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aero-glide | 5 years ago

I hope Apple allows us to install the OS of our choice. The battery life is impressive but I refuse to not use Linux.

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tinus_hn|5 years ago

They have already stated they won’t:

“We’re not direct booting an alternate operating system,” says Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. “Purely virtualization is the route. [...]”

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/24/21302213/apple-silicon-ma...

qz2|5 years ago

Another item added to the list of why I'm not buying one of these.

js2|5 years ago

I realize Federighi's reply seems to rule out Linux, but the context of the question seemed to be with respect to Boot Camp and Windows. My take is that Apple doesn't want to continue to invest in Boot Camp, especially since Microsoft apparently isn't willing to license ARM Windows for this use case.

It's not clear to me that the new Macs won't allow booting Linux if the Linux community can figure out how to do it. The number of folks booting Linux on Mac via Boot Camp has to be really tiny.

easton|5 years ago

But you can disable Secure Boot and boot whatever OS you want, so unless there's some other hardware gotcha it's not like someone couldn't get Linux running if they wanted to put the time in (which is a big if, considering there's no UEFI-ish helper like on the Windows ARM devices).

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/macos-recovery-a-ma...

saagarjha|5 years ago

You’re misunderstanding that quote. Apple has never claimed they won’t support booting something else (in fact, there are ways to enable this by removing signature checks); they were just explaining how their demo works.

dshpala|5 years ago

Challenge accepted :)

simonh|5 years ago

You’re likely to hit the common problems porters face with putting Linux on an arbitrary ARM SoC. These chips have lots of integrated components on them, requiring device drivers that may not exist for Linux. Take the custom Apple developed in house GPUs for example. Good luck finding any kind of Linux device driver for those, open source or not. It gets even worse for things there isn’t even an external equivalent of, like the neural engines.

Even if Apple does nothing to stop you running whatever software you like on the device, you’re still likely to be out of luck. I wouldn’t be surprised if some enterprising folks have a good run at it, but it’s likely to be a massive undertaking.

ghaff|5 years ago

I can pretty much guarantee you that trying to run anything other than macOS on Apple's silicon is going to be an exercise in frustration. You will presumably be able to run an Arm build of Linux in a VM--given that Apple has demoed this--but if you want native Linux, I'm not sure why you would pay a premium to possibly get a bit more performance on a laptop while probably having various support issues.

crazygringo|5 years ago

If you want to use Linux for the tools, then just use a VM.

But if you want full control over your hardware... Apple isn't the way to go. I'm not even sure what the "OS of our choice" means when we're talking about a custom-designed SoC. The amount of reverse-engineering required to get any other OS to work would be staggering, no?

If you want to run a custom OS natively, you need to buy a laptop with a commodity chip, not a custom one. Fortunately, there are tons of them.

josteink|5 years ago

ARM actually has a defined architecture and UEFI equivalent, which would have worked wonders here.

If Apple had decided to support it, that is.

alwillis|5 years ago

I hope Apple allows us to install the OS of our choice. The battery life is impressive but I refuse to not use Linux.

Apple's hypervisor technology runs natively on the M1; Linux running on that will be faster than Linux running on anything else you can buy for the same amount of money.

They showed Debian running on Apple Silicon during the WWDC keynote nearly 6 months ago.

lhl|5 years ago

Tuxedo Computing and Slimbook both sell Ryzen 4800H computers that will outperform the M1 in heavy multithreaded workloads and come with Linux preinstalled. These laptops aren’t quite as slick as the MBP but weigh in at 1.5kg, have huge 91Wh batteries, and have a better keyboard (I have one from a different OEM, but same ODM design). They also have user upgradable memory and storage - I am running with 64GB RAM and 2TB SSD at a total cost (with upgrades) of less than what Apple is charging for their base 8GB/256GB MacBook Pro.

I expect a future “M2” to maybe take the performance crown, but AMD isn’t standing still. Cezanne has Zen 3 cores, which should boost IPC by about 20%, and Rembrandt should get to 5nm and have RDNA2 graphics.

jdlyga|5 years ago

I wouldn't pay for Apple hardware unless I wanted to use MacOS.

OJFord|5 years ago

Why? The hardware's the nice bit.

rowanG077|5 years ago

The hardware is the only good part unfortunately. I would have clicked buy faster then the flash could if the M1 could run Linux.

ucha|5 years ago

You can't run Linux on Macbook Pros released after 2016 in any meaningful sense anyways...

bstar77|5 years ago

And that's your choice. I would start looking at AMD's Ryzen offerings because supporting Linux is not going to be high on Apple's list going forward.

JAlexoid|5 years ago

has it ever been?

k2enemy|5 years ago

You can, but need to sign the OS image.

criddell|5 years ago

What can you do on Linux that you can't do on macOS?

choward|5 years ago

Automate the entire set up of my computer using a declarative language. I use NixOS. Mac OS isn't even close.

toast0|5 years ago

Have a TCP stack with synflood protection? (The mac stack was copied from FreeBSD in 2001, before syncookies/syncache were added, and not meaningfully pulled since)