LyX on Apple Silicon (in a VM)

[Christopher Menzel]

LyX folk,

I haven’t seen any reports about running LyX on Apple Silicon so I thought I’d post a datapoint. I compiled LyX (with QT 5) from the latest source under Kubuntu 20.04 for ARM in a Parallels VM running on a 14” MacBook Pro with a 10-core M1 Pro chip. The compile ran flawlessly (once I got the package dependencies and configure flags right). Unsurprisingly, even though running in a VM, the Linux version is much faster than the current MacOS version which, because it is an Intel app, requires Rosetta 2 to run on the M1. Compiling a technical 135 page document with a large associated BiBTeX file as a PDF with the Mac version takes about 50 seconds; the Linux version takes 15 (most of that being biber processing the bibliography info). And updating a change with the Mac version takes about 10 seconds, whereas it takes about 4 seconds with the Linux version.

Chris Menzel