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Somewhat surprisingly, Linux support for Apple Silicon MacBooks seems to be shaping up to be better than that for pretty much any other laptop. The Asahi team d

Somewhat surprisingly, Linux support for Apple Silicon MacBooks seems to be shaping up to be better than that for pretty much any other laptop. The Asahi team don’t have support for everything yet (notably no GPU) but what they do have support for seems to be high quality, well integrated with Linux’s conventions, and upstreamed into the mainline kernel! How much other hardware can claim that? The Asahi developers have also stated that Apple tends to keep hardware peripheral interfaces stable across generations (they speculate that this is to keep things easy for their own OS dev teams), and that this has so far proven to be true for M2 (and several iPhone generations before that), and thus once support is available , it should stay relevant for some time. Given this, it seems like MacBooks could easily end up becoming the laptop of choice for Linux developers in the years to come.

DJeuxg 4y ago
> How much other hardware can claim that? You mean aside from system76 or of any of the other Linux first hardware sellers? > The Asahi developers have also stated that Apple tends to keep hardware peripheral interfaces stable across generations The Asahi team has made an assumption about apples implementation of mobile chipsets that hasn't had a Linux competitor working to exploit it. Nothing is stopping apple from rug pulling the project next cycle. Nobody should be relying on this.
- EricE 4y ago
  >Nothing is stopping apple from rug pulling the project next cycle. Why would they do that? As others have pointed outed, Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia, etc. are indeed pulling the rug out on the other side (in the name of security). Locking the Mac down 100% would have zero benefit to Apple and just generate negativity.
manholio 4y ago
> MacBooks could easily end up becoming the laptop of choice for Linux developers That is, if they want to subsidize with their own wallets the dominance of consumer-hostile computing that open source was created to avert. Except for development such as this here, which aims at liberating users from a closed platform, I would have a philosophical problem to buy such hardware purely for my convenience. Let's not fool ourselves, when proprietary hardware from platform giants like Amazon and Apple becomes dominant killing open ecosystems, the end of road can only lead to consumer coercion, regardless if a negligible fraction of users would be able to still run Linux on such hardware.
- nivenkos 4y ago
  Yeah, if you can afford a Macbook, you can afford a Framework.
  - mort96 4y ago
    I hear framework laptops can be quite loud though? With ARM Mac laptops, you have the choice between a machine which literally doesn't have a fan, and a machine which has a fan that's turned off unless you're maxing out both your CPU and your GPU for sustained periods of time (and even then it's just a wind sound, not a high pitched whine). The machines are great about coil whine too, which has been an issue for some PC laptops I've used even when their fan is off.
    - Sebb767 4y ago
      I use a framework and the laptop definitely isn't loud. The fan is off most of the time and even when running it's actually rather quiet. It might be running more than on an M1 (though I don't have personal experience), but it's far from annoying.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    The framework is not at all competitive with a MacBook.
    - babypuncher 4y ago
      I don't think they are really targeting the same people.
- Bud 4y ago
  Can't you make your argument without the fallacious roping-in of Amazon? Apple isn't Amazon. Also, if Macs are actually as hostile to consumers and to open-source computing as you claim (and boy, is this ever an old and tired claim at this point), why is Linus still working so very hard and enthusiastically to support the platform in question?
mhh__ 4y ago
Emphasis on MacBook Vs laptops (plural)
ogogmad 4y ago
> Given this, it seems like MacBooks could easily end up becoming the laptop of choice for Linux developers in the years to come. What's the situation with traditional USB and HDMI ports? Dongles are easy to forget and easy to break, and lots of us have traditional USB devices lying around and 10-year-old TVs.
- Fredej 4y ago
  There's an HDMI, 3 Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C), an SD card reader and a headphone jack on the Macbook Pro. https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-14-and-16/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-14-and-16/specs/
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  My M1 has an HDMI 2.0 port.
  - Mo3 4y ago
    Definitely not the Air
  - ZiiS 4y ago
    That isnt currently supported under linux.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      It's not, and in general I don't think one can claim that linux support for the Apple Silicon machines is good now. What seems to have been the case so far is that once hardware is supported it mostly stays supported (including on new generations of the machines), which suggests that linux support for Apple Silicon machines may well get to the point where it's really good.
