Buying Apple PCs to Run GNU/Linux is a Bad Idea (It Always Was)
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
Why You Shouldn’t Buy a Mac for Linux.
Meanwhile, on the Fediverse, I found this.
Buy a Mac! Run Linux on the piece of shit! It’ll be FUN!
Just when I got done complaining about the Lenovo firmware garbage, with just two examples, Apple proves why they’re not a real option.
In the more serious of these two cases, they can’t even reliably update RecoveryOS, which is sort of like the “Recovery WIM” partition in Windows-land. It’s where you usually end up if your computer is fucked, and I think it can do some things to repair macOS or get a fresh copy on your computer by downloading one from Apple.
The trouble with Apple’s buggy software is that when they screw up RecoveryOS it’s no longer safe to install Asahi Linux, and it wouldn’t be able to recover macOS either, likely, and you’d have to just take it to an Apple store and hope they do something for you.
Maybe even charge you even though it was because of their bug.
There are many bugs in Apple products, especially their most recent releases, and a lot of these are firmware bugs. They’re in there using the “Apple Tax” on their shareholder dividends and marketing, and I really don’t think their computers are a lot higher quality than a Lenovo.
And it was these Asahi Linux people that were a major push for Rust support in the Linux kernel. Almost the only project using it much is to get Apple hardware working, when all of the effort is most likely futile anyway. Apple has gone from m68k, to ppc, to x86, to arm, and if they want to do it again they will.
They don’t support anything. Even when they were on x86, they pointlessly dropped 32-bit x86 application support for no reason. If you say something is the way to run programs, you ought to support it for decades unless it was simply so horrible it’s impossible to live with.
Apple didn’t have to do that to their Intel Mac customers, they just dropped it with no warning a few years ahead of getting off x86 because they’re Apple.
Things like this, and all of these ridiculous bugs, are why Apple computers will never be anything beyond a joke.
They pissed Ken Thompson (one of the inventors of UNIX, and C) off enough to just move from a Mac to Linux on a Raspberry Pi, and that’s before the RPi 5 came out with 4 times as much processing power, double the RAM, and better graphics.
Once you put Linux on a Mac, you’ve still got a bad computer.
The drivers are reverse engineered, and do not support the majority of Linux applications. They are particularly deficient in graphics, where you’re stuck with OpenGL ES.
Not even real OpenGL. Just a deprecated subset that might be useful for a dumb Android phone game. On a desktop, almost completely useless except maybe for desktop effects.
From my understanding, you don’t get real OpenGL, and you sure as Hell don’t get Vulkan. The hardware may not even support Vulkan.
In my testing with Intel Xe GPUs, the Vulkan renderers on games usually run in the ballpark of twice as fast as the OpenGL ones.
You couldn’t run really expect to run Yuzu, the Nintendo Switch emulator, on OpenGL ES on Linux on a Mac.
First off, they’d have to write a new renderer, then they’d have to port the program itself to the M series CPUs, and it’s a pretty tall order, and is likely to happen on some new RPi before a Mac ever becomes a viable development target.
Someone asked about Yuzu on a Mac with Linux, and the answer was “Port it yourself. There’s source code.” and that’s where the conversation stopped. I run Yuzu every day almost, on a 2020 Lenovo laptop.
People who develop Linux programs like these do it because they’re using hardware that is a development target. So when you buy a Mac to run Asahi, you’ve got something you can’t even use for use cases that someone might target Mac OS itself for.
Some people have asked about getting rid of the macOS entirely and running Linux as the only OS.
From what I’ve gathered from the developers, this is possible, but they strongly advise against it. You can’t update the Mac’s firmware without macOS, so they recommend resizing the macOS partition which means it’s wasting some of the disk even if you never boot into macOS for anything.
While not being able to update PC firmware after you get rid of Windows, this isn’t usually a big problem. If your computer’s in warranty to where the manufacturer has to support a fucked BIOS update or doing something so outrageous you can’t live with it, you update it once on the way out the door and generally never have to do it again. Linux will work.
On an “Apple Silicon” Mac, system firmware is a much much larger problem.
From the description of it I have from Asahi developers, I understand that you may be required to use macOS to update the Mac’s firmware (1) so that you can update Linux at all past a certain point, or (2) so you can use some feature (like more OpenGL ES features) at some future date, which may not be usable without a firmware update.
So you’ve basically got an expensive pet rock that’s even more of a nightmare to deal with than a PC. And in return, you get all these Apple bugs and less software.
When they don’t think PC users are listening, the Mac heads bitch and moan about bad design that’s pissing them off. Even JWZ does it, but for some reason thinks Linux is stuck with the same issues he experienced in 2008.
The Mac is, sadly, not an option for Linux. If anything, it is polluting and bloating Linux with a meme language that people are using to write garbage with, and that could metastasize and become a problem for Linux later on.
This is why I briefly considered buying a Mac and then talked myself out of it. You’ll never actually free it from the really awful OS it came with like you can with a PC, it’s ungodly expensive, and it’s got more laughable Linux support than a $100 RPi 5 computer I can buy at an electronics store in Chicago.
What’s unbelievable, to me, is how much Apple has regressed from the point my editor, Howard, was sending me “Mac-formatted” floppies in the late 90s, and that people want to use Linux on this. █