Ubuntu on M1 Macbook Pro

[cliowa]

I'm in the market for a new laptop and thus considering one of the new M1 Macbook Pros 2021. Over the last decade or so I've been using Linux as my main machine, but haven't been too happy with battery life and screens on laptops recently. My workload is mostly basic, with occasional more intensive computational/development work.

My question for those with experience: is it feasible to use one of the new macbooks with main desktop a virtualized Ubuntu (say via parallels)? I don't want to make a full transition to MacOS, and would hope that eventually these new macs would be able to run linux well, but in the meantime it would be great to have a laptop with good screen and battery life...

Thanks for your help!

 

[Xiao_Xi]

Depending on your workload, you may find Canonical's Multipass useful.

Multipass orchestrates virtual Ubuntu instances

Multipass is a CLI to launch and manage VMs on Windows, Mac and Linux that simulates a cloud environment with support for cloud-init. Get Ubuntu on-demand with clean integration to your IDE and version control on your native platform.

multipass.run

How to install Multipass | Multipass documentation

Multipass is a CLI to launch and manage VMs on Windows, Mac and Linux that simulates a cloud environment with support for cloud-init. Get Ubuntu on-demand with clean integration to your IDE and version control on your native platform.

multipass.run

 

[haralds]

Parallels works great with Ubuntu and is quite fast. Pretty sure it's accelerated for the desktop. Shared folder and virtualized printers all work. Sound is also supported.

 

[zarathu]

I USE UTM to run windows XP Professional on my M1Pro. There are builds for lots of linux variations. UTM is free open source.

 

[mi7chy]

Tried it. Running Linux ARM in a VM isn't as good as an experience as bare metal x64 plus things that require hardware passthrough may not even work. Linux x64 in UTM takes two hours to install a Linux distro and it still didn't complete that takes like 5 minutes on bare metal x64.

Better off just transitioning to using MacOS if you're getting M1 Macbook.

Alternatively, look into laptop with AMD 5600U, 5800U or upcoming 6000U series APU that offers performance and long battery life equivalent to Macbook M1.

 

[cliowa]

Parallels works great with Ubuntu and is quite fast. Pretty sure it's accelerated for the desktop. Shared folder and virtualized printers all work. Sound is also supported.

Cool, thanks. Have you tried things like external monitors, hard drives etc?

 

[cliowa]

Better off just transitioning to using MacOS if you're getting M1 Macbook.

Alternatively, look into laptop with AMD 5600U, 5800U or upcoming 6000U series APU that offers performance and long battery life equivalent to Macbook M1.

Hmm, okay, good to know! I'm not sure what the right laptop to wait for is, but with a good display maybe it'll be a Thinkpad Z13 or so? Then Zenbooks with AMD seem to be pretty hard to get a hold of these days...

 

[zarathu]

The only problem with Parallels is that the $79 version is not upgradable, and the upgradeable versions cost a $99 a year fee. Just to run windows with some old legacy programs, that was not worth it to me.

Parallels has a monopoly and they are taking advantage of it(or in better words, US).

 

[Internaut]

For me, Parallels is the only game in town. I think, at some point, the open source alpha nerds will amaze us with Emu and (possibly) the full open stack, but VirtualBox is probably not to be.

 

[ahurst]

Cool, thanks. Have you tried things like external monitors, hard drives etc?

Parallels has multi-monitor full screen support, as well as full support for USB pass through for drives and peripherals. It’s a very polished product (as it should be for that sort of cost)! It recently got a big bump in GPU acceleration for Linux guests (VirGL support) which should make use even more comfortable.

Also, there’s still a lot of work to do, but Hector Martin and the Asahi Linux team have been hard at work writing drivers for the M1 hardware and getting them reviewed and merged into the mainLine Linux kernel: based on their rate of progress, I’m guessing we’ll see proper audio, display management, and at least partial GPU acceleration before the end of the summer.

All that said, you might find you like macOS more than you’d think: at it’s core, it’s more-or-less a fancy BSD distro with a slick UI and the ability to run a wide range of commercial software You certainly can’t mess around with the inner workings to the same degree though.

