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by marcan_42 1758 days ago
Nouveau has a problem with nonredistributable firmware. We don't have that problem because Apple distributes their firmware themselves and it gets loaded before Linux boots. I already put together a prototype installer that deals with the whole firmware situation for users.

I've been porting Linux to undocumented platforms for 10 years and the main barrier to getting it polished is motivational, not technical. It's precisely the hard problems that motivate people.

1 comments

Okay, Hector, so assuming your Patreon reaches 100% when can we expect to have Linux working on M1 with similar performance, battery life and hardware video decoding in mplayer and Firefox?
There's no way to make hard promises about reverse engineering projects, but if you want an educated guess: basic accelerated graphics by the end of this year, and polish to the level of proper sleep states/PM/video decode and such by the end of 2022.
> There's no way to make hard promises about reverse engineering projects, but if you want an educated guess: basic accelerated graphics by the end of this year, and polish to the level of proper sleep states/PM/video decode and such by the end of 2022.

Thanks for the honest response. IMO you are being _extremely_ optimistic, but I would be glad to be proved wrong on this one.