vbernat 4y ago
If you take a regular Lenovo laptop, everything likely works out of the box with an upstream kernel. This quite not the case yet with Asahi Linux which does not support power management, no USB, no sound. There was a time where Apple laptops came with very good Linux support. It was the time were every bit of hardware support was present in Darwin (a 12" iBook G3 was working flawlessly with Linux for example). I think that at each generation, support gets worse because the hardware is closing down. This translates to far more time between release and having something usable with Linux.
- avar 4y ago
  I used an iBook G3/G4 for years as a primary development laptop running Linux, and I think your recollection here is a bit off. The state of it was that: - There were numerous laptops with near-full Linux support, the Apple hardware wasn't categorically better when it came to that. - The power usage of x86 CPUs was atrocious at the time compared to PPC. Now history is repeating with Apple's M[12] line. Therefore people put up with a lot to get 2-3x longer battery life. As I recall I got 3-4 hours of active use out of my iBook, but (going to conferences) it felt like people's x86s almost always had to be plugged in. - The Linux support for software suspend/hibernation was really flaky at the time, but it worked perfectly on Apple hardware, because all Linux had to do was to tell the hardware "do the suspend thing now" (IIRC by tweaking a file in /proc). The hardware did a slow "heartbeat" with a front LED hidden behind the plastic frame when suspended (a nice effect). When running Linux it would do the the exact same, as it was all done in hardware. - There were still edge cases in hardware support, just as with any other laptop vendor, it all came down to what individual components happened to have Linux drivers. Some of this was better on Apple's hardware, some of it was worse.
  - protonbob 4y ago
    This is such a trip down memory lane. The iBook G4 was a bit of a pain to set up with ubuntu, but once you got it going it was pretty fool proof. I think I ran a machine on it until 12.04 where they stopped supporting PPC officially.
  - bityard 4y ago
okasaki 4y ago
Don't understand what's so great about it. Pretty much every amd64 laptop works great with Linux. I've had Lenovos, Dells, Huaweis, HPs, etc. Not to mention laptops designed specifically to target Linux like the Framework laptop.
- Avamander 4y ago
  > Don't understand what's so great about it. Pretty much every amd64 laptop works great with Linux. I've had Lenovos, Dells, Huaweis, HPs, etc. It's not amd64, it's especially not Intel. It's not fugly or fnoisy. The bar is really so low.
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  You really have to use the hardware to understand; things like the trackpad quality, battery life, blissful silence, and general build quality are beyond most other laptops on the market.
- acomjean 4y ago
  I'll agree with you here. I had a MacBook pro (2015) and switched to a system76 popOS linux notebook (8th gen intel, its really a "clevo" OEMed notebook). Its not quite as well built, but the Matt screen is nice, the keyboard and trackpad are good enough, and it has NVIDIA acceleration. Yeah, when pushed the fans spin up, the battery life if mediocre at best, but it can game (thanks steam) and its really fast. Its really not bad at all. I got an Linux AMD laptop for work this year, much better on the battery and still very fast. Its been great.
moonchrome 4y ago
Yeah I'm going to use a completely custom SoC + enthusiast driven driver support - with no support from manufacturer - to be my daily driver as a developer. Because I've got nothing better to do with my time than diagnose issues due to running a setup only 50 other people in the world use.
- JonChesterfield 4y ago
  If some of those 50 are kernel devs Linux is likely to run just fine.
- dijit 4y ago
  Honestly. That’s what I’ve been doing my entire professional career. Modern laptops are not materially different from SoCs, everything is soldered to the board and the CPU does basically everything memory related. I guess you think that Intel designs are an open standard? At the very least they’re extremely patent incumbered; with AMD and Intel having a sort of patent truce between them.
  - moonchrome 4y ago
    Intel and AMD have developers working on Linux support and drivers and support running Linux on their hardware.
    - sbuk 4y ago
      Intel and AMD don't make the whole widget. They want people to buy the components, so publicly 'supporting' multiple OSs makes sense. Apple on the other hand want people to buy and use Macs and macOS...
- mort96 4y ago
  Most laptops don't use a completely custom SoC, but most of them have enthusiast driven driver support -- or worse, formerly-enthusiast driven driver support where nobody currently cares -- with no support from the manufacturer. And on less popular hardware; the most popular laptop models in the world are macs. If you want manufacturer support, you need to use macOS or Windows or one of the very limited selection of laptops which feature Linux as an option. Most people who use Linux probably already use Linux on a computer without manufacturer support. If that's not for you though, that's totally fine.
