Alternative OS for MacOS? \ stacker news ~privacy

2097 sats \ 38 comments \ @sebastix 14 Dec 2023 privacy

I never digged into this question, so I would like to start asking this question to others. Others who already examined the options to use a FOSS operating system on a Macbook or other Apple device equipped with MacOS. Keep in mind there are Intel and Silicon powered devices, which are completely different architectures. My daily computer (Macbook Pro) is equipped with a M1 (Silicon) processor which I would like to use with a FOSS OS someday... MacOS is privacy concern growing as a spyware OS.

As far as I know these are suitable, alternative FOSS operating systems:

Linux Mint (Intel only
Elementary OS (Intel only)
Asahi Linux (Silicon)

Love to hear other options with additional advice (the pros and cons).

view all related items

859 sats \ 2 replies \ @krispy_donkey 14 Dec 2023 freebie

This is one of my pet topics! Having started on an Apple II and now we're here, plus a career that has exposed me to Windows, Linux and Mac as day to day work drivers, I have opinions on this matter.

In short your answer is some kind of Linux, which flavour and desktop manager quite frankly it doesn't matter too much and don't be afraid to look at BSD. With that said I'd recommend if possible sourcing a cheap older laptop and using that to install different distros on, and try them out. You can customise almost anything in Linux and if you are so inclined/retarded, like me, you can lose years playing around with different things which while fun is possibly not the best use of times. But you learn a lot, which is good.

For my part in my personal life I'm a big fan of Ubuntu's LTS releases, and right now I'm fond of Gnome 3 which I find is a very user friendly desktop/window manager, letting people install all kinds of add-ons in a very easy way, letting people set up a near-ideal approach to their desktop based on their needs with a minimal of faffing about. In the corporate space I'm Windows all the way, though I feel the change between 10 and 11 and much prefer 10, and while I think MacOS is the best looking of the three (very high in my list of criteria), by some margin, I am using it for my current job and I find it is the odd one out of the three, some of it's UX choices are difficult to adopt, to put it politely. Today, I feel I will never use MacOS again but I'm sure I've said that before. This time I mean it though. That said I think if I was in some kind of design/artistic kind of work I'd probably be based on MacOS.

IMO it's best to use all three as and where you can, they all have some features that the others don't and much like how learning about the Bitcoin network teaches you about the Fiat approach and Austrian vs Keynesian monetary policies, so does playing with the different OS's help you learn about operating systems and the varying approach to UX. I would love to talk to the Woz about this one day.

Have fun, taking control of your desktop is a relevant analogy to Bitcoin!

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @sudonaka 14 Dec 2023

deleted by author

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bullen 14 Dec 2023

We seem to be alike in this matter. How many hours have I not spent configuring something small and "unimportant"? haha.. Worth it.

Have you seen the one which looks like macos? https://elementary.io/

Personally I almost always use Ubuntu. Tried BSD and Arch, but I don't have the time to configure anymore

157 sats \ 5 replies \ @kristapsk 14 Dec 2023

Linus Torvalds has been using Apple hardware with Linux since mid 1990s.

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @fixthemoneyfixtheworld 14 Dec 2023

If I remember correctly, Steve Job offered Linus a job at Apple at some point (which he turned down) and gave him a Mac during his visit to Apple HQ. He probably used it a bit, but I'm pretty sure he stopped using it a long time ago.

157 sats \ 3 replies \ @kristapsk 14 Dec 2023

Common, just google / duckduckgo "linus torwarlds apple", it's common knowledge. Started with PPC Macs, now it's Apple silicon ARM MacBooks.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @fixthemoneyfixtheworld 14 Dec 2023

You are correct. He seems to still be running Linux on a Silicon Mac to help improve the kernel for that CPU architecture.

The last time I checked, Asahi Linux was the only Linux distribution that could run on a Silicon Mac, and it was in the experimental/alpha stage with many unresolved issues.

Here is a video made 2 months ago about the state of Asahi on an M1 Macbook Pro:

Maybe Linus uses more than one computer. Personally, I might run Asahi to experiment on it, but I would not use it as my daily driver at this stage.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @kristapsk 14 Dec 2023

It should be possible to run Gentoo Linux too on anything that works with Linux kernel (although there was also Gentoo/*BSD projects in the past), as it's by default mostly manually built system (although I have scripted install).

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kristapsk 14 Dec 2023

Likely he has more than one computer at home, including PPC and x86 Apple hardware, before ARM Mx chips.

31 sats \ 3 replies \ @sudonaka 14 Dec 2023

Hardware notes: “Intel” chips are “x86” - can be Intel or AMD CPUs. Apple M1, M2 etc chips are “ARM” chips - ARM chips are always used in phones due to their efficiency vs x86.

More powerful ARM chips such as the M1 are new and innovative for laptops, but ARM chips have been deployed in phones and servers for a long time.

