One of our website visitors asked if ThinLinc supports Mac M1.
Hello @muitotri
We have no native client built for the Macbook M1 (ARM) architecture, but
MacOS ships with Rosetta2 which enables x86-64 emulation on these Macbook’s.
We have users successfully running the Thinlinc Client on these
machines, so it shouldn’t be a problem to download and use the regular MacOS client.
Best regards,
Martin
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Can you please comment when native support for Apple Silicon (M1) is to be expected? It would really be a good move to have a native Apple Silicon version of the ThinLinc client available for macOS and it should be quite straight forward to compile a version with both (x86_64) and ARM in the same binary.
Hello @j.maus
Thank you for your feedback!
Could you elaborate a bit on how having a native client for M1 would be beneficial / give more advantages compared to running the client w/ of Rosetta? Do you notice any slowness/glitches/bugs with using the x86 client on M1?
We do have Bug 7520 - ThinLinc client for macOS ARM in our Bugzilla, and it seems to be some upstream problems with getting GCC to do cross compile for M1. Our buildsystem is on x86 and we do cross compilations for the different platforms which we support. So we would either have to wait for GCC to support this, or have a dedicated build system just for the M1.
We do of course want to have a native client for M1 in the future, but right now there has not been a high demand enough to prioritize this (yet).
Best regards,
Martin
It’s been 8 months since the previous discussion on this thread… any progress yet on a native ThinLinc client for Apple Silicon? My company issued me a new laptop and the ThinLinc client is the last piece of software that is keeping me from being able to use it in the field. Yes, I know about Rosetta but I really don’t want to pollute the new system with an emulation layer just for one app.
Apple Silicon (AS) was announced two years ago and has been shipping for 18 months. There is plenty of cross-platform software that has supported AS for quite a while. GCC 12.1 supports it and I’ve seen rumors that AS support has been back-ported as far back as GCC 11.3.
I’m afraid M1 support will not happen until our tooling supports it. Right now I can only find experimental support for gcc, so it is likely still some time away. Once that support is stable, we will also need to look at upgrading our internal systems, which can take some time as these things are complex.
So right now there isn’t any clear schedule on when this might happen. Rosetta will likely remain a requirement for the foreseeable future.
Do you see an issue with your machine when having Rosetta installed?