Which Linux Distributions is the best for Mac M1?

What you say is sensible, but does not match what others have been saying over the years. This Wikipedia article and Apple's own propaganda say that macOS is "UNIX 03" certified.
I find that strange to hear because 90% of the sources you find on the internet say that MacOS is FreeBSD based including the FreeBSD wiki.
Even on the apple forums.
Too bad that Apple doesn't have it officially documented somewhere since that would get rid of all the confusion.
 
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I find that strange to hear because 90% of the sources you find on the internet say that MacOS is FreeBSD based including the FreeBSD wiki.
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths#FreeBSD_is_Just_macOS_Without_the_Good_Bits
https://www.wired.com/2013/08/jordan-hubbard/

Even on the apple forums.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251319788
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1762337?page=2
Too bad that Apple doesn't have it officially documented somewhere since that would get rid of all the confusion.
It may boil down to whether you believe that FreeBSD is Unix or not. If you do, do you believe that macOS itself is FreeBSD-enough. I respect whatever a person believes. The label won't change macOS.

Apple has been touting that macOS is Unix for a long time in their marketing literature. Typically it appeared near the bottom of their macOS feature descriptions and new release announcements. I saw it many times over the years. I did another quick search and found this example from 2020:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-introduces-macos-big-sur-with-a-beautiful-new-design/

The second paragraph starts with a quote from Craig Federighi, Apple's VP of Software Engineering:
“macOS Big Sur is a major update that advances the legendary combination of the power of UNIX with the ease of use of the Mac..."

That is all I can contribute. As I said, whatever you believe, I respect it.
 
Guys, macOS is UNIX Certified. Here's the current UNIX trademark holder (The Open Group) mention of it and with links to the certification process: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

UNIX has nothing to do with the actual Kernel shipped, or the actual-and-final implementation decisions, but with the interoperability between systems.
 
Having said that, Asahi Linux is the distribution that is taking closer care of getting the most of Apple Silicon.
 
If I understand correctly with M1, Apple cut ties with the past, nothing developed up to now work anymore - including Parallel, unless you dole out more $ for the new version.
With the habit of forced obsolescence, I don't plan to buy any $A products now or in the future.
 
If I understand correctly with M1, Apple cut ties with the past, nothing developed up to now work anymore - including Parallel, unless you dole out more $ for the new version.
With the habit of forced obsolescence, I don't plan to buy any $A products now or in the future.
You're wrong in a few ways.
  • All Intel-compiled software for Mac works on Apple Silicon over Rosetta 2, and virtualisation is becoming more and more supported.
  • Parallels works on Apple Silicon, and even Windows 11 works on those processors through Parallels. If Parallels charge you for the new version, that's Parallels and not Apple.
  • You can use Docker, podman, Virtualbox already has a Developer Preview, and there's plenty of options that will work so long they work on ARM64. And any docker or virtual machine image that is precompiled to ARM64 will run on any virtualisation platform
  • Natively speaking, the CPU Cores of Apple Silicon are ARM64, and the Asahi team already got the GPU cores supported on the Kernel.
Day after day, Macs with Apple Silicon are more attractive machines to run Linux on them. I'm still not convinced when I compare them with modular and repairable approaches like the Framework laptops, but they are really interesting machines.
 
I do not trust Apple and their migration support. Don't be surprised if Rosetta 2 disappears in 5 years. Here are some Apple migrations I have witnessed:

  • 16 bit to 32 bit
  • 32 bit to 64 bit
  • Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X
  • Motorola 68000 family to PowerPC
  • PowerPC to Intel
  • Intel to ARM
In all of the above cases, Apple disabled the tool that supported legacy systems. Often it happens at the five year mark. The current Intel to ARM transition is still "active", but I see no reason to believe that this case is any different.

Based on what I have seen in the past, I predict that in a couple years Rosetta 2 will be disabled. After that we will see a period where Apple systems run only on a different hardware architecture than the mainstream Windows (and most Linux) for the foreseeable future. It will be like the bad old days when Apple used PowerPC and Windows relied on Intel. Their respective market shares of personal computer systems were small and large respectively, just as now.