adrian_b 4y ago
The rapid progress of the Asahi Linux team is very impressive, but there is no need to exaggerate. There have always been plenty of laptops with very good Linux support. Of the 3 laptops that I had during the last 15 years (before those I had used an Apple laptop, but then I have switched to Linux), on the first (a HP Compaq) and on the third (a Dell Precision), when I have installed Linux it just worked, while on the second (a Lenovo), I had to spend a couple of days until making everything work, mainly because it used NVIDIA Optimus, which required some workarounds, but after that it worked flawlessly. During these years I have also used Linux on various company laptops, always without problems. At least some months might have to pass until a MacBook will be able to work under Asahi Linux as well as most laptops with Intel/AMD CPUs work already in the day when they are bought.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Apple doing some minimal work to support their own hardware with Linux might bring them some new business. And it sounds like it shouldn't even be that much work. Mainly just documenting their hardware would be good enough to bootstrap that. For developers, macs are just really nice hardware and there are not a whole lot of similarly nice, Linux friendly laptops out there. Most of them seem to be compromises between being noisy, not having great screens, keyboards, and touchpads, mediocre performance, etc. Typing this on a Samsung Galaxy Book with a meh screen, meh touch pad, alright keyboard, and unimpressive performance. It runs Manjaro. I do miss having a nice screen and input options. I'm actually using a wireless mouse for the first time in a decade plus. Never needed one with a mac.
- smallpipe 4y ago
  You widely underestimate how much work goes into documenting hardware.
  - sumtechguy 4y ago
    It is a lot of work. But having not really done it myself would they not already have most of this? At least one would hope they would?
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    They need to have that sort of documentation internally anyway for their macOS devs to work on it, right?
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      And good luck convincing the team of lawyers to groom tens of thousands of pages of internal confidential documentation and source code and prune what can be release to the public and what stays classified as a competitive advantage. As lawyers usually play it safe (they're paid to defend the company) they'll tell you to keep everything internal internal, since Apple makes money selling finished products and services, not selling discreet chips to OEMs who's functionality needs to be explained to third parties.
ekianjo 4y ago
> to be better than that for pretty much any other laptop. No GPU support is a big miss though. ARM also means that you can't make every binary made for x86 out there work, even if initiatives like Box86 and Box64 help bridge the gap.
- _ph_ 4y ago
  The very interesting thing here is, that Apple announced Rosetta for Linux being released together with Ventura (assuming the Linux is running a VM, but it seems it works on plain Linux installations too).
jasoneckert 4y ago
Firstly, I agree with your points here. And while other comments here have pointed out that not all hardware is supported yet (a valid criticism), I feel it's also important to note that the current user experience of Asahi on Apple Silicon is stellar (as has been since it was released in Alpha). I've been using Asahi for over 3 months now as my daily driver to do real development work (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/asahi-linux/ https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/asahi-linux/), and everything I need is there, and fast. Consequently, I'm not surprised Linus is doing the same.
necovek 4y ago
> it seems like MacBooks could easily end up becoming the laptop of choice for Linux developers in the years to come. Having used MacBook Pro 14" with an M1 Max for ~6 months, I'd really wonder which developer submits themselves to such a glare-emitting screen and crappy keyboard (and potentially imprinting their palms/wrists on the sharp front edge), if you can get a Thinkpad X1 Carbon for much less? Sure, performance was slightly better than the latest X1 Carbon, and battery life was significantly better, but if I am undocked for a prolonged period, that screen and keyboard make it very unpleasant to use. If I needed more performance, I'd go for a desktop or a workstation-type Thinkpad laptop, though I'd lose on the portability (though MacBook Pros — including 14" — are heavy as well).
- throwingrocks 4y ago
  > I'd really wonder which developer I’m wondering the same. It’s probably just a few?
  - darthrupert 4y ago
    lol
  - necovek 4y ago
    Oh, I know it's masses of them (my previous company prescribed them, which is how I got the unfortunate experience). That does not make it any less perplexing to me ;)
- Meltion3 4y ago
