It is my understanding that ARM is tricky because different kernels need (or don’t) different things. @bero is probably a better person to ask.
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All of that stuff is way over my head. Hell I don’t even get why new AMD chips need their own version (I thought they were x86… shows how long its been since I cared about hardware… and also that I’ve never been into kernel dev)
But I know that Debian, and Kali (deb based) and Devuan (Deb based/fork) all have aarch64 versions that work in UTM on MacOS and I think Fedora does too, so I know it can be done.
I also know it’s probably not a priority for OMA, which I totally understand. But that said, it appears that aarch64/arm laptops are becoming more and more of a thing…
And only one distro actually installs on bare metal on a new (m series) Mac. Asahi, and its lead dev just left, although apparently you can highjack its installer and use ubuntu. Oh and it only works on M1 and M2 MacBooks… M4 is out now… But even if not for bare metal, it’s nice to be able to virtualize Linux in a VM
I’ll just keep checking in every once in a while and see how it’s going.
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Most of the ARM chips are released with white sheets and they work with manufacturers, to make them usable. They want them to succeed, so they will sell them and make huge profits. The Snapdragon fits into this category. They are new, but they will be working on Linux soon.
Apple chips are secret. They don’t give any info. Everything that Asahi knows is only what they reverse engineered.
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x86 architecture is standardized enough that you can use a general x86 kernel on any processor. Like with OM, the x86 version works perfectly fine on the newer AMD processors. AMD and Intel have gone in slightly different directions, so that is there the znver1 kernel comes in with optimizations for Ryzen chips.
ARM is a different story. Qualcomm’s chips are vastly different from Apple. Qualcomm even uses two vastly different ARM builds because they bought a firm that had a design, while already having their own design in place. That is what the ARM vs. Qualcomm lawsuits are about. So, building a kernel against all of these designs can be time consuming, especially for the Mac, because their drivers are not pushed to the kernel.
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