The only way Linux on Mac will become a reality is if it's legislated.
There were a couple of people (the Asahi team) that made this work for M1, but as I understand it, the effort has stalled since. This just goes to show how few people truly care.
If they wanted to go out of their way, they could spend a weekend writing Linux drivers - Apple have written Windows drivers in the past, so it's not unprecedented.
I believe the real hurdle is that Linux doesn't do well with modular (closed source) drivers. Unlike Windows, drivers can't practically be added to a kernel, they must be compiled into it.
Apple would not want to make their drivers open source or so they would want to distribute their drivers as binary blobs.
That would necessitate either maintaining an Apple-fork of the Linux kernel with their drivers hidden within it, or contributing shims to upstream Linux + binary blob drivers.
If they wanted to help, the bare minimum would be to publish documentation on their hardware so drivers could be written without reverse engineering from schematics and microscope photos.
Most people just want to sit down and eat a nice meal. They don't want to go through all the difficult back breaking work of farming, animal husbandry or fishing/hunting to eat.
That is how I look at people writing OS drivers and core components. It's boring back breaking work no one wants to think about. People pine for it, even romanticize about it. But the fact is that it's dirty annoying work and I have never heard anyone thanking the farmer for the meal they just ate. Yet we still have farmers. Few, yet they exist.
Just because a few people stepped away from the project doesn't mean there are plenty of other developers working hard every day on this.
Using the App Store is optional on the Mac.
The Mac has never been more popular in its 40 year history than it is now. The recently released MacBook Neo broke all previous Mac sales records. Needing to sell more Macs isn't an issue these days.
Linux on Mac is absolutely a reality [1], and Apple specifically supported it by deliberately leaving a documented/supported mechanism for another OS kernel to be loaded.
Linux on Apple Silicon is not a reality on my M5 Pro. I run Asahi on my M1 Pro, but I cannot use my USB-C dock with it and, while amazing, cannot practically use the GPU for gaming or local LLMs.
This limits my ability to practically use it for work and play.
If I play devil's advocate, the only reason I could think of is that supporting Linux signals to investors that Apple is offering a key to bypass their API moat, perhaps sacrificing a longer term vision of vendor lock-in.
By contrast, I can imagine investors would get upset if the iPhone had an unlocked bootloader and allowed Android to be installed - but that's because the App Store is a significant revenue stream for Apple. I don't think there is a parallel on MacOS that investors could point to as being upsetting.
If anything, optional support for Linux would lift the market cap for Mac hardware as it would close the only pull that other laptop vendors previously enjoyed.
In reality though, just like is historically true, 99% of people would continue to use MacOS. Only SWEs, enthusiasts, gamers and some number of Windows refugees would pick Linux.
Though I am 100% behind legislating Linux support - EU are you listening?