  I was surprised about this hard edge as well. But as I only use it on a docking station, all good.
  - necovek 4y ago
    Did you experience any issues with USB-C monitors? I have a Dell U3219Q as a docking station, and my Thinkpads running Linux never put it in a state MacOS was able to: it won't turn on after Mac suspends, and it requires an intricate dance to unplug it from the socket and then turn it on while connected for it to restart working, and not even that always works.
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motoboi 4y ago
The best Linux support is always where most Linux developers work on. This seems like obvious but really is not. As long MacBooks keep being the insane machines they now are, they will soon become (and keep being) the best Linux machines available. Just because people will make sure of that.
- maven29 4y ago
  This doesn't mean that support would necessarily regress on existing platforms, just that there will be a window of opportunity to catch up to the state of the art. As for the fixed function accelerator blocks, vendors who cooperate will have more robust driver implementations derived from their work to support customers who rely on it operationally.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  Not disagreeing (or agreeing) with you about that, but as a coda I would note that I find it somewhat absurd that laptops have become the typical platform for developers. It implies something about what drives people's choices for working environment that I find strange. I do have a laptop, and I appreciate it being portable and thus being able to do work away from my (home) office. But most of the time I work on "desktop" system (Threadripper 2950X) with 3 screens, a fantastic keyboard, an even better mouse and many other things in the physical environment that improve my working experience. In short, it makes essentially no difference to me how "insane" MacBooks might be - they will never replace my "desktop" system for work. Apparently, this is an area where if I'm not in the actual minority, I'm certainly in the quieter faction.
  - the_gipsy 4y ago
    You can use a laptop as a desktop, but not the other way around.
  - acedTrex 4y ago
    The option to work anywhere is nice, I have a dock that I just plug one cable into my macbook and the entire setup lights up and is ready to go. But sometimes i want to work from the living room, or work at a coffee shop etc. and all i have to do to enable that is just unplug that cable and put my laptop in my bag. It's some pretty nice freedom to be able to do that.
bodge5000 4y ago
I wonder if its possible to dual boot the M1/M2 macs? Having a laptop running both Asahi and MacOS would be pretty fantastic (although my understanding is that application support is still early days)
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  That's how Asahi is built; you still have macOS on a separate partition, so you can boot to either OS at will.
rvz 4y ago
> Given this, it seems like MacBooks could easily end up becoming the laptop of choice for Linux developers in the years to come. Sounds like a failure for free software and open source, and the quest for progressing for open systems in general.
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pxc 4y ago
> Somewhat surprisingly, Linux support for Apple Silicon MacBooks seems to be shaping up to be better than that for pretty much any other laptop People are writing about Thinkpads below, but the real comparison should be to laptops that are sold with Linux on them, like the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition, the HP Dev One, or the many laptops sold by System76 which even feature 'instant on' since they run open-source UEFI implementations. The Apple Silicon laptops have gained Linux support faster than most Apple hardware in recent memory, including the Intel MacBooks from 2016 on. But Linux support has long been especially late on Apple machines because the hardware is custom and quirky and volunteer interest in reverse-engineering it has been relatively low. And let's be real— a computer without GPU acceleration is virtually unusable. You need that these days for everything from actually getting to use basic features of your window manager to videe playback. That said, Intel and Microsoft have hampered Linux support recently with crap like S0ix and Pluton, so if the GPU support ever becomes stable enough to support most Linux window managers, the Apple Silicon laptops might seem attractive by comparison to laptops that aren't built for Linux. I would consider one at that point. But it's hard to be optimistic when Apple has no material reason not to pull the rug out from under Asahi at any time (not necessarily out of malice).
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WhyNotHugo 4y ago
> The Asahi developers have also stated that Apple tends to keep hardware peripheral interfaces stable across generations (they speculate that this is to keep things easy for their own OS dev teams) It's crazy what happens when hardware designers collaborate with software developers. The current de-facto standard of working in silos with no regard for how the other party gets their part done is what's led us to the current global status quo.

