• 3 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2023

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  • https://github.com/eiln/ane

    I think the neural engine works, but you need an out-of-tree kernel module. The asahi wiki talks about that, they say it is yet to be merged on mainline.

    Gaming on arm is absolutely a thing… But not on the M’s… About the other chips it’s just on its infancy right now, fex-emu(https://github.com/szllzs/FEXEMU) and box64(https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64) are both capable of running wine, and of course steam. Games work, I don’t think its 100% of native speed, and the compatibility must not be perfect, but like wine/proton I’m sure it’s only going to get better.

    The apple silicon devices have 16k pages kernels, while x86 is 4k pages, that would not be a problem if we had 4k page emulation/simulation on Linux, but we don’t, seems like macOS’s way of emulating 4k pages is wasteful to performance, and the contributors do not wish to make a similar implementation, so we don’t get one for now.





  • Since the first release of apple silicon I was quite a bit impressed with the hardware, of course im not really an apple guy, and so I initially thought “cool, but that’s not for me”

    And then came asahi linux, and it changed everything, in a very short period they got the GPU working, and then came vulkan, opengl 4 and 4.2, most stuff seems to be working already, either on the bleeding edge kernel or the mainline; https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki Take a look at the feature support page, it’s really impressive.

    I started to study more and more the development of Linux on apple silicon, and even more so after my laptop’s hinge has broken(tldr: I don’t have a laptop anymore, it’s just a PC); recently I’ve been wanting to buy a new laptop, so I can actually use it as one, of course, as any Latin American, I wish to buy for the long run, and all the options seem to be:

    1 - Qualcomm laptops designed for windows ridden with shitware, useless AI, and a ducking copilot key( also I have terrible experience with the firmware of my current windows first laptop, I do not wish for more)

    2 - Recent or older terribly power inefficient X86 laptops(mine is from 2021, the battery life sucked, even in windows, and it just heats up so easily, I don’t think it can even maintain maximum clock for 5 minutes straight)

    3 - Apple silicon macs designed for macOS first that have a decent compatibility with linux, that will only get better with time.

    Of course, I do believe X86 will get better with time, as it has already gotten, but until then, I either stick with my current deplorable hardware and wait until the improvements get actually mainstream, or buy another older x86 laptop, just to retire it later on.







  • Well, i can’t really recommend a specific combination, but I can give you options so you can comprehend more about by researching. All the distros I will list here have dedicated editions, or ways to install different desktop environments. As of judging by your screenshot, it seems like you’re somewhat of a technical user so these recommendations were made by keeping this in mind, these are not the greatest options if you want something for a newbie non-tech savy Linux user.

    • Fedora - exceptionally stable and quite fast distribution, altrought not the fastest, great software availability, if you don’t find your software, or the version shipped by fedora on the repos isnt working for you, consider install it using containers, like flatpak, or distrobox.

    • Arch Linux - very tecnicial distribution, on my experience not really stable and not very usable on the longterm, but works well for a Great amount of people, it’s main features are it’s customizability, being able to craft your own system by deciding precisely what will compose it, and the aur(arch user repository), in it, you will find user made scripts to install all kinds software, even pathed ones.

    • EndeavourOS - Arch’s youngest daughter, arch but a bit more polished, and user friendly, with it you get all the features of arch Linux, with better setuo, and more ease of install your desktop environment / window manager, at the expense of worsened customization.

    • Opensuse - not very popular, but by far the fastest distro on the list, its main edition is based on the plasma desktop environment, you may run into some issues, but if you know your way around things, you will surely get the most out of this system, just like fedora, if you don’t find, or the software on the repositories isn’t working for you, you can always use containers.

    Desktop environments / window managers - if you don’t know what these are, I recommend you do a more indeph research about them, but in resume, both are the user interfaces which run on top of your system, the difference is that desktop environments tend to be more user friendly and “complete” than window managers, while window managers tend to be more lightweight, simpler, and customizable.

    • KDE plasma environment - excellent and fast desktop environment, has a great implementation of the keyboard shortcuts, you can make anything do anything just by changing them on the settings app, the glimpse of desktop customization on Linux, it has a lot of themes available and a built in theme “store” integrated right into the desktop. Recommended if you want a great balance between customizability and convenience.

    • Sway - sway is a window manager for Linux based on the Wayland protocol, being the first of it’s kind, can be heavily customized using it’s configuration files, in which have a simple and comprehensive syntax, just like any other window manager, it can be configured to do pretty much anything.

    • Hyprland - I would sway hyprland is a successor to sway, it’s more polished than sway with more features, has beautiful and fluid animations, I have never used hyperland myself, but for what I have seen, it’s the best window manager out there.


  • For the university work you could try libreoffice, it works on windows too if would like to try, Epic games work through Heroic games launcher or the Epic games launcher trough wine. Please do not use Manjaro as your starter distro, it’s very unstable, Ubuntu is not your best option, Linux mint might be the way to go if you want something simple. You could try out fedora workstation, or fedora kde spin, it’s great, only remember to use flatpak for your multimedia apps.