All chips are made out of silicon.

x86 and Arm are the top 2 types of CPUs, but there are others under development, such as RISC-V

https://www.microcontrollertips.com/risc-v-vs-arm-vs-x86-whats-the-difference/

Apple came up with the name “Apple silicon” meaning they designed the chip (similar to iPhone chips)

Debian for Apple silicon chips is under development: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @davidw 15 Dec 2023

Debian does Dallas. Look forward to that release, on Mac

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @m00ninite 14 Dec 2023

Thanks for making the pedantic post so I didn't have to 😂.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @sudonaka 14 Dec 2023

I was compelled 🫣

84 sats \ 1 reply \ @franzap 14 Dec 2023

I have gone down this path and using M1 with Asahi Linux (Fedora on Gnome 45), yes on a second partition alongside MacOS. I'm very happy with it so far.

Running the same setup on an Intel processor is a degraded experience. It's really much worse.

Caveat: On Asahi not all hardware is fully supported. Check their wiki: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki and follow @marcan (https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan). Speaker support is coming, and I think HDMI support too.

I have lots of tips and tricks if you want to (for example, I swapped Ctrl with Cmd to make some keybindings more ergonomic)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @sebastix OP 14 Dec 2023

Wow, awesome! Cutting-edge! Very highly valuable content!

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @GlobalThreat 14 Dec 2023

arch is my favorite for desktop. ubuntu for server.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @davidw 14 Dec 2023

May also do this next year.

Best step probably to partition some space and experiment with options like Asahi. Not come across any others yet for Apple chips.

This GitHub post shares some challenges with compatibility on certain macOS versions this year for info.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @wingalt 14 Dec 2023

Haven't tried Asahi on the M series yet, interesting to see here that the battery life is similar to running MacOS. For Intel Macbooks I run KDE Neon and Kubuntu and it works very well, very customizable you can even give it a MacOS look in one click by changing the global theme to Ventura or Sonoma (global themes by zayronXIO)

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @VEINTIUNO 14 Dec 2023

Ubuntu.. more on ubuntu.com

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @sebastix OP 14 Dec 2023

Worked with Ubuntu in 2014-2015 by my former employer. Using Windows was an absolute nightmare for me and that computer was so slow with that OS. Ubuntu fixed a lot for me in that time :)

I'm running Lubuntu on of my homeservers btw =)

0 sats \ 9 replies \ @Zepasta 14 Dec 2023

deleted by author

1 sat \ 5 replies \ @sebastix OP 14 Dec 2023

Using windows is worse 😘

15 sats \ 3 replies \ @fixthemoneyfixtheworld 14 Dec 2023

I think every platform has its pros and cons. If you want to prioritize and maximize your privacy and freedom on the desktop, Linux is by far the best option imho.

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @sebastix OP 14 Dec 2023

Question is, which Linux distro?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @fixthemoneyfixtheworld 14 Dec 2023

MacOS is not Linux. It is based on a BSD kernel with proprietary Apple code on top.

Most Linux distros are ethical in terms of privacy and freedom, but not all of them are like Google's ChromeOS.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @sebastix OP 14 Dec 2023

True, I was too fast typing 'MacOS is also a Linux distro' which is false. When I edited my reply, your reply was not here yet ;-)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Zepasta 14 Dec 2023

deleted by author

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @franzap 14 Dec 2023

If you care about privacy, this is a terrible take

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Zepasta 14 Dec 2023

deleted by author

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @franzap 14 Dec 2023

For starters the OP is talking about computers not any device. And talking about hardware not software.

Running Linux on M-series is an excellent option and probably superior to running on Intel (as Intel chips after 2017 ship with the Intel ME spyware, but also in terms of performance)

The M-series SoC is very well designed, even for booting other operating systems because of security and verifiability at the firmware level.

0 sats \ 6 replies \ @030e0dca83 14 Dec 2023

Don't forget battery usage optimization. Even if you instal Linux over there you won't be able to use it far from charger. In this case what the purpose to buy apple if you can use any other hardwares

0 sats \ 5 replies \ @sebastix OP 14 Dec 2023

In this case what the purpose to buy apple if you can use any other hardwares

I agree, that's another topic: what is the best hardware/linux distro combo out there? :-) I really like the hardware of my Macbook, but I wish I could use just another OS.

21 sats \ 2 replies \ @franzap 14 Dec 2023

I can report from experience dual booting Asahi and MacOS that battery life is almost the same. Stop wishing, start using it :)

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @sebastix OP 14 Dec 2023

That's really interesting! Setting up a dual boot with Asahi sound like a very fair trade-off at this moment! How complex is this to achieve?

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @franzap 14 Dec 2023

Extremely easy: https://fedora-asahi-remix.org/

I heard about a Sonoma bug, didn't run into it but many others did. Just be aware of that one. I would follow people on this mastodon for updates: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan

Once you're running keep doing sudo dnf --refresh upgrade for updates.

Browsers: Firefox ships with the OS, Brave crashes (but Brave Nightly works) and Chromium works too. Not Mullvad Browser and no Tor Browser unfortunately. I would need to check if they can be compiled from source on aarch64.