Posts and replies

@AsahiLinux Ugh. RPM and I don't get along.

@JetForMe @AsahiLinux @marcan so Asahi isn't really a distro in the same vein as Fedora and Debian. Asahi is a collaborative effort lead by @marcan to enable Linux on Apple Silicon based Macs. Some forked packages are required to run Linux on Apple Silicon based Macs, so we have Asahi variants of Fedora, Debian, etc. A goal of Asahi would be that Apple Silicon Linux works well on virtually all distros with no forked packages. On x86 things are well standardised so it's easier to run vanilla images. In ARMland the ecosystem is less standardized (although there are efforts to change that), plus the Asahi group have done a truckload of amazing reverse engineering to make this happen. Hope that explains it well!

@ecurtin @AsahiLinux @marcan [social.treehouse.systems] Ooooh yeah now I understand! Is this more about drivers on Macs than ARM per se? I seem to run Debian and Ubuntu pretty well on Parallels on my M1 Mac, and Ubuntu seems to work well on the Jetson Orin Nano I’ve been tinkering with (although lack of ARM support in Linux might explain why Nvidia is so far behind on distro support for their SDK).

@JetForMe @AsahiLinux @marcan to not leave your question unanswered, upstreaming is tedious, regardless of hardware platform (although ARM is more tedious than x86 and Asahi is more tedious than other ARM devices because of the reverse engineering involved and the platform not being specifically designed for Linux but for macOS), but the Asahi team are making great progress and regardless of all this, it's still IMO the best ARM development experience available today. VMs are generally the first thing to work well, before a bare metal implementation, because to an OS a VM is a generic piece of hardware, so VM enablement tends to be upstreamed quicker than bare metal hardware. In fact, that's often a workflow I use for work in general, get it working on a VM, then worry about real hardware after.

@ecurtin Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks!

@Guara Unfortunately you have to reinstall, there's no way to switch Linux distros in general.