No. I appreciate the effort and the skill this would take, but since the bulk of the work would be reverse-engineering the custom GPU to get a driver working, I’m not super-interested in a solution that in an ideal world (assuming this takes months and not years), still won’t be as performant as a native driver (and performance is the whole reason to do this, so getting substandard performance confuses me — maybe focus on more open ARM-based machines and chipsets).

There is also the ongoing work. Apple currently releases a new iOS AX chipset every year. It’s reasonable to expect something similar for the M series. That means additional work to reverse-engineer. I’m not trying to be negative, but the amount of money required for that kind of ongoing work really doesn’t seem ideal for crowdfunding. Someone downthread made a point that most of the good Linux hardware support in recent years has come from Intel. That’s a great point. For the work this would need to be really viable and not just a fun toy, this needs to be backed by a corporation or by Apple itself.

If this were explicitly stated to be a toy/proof of concept goal, I might chuck $50 as a one time thing at it. Because why not. But for an ongoing thing with real support, I’m sorry, I don’t think this is feasible to undertake. I would love to be wrong about this, but I’ll add that expectations are a lot higher when you start out charging.

And here’s the real thing: As happy as I am that people want to explore this and as open as I will be to experimenting with this stuff when people inevitably reverse-engineer the M1 enough to get X11 running (because that will happen without any crowdfunding campaign — we’ve had people successfully get Android and other versions of Linux running/booting on older iOS devices), the real future of Linux on M1 and macOS will continue to be through virtualization. QEMU and other hypervisors (including the native HyperKit) are how most Mac users interact with Linux anyway — and QEMU is quite performant.

I get the appeal of doing something because you can. I get the appeal of wanting to use really nice hardware for other purposes. I don’t necessarily understand the appeal of running a Linux distro on bare-metal in a hacky way when running it virtualized is likely going to offer better performance than a reverse-engineer job funded by the potentially small Venn diagram of people who both care enough about Linux on the desktop to fund this sort of project AND who don’t have a problem buying hardware from a company that really gives zero fucks about FOSS ideals and is literally the antithesis of open hardware. (For the record, I’m not in that union because I personally don’t care about Linux on the desktop on modern Apple hardware (I do actively support people building PPC Linux distros for obsolete hardware).) Especially when macOS IS Unix and will be able to run most of the same userland packages as Linux once they are ported to ARM, albeit with a much prettier windowing system and much better commercial software support.

If you’re someone who really loves KDE or GNOME or Xfce or whatever DE, well, you do you bro — happy for you. But you’re likely going to be way happier on a machine that doesn’t cost $1500 and isn’t designed in ways that actively discourage you from replacing that DE or make booting to another kernel more difficult.