Is this the end of Linux as the host OS on Mac hardware? It's been really difficult for many years anyway, so for essentially hasn't been practical for a long time. I know there are plenty of working ARM builds of Linux so if the new Mac chips are ARM compliant then the ARM linux builds should work. I would think Apple has their own proprietary extensions or something tho, otherwise why make their own? Just very high manufacturing standards?
> so if the new Mac chips are ARM compliant then the ARM linux builds should work
That's not how it works. ARM is just the processor architecture. While Linux may very well support the processor, it's unlikely to support the rest of the hardware well, if at all.
yeah, but driver support has been a challenge for years on mac hardware (as I implied poorly) but there are ways to run if you tolerate some absurdities as a result of poor hardware support (like the fans running 100% all the time, battery draining from 100% to 0% in 60 mins, no wifi, etc). There are also workaround for some things like Broadcom where you can pull the firmware out of the windows driver. So you don't necessarily need the Linux kernel to work perfectly with all the hardware.
But my question/point was, is there likely to a total show stopper now that you can't just tolerate?
I believe that Apple won't provide its own GPU drivers for Linux and it looks like hard to implement OSS driver (the GPU is for Metal not OpenGL). So Linux on Mac Hardware looks hard unless RADEON equipped Mac.
