Gentoo on Macbook Air/Pro M1 (ARM64)

[Zucca]

I've been looking for used M1 Air semi-actively. So far the prices seem to be around 600€ here.
I think I'll wait a little more... If I ever get one I'll be running Linux on it bare metal.
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Gentoo IRC channels reside on Libera.Chat.
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[axl]

finally spent some time to do it bare metal.

short version of whats happening is: you basically can have more than one version of mac os on your mac. so you not technically install linux, you just install another mac. quite difficult to get early screen, so if you mess up grub and booting or forget to put a root password and start network/ssh before reboot ... might be hard to return and fix it later. But there are creative ways. )

I tried it on a mac mini with M1 and 16GB of RAM. its much faster running on bare metal than parallels. But some things wont work out of the box, or wont work at all. Fortunately the list is getting shorter. You basically can't do USB4/thunderbolt. sound still finicky.

My suggestion, and what I chose to do is to slim mac os as much as possible, then made a minimal fedora install, and from fedora, using guides, I managed to start a gentoo install. From the system point of view, I have 3 mac OS installed. 1 is the original mac os, the other 2 are linux installs masquerading as macos. Also, should prolly keep in mind that ext/2/3/4 you can read/write from mac os, but other more exotic FS wont be able to open. its good to have a second version of linux, just in case you lock yourself out of the system somehow, otherwise you basically are forced to delete and reinstall. unless its ext4 can't otherwise get back to that data, unless you have a second linux.

Its not that complicated. Most of the work is mostly done. Wont be easy either. But its doable now.

yes, the gpu driver is reasonable now. has some GL functionality. better than macs I think. and vulkan. but only on wayland. I mostly use it as compile machine, and for that its amazing. when it idles it just plays stuff on kodi. and does that very well.

[NeddySeagoon]

It looks like Gentoo on Mac is officially supported now.

Project:Asahi
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[flysideways]

[Freed]

Yes, asahi Linux can support Gentoo, although it is unofficial. https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/SW%3AAlternative-Distros

Official support OS is Fedora Asahi Remix, https://asahilinux.org/fedora/

Maybe in the future, Gentoo Asahi Remix will come

[Zucca]

[Zucca]

I have now have an opportunity to buy a used M2 MB Air for a pretty low price.

So what's the current status of Linux on Apple M2? My goal, of course, would be to install Gentoo on it. And maybe play around with some exotic combinations of llvm toolchain and musl.

EDIT: Looks like if Linus used that with 5.x series, I should be safe with 6.x. ;)
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[axl]

Current asahi kernel is stuck at 6.9.12. https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux

https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support

[Zucca]

Yeah. Sounds good enough.
I'll proceed discussing about the price for the M2 variant.
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[Zucca]

So I could maybe get a M2/8/256 variant for 350-400€.
That really feels like downgrade... My current laptop is R5-something/8/1024. And already now 8GB of RAM feels like too little. I commonly have somewhere around 2GB of swap used. The disk space and RAM really limits, or rather outright excludes running any virtual machines.
Then the keyboard... It's really not great, but on the other hand that seems to be the trend nowdays - bad keyboard on laptops.
One thing that is surely better on that Apple would be the screen. I like to use my laptop outside. In bright sunlight most struggle. I wonder what's the case with M2 MB Air..?
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[Zucca]

Ok.

I bit the bullet, but not without a fight. I offered 300€ and no more. And I got it.
Not sure if I use that MacBook as some kind of testing platform or as my daily driver.
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[pjp]

Do you generally use any Apple laptops? I've read that they had general decrease in hardware quality from their prior reputation (possibly well before the move away from Intel).

I'm curious about the new processors, but not enough to buy anything new, and hesitant on anything used these days.
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[Zucca]

Last time I had my own Apple computer was some PowerPC based 133 MHz machine. It was PowerMac, but I can't recall the model. I used MacOS 9 on it, but downgraded to MacOS 8 because 9 was the most unstable OS I've ever used. I eventually installed mkLinux on it, but my machine didn't have a supported network card...
I also had Performa 5200 (m68k based) along side of that PowerMac. We used to play networked (IPX, I think) Doom on those.
Yeah, but after the short lived mkLinux adventure, I bought a used x86 laptop and installed Gentoo.

[pjp]

:)

Maybe I'll come across a used one some day that is sufficiently inexpensive and still usable. I'd really like to switch to a non-laptop, but I've not seen anything to reasonably hide the monitor when not in use. The laptop form factor does make that convenient.
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Quis separabit? Quo animo?

