Decent point. Not every grandmother is my grandmother. And a 21 year old that has only used phones and tablets to consume content may actually be less tech literate than an older person with no screen experience that knows how to fix their car, blender, or sewing machine.
If you install a kernel from the Arch repos, DKMS will build the kernel module for you automatically as well as the initial RAM disk and boot entries. Kernel upgrades take a little longer but you do not have to do anything manually.
It will work with custom kernels too but, if you do build your own kernel, you have to make sure a couple of options are selected.
There is so much misinformation and bad advice in this thread.
Thankfully, there are a few that correctly just say install nvidia-580xx-dkms
You can install new kernels after that. There is nothing to manually manage. They do not have to be LTS.
Hopefully we will start to see some this year or next. Maybe not Apple Silicon level but Ascalon shows a lot of promise. And something may come out of the Qualcomm Ventana acquisition.
Still waiting for the latest Spacemit to drop as well, which will at least be RVA23. Ascalon will be the first “high performance” RISC-V though.
This is not meant to fight but to reveal an alternate perspective.
I never understand why people leave these comments. That is, I do not truly understand the objection. I assume these comments are anti-Apple or anti-corporate in some way but I am really just guessing.
Here is what I think could motivate people to work on Linux support for this hardware.
1 - people have this hardware or like it and want to run Linux on it. In other words, people with the skills are serving their own interests and not driving towards some great social outcome like the question “why not riscv” would suppose. This is the “scratching your own itch” aspect of Open Source.
2 - people with the skills find this hardware interesting or are attracted to the challenge that it has been made difficult. Similar to #1 with a different motivations but still a personal one.
3 - some people are drawn to “freeing” things that are closed. The more proprietary, the more attractive it is as a target.
4 - people with the skills are thinking of their impact on the world and realize that these are extremely popular devices that are destined for the landfill after really short lives if allowed to remain fully proprietary.
If I had the skills, honestly I would find all of these compelling. The last one would provide the greatest fulfillment. There are A LOT of these devices being sold. I think Apple may be the single most popular laptop brand. The social good that comes from providing Linux support for Apple Silicon may be greater than time spent on any other hardware.
I am somebody that will ultimately benefit from all these efforts. It has been years since I have given Apple any money but quite like their hardware. I have 4 old Apple laptops, 2 iMacs, and one Mac Pro. These were all bought used or acquired for free. They are amazing Linux machines. I do not have any Apple silicon but I almost certainly will at some point. And it looks like the M1 and M2 hardware is already a great experience. In my view, old high-end gear is far better than new low-end gear. An Apple M1 laptop today is still nicer than the lower half of the Windows market. Buying a used Mac keeps two machines out of the landfill.
But, if I had the skills, the joy of just getting it to work would also be a motivator. It would be a fascinating project. And it is one that brings a lot of positive attention and even employment opportunity as we can see from where Asahi Linux contributors have ended up. Making Apple Silicon work provides a lot of what draws people to write free software.
Developing the RISC-V ecosystem would also be fulfilling. But this even helps with that. Creating a large and vibrant ARM Linux desktop community helps diversify and mature Linux in all kinds of ways that will also benefit RISC-V. One of these is just normalizing for us users the idea of running on something that is not x86. Another is increasing the size of the software ecosystem that builds and runs on RISC (either ARM or RISC-V.
And if the objection is that Apple will see greater demand for their proprietary products as a result of these efforts, I think we are greatly overestimating the current size of the community as a percentage or the overlap between “mainstream”’ Apple buyers and those of us with the patience to wait or suffer the limitations.
You can install NVIDIA-580-DKMS from the AUR. Problem solved.
Point taken but….
UML requires:
1 - extensive support from the host kernel above and beyond what is required to execute for regular programs
2 - the guest kernel to be specially compiled to be a UML guest
In other words, even though UML allows a guest Linux kernel to execute as a process on a host Linux kernel, that Linux kernel is not “just a program” like every other user mode application is.
Well, the kernel is not “just a program” in that it is not like the other programs on your system. If it was, you would “just” run it in your shell. The kernel cannot run this way of course because it is not a user mode program.
That said, if course the kernel is a program in the sense that it is a set of machine instructions that make the hardware do what you want.
And the kernel is designed to talk to hardware and other programs—to be the bridge between the two. It is not something an end-user interacts with directly.
If an old CPU would work for, I highly recommend and older Intel based Mac. They run amazingly well with Linux and, as you say, the “experience” is excellent.
The MacBooks with T2 chips are a bit less ideal as they require a special kernel. And the 2020 MacBook Air has crappy thermals and runs up the fan. There is a version of EndeavourOS that installs everything ou-of-the box through. The WiFi in these old Macs is out of tree but many of them require the Broadcom wl driver which Arch Linux distros ship by default. Depending on model, the out-of-tree FaceTimeHD camera module may be required but it ships in Arch distros as a DKMS packages. So, again, everything just works.
They really are a joy to use. I bought a 2013 MacBook Air a few years ago for less than $100. I bought it to go on backpacking trip because it was light and I did not worry about breaking it or having it stolen. I love it so much I still use it several times a week and it still amazes me what it can do.
