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Comment by panny | Hacker News Reader

It is telling that there are many obvious ARM fans in this thread, but not a lot of proud M1 owners. It seems Apple really screwed the pooch by failing to ship some sort of bootcamp for M1 to make Linux possible.

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Apple obviously wants you to use MacOS. With that said the M1 fully supports booting unsigned/custom kernels, so running Linux doesn’t require any security exploits. Asahi Linux aims to bring you a polished Linux experience on Apple Silicon Macs, sounds like some of their code might make it into the 5.13 version of the Linux kernel. Oh and M1 doesn’t have bootcamp but you can run windows ARM with Parallels.

That code can only boot to a serial console. It is a start, but it will not produce a usable linux system in any way. It doesn't even touch drivers for the GPU/NPU/Bluetooth/WiFi/etc. By the time they can produce a minimum usable system which boots with a display, keyboard, headphones, usb, ssd, and trackpad, the M1 will likely be end of life. M2 went into production two weeks ago.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Apple-s...

You'd need to buy one now, speculating that someday the Asahi work will produce a barely usable system on a laptop you can't even buy anymore. Considering the 2016 macbooks are basically unusable with Linux now 5 years after release, I don't have a lot of hope the M1 ever will be.

https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux

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