Run a Linux VM (basically no performance impact) and you have a killer quality Linux laptop. Sure it’s not the same as a dedicated Linux system but with these specs you’re going to do lighter work away from your desk anyway.
Or perhaps this will be the perfect machine for the Asahi team to focus on…lots of demand at this price point, and a lean Linux install would make this machine fly.
It's a much better QOL thing I've found to just ssh into a remote Linux box from a Mac. The BSD stuff on macOS isn't bad at all, just an adjustment... and homebrew lets you get your environment however you'd like.
I am curious how long Apple is going to continue to support XQuartz though. There seems to be no equivalent wayland project.
I use UTM, it's simple and seems light. I can share my source directory with the VM so I can edit using macos pycharm, and test the containers in the VM.
What really caught me out was I downloaded an x64 image once (there was no arm64 image) and it somehow just ran anyway in the arm64 VM. That may have been some qemu magic?
I love the macos/virtualised linux dev workflow, but is isn't better than plain linux. I'm just still not convinced GUI stuff works on linux as well as it does on macos and macbook hardware is so nice (if you're not paying for it).
Linux is quite different from macOS in many ways. They are both distantly inspired by "unix" (and Apple has managed to convince someone to let them use the trademark, so they really "are" unix, legally at least), but the similarity ends there.
They didn't convince anybody of anything. They poured an enormous amount of technical work [1] into making it compliant with the Single Unix Specification [2].
> The standard specifies programming interfaces for the C language, a command-line shell, and user commands.
Unix was a specific piece of software from a specific era. The experience of using it was very much unlike macOS for most users. Making it a "specification" was a later ret-con.
If someday Microsoft goes out of business and whoever acquires the trademarks makes a "Windows Specification", that you can meet and be legally considered Windows despite sharing zero code with the original, I would also think that was silly.
At most it makes sense to say that macOS has a sufficient set of features to emulate Unix, not that it is actually Unix.
Or perhaps this will be the perfect machine for the Asahi team to focus on…lots of demand at this price point, and a lean Linux install would make this machine fly.