Daily Driving Ubuntu on M1 Mac

https://www.feliciano.tech/blog/daily-driving-ubuntu-asahi-for-over-a-month/

by vsgherzi • 2 years ago

20 18 2 years ago

Sounds absolutely exhausting. Playing around with problems like that was entertaining in a way 20-30 years ago. I just want my computer to work nowadays.

cortesoft• 2 years ago

Playing around with problems like that was entertaining in a way 20-30 years ago.

Yeah, but some people 20-30 years younger than you do find it fun, so this is probably more for them than you.

chubs• 2 years ago

I wonder... perhaps linux driver issues were more entertaining 20-30 years ago because there were less peripherals to worry about. Eg no wifi, no power management, etc etc. Nowadays computers are more complex, it's more involved, more exhausting?

mbreese3• 2 years ago

20 years ago Linux still had issues with wifi drivers and power management. You had to be very careful with which network card you had (wifi and ethernet), as only a few had good in-kernel support.

Actually, it was very analogous to Asahi too. At the time, there was Yellow Dog Linux which was a project to make Linux run on (at the time current) PPC macs. I ran it on both Xserves and Powerbooks (although I only remember really being successful with the Xserves). Even then, the restricted amount of hardware present in Apple machines made it much easier to support that small subset in Linux. Funny enough -- Yellow Dog was also where the "yum" program started.

None of these things are that new... all of these have happened before and will happen again.

pram• 2 years ago

It was pretty exhausting, involved, and complex getting my shitty 56k winmodem working in Linux. Looking at a FAQ about it gives me ptsd lol

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DialupModemHowtoOld

austinshea• 2 years ago

There were more peripherals to worry about, and fewer generic drivers.

It's not like people are trying to individually purchase PCI sound/ethernet/modem/graphics; they just get these components from the south bridge and they don't think about it at all. This makes things much easier, and gives a clear target for community notes/contributions.

I suspect that the reason he is describing this systems admin work as exhausting is because we've moved on. Personally, I only care about the thing I'm doing with the computer I happen to be sitting at, as opposed to computer itself.

Separately, power management is not a new detail: https://www.lpthe.jussieu.fr/~talon/pentiumII.pdf The Pentium II processor supplies a STPCLK# pin to enable the processor to enter a low power state. When STPCLK# is asserted, the processor puts itself into the Stop-Grant state. The processor continues to snoop bus transactions while in Stop-Grant state. When STPCLK# is deasserted, the processor restarts its internal clock to all units and resumes execution. The assertion of STPCLK# has no effect on the bus clock.

mbreese3• 2 years ago

This was my rationale for switching over to Macs (from a mix of Windows and Linux) many years ago. I liked the flexibility of working within Linux to get a workstation to be setup exactly as I wanted it. If I had problems, I was able to (usually) figure out a fix or script a workaround. Eventually I got tired of the thousand cuts of desktop Linux and decided to just use a Mac for the "daily driver" stuff and keep my Linux work on servers.

That said, I do feel that these projects are helpful. Aside from the joys of tinkering, I think that adding more OS support for older Apple hardware is useful. Not only are we adding more architectures to the list that Linux supports, but projects like Asahi will help to keep hardware useful well after Apple stops supporting it.

That said, we still have the same problems... new unsupported drivers, poorly supported power management... re-re-redesigned desktop environments that aren't yet uniform.

What I was disappointed with the article though was a lack of attempting to compile their own software. Their two major complaints were missing Google Chrome and an outdated version of Postgres. I know there are some differences with Chrome and Chromium, but they should have been able to compile a new version of Chromium and Postgres.

throwaway2990• 2 years ago

Stuff not working is why I went back to windows. Still use Linux now n then but most of my time is in windows now. Just works.

beagle3• 2 years ago

30 years ago, there was no “just works” option. Windows was at WfW 3.11 / NT 3 , so you had to choose between being “entertained” by Windows driver issues and crashes (which you could hardly do anything about), or Linux (which you could!)

When Win95 came with Plug and Play, it still took a few years to go from “Plug and Pray” to “Plug and Play”. It’s only with 2000/XP that windows got to the “just works” stage.

Nowadays, everything just works, so the choice to deal with driver issues is a deliberate choice, not a “lesser evil” one.

tdstein• 2 years ago

A Linux tale as old as epoch time.

teaearlgraycold• 2 years ago

It was a cold day in Helsinki on January 1st, 1970 and a 4 day old Linus Torvalds knew he had a lot of system configuration ahead of him.

achrono• 2 years ago

This is useful to know, but why not just virtualize via UTM esp. if it's only for "daily driving"?

gettodachoppa• 2 years ago

Yep. I do this for Windows. I have a Surface laptop which requires tinkering to get Linux working on it (keyboard doesn't even work out of the box, you gotta use a USB keyboard until you install a custom kernel off Github).

I couldn't be bothered. I just keep Windows running and run Ubuntu in Virtualbox. With an SSD there's no noticeable performance penalty except in accelerated graphics (in which case you should be using VMware).

lagniappe• 2 years ago

I'd be interested in hearing some of the same testimonials from the Fedora users. There seems to be more resources being put into Fedora support from both sides.

sys_64738• 2 years ago

I've been running Fedora on a Mac Mini M2 since Christmas. I like it a lot.

Teknomancer• 2 years ago

Been a NixOS daily driver on Apple Silicon since I was laid off in similar unceremonious fashion. The Mac was my pitiful severance. Pitiful until NixOS. Now I would not live without it.

Aerbil313• 2 years ago

How is the experience? Any rough edges?

Daily Driving Ubuntu on M1 Mac

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