[pingtoo]

Have you consider Mac Mini? No monitor required. May be there is some place you can find second hand for low price.

[pjp]

I'd forgotten about that. I'm not in the market, but I'll keep that in mind. A new, open-box with 8G RAM, 256G SSD M2 isn't awful, so maybe something used would be an option. I'd have to read about hardware maintenance and installing Linux before I bought one. I don't need more, expensive paperweights or doorstops.
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[axl]

few points.

first. not fair to say apple stuff is bad hardware. is extremely good hardware. i have a 2020 m1 macbook pro with 64 gb of ram. it is today just as it was the day i got it. only things that degraded on it is battery life, and you can actually hear the fans (yes pro has fans) working a bit more when compiling gcc. screen is awesome. keyboard is. trackpad is. there were complaints with past intel models, but afaik, modern apple systems got past that. was the trackbar. lack of magnetic connection for charging. lack of ports. anyway, my 3 year old laptop is just fine. hardware is fine.

Problem is not general hardware. Problem is miniscule GPU. And lack of drivers for GPU. If you keep apple os, and run linux as a guest os in parallels, its a great machine. if you have enough ram. I used mine as such, to compile heavy stuff like gcc for raspberry pi. for that... its great. as long as you use apple os for video compressing, decompressing. all that hardware stuff. its great. NO games at all.

a bit overpriced. it feels. its a platform that never disappointed me. But also never impressed me. If you buy one, buy it for the cpu. M series. If you want a fast arm cpu, this is a legitimate thing to consider. if you want to remain in the apple ecosystem, if you have headphones and watch and phone and tablet... legitimate system to have. but for every other use-case... no.

But be warned... asahi linux can brick your apple. i bricked a mini.

[Zucca]

I mostly agree that the current hardware from Apple is good, but

• I don't see how the keyboard is any good. It's basic when it comes to laptops.
• Trackpad is above average, not superior (sometimes even too big).
• The lack of upgradeability is frustrating, although I understand one cannot just plug in more HBM.

Screen and the fact Air model is passively cooled over weighted the downsides for me.
The lack of ports may bite me later, but oh well...
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[psycho]

Yes, the company is repulsive, but Apple silicon is amazing, and many other things about their overpriced and abusively closed products are, in fact, very good. It's easy to underestimate how great the hardware is because people just look at e.g. the GPU performance and think "ha, I can buy an RTX 4080 for the price of an M2 Pro Mac Mini, I'd rather have a box I can tinker with than a nasty closed slab". OK, but is your PC with its RTX 4080 completely fanless and silent, using a tiny fraction of the power, and effortlessly popping into your backpack for transportation? No. Even if you have an RTX 4080 laptop, it will probably be a hefty tank of a "laptop" with fans that scream like a jet engine and a base that will burn your thighs... and it will cost about three times what the Mini costs.

My favourite Mac Mini is the 2011 server than you can buy second hand for about the price of a new webcam. For IT folk supporting users cross-platform Intel Macs are handy as you can legally multi-boot official installations of all the major operating systems on them. It's a bit of a mission (lots of risky unplugging of tiny delicate connectors etc.) to swap out the two crappy old spinning disks... but once you've replaced them with fast SSD storage you can have many TB of storage on two drives, legally multi-booting Linux, MacOS and Windows, running all three at respectable speeds (it's an i7) and, again, this thing is smaller than a laptop so it's a breeze to carry around between monitor/keyboard setups: zero cables needed if you keep a power cable at each station. And you can get them for about the price of a webcam or a Raspberry Pi.

So despite my dislike for Apple the old Mini has grown on me, it's just so cheap (now... obviously it was as overpriced as all Apple gear in 2011), tiny and handy... and then when I saw the new Apple silicon Mini was much more power efficient, completely silent, and about a zillion times more powerful, I'd have loved it if it had still had two disks and could still run every OS. Sadly it not only lacks two disks (only the "Mini Server" had them), it now deliberately prevents upgrades so you're stuck with the original SSD... and you can only run (ARM) Windows virtually.

Still, I admire the quality of some of their overpriced hardware, and there are some advantages to producing the hardware and software together and having a unified system that are pretty cool: shared clipboards between devices, file transfers by tapping one with another, using your iPad as a second monitor or your iPhone as a webcam... as a tech-appreciative geek it's hard not to enjoy some of that stuff. Anyway... I'm always happy to see Gentoo on another platform.