[rkangel]

> the Linux in M1 projects are probably targeted at Mac Minis

I'm not sure that's true. What the M1 gives you is an incredibly powerful processor that's also very power efficient. That gives you a spectacularly performing laptop with good battery life, making the M1 laptops compelling even if you want to run Linux.

If you're plugged into the wall the M1s are still quick, but there are other options to get you into the same ballpark. There are no other options that use as little power.

[vletal]

I'm curious about the power efficiency. From all my experience, all laptops I had usually drained battery much faster on Linux than on Windows. And these were very standard mainstream machines. M1 is a proprietary CPU which requires reverse engineering to even make OS running. I wonder how close to "native" is the Linux going to get.

[chippiewill]

I doubt the CPU itself will be that much trouble, it's still mostly an ARM CPU.

Power draw problems usually arise because the drivers are half baked and don't know how to turn the peripherals off when they're not being used.

It might not be native power efficiency, but if non-M1 Mac linux experience is anything to go by then it's still plausible that it can run circles around x86 based laptops with good Linux driver support.

[hvis]

> What the M1 gives you is an incredibly powerful processor that's also very power efficient.

While true, the benchmarks show that recent AMD CPUs have comparable power efficiency, even on single-core loads.

And it might be that a significant part of M1's advantage lives in some (proprietary) scheduling software, so the Asahi Linux effort might not reach the same numbers even with a few years of work.

But then again, some companies just standardize on Apple hardware for their employees, so this can at least allow people to run GNU/Linux in those situations. Someday.