There is a difference between then and now. The unknown factor is predicting the future impact of Windows 11 for ARM.

(Does anyone remember Windows NT for: MIPS? PowerPC? DEC Alpha? I worked on all of those, too.)
 
DEC Alpha?

I'm kinda from New England. So, obviously I'm a Digital kinda guy. DEC helped fund my research and allowed me to keep using their equipment after graduation to get my company started.

Edit: I can't type today.
 
DEC Alpha?
I'm kinda from New England. So, obviously I'm a Digital kinda guy. DEC helped fund my research and allowed me to keep using their equipment after graduation to get my company started.

Edit: I can't type today.
I always liked DEC. I used a lot of DEC equipment over the years, including PDP-8, DECSystem-10, PDP-11 in many forms on multiple OSs, VAX-11, and finally Alpha on Digital Unix, then Alpha again on Windows NT.

Our company was partnered with DEC on a large project in the late 1980s / early 1990s. It did not go well. At the start, we deployed many networked VAXstations in a multi-story building. Those workstations booted over the network from a single VAX server. After a power outage, the workstations automatically rebooted once power was restored. Every workstation needed one particular file to boot, and they hammered the network to get it. The poor lonely server was thrashing and could not service the requests that got through. The workstations would cycle through timeouts/reboots, so the network and server were constantly thrashing. IT guys learned that when a power outage hit, they had to go from floor to floor and switch off every workstation. After power was restored, they would go back and start the workstations one by one to avoid the thrashing issues. It took four hours to restore service after power resumed, so usually the developers were sent home for the rest of the day if a power outage occurred. Sometimes the power would fail for a minute or two and then the lights would come on again. It didn't matter how long the outage lasted.

The project was targeted for Alpha, but Alpha was not yet ready, which is why it started with VAX and those VAXstations. DEC experienced many delays associated with Alpha - chip issues, operating system problems, delays in development tool availability, buggy everything, etc. Eventually the company had to drop DEC and switch to another RISC architecture instead. Many friends from DEC disappeared. Soon after that, Compaq bought DEC, which shocked everyone and was a sad day for many.

A couple years later, I found myself looking at Alpha again, but this time with Windows NT. I don't know about any legal agreements that Microsoft made with DEC over Windows NT (and its many internal similarities to VMS), but Microsoft kept Windows NT for Alpha going far longer than any market need that I could see, and I always assumed it had something to do with a settlement over Windows NT and VMS. (Do not ask me to explain why a company would develop a product for Windows NT on Alpha. That decision came from above and was not subject to discussion ... or common sense.)
 
Soon after that, Compaq bought DEC, which shocked everyone and was a sad day for many.

We saw the writing on the wall and were moving to a lot of Sun equipment. I sold and retired not long before they were bought out by Oracle. We also used a bunch of HP gear, their blade servers were cost effective though I've long since forgotten the name. I was no longer hands on with that stuff by then anyhow.
 
We saw the writing on the wall and were moving to a lot of Sun equipment. I sold and retired not long before they were bought out by Oracle. We also used a bunch of HP gear, their blade servers were cost effective though I've long since forgotten the name. I was no longer hands on with that stuff by then anyhow.
Like your company, ours switched partners from DEC to Sun. SunOS was evolving to Solaris around that same time.
 
SunOS was evolving to Solaris around that same time.

Yup, same time period. Then, they were bought out by One Raging A-hole Called Larry Ellison.

I have reasons, many reasons - many, many, many thousands of reasons to despise Oracle. I've touched on the subject before, but that'd have been before your time here.

I still use MySQL and I still use VirtualBox. I might even have an Oracle Linux VM. But, I do so kinda grudgingly.
 
