[QGIS-Developer] QGIS for Apple: Intel vs. arm

[Stefan Steiger]

Hi,

Well, Linux systems for ARM have existed for ages NOW.
Simply put, the energy consumption of ARM devices is far lower than intel’s crap.
That’s why Apple is doing it, they have announced that intention years ago.
Microsoft has started shipping tables for ARM, too, btw.
Though, MS is not quite there, yet, and they probably never will be, not within the next few years at least.

You can do cross-compile builds with CLANG/LLVM on a 250$ Chromebook using OSXcross.
https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross
Chromebooks are the easiest commercially obtainable ARM-computers nowadays.
Switch to developer mode, install Crouton with ARM-Ubuntu in a chroot, and there you go.
Or install Chrubuntu if you don’t want to use the kernel of the underlying ChromeOS.
Using Chrubuntu, you might have trouble with drivers, though.

That worked for me; mono (.NET) and Java work on ARM, too.

PS:
Why not simply ship a Linux-Docker-Image for ARM processors ?
It is my understanding Linux Docker images work on OSX.
Certainly would work for server components.
GUI might be a different chapter, but since OSX can do X11 ...
Not sure how Wayland would play into that, though.

The most intelligent way would be dropping the proprietary Desktop-GUIs anyway.
Switching to a web-based editor.
Then you can drop everything but Linux, and just ship docker containers.
Users connect via browser.
Saves a lot of work.
Also a lot more secure.

All you need to ship per platform then is an icon and a startup link/shell-script.



Von: QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> Im Auftrag von Andreas Neumann
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 24. Juni 2020 11:11
An: QGIS Developers List <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
Betreff: [QGIS-Developer] QGIS for Apple: Intel vs. arm


Hi all, esp. Peter,

So I wonder what the new announcement of Apple switching everything from Intel to arm architecture will mean for our project? According to Apple they will switch all of their devices to arm over the next 2 years.

Will it be a lot of work to adapt the build system to the new processor architecture? It will probably mean that we will need an additional Mac build server for arm architecture in our infrastructure and will have to provide packages for both systems for many years to come ...

Not so nice for us as a project - can we forward these costs to Apple for that move?

Greetings,
Andreas
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/attachments/20200624/462eaed7/attachment.html>