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Linux on an M1 Mac
- rowanG077 5y agoVery impressive. Basically a year later and (I assume) the first release is imminent. I'd wager most people don't need a GPU with such a powerful CPU. Only thing missing for me to daily drive something like this is Audio and BT.
- marcan_42 5y agoHeadphone jack works on M1 models (though I discovered today it's a bit flaky on boot). The speakers technically work on all the laptops, but we need to implement safeties to make sure you don't accidentally blow your speakers, and also add DSP so they sound good. Fir now, we keep the speakers disabled. BT will take longer though, it's not a huge priority for me so it's behind things like the GPU on the list (unless someone volunteers, of course.
- nyanpasu64 5y agoOn the topic of MacBook speaker DSP, I'm irritated how the MacBook Air speakers seem to add copious amounts of negative crosstalk to stereo to artificially widen the image. Playing a sine wave on the left speaker plays a slightly quieter inverted waveform on the right speaker, creating unnatural imaging that's tiring to listen to, much like "invert surround" SNES music. The worst part is that macOS offers no way to turn it off!
- marcan_42 5y agoChadmed is working on the processing, and he already thinks he can get better results than macOS. The other day he measured the response with a calibration mic so we can compute good correction coefficients.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoI’m curious, why can’t you limit the max speaker volume to something stupidly low in the interim? (Under the logic that a very quiet speaker is better than no speaker.)
- sudosysgen 5y agoYou will absolutely need a GPU even if the CPU was 3x faster. It doesn't have anything to do with speed - the issue is that without hardware accelerated rendering, your battery life will tank, hard.
- rowanG077 5y agoIf you care about battery life I would say the video decode unit is much more important then the GPU. The M1 doesn't really struggle with rendering a basic DE.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoIf you're playing games or rendering 3D models, sure, but how much graphics work does it really take to render a DE? Wasn't it Vista that was the first OS to even support graphics acceleration for rendering the UI? That was a long time ago, but not that long either, and I don't recall it coming alongside massive improvements in battery life. I'm not against graphics acceleration or anything, but I don't find it at all hard to believe that a fast, power-efficient CPU like the M1 could perform adequately with software rendering.
- sudosysgen 5y agoIt takes a fair amount of work to render a modern DE. Especially at high framerates. I'm sure an M1 could perform adequately, but it would probably be around half the efficiency possible otherwise.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoSure, but the question isn't how it could run otherwise, but how well it runs in comparison to other options for running Linux.
- haxiomic 5y agoFrom Hector Martin, who's working on the project: "- This is with software rendering. Seriously, these CPUs are good. Better than some other ARM laptop GPUs. - Notice how it picked the right keyboard layout automatically. This was not an accident nor was it based on the locale; it's based on the hardware. Details matter! :-)" https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/1504629818645975040 https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/15046298186459750...
- rvz 5y ago> "- This is with software rendering. Seriously, these CPUs are good. Better than some other ARM laptop GPUs. Exactly. I can only guess it will be even better if the graphics was accelerated, even faster if it was on the Mac Studio. It is still fine. We'll see. As soon as they have a user friendly macOS installer or live USB-C installer then that will be an easy install path or try it out for many. Overall, great progress!
- marcan_42 5y agoThe installer is done, you just curl|sh from macOS and follow the prompts :-)
- d3nj4l 5y agoThank you for all your work! It's been great watching you stream through some of the problems you solved for asahi :)
- marcalc 5y agoAmazing stuff. Can't wait to try it out. Can it dual boot with my current macos install?
- pthariensflame 5y agoYes, it can; it's intended to!
- 5y ago
- wildrhythms 5y agoLooking forward to trying this in the not so distant future. Great work to the team
- _8j50 5y agoHas anyone here tried this? How usable is it? Can you get a windows vbox guest to work? 4K with VLC?
- MuffinFlavored 5y agoVirtualBox is x86 only and has 0 ARM64 offering.
- _8j50 5y agoCool, I remember a post about someone getting vmware working on M1 , mixed it up with vbox. I don't get the downvotes, not supposed to ask other users' experience? Whatever HN.
- wincy 5y agoI mean, marcan_42 is the creator and he’s on some other threads in this discussion. I’d suggest asking him.
- _8j50 5y agoI wanted a user's experience based input before I spend time+money on this because I like the project a lot. Sounds like I should wait a bit longer.
- ossusermivami 5y agoI encourage you to donate to the patreon page
- constantlm 5y agoThe project might get accelerated with some of your time+money.
- willcipriano 5y agoSo you can finally try out WSL?
- 5y ago
- em3rgent0rdr 5y agoAre there working drivers (preferably open source) for all hardware components yet?
- rowanG077 5y agoNot all but a most. https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
- smoldesu 5y agoOn the contrary, it looks like a lot of essentials are still missing: HDMI out, webcam, speakers, Thunderbolt, USB3, backlights, and of course, the GPU. This is "usable", but a long ways away from being a daily driver. I think you can cross the "mostly there" threshold when the GPU is working...
