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.
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 if Wine became the new Windows. (Or became all that was left of Windows).
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.
Does it? All of the “windows on arm” video I’ve seen say that tons of things are broken.
I’ve been using an Arm notebook with Windows for over a year now (not as main system, but development system for a customer project). I’m running a lot of x86 software (like Emacs) as a gcc port for Windows/Arm is being developed only now - with no problems. It integrates nicely into the native stuff - which is one area where you run into issues on the Mac: If you start a shell in rosetta it’s annoying to make calls to native arm binaries.
The only issue I ran into were some drivers not available for Arm - emulation layer (unsurprisingly) just is for userland, not kernel drivers. Also x86 emulation isn’t working well if Windows is running in a virtual machine on MacOS - but supposedly that’ll be fixed in the upcoming Windows release.
All of this only applies to Windows 11 - if for some reason you decide to run Windows 10 on Arm you’re in a world of pain.
I don’t think your experience is representative of a generic user. This video from Level1Techs paints a completely different picture. Gaming for example, is pretty much out of the picture in the ARM version of Windows.
Performance of the snapdragons is roughly that of an i7 from a decade ago - so yes, it’s a good machine for office tasks and light development, but in no way suitable for gaming. That’s not a Windows problem, though, just the hardware is not suitable for that.
No. You can’t game on it meaning that the games do not even launch.
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.
but how do I run it on confusingly named chinese sbc’s for which the only os images that seem to exist are an untrustworthy debian based system and an old version of android?
You avoid buying them precisely because of this.
I figured as much. These are things that were given to me as an “otherwise it goes in the landfill” package deal. a couple have klipper over dietpi for my 3d printers but the rest are seemigly junk and I’ll probbaly toss them in the electronics section at the recycle depot next time I go there
otherwise it goes in the landfill
Ah, well in that case, fair enough.
I’ve done my fair share of ridiculousness to keep free crappy hardware running.
I will say, try running Alpine Linux on a container.I’ve managed to extract some usefulness out of a borderline e-waste Android tablet running some flavor of Jelly Bean, so outdated you couldn’t connect to most websites due to bad TLS certs, by running a Alpine Container on it.
Alpine was the only distro I found that could run up-to-date software on such a ancient version of the Linux kernel, everything else failed to work at all.
Running into this issue with nixos and the mango pi bored currently lol
yeah I think I have an orange, a mango, a nanopi, and a couple entirely written in chinese that are different from each other. Just before reddit went senile I was planning on posting images to try to ID the unknown ones but I didn’t and got busy with stuff less likely to be a dead end.
Can anyone confirm if it is indeed the case that you can’t just put whatever os you want on these things, or if it is possible by jumping through some hoops that google would never show me in favour of showing me other shit that makes them more money?
Usually you need to patch some stuff as a lot of the hardware doesn’t have mainline support. For the mango pi I found this
https://github.com/boosterl/awesome-mango-pi-mq-pro
The nixos link there works but it’s a bit out dated
We can already run arm seamlessly on x86 Linux, why not use Qemu-user + binfmt misc the other way around? I guess FEX must be much faster. Im also not super keen to run binaries that can’t be recompiled anyway so probably not the target audience.
Take that Java, everything is a portable binary now.
I miss Java.
I hate Java with the white hot passion of a thousand suns. It is baked into so many admin tools for hardware (Dell, Cisco, etc) and trying to connect to older hardware that requires a security model that isn’t supported anymore or has expired certs that are never getting updated is a giant pain in the ass. Run anywhere my ass. I have to keep special VMs with just the right version of Java and all the necessary tweaks (like having to tell it that certain older encryption methods are ok) to even access some of these tools. I’ve even had to surplus hardware that was perfectly fine accept for the fact I could configure it because of some stupid Java thing. In short Fuck Java with a rusty wire brush.
I’m not bitter at all 🤣
It’s still around, with Oracle humping it’s corpse.
Don’t worry Java is alive and well on Android… For now 😹
Until you try to run Android app without Android :)
But I got the point.
Alyssa Rosenzweig stay winning. Incredible work as always.
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.
You can but the performance will be suboptimal
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.
