On the economic/$$ perspective: the Linux in M1 projects are probably targeted at Mac Minis and given that when you pay for a Mac Mini you are paying for hardware and Apple software. Does this make sense economically, comparing other bare bone systems with a Mac Mini style form factor?
I'm not sure that's true. What the M1 gives you is an incredibly powerful processor that's also very power efficient. That gives you a spectacularly performing laptop with good battery life, making the M1 laptops compelling even if you want to run Linux.
If you're plugged into the wall the M1s are still quick, but there are other options to get you into the same ballpark. There are no other options that use as little power.
While true, the benchmarks show that recent AMD CPUs have comparable power efficiency, even on single-core loads.
And it might be that a significant part of M1's advantage lives in some (proprietary) scheduling software, so the Asahi Linux effort might not reach the same numbers even with a few years of work.
But then again, some companies just standardize on Apple hardware for their employees, so this can at least allow people to run GNU/Linux in those situations. Someday.
But, if your requirement is for a "high performance" ARM based machine, suddenly the M1 macs become very appealing.
Many of the other solutions are ARM dev boards that have a tenth of the performance and very limited RAM. There are some half decent Snapdragon based laptops, but that only gets you about 50% of the way to M1 performance.
Care to elaborate, or at least some names/models and opinions? I might be in the market for a fanless home server in that form factor. I might end up just buying a Synology but I would like to run HomeAssistant on it as well (although currently it just works fine on a Raspberry Pi4)
Although practically I am interested in running Linux on an appleM1, my conscious will no longer allow me to fund the company producing it, so I can never own one.
Every single time I've found it sufficiently cumbersome and glitchy that I moved back off of it within a few weeks. Last fall–needing a new computer, frustrated with the slow iOSification of MacOS, and anticipating months to years of compatibility issues with developer tools on the M1–I built a desktop PC and installed Ubuntu.
I figured if running Linux was as annoying as it had been on my Macs I'd just install windows and run a VM like I'd done for years on Mac, but it has been way smoother than I expected. There are still a few driver issues now and then, but I mostly just bought the newest hardware and didn't make much of an effort to ensure compatibility. I'm not sure I'll buy another Mac at this point, but if I do I'm not going to bother with Linux.
I've got a Mac Mini (2014?) that I bought for a Mac/Windows contract. Contract is long over so I wiped Windows and now dual-boot MacOS and Pop!_OS (a terrible name). Works fine. The machine is tolerably fast/quiet.
I'd scrub the MacOS entirely as I'm not a huge fan but still like to mess with Rocksmith now and again.
The Linux software-side support is... a bit of a mess though.
https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect
And if you are on Android, you can also use the Fritter client without a Twitter account:
That said, we know at least the VMkernel is likely to work on other ARMs, though userspace might not like it if you don't have things like AMX in your CPU, or the SPRR stuff. Rosetta is also unlikely to work without Apple's custom extensions, though some are headed for standardization. And the GPU is still an issue. If you try really hard (e.g. sticking the OS in a VM and emulating a bunch of stuff) it can hypothetically work... but it's orders of magnitude harder than a Hackintosh.
Presuming those other 2025-era ARM CPUs have standardized virtualization extensions, macOS would probably be best run through a hardware-accelerated hybrid emulator that interprets, rather than executes, the non-supported instructions. (Think Linux-aarch64 running qemu-kvm.)
“Hackintoshing” in the sense of needing to write macOS drivers for Apple-unsupported hardware/peripherals would still exist in that world, as people would want to pass hardware (like the GPU!) through to the VM for performance. Though the construction of these drivers might be easier than today, as for peripherals that are just too hard to get macOS itself to support, hardware-abstracted peripheral drivers could be written instead (or even reused from VM software like VMWare Fusion!)
There is no one dominant firm/distro. This is an OS that can’t agree on a way of distributing applications across distributions: flatpack, snap…
It interesting That every M1 machine comes with an OS these people people are enthusiastically looking to replace with something better.
I think the issue for me with this is that it’s a lot of volunteer effort going to support a single machine vendor that is very wealthy and seems disinclined to help out.