DJeuxg 4y ago

> How much other hardware can claim that? You mean aside from system76 or of any of the other Linux first hardware sellers? > The Asahi developers have also stated that Apple tends to keep hardware peripheral interfaces stable across generations The Asahi team has made an assumption about apples implementation of mobile chipsets that hasn't had a Linux competitor working to exploit it. Nothing is stopping apple from rug pulling the project next cycle. Nobody should be relying on this.

EricE 4y ago
>Nothing is stopping apple from rug pulling the project next cycle. Why would they do that? As others have pointed outed, Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia, etc. are indeed pulling the rug out on the other side (in the name of security). Locking the Mac down 100% would have zero benefit to Apple and just generate negativity.

manholio 4y ago

> MacBooks could easily end up becoming the laptop of choice for Linux developers That is, if they want to subsidize with their own wallets the dominance of consumer-hostile computing that open source was created to avert. Except for development such as this here, which aims at liberating users from a closed platform, I would have a philosophical problem to buy such hardware purely for my convenience. Let's not fool ourselves, when proprietary hardware from platform giants like Amazon and Apple becomes dominant killing open ecosystems, the end of road can only lead to consumer coercion, regardless if a negligible fraction of users would be able to still run Linux on such hardware.

nivenkos 4y ago
Yeah, if you can afford a Macbook, you can afford a Framework.
- mort96 4y ago
  I hear framework laptops can be quite loud though? With ARM Mac laptops, you have the choice between a machine which literally doesn't have a fan, and a machine which has a fan that's turned off unless you're maxing out both your CPU and your GPU for sustained periods of time (and even then it's just a wind sound, not a high pitched whine). The machines are great about coil whine too, which has been an issue for some PC laptops I've used even when their fan is off.
  - Sebb767 4y ago
    I use a framework and the laptop definitely isn't loud. The fan is off most of the time and even when running it's actually rather quiet. It might be running more than on an M1 (though I don't have personal experience), but it's far from annoying.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  The framework is not at all competitive with a MacBook.
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    I don't think they are really targeting the same people.
Bud 4y ago
Can't you make your argument without the fallacious roping-in of Amazon? Apple isn't Amazon. Also, if Macs are actually as hostile to consumers and to open-source computing as you claim (and boy, is this ever an old and tired claim at this point), why is Linus still working so very hard and enthusiastically to support the platform in question?

mhh__ 4y ago

Emphasis on MacBook Vs laptops (plural)

ogogmad 4y ago

> Given this, it seems like MacBooks could easily end up becoming the laptop of choice for Linux developers in the years to come. What's the situation with traditional USB and HDMI ports? Dongles are easy to forget and easy to break, and lots of us have traditional USB devices lying around and 10-year-old TVs.

Fredej 4y ago
There's an HDMI, 3 Thunderbolt 4 (USB-C), an SD card reader and a headphone jack on the Macbook Pro. https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-14-and-16/specs/ https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-14-and-16/specs/
anothernewdude 4y ago
My M1 has an HDMI 2.0 port.
- Mo3 4y ago
  Definitely not the Air
- ZiiS 4y ago
  That isnt currently supported under linux.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    It's not, and in general I don't think one can claim that linux support for the Apple Silicon machines is good now. What seems to have been the case so far is that once hardware is supported it mostly stays supported (including on new generations of the machines), which suggests that linux support for Apple Silicon machines may well get to the point where it's really good.

