As others have said, should be fine to run Linux in a VM. Running natively from boot, the only potential option would be Asahi Linux, but my understanding is that the A18 Pro chip has certain internal attributes which are akin to an M3, and Asahi has only gotten full support in place for the M1/M2 generations. Perhaps once they get M3+ fully working, A18 Pro would also be an option. (I'm also super interested in a Neo running Linux.)
If the A18 Pro has the same ISA as the M-series chips then this may not be so straightforward. I am still hanging on to my 2020 Intel MBP for dear life because it is the only Apple device I own that allows me to run Ubuntu and Windows 11 on a VirtualBox VM.
Would you elaborate what you mean by saying Linux on an M-series chip isn't straightforward? That's not been my experience, I (and lots of other devs) use it every day, Apple supports Linux via [0], and provides the ability to use Rosetta 2 within VMs to run legacy x86 binaries?
The instruction set is not the issue, the issue is on ARM there's no standardized way like on x86 to talk to specialized hardware, so drivers must be reimplemented with very little documentation.
As long as you're ok with arm64 guests, you can absolutely run both Ubuntu and Win11 VMs on M-series CPUs. Parallels also supports x86 guests via emulation.
Have you confirmed this? I haven't seen anyone concretely describe the boot policy of the Neo yet (it should be an easy enough check for anyone who has one in-hand).
Yes; macOS has native container support for Linux [1].
[1]: https://github.com/apple/container
Umm that's a lightweight VM just like WSL2, not native Linux.
It's funny that we're not even considering native but like, at all.
As others have said, should be fine to run Linux in a VM. Running natively from boot, the only potential option would be Asahi Linux, but my understanding is that the A18 Pro chip has certain internal attributes which are akin to an M3, and Asahi has only gotten full support in place for the M1/M2 generations. Perhaps once they get M3+ fully working, A18 Pro would also be an option. (I'm also super interested in a Neo running Linux.)
oh you'll be able to run a vm but they'll screwup support for anything that matters like graphics or gpu-compute stack.
Lima is more or less the equivalent of WSL for Macs.
https://lima-vm.io
In a VM, definitely. Just like other Macs.
If the A18 Pro has the same ISA as the M-series chips then this may not be so straightforward. I am still hanging on to my 2020 Intel MBP for dear life because it is the only Apple device I own that allows me to run Ubuntu and Windows 11 on a VirtualBox VM.
Would you elaborate what you mean by saying Linux on an M-series chip isn't straightforward? That's not been my experience, I (and lots of other devs) use it every day, Apple supports Linux via [0], and provides the ability to use Rosetta 2 within VMs to run legacy x86 binaries?
0: https://github.com/apple/container
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The instruction set is not the issue, the issue is on ARM there's no standardized way like on x86 to talk to specialized hardware, so drivers must be reimplemented with very little documentation.
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As long as you're ok with arm64 guests, you can absolutely run both Ubuntu and Win11 VMs on M-series CPUs. Parallels also supports x86 guests via emulation.
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Same Armv8 ISA. And it's the same ISA Android Linux has run on for over a decade.
Has anyone verified that the Virtualization framework indeed works on the Neo/A18, since the framework requires chip-level support?
In a vm, I don't see why not.
Just run WSL inside of Windows.
Likely yes, eventually
Native, no. That would cannibalise Apple services which is a huge source of revenue for them.
Nobody is moving to Linux because there’s an iCloud replacement waiting for them over there…
Have you confirmed this? I haven't seen anyone concretely describe the boot policy of the Neo yet (it should be an easy enough check for anyone who has one in-hand).
Like any other Apple Silicon Mac, you can't currently boot into Linux but Apple has native container support that Linux works on [1].
[1]: https://github.com/apple/container
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