I actually boot macOS and Manjaro KDE on my MacBook Pro, granted it is an Intel model but I have had no issue dual booting the two operating systems.
This topic is about ARM cpu version macs.
ARM images are per device.
Why is that exactly? The Intel images work on any Intel machine. Is there something unique about the ARM architecture that makes such a generic approach impossible?
Yessir I get that but I was merely responding to your blanket statement were you do not differentiate what Apple Branded hardware you are talking about. You basically stated that running Linux on Apple Branded hardware is not possible, nor should it be tried.
“There is no point in trying to get Manjaro running on Apple branded hardware - If you want to use Apple branded hardware - use macOS - it is a much better solution as they are built for each other and quite frankly - I don’t think Apple has no intention of making it possible to run other operating systems on Apple branded hardware”.
x86_64 architecture depends on ACPI ( I think it is) to detect what hardware is present. ACPI has not been implemented for ARM (yet), so on ARM we use a device tree file to define what hardware is present, so Linux knows what to expect. But this also means that what device tree to use, needs to be defined in a boot script somewhere. These boot scripts, often named boot.scr or extlinux.conf, therefore needs to be made on a per device basis. This also trickles down to the board firmware (often u-boot), which makes sure the board is actually looking for a kernel to boot and initializes the hardware. On x86_64 this process is already done by the manufacturer of the motherboard, often referred to as the BIOS or UEFI firmware, but most vendors of ARM boards, do not do this. So we (the operating system) are required to provide this firmware, which is, again, board specific.
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I’m still dreaming of a Boot Camp method to dual boot MacOS and Manjaro on a M1 based Mac.
Like on previous intel based Macs.
It’s great, Linux for home, MacOS for graphics design at school/work on a single device.
I was able to build a custom generic aarch64 UEFI image and get Manjaro running on my Mac
@GeekPower0 would you be willing to share your image (or a small write-up explaining the process?)
I too would like to run Manjaro on my M1 Mac in Parallels. I currently have Windows 11, Fedora 34, Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 22.04 running Aarch64 versions, which is nice, it allows me to fire up these Operating Systems in a Hypervisor for various Linux-only (or Windows-only) tasks when needed. I’m trying to troubleshoot an issue that someone is having with Manjaro and although I can fire it up on Intel without an issue, getting it running in a VM on the M1 would be very convenient. 
Hey, I started experimenting with Manjaro ARM images in UTM on M1 MacBook Pro a couple of weeks ago. Initially there were a bunch of obstacles to overcome. After some initial trial-n-error I was able to get the images booting (at least), but faced issues with the calamares oem installer. As it turned out this was due to the initial display configuration in the VM…
Configuring it properly, and also installing the spice-vdagent enabled me today to run through the initial setup and after reboot have a fully functioning desktop (tested with GNOME and Sway at the moment)…
GNOME:
Sway:
As usual Sway is a bit more manual tweaking as the wlroots usually require hw-accel graphics, which seems to be buggy in Qemu / UTM. So adding some environment variables to enable fallback to sw-raster is required. Performance is decent though…
Note: this thing is still very experimental. One thing that might break it easily is a Linux kernel update in the VM (due to the way you set up UTM to boot from a given Linux kernel and ramdisk). As such I disabled Linux kernel updates in the VMs for now…
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hello appel! Would it be in any way possible go into more detail about how you managed to get manjaro arm working on UTM? I am a mac m1 user, with not a lot of linux experience, and would love to get manjaro working on my m1.
I have tried both virtualisation (Manjaro-ARM-gnome-generic-22.06) as well as emulation (Manjaro-ARM-gnome-generic-22.06) on UTM but neither work.
Thank you!!
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I’m working on a blog post with the details. Will update here as soon as it’s published.
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Here we go… New Tech on the Blog
Please check it out and let me know if something doesn’t work for you. I run through the steps once more today with the KDE profile…
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If you haven’t seen it already - there’s some good news with relation to this thread
The same:
I am testing UTM/QEMU on my M1 MacMini.
I also downloaded Manjaro-ARM-gnome-generic-22.06.img - but that don’t work
But with a also downloaded debian-11.4.0-arm64-DVD-1.iso image the installation with the UTM/QUMU default settings worked without problems.
What makes Debian different?
Manjaro is my prefered Linux distribution.
We don’t have UEFI support yet. That’s likely the difference.
How I could create an non UEFI VM in UTM/QEMU - deactivate UEFI don’t work.
It seems you can download a non-supported UEFI image.
More information in this thread.
You will need startup.nsh (see in thread).
I couldn’t load the desktop, as there is no AMD driver, but the terminal was working.
No. That’s a supported non-UEFI image.
I have been able to install GNOME and KDE versions from the provided generic images as described on my blog post. Even though it’s not as straightforward as using an ISO image it’s still doable and working quite well…
Great, I marked the post with the link as the solution, so it’s easy to find.
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