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Comment by endorphine | Hacker News Reader

Do you people think Linux on Apple Silicon will become a thing? I'm following Asahi - I guess what I'm trying to say is: do you believe this pipe dream will become true?

If there's Linux support on M1/M2 that's on par with Lenovo's laptops, this will be my dream setup.

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There’s a lot of ground being covered and I feel like as soon as we have a semi reliable setup that Apple devs are going to switch to, they’ll see a flood of open source and hardcore nerds switch to Macs just because it’s common hardware that will make Linux on the laptop just fucking work.

They are not keen on becoming a hardware only vendor and I expect pushback when alternative OS's gain traction on Apple Silicon.

Following Asahi too, I am reasonably optimistic. Also it is interesting to watch what Apple is doing. While not providing any official support to Asahi, they did some changes to macOS to make the life of the developers easier. Also, Apple just announced Rosetta for Linux, shipping with Ventura. Apple is obviously watching the Linux space.

Linux support for Lenovo's laptop is based on Intel/AMD's official contribution. I don't think community support become on par for everything, but it could become very good.

Linux x86 has a hard time consistently supporting drivers of popular hardware (WIFI, for example). I doubt ARM will ever be a thing for consumer systems, let alone Apple silicon.

I don't think it's likely any time soon but forcing Apple etc to provide drivers would be a pretty natural extension of the 'right to repair' and other tech regulation demanding interoperability, to guarantee M1/M2/etc devices remain useful beyond their years of macOS support.

I wouldn't say so. The nice thing about the Apple Silicon seems to be, that the hardware is pretty constant. So once WIFI works, it should continue to work, maybe with minor tweaks on each generation. Lenovo just announced an ARM laptop too, and I got the impression that they are officially planning for Linux support.

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