How will Apple's switch to ARM (Apple Silicon) affect compatibility with Linux / Unix tools and APIs? At the moment, a huge argument for using Macs in academic and research settings (and possibly quite a few other use cases) is the compatibility with the Linux/Unix ecosystem, through Homebrew, Macports and similar projects, and of course the classical terminal (nowadays using zsh) that allows control over system internals. Users in many areas would not be able to work with a &quot;plain&quot; macOS without access to specialized applications which are generally only available on Linux.
Is there already information available as to what Apple's move to the ARM CPU architecture (&quot;Apple Silicon&quot;) is going to mean for this compatibility? Will it still be possible to compile programs from source on macOS? How about graphical Linux tools, will there still be a possibility to use X / Wayland / whatever on the Mac?
I do understand that it is possible for Apple to arbitrarily restrict the OS in order to make it as hard as possible for users to do that. My question is aimed more at the practical / technical side of things: Is it enough to say &quot;compiling for ARM is easy enough, no worries&quot; or are there hidden issues?
The betas of Big Sur (on Intel, at least) have the all the same Unix underpinnings and other components as before. (Even python 2.7, which was widely expected to be removed!)
You would hear a lot of noise it if Apple ditched its 'certified Unix™' status.
Xcode isn't going anywhere either, so you can compile any Unix code you've got source for.
As for X11, that hasn't been updated for years, so will have to run in emulation until someone recompiles it (hopefully fixing the Retina display issues while they're at it).
There may be teething problems, particularly in the early days. But I'd say that recompiled code is likely to have fewer problems than Rosetta emulated stuff.