vbernat 4y ago

If you take a regular Lenovo laptop, everything likely works out of the box with an upstream kernel. This quite not the case yet with Asahi Linux which does not support power management, no USB, no sound. There was a time where Apple laptops came with very good Linux support. It was the time were every bit of hardware support was present in Darwin (a 12" iBook G3 was working flawlessly with Linux for example). I think that at each generation, support gets worse because the hardware is closing down. This translates to far more time between release and having something usable with Linux.

avar 4y ago
I used an iBook G3/G4 for years as a primary development laptop running Linux, and I think your recollection here is a bit off. The state of it was that: - There were numerous laptops with near-full Linux support, the Apple hardware wasn't categorically better when it came to that. - The power usage of x86 CPUs was atrocious at the time compared to PPC. Now history is repeating with Apple's M[12] line. Therefore people put up with a lot to get 2-3x longer battery life. As I recall I got 3-4 hours of active use out of my iBook, but (going to conferences) it felt like people's x86s almost always had to be plugged in. - The Linux support for software suspend/hibernation was really flaky at the time, but it worked perfectly on Apple hardware, because all Linux had to do was to tell the hardware "do the suspend thing now" (IIRC by tweaking a file in /proc). The hardware did a slow "heartbeat" with a front LED hidden behind the plastic frame when suspended (a nice effect). When running Linux it would do the the exact same, as it was all done in hardware. - There were still edge cases in hardware support, just as with any other laptop vendor, it all came down to what individual components happened to have Linux drivers. Some of this was better on Apple's hardware, some of it was worse.
- protonbob 4y ago
  This is such a trip down memory lane. The iBook G4 was a bit of a pain to set up with ubuntu, but once you got it going it was pretty fool proof. I think I ran a machine on it until 12.04 where they stopped supporting PPC officially.
- bityard 4y ago

okasaki 4y ago

Don't understand what's so great about it. Pretty much every amd64 laptop works great with Linux. I've had Lenovos, Dells, Huaweis, HPs, etc. Not to mention laptops designed specifically to target Linux like the Framework laptop.

Avamander 4y ago
> Don't understand what's so great about it. Pretty much every amd64 laptop works great with Linux. I've had Lenovos, Dells, Huaweis, HPs, etc. It's not amd64, it's especially not Intel. It's not fugly or fnoisy. The bar is really so low.
geerlingguy 4y ago
You really have to use the hardware to understand; things like the trackpad quality, battery life, blissful silence, and general build quality are beyond most other laptops on the market.
acomjean 4y ago
I'll agree with you here. I had a MacBook pro (2015) and switched to a system76 popOS linux notebook (8th gen intel, its really a "clevo" OEMed notebook). Its not quite as well built, but the Matt screen is nice, the keyboard and trackpad are good enough, and it has NVIDIA acceleration. Yeah, when pushed the fans spin up, the battery life if mediocre at best, but it can game (thanks steam) and its really fast. Its really not bad at all. I got an Linux AMD laptop for work this year, much better on the battery and still very fast. Its been great.

moonchrome 4y ago

Yeah I'm going to use a completely custom SoC + enthusiast driven driver support - with no support from manufacturer - to be my daily driver as a developer. Because I've got nothing better to do with my time than diagnose issues due to running a setup only 50 other people in the world use.

JonChesterfield 4y ago
If some of those 50 are kernel devs Linux is likely to run just fine.
dijit 4y ago
Honestly. That’s what I’ve been doing my entire professional career. Modern laptops are not materially different from SoCs, everything is soldered to the board and the CPU does basically everything memory related. I guess you think that Intel designs are an open standard? At the very least they’re extremely patent incumbered; with AMD and Intel having a sort of patent truce between them.
- moonchrome 4y ago
  Intel and AMD have developers working on Linux support and drivers and support running Linux on their hardware.
  - sbuk 4y ago
    Intel and AMD don't make the whole widget. They want people to buy the components, so publicly 'supporting' multiple OSs makes sense. Apple on the other hand want people to buy and use Macs and macOS...
mort96 4y ago
Most laptops don't use a completely custom SoC, but most of them have enthusiast driven driver support -- or worse, formerly-enthusiast driven driver support where nobody currently cares -- with no support from the manufacturer. And on less popular hardware; the most popular laptop models in the world are macs. If you want manufacturer support, you need to use macOS or Windows or one of the very limited selection of laptops which feature Linux as an option. Most people who use Linux probably already use Linux on a computer without manufacturer support. If that's not for you though, that's totally fine.