 

[Gnattu]

Tried it. Running Linux ARM in a VM isn't as good as an experience as bare metal x64 plus things that require hardware passthrough may not even work. Linux x64 in UTM takes two hours to install a Linux distro and it still didn't complete that takes like 5 minutes on bare metal x64.

Better off just transitioning to using MacOS if you're getting M1 Macbook.

Alternatively, look into laptop with AMD 5600U, 5800U or upcoming 6000U series APU that offers performance and long battery life equivalent to Macbook M1.

View attachment 1958051

How did you install it anyway? This is quite different from my experience. I don't use Ubuntu as main distro (for reasons), but it definitely did not take 2 hours to install, at least not in VMware fusion's technical preview. Arch Linux and Fedora's installations went through even faster as you have a rootfs in the first place. From my own experience, a Linux VM is extremely useful if: 1. You don't require graphics intensive tasks. 2. You don't require more than 1Gbps networking. For example, some backend developing like I'm doing for my job.

 

[Gnattu]

Alternatively, look into laptop with AMD 5600U, 5800U or upcoming 6000U series APU that offers performance and long battery life equivalent to Macbook M1.

By the way this is not true under Linux. Linux requires lots more power management work to make the battery life on par with Windows. It is improving for sure, but if you are using some distro like Ubuntu, you still have to wait for a long time to use it after those patches been mainlined, or you have to install your own kernel.

 

[Gnattu]

Can you tell us more on what you want to use under Linux? Maybe you don't need a VM at all to do what you want. macOS is POSIX compliant and runs a wide range of software that Linux runs.

 

[Xiao_Xi]

Parallels is the only game in town

What are the pros and cons of Parallels vs VirtualBox vs VMware Fusion?

Running Linux ARM in a VM isn't as good as an experience as bare metal x64 plus things that require hardware passthrough may not even work. Linux x64 in UTM takes two hours to install a Linux distro and it still didn't complete that takes like 5 minutes on bare metal x64.

What can you do in Linux x64 but not in Linux ARM?

 

[Mikael H]

I'm in the market for a new laptop and thus considering one of the new M1 Macbook Pros 2021. Over the last decade or so I've been using Linux as my main machine, but haven't been too happy with battery life and screens on laptops recently. My workload is mostly basic, with occasional more intensive computational/development work.

My question for those with experience: is it feasible to use one of the new macbooks with main desktop a virtualized Ubuntu (say via parallels)? I don't want to make a full transition to MacOS, and would hope that eventually these new macs would be able to run linux well, but in the meantime it would be great to have a laptop with good screen and battery life...

Thanks for your help!

I'd say this is not a good use case for virtualization. Your best bet this computing generation is still getting a good Linux certified business laptop from the likes of Lenovo, HP or Dell; or a purpose built Linux machine from someone like System76.

Apple's work on Arm will surely have repercussions in the industry, leading to more interest in power efficient premium laptops from other makers, which in turn will be good for running Linux natively. Unfortunately I don't have high hopes that the ongoing projects for getting Linux to run natively on ASi Macs will yield spectacularly good results: Apple has no interest in supporting the efforts, even though they don't seem to be actively fighting them.

 

[michalm]

I'd still be interested what it is that one needs to run on Linux he may not be able to do on macOS. I mean most of us here do have a very good relationship with linux and that is one of the reasons why we use macOS.

 

[Mikael H]

I'd still be interested what it is that one needs to run on Linux he may not be able to do on macOS. I mean most of us here do have a very good relationship with linux and that is one of the reasons why we use macOS.

MacOS is a Unix and has a lot of the tools you'd expect, but if you're used to a given Linux server distribution it's a lot easier to keep an identical toolchain on your workstation without resorting to VMs if you run a similar desktop flavor as your primary OS.

 

[leman]

I would doubt that running virtualized OS as your main desktop will be an optimal experience. And I wouldn’t hold my breath for full-features native Linux on Apple Silicon. It you are absolutely set on running Linux, staying with one of the x86 offerings might be a better bet. They won’t give you the performance and battery life of M1 of course, but the experience will be more natural.

 

[Xiao_Xi]

My workload is mostly basic, with occasional more intensive computational/development work.

If you explain what software you use, we can tell you whether that software work in macOS or suggest alternatives.

I'd still be interested what it is that one needs to run on Linux he may not be able to do on macOS.