I find that strange to hear because 90% of the sources you find on the internet say that MacOS is FreeBSD based including the FreeBSD wiki.
Even on the apple forums.
Too bad that Apple doesn't have it officially documented somewhere since that would get rid of all the confusion.
OK there seems to be some mix up so, I'm gonna go through a brief history. In order to help clarify things and maybe add why I prefer Linux over MacOS. But BSD is Unix. See what happened is way back during the beginning of Unix System V which is what the majority of the world has used for forever. AT&T would push Unix into the universities along with the source code under the premise that grad students could learn more about OS developement. In reality AT&T benefitted a lot from their code. Eventually they even started making their own unlicensed equivelants of Unix tools (this by the way is where people like Stallman would come out of) and right lesser restrictive licenses. AT&T heard this and of course instantly took them to court and said whatever was developed under Unix even for free, was AT&Ts property... The students and faculty not only disagreed they fired back stating AT&T had no rights.

Essentially BSD(Net/2) is UNİX (Net/1) if you removed all the AT&T intellectual property. USL who has changed hands from AT&T, Novell (of Netware fame), Caldera. Under Novell it tried to claim that BSD was infringing on its intellectual property, a trial was had and it loss. Not that long afterwards Caldera tried to use it to do the same thing again to GNU/Linux... And again the suit was thwarted. Because of that though the Linux kernel was completely rewritten to not only not be Unix... But to loose any resemblence to Unix coding conventions. So while it may share some similar user functionality, under the hood it's not even close. Linix BTW is based off Linus Torvalds love of the Minix operating system which is a POSIX. That is an operating system that's seemingly like a Unix (aka Unix-Like) as it runs the same or similar commands but isn't Unix under the hood. The other side of this is the GNU toolsset which accompanies Linux and comes from the HURD project. Hurd is where you get in to Stallman and others who weren't completely happy with BSD and considered the idea selling out. They wanted to rewrite everything and break away.

So BSD is very much Unix on some level. In fact the lawsuit in 92 has to do with the fact that Berkeley Software Design inç (the seller of the commercial version of BSD known as BSDi) was selling copies of BSD/386 then through 1-800-It's-Unix line. Speaking of adding insult to injury, not only did they have the right to publish this they were gonna tell the world it's genuine Unix. They had to know they were lighting a match with that.

As for GNU/Linux which is a convergence of Linus Torvalds love of Minix (a POSIX OS) with the toolchain / toolsset / utilities for GNU/Hurd (at best a POSIX). POSIX by the way is literally the conjunction of Poser and Unix. So literally it's it's own operating system but that poses as a Unix.. Similar or same CLI. This is why on Unix you have the Bourne shell and on clones you have BASH (Bourne Again Shell, meaning it's Bourne reincarnated on GNU/Systems)...

And a last cavaet. Everything that went into MacOS, and Next Step has paid fees to USL last I heard. That means they licensed at least part of the commercial USL code and they have BSD TCP stacks like 99% of the world. So there's that.

POSIX while feeling the same are never the same under the hood. They're completely different, for example single user instead mulri-user.. POSIX systems are also not licensed because they are not considered UNIX and thus not intellectual property of USL.


As for the last of us being MacOS. Mac at its core uses a lot BSD code, which in turn is heavily based on the System V architecture which dates back to before the 80s. Linux uses a far more modern kernel. I prefer the more modern kernel architecture, but to each their own . The Arch of BSD has been revised but Linux has been completely rewritten twice. So which is better, is any better, and I think that's up to the user. There's features sometimes in Linux that annoy users because they're so modern. And that's fine. Everyone has their level and preferences.

But as for the answer

Linux is a POSIX at best
BSD is at least partly based in generic (non-Ip) Unix code
And MacOS is most probably a UNIX if not a Unixish (meaning not a true Unix but way more than a POSIX)
 
If you want simple, easy and very effective.. Install UTM, Select a linux image from the gallery of ARM Linux images, and fire it up. It works very well and is super easy.
 
My MacBook M1 is new one and working perfectly, only I want to learn coding in Linux, that s why I want this to try
I dont know what you mean by learning to program on linux specifically. I develop on both OS using the same programs/tools and sharing the same configs (zsh configs, plugins, bash scripts, rust, react, etc) You can use brew to install programs on macosx. If you want to learn how linux work then the suggestion of using a virual machine is the easiest option on apple M/M2 computers.
 

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