adrian_b 4y ago

The rapid progress of the Asahi Linux team is very impressive, but there is no need to exaggerate. There have always been plenty of laptops with very good Linux support. Of the 3 laptops that I had during the last 15 years (before those I had used an Apple laptop, but then I have switched to Linux), on the first (a HP Compaq) and on the third (a Dell Precision), when I have installed Linux it just worked, while on the second (a Lenovo), I had to spend a couple of days until making everything work, mainly because it used NVIDIA Optimus, which required some workarounds, but after that it worked flawlessly. During these years I have also used Linux on various company laptops, always without problems. At least some months might have to pass until a MacBook will be able to work under Asahi Linux as well as most laptops with Intel/AMD CPUs work already in the day when they are bought.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Apple doing some minimal work to support their own hardware with Linux might bring them some new business. And it sounds like it shouldn't even be that much work. Mainly just documenting their hardware would be good enough to bootstrap that. For developers, macs are just really nice hardware and there are not a whole lot of similarly nice, Linux friendly laptops out there. Most of them seem to be compromises between being noisy, not having great screens, keyboards, and touchpads, mediocre performance, etc. Typing this on a Samsung Galaxy Book with a meh screen, meh touch pad, alright keyboard, and unimpressive performance. It runs Manjaro. I do miss having a nice screen and input options. I'm actually using a wireless mouse for the first time in a decade plus. Never needed one with a mac.

smallpipe 4y ago
You widely underestimate how much work goes into documenting hardware.
- sumtechguy 4y ago
  It is a lot of work. But having not really done it myself would they not already have most of this? At least one would hope they would?
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  They need to have that sort of documentation internally anyway for their macOS devs to work on it, right?
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    And good luck convincing the team of lawyers to groom tens of thousands of pages of internal confidential documentation and source code and prune what can be release to the public and what stays classified as a competitive advantage. As lawyers usually play it safe (they're paid to defend the company) they'll tell you to keep everything internal internal, since Apple makes money selling finished products and services, not selling discreet chips to OEMs who's functionality needs to be explained to third parties.

ekianjo 4y ago

> to be better than that for pretty much any other laptop. No GPU support is a big miss though. ARM also means that you can't make every binary made for x86 out there work, even if initiatives like Box86 and Box64 help bridge the gap.

_ph_ 4y ago
The very interesting thing here is, that Apple announced Rosetta for Linux being released together with Ventura (assuming the Linux is running a VM, but it seems it works on plain Linux installations too).

jasoneckert 4y ago

Firstly, I agree with your points here. And while other comments here have pointed out that not all hardware is supported yet (a valid criticism), I feel it's also important to note that the current user experience of Asahi on Apple Silicon is stellar (as has been since it was released in Alpha). I've been using Asahi for over 3 months now as my daily driver to do real development work (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/asahi-linux/ https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/asahi-linux/), and everything I need is there, and fast. Consequently, I'm not surprised Linus is doing the same.

necovek 4y ago

> it seems like MacBooks could easily end up becoming the laptop of choice for Linux developers in the years to come. Having used MacBook Pro 14" with an M1 Max for ~6 months, I'd really wonder which developer submits themselves to such a glare-emitting screen and crappy keyboard (and potentially imprinting their palms/wrists on the sharp front edge), if you can get a Thinkpad X1 Carbon for much less? Sure, performance was slightly better than the latest X1 Carbon, and battery life was significantly better, but if I am undocked for a prolonged period, that screen and keyboard make it very unpleasant to use. If I needed more performance, I'd go for a desktop or a workstation-type Thinkpad laptop, though I'd lose on the portability (though MacBook Pros — including 14" — are heavy as well).

