I know a pipedream, but if apple provided the docs and drivers for Linux on m1, it would really cement the current defacto standard of a MacBook as the development laptop of choice

Amazing progress - but I wonder if getting accelerated gui is 10x the current effort

No skin in the game, but can't wait to see how this progresses

Apple is not known to provide any documentation, and it's incredibly hard to get Linux running since the introduction of T1 chips.

The T1 had zero impact whatsoever on getting Linux running. The T2 did, but only because Apple's NVMe implementation wasn't quite spec compliant. The trouble we've had with Apple hardware other than that is that Apple have made whatever design choices suit them best rather than following any external standards.

If you define running as "Linux boots", than this is correct, but as the the T1 chip provides access to the Touch Bar which is necessary to have function keys, I'd argue that there was indeed impact of the T1 chip for Linux essential compatibility. Also access to the webcam is provided by the T1 chip and required a quirk to work, as well as Touch Id, which isn't even supported at all yet.

What the parent comment was probably referring to is not the impact of the T1 chip per se, but of all changes Apple introduced with the MacBook Pros featuring the T1 chip, like a different way of interacting with the input devices, a different setup for audio and Bluetooth, a new chipset for Wifi and so on. The sheer number of changes caused these devices having a pretty bad compatibility with Linux when they came out and even today there are still a lot of unsolved issues around audio, Bluetooth, Wifi and other components [1]. And of course some features like the extended capabilities of the Touch Bar or the Touch Id sensor are still completely unsupported.

Btw: T1 MacBook Pros also required a quirk for NVMe, because Apples implementation back then also wasn't standard-compliant [2], [3].

[1]: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux

[2]: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/124298bd03acebd9c9d...

[3]: https://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-nvme/2017-Februa...