Hector Martin

The amount of effort involved to get there is proportional to how different a given platform is to existing ones. M1 macs are brand new. Other than the CPU architecture itself and a few peripherals, almost everything is Apple-custom and proprietary. Especially the GPU.

The big time sink is GPU support, which is what takes a Linux port from being a toy to being something you would actually want to use. It's why Switch Linux and PS4 Linux happened: the Switch uses a completely standard GPU, and the PS4's is only slightly customized.

No such luck for the M1, but we at least have the fact that it's a legacy-free architecture, comes from the mobile space (where GPUs are historically less insane than PC ones), and I trust their engineers a bit more than AMD or Nvidia ones :-)

The other big open source fully reverse engineered GPU driver project is Nouveau, which has shown that this is possible. Unfortunately they've been *heavily* screwed over by Nvidia (except on Tegra, the only place they've helped out at all).

The fact that Apple allows this in their secureboot policy is critical. Linux ports to game consoles / iPhones / etc are all fun and games, but you're always at the mercy of exploits, and the resulting cat and mouse game.

That means all effort is wasted unless exploits keep up, and regular users would never want to do this and severely limit their access to official upgrades and such. But this isn't an issue with M1 macs.

Of course there are downsides (security-wise) to downgrading your secureboot policy to run Linux, but nothing that would be worse than any old x86 machine with no serious secureboot anyway, so that's hardly a problem for the kind of people who'd want to boot Linux.