I haven’t looked in a few months but it didn’t seem like the Asahi Linux project was necessarily ready to be a daily driver yet, but they’ve made a lot of progress in just a few years with a small team of volunteers and as far as I know no support from Apple. Seems like it’s only a matter of time before they really get it nailed down. For now you can run ARM versions of Linux in virtual machines on Apple silicon.
Asahi Linux is amazing, and they progress really fast without any help from Apple, but I really don’t want to buy an Apple product; I don’t want to give Apple money, and I also don’t want to buy a machine that’s intentionally designed to be hard to repair and obsolete quickly.
Once my old laptop dies, I’ll probably get a Framework 13.
It all depends on how hard Arm SoC vendors like Qualcomm, Samsung, and MediaTek push in that direction. Once they figure out the compatibility stuff, the average consumer won’t care that it isn’t x86, and would happily take the better battery life offered. At that point pretty much every laptop maker will have at least one Arm laptop available, and Framework will probably follow suit, as they managed to get the AMD version released faster than I expected for a new company, and their 16" laptop shows they are not only innovative but also ambitious, so I’m sure this will be in their pipeline.
As for RISC-V, it doesn’t seem to have a lot of steam in the desktop/laptop direction, but I’m sure we will see a lot of SBCs with these, increasing public interest and eventually even desktop/laptop… If I had to guess, its going to be at least a decade before we see a mainstream laptop brand offering a model with a RISC-V SoC…
Is putting Linux on a macbook not an option?
I haven’t looked in a few months but it didn’t seem like the Asahi Linux project was necessarily ready to be a daily driver yet, but they’ve made a lot of progress in just a few years with a small team of volunteers and as far as I know no support from Apple. Seems like it’s only a matter of time before they really get it nailed down. For now you can run ARM versions of Linux in virtual machines on Apple silicon.
Asahi Linux is amazing, and they progress really fast without any help from Apple, but I really don’t want to buy an Apple product; I don’t want to give Apple money, and I also don’t want to buy a machine that’s intentionally designed to be hard to repair and obsolete quickly.
Once my old laptop dies, I’ll probably get a Framework 13.
Yeah this is pretty much my thoughts exactly. I wish there was an ARM (or eventually maybe even RISC-V) Framework laptop, maybe someday
It all depends on how hard Arm SoC vendors like Qualcomm, Samsung, and MediaTek push in that direction. Once they figure out the compatibility stuff, the average consumer won’t care that it isn’t x86, and would happily take the better battery life offered. At that point pretty much every laptop maker will have at least one Arm laptop available, and Framework will probably follow suit, as they managed to get the AMD version released faster than I expected for a new company, and their 16" laptop shows they are not only innovative but also ambitious, so I’m sure this will be in their pipeline.
As for RISC-V, it doesn’t seem to have a lot of steam in the desktop/laptop direction, but I’m sure we will see a lot of SBCs with these, increasing public interest and eventually even desktop/laptop… If I had to guess, its going to be at least a decade before we see a mainstream laptop brand offering a model with a RISC-V SoC…