CUA was not followed everywhere, but it was followed by CDE and so it was native to Solaris.
I totally understand the reaction. The objection makes sense.
The Distrowatch numbers are clearly nonsense. The biggest reason they are nonsense is because they feed into each other. “Oh hey, I have never heard of MX Linux, I wonder what that is”. Click. And nobody needs to be told what Ubuntu is.
But I full expect the traffic pattern at a website like OSI to be quite different. And what brings people to a license page to begin with?
Anyway, we can see from the results that the methodology is not as flawed as we fear. Because it closely aligns with other sources.
But again, I get the objection. We would have to take these conclusions with a grain of salt and agreement with other sources before basing any decisions on it.
Still, I found it interesting.
Thankfully, we have much better data on license popularity than we do for say programming language popularity, or Linux distribution use for that matter.
Fair enough I suppose. There is no guarantee that pageviews reflect usage. In this case though, the error is likely to skew even further towards popularity.
The OSI website is not Distrowatch. Why would a user be looking up a license?
I would say that “I would guess” that the OSI page view ranking mirrors real world popularity. I do not have to guess though as I can see that this is the case. So I will have to settle with saying I am not surprised.
I mean, I would not trust the results too far down the list but I fully expected the first 5 or so to align.
The day ARM announced their lawsuit against Qualcomm, I said that Qualcomm would switch to RISC-V on the high-end and I still expect them to do so.
Who wants to invest in home grown chip tech just to be told by ARM that they do not like your strategy or that they are not monetizing it enough? RISC-V offers total control over your tech investment strategy.
Qualcomm has not built out the ecosystem in that market yet. They can switch. And longer term, RISC-V is the clear market leader anyway. It will be the better developed ecosystem.
I would expect Snapdragon to stay ARM, but a new RISC-V family can grow beside it.
Apple is too heavily invested in ARM to switch. But most others designing and deploying their own silicon to desktop or server would be better off without ARM.
And RISC-V is already killing it in microcontrollers, automotive, and healthcare.
The place ARM is most entrenched is mobile. That is going to take longer. But if you look at ARMs licensing business model there, there will be a dozen RISC-V players playing the same game against them. That makes it very hard for ARM in the long run. It will be hard to outrun them all.
I think the novelty here is “actual” Amiga drivers in that you are running the Amiga code and not a reverse engineered implementation.
It would be so great if the world actually had the resolve to pull that off.
It is what should happen but I am not holding my breath.
In my experience, EndeavourOS works best on these old Macs.
People report good results with Mint as well but I get the impression they have to jump though more hoops to get decent WiFi.
To continue Mandriva development (same as OpenMandriva does).
Mandriva started as Mandrake Linux in the 90s. It was a Red Hat Linux alternative built for polish and performance. It was compiled for Pentium when Red Hat was still built for 386. Back in the day, it was popular and well respected.
Mandrake Linux was corporately backed in France and that company merged with Connectiva out of Brazil to create the Mandriva distro.
When Mandriva failed as a company, many of the devs continued the distro as Mageia.
Some of the original Mandriva devs later started the OpenMandriva project to make the naming even more confusing. But Mageia actually came first.
So it is mostly a distro that exists for historical reasons and as an established community. As for where it shines now, I am not sure.
I am hardly suggesting that this chip is competitive but the article is too hard on it.
In particular, this chip inherits the existing RISC-V ecosystem. The article mentions that it runs Linux and it will be well supported by compilers like GCC and Clang. If there is a niche where it fits, this chip could be put to use right away.
There are many, many applications that do not need the most powerful or even the most efficient chips.
Reliability and longevity of supply are often the most important criteria. I notice that the Indian government describes this chip as “reliable”.
At the right price and with a bit of government support, you could build a domestic industry around this thing (or future versions).
Well, you could also count packages in most Linux repos. You would reach the same conclusions.
Or, you could look at licenses on GitHub. The same story is repeated there.
I take it this collides with your assumptions?
I think a fair number of the “Wayland haters” upgraded to KDE on Debian 13 and found out that things had gotten better in the years since Debian 12 was released. Or their Debian-based distro did the same.
As the percentage of Wayland users goes above 75%, it gets harder to trash Wayland as, instead of people coming to agree with you, the majority of the comments support Wayland instead.
We are in the final transition where an increasing number of users have never used Xorg at all. Pretty much the only “new” Xorg users coming to desktop Linux these days are via Linux Mint. Once it goes Wayland, Xorg use in Linux will likely drop below 10%. XFCE is the other “big” X11 DE but it is already defaulting to Wayland on some distros.
We already have our first Wayland-only DE, COSMIC, and GNOME and KDE are not far behind. Despite it lagging, I do not think Cinnamon will keep x11 long after they switch.
There are some new places for x11 fans to go though. There is XLibre of course. And now there are Wayback and Phoenix. So people do not have to complain as loudly that they are being “forced” onto Wayland as Xorg development slows to a crawl. Both Phoenix and Wayback use the kernel DRM and KMS and so they are much smaller and easier to build and ship even if distros drop Xorg. Phoenix may even run Wayland apps. So if you love some x11 wm, it looks like you will be able to keep it around a bit longer.