OK? and Android Phones are not consumer devices ?I'll agree it's long-failed on consumer devices. That doesn't mean they (we?) should stop trying
Linux is by far the most successful OS today.
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Linux running natively on M1?
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Linux is by far the most successful OS today.
I was imprecise. How about a narrower focus of "personal computers" (although still wrong because you can get Linux preinstalled on System 76/Dell ...)
For a large part of my work (dev related stuffs), Linux is the way to go. But for other things I do (audio, photo, etc), it is very useful to have another OS, and MacOS is by far my preferred choice. For now, there are Macs with great support for Linux (and this is what I use exclusively at this point), but sooner or later, all Macs will run some kind of ARM chip. On that day, I will be very happy these guys will have done all the reverse engineering / Linux kernel adaptation work (kudos to them!). This is one example...
Also, as said above, another example will be when Apple considers early M1 machines vintage and drop OS support for them. Again, we will be thankful that some people have done the job of making much of how these beautiful computers work public knowledge. Linux is awesome at keeping some outdated hardware useful in one way or another (desktop work, home file server, etc).
I'll agree it's long-failed on consumer devices. That doesn't mean they (we?) should stop trying
I also have to agree with this, that it depends on what one defines as "consumer devices". Most people don't realize that a LOT of IoT devices use Linux. At my last employer, they asked me as the Linux sysadmin to help figure out their espresso machine... all because it was running on a Slackware Linux LiveCD. I mean, when you turned the machine off and on, it boots to a x86 BIOS, does its memory and CPU checks, etc. etc., then boots into Linux, with the kernel fully loading, starts X on the touchscreen panel, and you're up and running.
When you have that, most refrigerators, All Playstation 3s, Playstation 4s, PS5s, most Raspberry Pi devices (even those used for LiveATC), on top of those gaming devices, most people don't realize how much Linux truly runs on.
BL.
Sony actually uses customized versions of FreeBSD on PS3, PS4, and PS5. Not that this changes anything you're saying, it's just a different flavor of open source UNIX.
M1s are too new for me to want to run Linux on. Once I get my next Mac (looking at M1 Mac Mini M1X, if it's coming out soon), my current 2015 iMac (Intel) will probably become a full Linux box.
The Mini would be a stop gap until something more powerful (Mac Pro, IF the price comes down a bit), or iMac M1 with a 27" or larger screen comes out.
The Mini would be a stop gap until something more powerful (Mac Pro, IF the price comes down a bit), or iMac M1 with a 27" or larger screen comes out.
For myself, I have a use case for running Linux bare metal on AS once they get it up and running: namely I do CUDA development and being able to chuck my separate Linux box and go eGPU+Linux-AS for working at home would be nice. Not a must have because I do have a Linux box and I don’t yet have an AS Mac, but a nice to have once I upgrade. I’d probably still use macOS as my daily driver, but having Linux bare metal would be a big bonus for me.
They are BSD based, not Linux based. In fact for companies want to develop their own OS for their own hardware, BSD is easier to deal with due to the license. Google uses a very special approach to keep all non-free stuff in the user-space to avoid GPL requirements.
Don't get me wrong, GPL is not a bad thing and it is one of the reason Linux could success and become the OS that supports most number of hardwares by far.
True, they are BSD based. I was meaning that they are capable of running Linux, especially as a LiveCD. I've even installed a native Linux distro on the PS4 (after pulling the original HDD from it), just to see how bad bad could get.
BL.
Trying to decide how pedantic I want to be here … Android uses a Linux kernel but it can’t be classified as what we think of as a “Linux OS” which is typically a flavor of GNU-Linux. For instance, as @Gnattu alluded to, “Linux” and Android have *very* different user spaces and applications written for one are not automatically cross compatible with the other. Chrome OS has only recently gained (well recently got out of beta) the ability to run Linux apps.
So you can say the Linux kernel is hugely popular and on top of that backend servers, HPC, et al are overwhelmingly GNU-Linux-based OSes, but there’s a reason why “this is the year of the Linux desktop” has become a running joke. No hate: I use a Linux desktop for work and development (and it does have a strong niche there!), but it ain’t popular.
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There an ubiquitious device that's made their way into most homes nowadays that runs full blown Linux stacks, and that's the home WiFi routers. Most consumer and I would think commercial network equipments are running on Linux.
You'd think.. and in fact, most Cisco/Linksys routers/WiFi Hotspots are running Linux. That's what makes the entire "linux is useless" thing hilarious; people don't realize how much they are using it, while trashing it at the same time.
BL.
Yes most back end stuff and infrastructure is running full Linux - a lot of iot and smart stuff are running full Linux too. That’s the “et al” in my post, I was simply to lazy to list it all. But when people are referring to “why isn’t Linux more popular?” They mean why aren’t more Desktops, laptops, tablets, phones running a full GNU-Linux stack. Android doesn’t count. ChromeOS counts about as much as Windows with WSL/WSL2, maybe a touch more.
The fact that your WIFI router can theoretically be hacked to run Linux games is not exactly driving development of Linux applications. That’s what people mean when they say consumer Linux failed to gain traction.
Again, I want the Asahi Linux team to succeed and unlike @leman I really do think they’ll come up with some pretty darn usable as a daily driver. I think there people who will absolutely use it as such. I will probably use it myself (though not as a daily driver)!
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Linux, as in GNU-Linux, isn’t useless. I use it! Not only as a work computer but in HPC and a host of other ways, pun intended. But again, it is also absolutely fair to say, from a consumer’s standpoint the fact that what are effectively appliances use Linux doesn’t actually drive up consumer Linux adoption in ways that matter for the development of applications.