- gjsman-1000 5y agoBaloney. We had computers for decades before we had GPUs. And considering most computers are just used for browsing the web, writing documents, and writing code, most people rarely touch their GPU (YouTube being Media Engine Decoding and not technically the GPU). Even my job - I write web apps, I don't need a GPU. If it can play audio through a headphone jack, and draw a window nicely without aggravating amounts of tearing (though I might work in a full-screen CLI anyway), I don't care, it's Linux! [Edit: I'm not disputing a GPU is nice to have. I am dismissing the overly negative reply above.]
- ravi-delia 5y agoI wouldn't call the comment you replied to overly negative, at least by the text alone. Look at the full unsupported list; there's a lot of work left. Considering the pace the project has moved so far, I suspect we'll see most of it in the coming months, but for now there are big gaps. I mean, if all you want is browsing and a headphone out, why an M1? Any cheap device could do the same. The magic is in the "unnecessary" other things, like speedy rendering or, you know, speakers. It's coming for sure, probably soon, but not quite yet.
- tcbawo 5y agoDoes anyone know the state of networking I/O using this? What kind of network latency and throughput is achievable? I haven't seen any benchmarks besides WiFi. What networking hardware is now supported or will be supported in the near future?
- auraham 5y agoAsahi Linux is an impressive project. I cannot imagine how difficult is to reverse-engineering the M1 platform for porting a distro. I know that https://rosenzweig.io https://rosenzweig.io describes how the drivers are developed. However, I would like to read an ELI5 version of that process.
- DougMellon 5y agoDirect link to anyone curious: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-1.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/asahi-gpu-part-1.html
- viraptor 5y agoNot really the eli5 side, but if you want to see the RE process, marcan streams a lot of his work: https://youtube.com/c/marcan42 https://youtube.com/c/marcan42
- ushakov 5y agoabsolutely unbelievable!
- hbbio 5y agoThe work they do is just outstanding - congrats to all involved. I am proud of backing the project and if you own a M1 (or now plan to get one just because of Asahi Linux), you'd probably want to contribute too: https://www.patreon.com/marcan https://www.patreon.com/marcan
- jzer0cool 5y agoCould someone the typical benefits of replacing MacOS with Asahi Linux — what are use cases people are desiring here? Is it mostly for server performance?
- voidfunc 5y agoWell for one you no longer need to use macOS… which is a bonus in some folks mind.
- Underphil 5y agoYeah, this really. I've no idea why someone wouldn't consider choice of OS to be a net positive for everyone. Only thing stopping me getting one of these (through work) is the OS.
- lomereiter 5y agoWhy give your money to a manufacturer who explicitly wants you to run MacOS on their hardware, and not to its Linux-friendlier competitors?
- dimgl 5y agoBecause the hardware is actually good?
- Underphil 5y agoBecause I like the hardware but despise the software. I haven't found another laptop that comes close, although I don't have the money to try many. Not only that, but in the F500 companies I've worked for it's not uncommon for employees to get the latest shiny new thing when their existing machine still has lots of life left. Repurposing it with Linux means I can use it.
- dmitrygr 5y agoBecause there is no comparable hardware to be had for any amount of money anywhere.
- dang 5y agoRelated: AsahiLinux's Introduction to Apple Silicon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30699794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30699794 - March 2022 (5 comments) Asahi Linux Add Support for the Broadcom FullMAC WiFi Chips Used on Apple T2/M1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29694497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29694497 - Dec 2021 (9 comments) Apple Helps Asahi Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578 - Dec 2021 (174 comments) Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29564384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29564384 - Dec 2021 (211 comments) Asahi Linux for M1 Macs: progress report for September 2021 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28762744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28762744 - Oct 2021 (186 comments) Asahi Linux for Apple M1 progress report, August 2021 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28180135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28180135 - Aug 2021 (183 comments) Asahi Linux Progress Report: January/February 2021 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26421963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26421963 - March 2021 (65 comments) Asahi Linux: Linux on Apple Silicon project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25649719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25649719 - Jan 2021 (405 comments)
- Gigachad 5y agoWould the end goal of this project be for the distro to no longer exist and mainline linux containing everything required? So that you could just grab the M1 version of Fedora/Ubuntu and it just works?
- viraptor 5y agoCorrect. Can't find the tweet now but marcan wrote something like "the goal of Asahi is to stop existing". I.e. upstream everything.
- pabs3 5y agoI hope the folks responsible for this are well compensated for the work.
- l72 5y agoI can't wait until this gets a little further along. My company issues macbooks even though all my development is linux based (I have a linux desktop for my normal day to day work development). I currently use UTM and run Fedora full screen, which works reasonably well, but it'd be nice to just boot directly into linux.