Someone in another thread has explained that Docker in macOS is much slower than Docker in an Ubuntu VM.

 

[Internaut]

What are the pros and cons of Parallels vs VirtualBox vs VMware Fusion?


What can you do in Linux x64 but not in Linux ARM?

To answer the first question, I’ve not used VMWware Fusion, but Parallels and VirtualBox are both very similar. In the ARM environment, I suspect (quite strongly) that Apple’s virtualisation support puts a Parallels hosted virtual machine a bit closer to the metal.

For the second, this may have changed since I last tried, but here goes. There was no Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, Teams wasn’t available and for software development I found availability of IDEs a bit spotty. So Visual Studio Code but no (at the time) Eclipse or IntelliJ. So ARM Linux isn’t as well supported as ARM macOS and, of course, it has no Rosetta.

 

[cliowa]

Parallels has multi-monitor full screen support, as well as full support for USB pass through for drives and peripherals. It’s a very polished product (as it should be for that sort of cost)! It recently got a big bump in GPU acceleration for Linux guests (VirGL support) which should make use even more comfortable.

Ah, that's good to hear, thanks!

 

[cliowa]

Can you tell us more on what you want to use under Linux? Maybe you don't need a VM at all to do what you want. macOS is POSIX compliant and runs a wide range of software that Linux runs.

I doubt I'd have trouble running what I need on MacOS - apart from occasional free time (photo/video) stuff, I would mostly use the computer for scientific work, i.e. some computations/data processing in matlab/mathematica/maple and writing things with LaTeX. My preference for a Linux is mostly due to having gotten used to being able to tweak and change everything I want to...

 

[Steve Bishop]

Can you tell us more on what you want to use under Linux? Maybe you don't need a VM at all to do what you want. macOS is POSIX compliant and runs a wide range of software that Linux runs.

For me, generating map tiles from the command line with OSM data. I have an old Mac that I keep around for that purpose because it's no longer possible with the more recent versions. But I'm looking into spinning up a Linux VM on my M1 so that I can have just one laptop.

All the tutorials and methods online are years out of date and suffer from outdated dependency hell. It's just not possible on an M1 machine. A lot of that was because of the deprecation of Python 2.7, but when you're just trying to do work, it doesn't matter who is at fault. You just want to do work.

 

[leman]

For me, generating map tiles from the command line with OSM data. I have an old Mac that I keep around for that purpose because it's no longer possible with the more recent versions. But I'm looking into spinning up a Linux VM on my M1 so that I can have just one laptop.

All the tutorials and methods online are years out of date and suffer from outdated dependency hell. It's just not possible on an M1 machine. A lot of that was because of the deprecation of Python 2.7, but when you're just trying to do work, it doesn't matter who is at fault. You just want to do work.

I am quite sure that there are modern alternatives to the frameworks you might be using that work. Also, Python 2.7 has been globally depreciated on all platforms - but you can still download and use it if you have legacy software that needs it.

Of course, it’s as you say, sometimes one just needs to do work. But software ecosystem is evolving and I think it’s a good idea to keep your workflows updated - makes you more flexible and is less overall effort IMO.

 

[ahurst]

For me, generating map tiles from the command line with OSM data. I have an old Mac that I keep around for that purpose because it's no longer possible with the more recent versions. But I'm looking into spinning up a Linux VM on my M1 so that I can have just one laptop.

All the tutorials and methods online are years out of date and suffer from outdated dependency hell. It's just not possible on an M1 machine. A lot of that was because of the deprecation of Python 2.7, but when you're just trying to do work, it doesn't matter who is at fault. You just want to do work.

I have Python 2.7.18 running smoothly and natively on my M1 MBP with pyenv. I also have to deal with legacy scientific code from time to time, so I have it set so "python2" and "pip2" point to pyenv's 2.7 and python/python3 and pip/pip3 point to pyenv's 3.8. Using pyenv also frees me from the yearly ritual of brew unexpectedly nuking my whole site-packages with every major version update, which is a nice bonus

Once pyenv's up and running, it's just:

pyenv install 2.7.18
pyenv install 3.9.10  # or whatever version you want
pyenv reshim
pyenv global 3.9.10 2.7.18  # sets 3.9 as primary, 2.7 as secondary