Edit: your post even illustrates my point, people don’t realize that so much stuff is running Linux under the hood because to them it doesn’t effectively matter that it’s running Linux. They don’t interact with it in any meaningful way that makes them actually be Linux users. It could be anything and they wouldn’t know. That doesn’t make Linux useless, but it does put a cap on how much ”appliances use Linux” impacts a conversation like this one.
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Oh, I know it isn't useless. I'm a 27-year going Linux Sysadmin, and maintain 4 data centers full of nothing but Linux servers, whether they are for Weblogic and Oracle, HPC, Kubernetes, Kafka, Splunk, the entire lot.
People just don't realize that because they don't see it at any superficial level, that it must be useless, yet don't realize how many things that they use that has Linux running underneath it. They'd be shocked to see that the A330 and parts of the A380 run it.
BL.
I don’t think anyone in this thread (I hope anyway) would contest this. It’s more “why bother with the Linux desktop on the Mac?” and even more “why bother with bare metal Desktop Linux on the Mac?” Which for most people is probably “don’t” for the first and definitely “don’t” for the second. Desktop Linux had a brief moment in the aughts when I think it reached 10% or something - definitely higher than Macs at the time! - but surveys now have it at basically where Macs were at their lowest point, like a couple percent of users if that.
But for those of us that have a use case (and I’m sure I’m not the only one that has one!), this is a great project done by some scarily talented people.
Not sure who’s trashing it? But questioning it’s value on the desktop, particularly on Mac hardware which already runs a full-blown UNIX, doesn’t seem out of bounds.
Oh, I agree, trying to throw Linux on something already Unix based, especially in a desktop environment is a bit redundant, with the exception of wanting to play the eager beaver, just to see how much they can get away with.
Serverwise, even that is questionable. Why throw Linux on a DEC Alpha, when it can already run Ultrix, OSF/1, or Digital Unix? Even though Sun went AMD, why throw Linux on it when you already have Solaris x86, or even throw Linux on any of their servers running Sparc? It's just one of those things people can check off the box and say "yeah, Linux runs on that, let's add that code to the mainline kernel, and let's move on."
BL.
As a CPU designer, I started on VMS (at RPI), moved to Solaris and whatever IBM’s UNIX was called back then (also at RPI), then to NetBSD on cheap PCs (at Exponential), then to Solaris (at Sun), then more Solaris (at AMD) and then to Redhat on self-made PCs (at AMD). Never ran Linux on boxes that already ran UNIX. Linux was always less reliable than the industrial UNIX’s (maybe that’s not the case anymore), so the only reason we used it was to run it on cheap hardware and save a lot of annual fees on operating systems, etc. Didn’t hurt that a not-yet-for-sale Opteron workstation on white box hardware ran EDA tools on linux 5-10 times faster than a Solaris workstation that cost 10x the price.
This is how I’m running my home servers currently. Works surprisingly well just running Fusion with a couple VMs each, and easy on the power budget.
Even if Linux on the desktop is a marginal use case, watching the progress of the Asahi Linux team has been informative. The issue is that if you've seen one distro, you've seen one distro. Trying to design desktop software for Linux can be quite challenging. Many ISVs that do only support a specific range of hardware configs and specific distros. If I had a desktop, it would be nice to know I could repurpose it as a home server if I wanted to. Or if I just wanted to install it just because.
To run apps that are not available on Mac like Kile and Ghostwriter (insert your own favourite app here...). Other complex systems like TeXLive run faster under Linux than on Mac.
This is where a distro can either get comprehensive or picky/choosy. What I mean is that if you look at something like CentOS, Ubuntu (any flavor), you have the choice of selecting the type of server or desktop you want, and it will install the accompanying packages for it. If you want a web server, it will install Apache, nginx, and any relevant packages. If you wanted a file server, it will install Samba and any CIFS/SMBFS related packages. It's all down to the suitable purpose. If you wanted to change functionality, you'd have to go back through the installer or updater (yum, dnf, apt, etc.) and choose what function you want for it to install the required packages.
There are other distros that allow you to comprehensively install everything so it can act as both a client and server, and allowing you to turn on or off what functions you need (granted, CentOS, Ubuntu, etc., does allow you to install everything and control what is on or off as well). When I primarily ran Slackware, I had it running as my mail client and server, SSH server, webserver, iptables-based firewall for my home network (including IP Masquerading), database server (MySQL and PostgreSQL), CIFS to talk Windows, all in addition to being my desktop where I ran X, browsers, GIMP, XMMS, and compiling kernels the entire time.
Granted, most of those I compiled from source (because I could/wanted to), but the packages were there and easily able to be disabled to change the function of my Linux machine to be whatever I wanted.
BL.
I'm not the target audience, but I understand why some want it. For most Linux enthusiasts, any proprietary UNIX is a non-starter - they want full source code for everything.
Even for those with a less dogmatic point of view, there's a bunch of things about Apple's UNIX which would be annoying or showstoppers for long-term Linux users. Apple's take on a lot of things is just weird to anyone who grew up on Linux. Apple ships creaky, ancient versions of many open source UNIX programs because their legal department decreed that Apple employees Shall Not Touch anything with the GPLv3 license. Lots of the apps Linux enthusiasts want to run can be (and have been) ported, using layers like XQuartz, but they'll always be weird and poorly integrated with the native Cocoa UI. Which isn't nearly as customizable as they window managers they're used to.
Once you accept that people exist who really won't run any desktop OS other than Linux, it's easy to see why there's demand for M1 Linux. What can you buy in x86 land which matches up with the M1 MacBook Air?