Hector Martin

So you *can* run your own OS on M1 macs - if such an OS exists. But getting a Linux you would *want to use* working on Macs is a huge amount of work. Not something any single person could seriously tackle -and succeed at- on their spare time. It's a full-time job.

I have experience on this front, having worked on Linux ports for a bunch of things - from getting it to run on an old ISP router back when I was 14 years old, to making PS4 Linux happen, even to the point of running Steam games with full OpenGL and Vulkan support on it.

Porting Linux to random devices is easy. I've done one-evening ports to completely bespoke architectures other than the CPU/MMU. Porting Linux to the point where you'd *actually want to use it*, now that is much harder.

Having financial support for such an endeavour would actually make it viable. It would go from something I could dedicate random evenings to (plus crunch time before a conference where I want to show stuff off) to something I could consistently work on.

When I say a Linux you would actually want to use, I mean something with all basic hardware working: keyboard/touchpad/sound/screen/GPU/WiFi/BT/USB and *decent power management*.

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 :-)