HITTING THE M1

I continue to be shocked on a regular basis by the rapid rate of progress in the community that is porting Linux to the Apple M1 (Apple Silicon) Macs. As of this writing, and as reported by one of those involved (Alyssa Rosenzweig), “git status says the lines of code added for the Apple M1 is over 9,000”. She is able to use the internal storage, HDMI, USB, Ethernet and much more as she works on enabling support for graphics (she is running GNOME on her M1 Mac).

At first glance, I (almost) wondered why anyone would bother. After all, support for virtualisation on that hardware is first rate and you can run a Linux guest VM faster than some ‘bare metal’ Windows (or Linux) laptops that are on the market. But while virtualisation might be an option for running Linux on top of macOS, it is of course never enough for the most dedicated developer. The most dedicated want to run Linux on the hardware just because they can. It’s the same spirit that has driven many other efforts within the Linux community.

So I realise why these folks would ‘bother’ to do the work. Yet I still find myself conflicted between the amazing amount of work they have done – and the great progress that has been shown technically – and the potential difficulty that could be encountered by real-world users. The non-standard hardware uses a special bootloader, and requires various careful setups that will make dual-booting potentially awkward. That’s not to say developers won’t enjoy it, but just that it will be interesting to see that scale to many end distro users.