Anecdotally, I just bought my first Mac just because of the M1. It's an absolute game-changer and at least 5 years ahead of the competition. If macOS becomes too burdensome or heavy-handed, I anticipate I'll move to some Linux distribution assuming there's support (and would help fund its development). I'm guessing there are at least a few people like me who will constitute a market for developers to cater to.

Hi from Linux on an Intel Mac.

(I've got fixing up amdgpu to work on this 2015 iMac on my TODO list too... might even do that as a bonus warm-up if this takes off, while I get my hands on an M1 mac)

I admire the work but you have to admit that even after all this time it's easier to install Ubuntu, say, on a random PC :-)

To be honest, the only problems on this iMac are audio (fair to say Apple's fault), the screen only running at 4K max (Apple custom stuff involved for 5K, but hey, not complaining about 4K, go find me an AiO PC with a 5K screem), the amdgpu issue (not really an Apple problem, it's just a rarer chip and probably a dumb bugfix and the older radeon driver works fine), and the Ethernet and SD card reader being problematic (that's a Broadcom chip and their silicon is universally buggy; not Apple's fault, these chips have issues on PCs too)

So really just audio is the one thing that jumps out as broken and specific to this being a Mac. I personally happen not to care as I use an external audio interface anyway :-)

Actual installation is trivial, it's just standard UEFI pretty much. As long as the right GPU driver loads you're fine. Thunderbolt and all that works out of the box.

The Broadcom part is huge IMO. I try to avoid Broadcom as possible on every (programmable) thing I own, but that is not possible with Apple devices.

I mean, I'm sure we can make brcm* not suck on Linux (or it already works well now), but I don't want to support such a hostile vendor.

I ran linux on a MBP as my primary machine from 2009 - 2015 (on 3 different hardware revs). The late 2015 MBPs moved a bunch of peripherals off of the USB bus making them harder to use with linux at the time. In the years since, support has been added for all those peripherals.

I still use my late 2013 MBP running nixos. That machine was a great piece of hardware at the time and still works fantastically well even today. (Its really sad how terrible most most non-Apple speakers are in laptops).

I would buy an M1 Macbook Air if it could run linux and had good power management. (I'll say the same about an M1 MBP in the generation where they give up on the touchbar and go back to hardware buttons.)