Asahi Linux announced that they are collaborating with Fedora to be the flagship distro for Asahi.
I’m not sure if this means that it won’t be Arch anymore, but being the official distro for M1 support would’ve been big for NixOS. It probably would’ve also helped Asahi Linux. And it all started by someone from Fedora joining their IRC
Anyway, it’s not the end of the world. I’m sure some M1 afficionados will decide NixOS has to work on their hardware as well and try to target it. I do wonder if that would break a few derivations that only use aarch64-darwin to differentiate OSX from Linux. Is the darwin stdenv ready for this possible future?
You get me confused with aarch64-darwin and “darwin stdenv”. It would surely be a Linux running on an aarch64, i.e. aarch64-linux for our platform naming.
I hope so The darwin stdenv is transparently replaced and I’m not sure with which criteria. But it does make sense that the platform would be aarch64-linux when running linux on m1 (m2 once it’s supported).
I’m certainly one of them. As pointed out by others, this will be aarch64-linux, not related to darwin at all. As far as we know right now, M1 will have drivers that need to be packaged in nixpkgs and hardware quirks that will require some additional work and a new entry in nixos-hardware/apple, but we can’t say right now what those will be exactly, only once we try it out.
I don’t have multiple M1 machines, so I’ll wait until Fedora is stable on it before trying out anything.
It also would’ve been a massive amount of work that I’m doubtful we’d have the manpower for. Nix is already a small community and even smaller team of collaborators that struggle with keeping up maintenance, feature development and documentation.
Fedora is a bigger distro with a bigger community backed a major player in OSS. I’m not saying Nix is struggling financially, but a project like this is not free, and with the amount of basic things that are still broken in the Nix ecosystem, I believe we could not afford the price.
Don’t you think the move to Fedora as the base is specifically to make it more user-friendly? The blog post you linked seems to indicate that to me.
As far as I can tell from the wiki entry and tpwrules hardware flake NixOS seems to support Apple Silicon just fine (at least as well as to be expected at this stage). However I 100% understand why they chose to support Fedora. What they are aiming at is some platform that is more mainstream than ALARM, not even more obscure.