It is crazy how many highly skilled people put a lot of free work into pushing Linux forward, because of „let’s see, if we can get this thing working!”
I love the free software community.
A lot of people enjoy solving tricky and nuanced problems, and this is one. The fact that it yields really awesome outputs like this is, to some degree, just a bonus.
We might live in a strange world where it’ll be easier to run Windows programs on ARM with Linux than on the OS they’re written for.
Windows 11 has pretty good x86 emulation, both 32 and 64bit - imo better than what macos does with rosetta. Windows 10 for arm is just a pretty broken tech preview, though.
Just ran a VR game for Windows just this morning, worked like a charm, didn’t tinker one minute (using Proton and SteamVR, Valve with NVIDIA, just for context).
Then you also read things like https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2024/08/21/linux-scores-a-surprising-gaming-victory-against-windows-11/ on non technical websites… and can’t help but wonder if it “will” be easier or… if it’s already done.
Imagine it becomes easier to run Windows x86 programs on Linux, than on Windows. And I won’t be surprised at all if performance is better.
Imagine if THAT becomes Linux’ killer feature.
A more lightweight system without the crazy system requirements, certain systems more stable and easier to get into for gaming, no ads and no spyware out of the box, no extra cruft nobody needs out of the box, and better support for x86 emulation on ARM.
Now THAT is a checklist to getting people interested.
There is also the free of charge aspect, but I’m not sure how appealing that would be, with Windows being bundled in.
Anything else I missed, feel free to let me know.
Alyssa Rosenzweig stay winning. Incredible work as always.
Does this mean my M2 Mac mini can finally run Linux well soon? Asahi works but is missing so much functionality
Out of genuine curiosity, what is it missing? I have to use macOS on my Apple Silicon computers, so I haven’t tried out Asahi.
There are support table on asahi wiki. Here us M2 for example: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/M2-Series-Feature-Support
It is missing thunderbolt, touch id, video decoder, video encoder, DP alt mode, pro res, PCIE etc.
That’d be cool.
I mean, can’t you just run it with qemu-user anyway?
I guess it is more performant.
Let me know if I don’t know enough about what you are talking about, but I think your saying to use qemu to o run windows.
This is about running x86 code on arm processors, like what Apple does with Rosetta.
Qemu can emulate one architecture on another. And qemu-user can be used to run a single userspace-program on a different architecture.
I might be very mistaken, but I don’t think QEMU can link mixed-architecture dependencies. Box86 can run an x86 game on ARM and link ARM-native shared objects for OpenGL, thus skipping emulation of some hotpath code.
This is what I was refering to.
