JeffGeerling You've nothing to lose by asking them; go for it!

[@xheralt]

Years ago, I put Debian on a G4 PPC, and was likewise amazed. Never used it much (its still a very low spec machine), but I still have it on a shelf.

[@noble_lime]

Apple should really make drivers open source for m1

[@milesrout]

One of the main performance tests for Linux (kernel) developers has always been... compiling the Linux kernel! It's one of the reasons Linux is so fast for general desktop use and compiling especially. Compiling something like Linux involves starting a lot of new processes, opening lots of small files, doing I/O on small files, etc. Linux's memory management, process scheduling and filesystem is highly optimised for this. So it's not really a fair comparison, in some ways. But it's still very cool.

[@rmcdudmk212]

Linux running faster then Apple software? No surprise here. 😁

[@realandrewhatfield]

Great info, great delivery, thanks Jeff!

[@5trubel]

Using a M1 Mac as a low power render farm would be a great thing, I'm really curious to see if ffmpeg with GPU acceleration is worth it or not.

[@boppernostopper8598]

Can you make a video when the full release comes out this month? its out on a dev beta

[@alexatkin]

Glad to hear this as I only risked dabbling in the Apple ecosystem after hearing that Linux was going to be possible for when I inevitably get a faster Mac Mini so wont need the abomination that is MacOS on it any more. KDE is also my preferred DE, so huge bonus there. Would also be nice to dual-boot my Macbook Pro (which I bought after being so impressed with the Mini).

[@oleksandrpanchyk6851]

Thank you Jeff. Great job as usual.

[@fredrik241]

Great video again Jeff! I love what Apple have done with these new chips. Just when you think theyv'e become a boring 'dad' company they bust out and make everyone rethink computing! I also wish that Arm becomes more broadly used as in my day job we use computer farms extensively. Less power draw would be at least some help towards more Planet friendly computing. (until we have unlimited free green energy) Thinking of other Arm alternatives to Raspberries how compatible are Snapdragons with regular Arm linux computing?

[@truthmatters7573]

Thanks for doing the kernel compile benchmarks ! really wanted to see that

[@centopus]

Noice. AppleOS is something I'm allergic to... Looking forward to the development of Asahi and some third hand macsminis in future.... and more arm hardware running linux means more software compatible with arm.

[@RandomDSdevel_WCFaWF]

Remember that boot security settings are per-OS/-installation/-partition on Apple silicon, as opposed to global for all drives and partitions like they are on other systems.

[@snoochpounder]

No bloat does that

[@upload00]

More than likely just different libraries

[@robertomelocavalcante9599]

Thanks Jeff. I enjoyed your video. I see you have put an effort to improve and cheer up your presentations. Congratulations on that too.

[@rasaskitchen]

Of course Linux is faster.

[@falazarte]

Great video. Excited about Linux and M1

[@alerey4363]

you never installed Linux on a Mac? or PC? Linux always beats windwos and macos

[@JeffGeerling]

Many times, but not ever native on an M1 with Apple Silicon. There are many things that Linux runs faster, but there's also a lot that runs faster on macOS and Windows. It all depends on your workflow. For me, the ideal would be a hybrid that lets me run containers native on Linux, while still running Final Cut Pro and other media apps that aren't supported on Linux.

[@digitalspecter]

@@JeffGeerling People have their preferences and reasons to use certain software.. that being said I've enjoyed using Davinci Resolve on Linux =)

[@JeffGeerling]

@@digitalspecter Blackmagic does some great work-I use some of their hardware in my production workflow!

[@pweddy1]

The funny thing about running a Linux without GPU support on the M1 Ultra is the majority of the die space is the GPU! The GPU on the M1 Max is roughly 4x the size of the CPU and the CPU is about 1/12th the total die space! As powerful as the CPU is on the M1 Ultra what your paying for is the GPU. Both the M1 Max & Ultra are GPUs with an attached CPU. Not being able to use the GPU, which Apple is not likely to ever document for 3rd parties, seems kind of silly once you get past the base M1.

[@puerlatinophilus3037]

Hey. The Raspberry Pi 400's mainboard is pretty slim. So slim in fact it reminded me of the blade. So you know what I thought? Maybe that'd make for a good 2 or 3 U rack cluster if placed upright with all IO; but one wouldn't need all IO on a rack server. *So here's the twist:* you turn it on its side to make it 1U high and get the necessary IO to the front via extensions (and a 3D-printed front plate to mount the IO ports.)

[@pjlira]

I liked the fact you said "wicked" fast.

[@LoftwahTheBeatsmiff]

This is excellent news!!

[@Cannaroct]

Thank your very much for the super professional analysis and detailed information Jeff! Helped me to decide against a job offer...

[@thebuddercweeper]

I really hope they get GPU support sorted, I'd say that's the one thing holding Linux on Apple silicon back from being usable.

[@elmonte5lim]

Ooh! A Linux distro named after a beer! Two of my favourite subjects. Far out!

[@vladislavkaras491]

It was interesting to watch. Thanks!

[@darmou]

Update, GPU support is now supported

[@travelcompass591]

Great review, thank you. One subject not mentioned is hat in spite of the fact that canned Apple OS is a high quality software it can not beat the huge amount of FREE open source software available in Open source Linux.

[@nathanbanks2354]

Nice! The first Mac computer I actually liked was a PowerPC at school running Red Hat....

[@kizomanizo]

Felt more like an ad for ASAHI than actual information on running linux on M1 Mac.

[@LoftwahTheBeatsmiff]

ARM is important for cloud and Amazon have their own ARM silicon so I think we'll get there with a headless Linux for ARM. It brings the cost down a lot if you're able to leverage it, I think they are called Graviton.

[@tcrichton]

Not just limited to Apple silicon. My Early 2015 MacBook Pro was getting really sluggish with OSX, your video promoted me to give Ubuntu a go and so far it's much more snappy. Obviously there's the poorer support of Bluetooth audio (but after some tinkering it works) and the webcam needing an additional facetimehd kernel module. Overall I'm really glad I've added a few more years to this laptop.

[@alecespinoza8944]

Excellent video and good message at the end. Lower de e-waste could be a task force for all of us. It a good thing re-porpoise hw we have. In the other hand, new intel lower end processors (example i have a new N5105 with TDW 10W and as a server runs great for 1080p video apps. In 4K arena could be different. And the little N5195 with 8GB Ram, performs very well as a desktop for Archlinux (Manjaro in my case). Then the use case, for me, should be more specific. Because the Mini-S (from China) with 8GB Ram, 128GB SSD and ready to play windows 11 and linux, costs USD$100.

[@GuenterErde1]

Hello fellow St. Louisian. T-Ravs and all that. I believe the future is ARM. I recently got a Surface Pro X - other side of the spectrum I guess haha, and yeah. This thing is amazing. Not the compute power house of the M1s, but for what I need it to do, literally best in class. I'm with you that I wish more and more people would release binaries for ARM (though, I guess Apple devs are being strong armed into it). I opened a github issue for openRCT2 (open source remake of Rollercoaster Tycoon 2) for this. It has both an x86 and an x64 exe - nd both will run, but the moment the game calculates any sort of physics (being a *rollercoaster game*, this is frequent), it chugs. So, hopefully more devs will get on the ball on Windows and Linux. To their credit, they are interested. My dev skills are... fundamental, but I'm at least going to test and provide feedback and whatnot.

[@JamieStuff]

I'm glad to see that Asahi Linux is based on Arch Linux ARM (ALARM). It should get some good community support behind it.