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Linux Mint arm64

Jeroen Diederen

Jeroen Diederen

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 31, 2019
561
508
Thailand
Hello,

My name is Jeroen and I am the developer of MintPPC, a port of Linux Mint to the powerpc architecture.

I have now ported Linux Mint to arm64. I have several versions running, i.e. one is LMDE6, one is xia in an Ubuntu base. They all have their pros and cons.

I don’t own a silicon Mac. I am looking for some people to test a very rough version based on xia in a Debian trixie environment in a virtual qcow2 disk. I only need to know if it is possible to boot such an image in utm or any of the commercial programs out there for virtualization.

This is a pointer of how to import qcow2 in utm:

utm - hitchhiker's guide

man.ilayk.com man.ilayk.com

Please contact me if you want to test this.

Regards,
Jeroen
 
not interested in the virtual way only the Asahi Linux way but thanks anyway...
 
Some update to the project: the disk image is working in Parallels Desktop. I am still porting the remaining programs which were not done yet.
 
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Screenshot from 2025-07-11 15-36-38.png


This system was built on top of Debian Trixie, without altering base-files. Therefore you see Debian as os-release. In the official release, it will be LMDE 7 with Linux Mint base-files. The latter has not yet been made as LMDE 7 as well as Debian Trixie have not yet been officially released.
The current release is based on Trixie, which will be supported for many years to come. Even if you were to install this release, you will be able to get all the new packages which will become available once the next release will be made, as the same repository is used. The packages will be installed automatically.
I am working on a way to get users to purchase this disk image on my website. Keep tuned.
 
Last edited:
I give you guys the first review of someone who is testing the disk image I created in Parallels on an M3 Mac:

“I've played a bit with Mint this morning. It's very fast on my laptop (M3 Max). I gave the VM 4 processors and 8 gig of RAM. A pretty "minimal" configuration, but the VM is still really fast.
I personally wouldn't see the advantage of running Linux bare metal. Parallels VMs run very fast under Mac OS without a lot of CPU overhead. It's much better than the Intel processor days when VMs really slowed the machine down.
I can run Firefox no problem complete with video on web pages.
I'm more used to the KDE environment so I installed KDE. To my surprise, the install went very well and I'm able to run that environment no problem.
I also have a Kubuntu VM and a VM running my usually favorite distribution: Gentoo. The Ubuntu distribution is a little glitchy and has some issues. I'm not impressed. The Mint environment seems more stable to me.
If people want to run the Mint environment, I think they'll be very happy with the performance under Parallels.“

I want to add that running Linux bare metal on silicon Macs may brick the computer. Some people reported this. I therefore think it would be great to run Linux Mint at native speed in a VM on these machines using my disk image.
 
These are live iso files, for amd64.


These do not work on an Apple silicon Mac, but filenames show all debian supported desktop environments.

Let's assume you want Debian Cinnamon. You download an arm64 debian .iso from here:



and select cinnamon during installation in a virtual machine.

Do not try to install Linux directly on an Apple silicon Mac, because it will fail.

Only Asahi Linux aims to install on an arm64 Mac, but I would not suggest it.
 
Last edited:
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johnprogrammer said:
These are live iso files, for amd64.


These do not work on an Apple silicon Mac, but filenames show all debian supported desktop environments.

Let's assume you want Debian Cinnamon. You download an arm64 debian .iso from here:



and select cinnamon during installation in a virtual machine.

Do not try to install Linux directly on an Apple silicon Mac, because it will fail.

Only Asahi Linux aims to install on an arm64 Mac, but I would not suggest it.
Click to expand...
What are you trying to say?
 
Jeroen Diederen said:
Hello,

My name is Jeroen and I am the developer of MintPPC, a port of Linux Mint to the powerpc architecture.

I have now ported Linux Mint to arm64. I have several versions running, i.e. one is LMDE6, one is xia in an Ubuntu base. They all have their pros and cons.

I don’t own a silicon Mac. I am looking for some people to test a very rough version based on xia in a Debian trixie environment in a virtual qcow2 disk. I only need to know if it is possible to boot such an image in utm or any of the commercial programs out there for virtualization.

This is a pointer of how to import qcow2 in utm:

utm - hitchhiker's guide

man.ilayk.com man.ilayk.com

Please contact me if you want to test this.
Click to expand...
I can test it.

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The problem is not the Linux porting. There are already several distro’s ported to Aaarch64. I have recently created a full blown Arch from a minimal console stub iso. The real problem is getting full blown graphics acceleration. UTM and parallels provide upto Mesa 2.1. There is also version of QEMU using SDL with OpenGL but still only Mesa 2.1. Asahi as good as it was in the beginning now the development for M3 and M4 is stalled and will probably be in that state forever. If someone develops Vulcan drivers one can get Mesa upto 4x. Even pure Windows XP emulation with 3dfx graphics drivers is blazing fast for gaming.
 
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