throwingrocks 4y ago
> I'd really wonder which developer I’m wondering the same. It’s probably just a few?
- darthrupert 4y ago
  lol
- necovek 4y ago
  Oh, I know it's masses of them (my previous company prescribed them, which is how I got the unfortunate experience). That does not make it any less perplexing to me ;)
Meltion3 4y ago
I was surprised about this hard edge as well. But as I only use it on a docking station, all good.
- necovek 4y ago
  Did you experience any issues with USB-C monitors? I have a Dell U3219Q as a docking station, and my Thinkpads running Linux never put it in a state MacOS was able to: it won't turn on after Mac suspends, and it requires an intricate dance to unplug it from the socket and then turn it on while connected for it to restart working, and not even that always works.

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motoboi 4y ago

The best Linux support is always where most Linux developers work on. This seems like obvious but really is not. As long MacBooks keep being the insane machines they now are, they will soon become (and keep being) the best Linux machines available. Just because people will make sure of that.

maven29 4y ago
This doesn't mean that support would necessarily regress on existing platforms, just that there will be a window of opportunity to catch up to the state of the art. As for the fixed function accelerator blocks, vendors who cooperate will have more robust driver implementations derived from their work to support customers who rely on it operationally.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
Not disagreeing (or agreeing) with you about that, but as a coda I would note that I find it somewhat absurd that laptops have become the typical platform for developers. It implies something about what drives people's choices for working environment that I find strange. I do have a laptop, and I appreciate it being portable and thus being able to do work away from my (home) office. But most of the time I work on "desktop" system (Threadripper 2950X) with 3 screens, a fantastic keyboard, an even better mouse and many other things in the physical environment that improve my working experience. In short, it makes essentially no difference to me how "insane" MacBooks might be - they will never replace my "desktop" system for work. Apparently, this is an area where if I'm not in the actual minority, I'm certainly in the quieter faction.
- the_gipsy 4y ago
  You can use a laptop as a desktop, but not the other way around.
- acedTrex 4y ago
  The option to work anywhere is nice, I have a dock that I just plug one cable into my macbook and the entire setup lights up and is ready to go. But sometimes i want to work from the living room, or work at a coffee shop etc. and all i have to do to enable that is just unplug that cable and put my laptop in my bag. It's some pretty nice freedom to be able to do that.

bodge5000 4y ago

I wonder if its possible to dual boot the M1/M2 macs? Having a laptop running both Asahi and MacOS would be pretty fantastic (although my understanding is that application support is still early days)

geerlingguy 4y ago
That's how Asahi is built; you still have macOS on a separate partition, so you can boot to either OS at will.

rvz 4y ago

> Given this, it seems like MacBooks could easily end up becoming the laptop of choice for Linux developers in the years to come. Sounds like a failure for free software and open source, and the quest for progressing for open systems in general.

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pxc 4y ago

> Somewhat surprisingly, Linux support for Apple Silicon MacBooks seems to be shaping up to be better than that for pretty much any other laptop People are writing about Thinkpads below, but the real comparison should be to laptops that are sold with Linux on them, like the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition, the HP Dev One, or the many laptops sold by System76 which even feature 'instant on' since they run open-source UEFI implementations. The Apple Silicon laptops have gained Linux support faster than most Apple hardware in recent memory, including the Intel MacBooks from 2016 on. But Linux support has long been especially late on Apple machines because the hardware is custom and quirky and volunteer interest in reverse-engineering it has been relatively low. And let's be real— a computer without GPU acceleration is virtually unusable. You need that these days for everything from actually getting to use basic features of your window manager to videe playback. That said, Intel and Microsoft have hampered Linux support recently with crap like S0ix and Pluton, so if the GPU support ever becomes stable enough to support most Linux window managers, the Apple Silicon laptops might seem attractive by comparison to laptops that aren't built for Linux. I would consider one at that point. But it's hard to be optimistic when Apple has no material reason not to pull the rug out from under Asahi at any time (not necessarily out of malice).

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WhyNotHugo 4y ago

> The Asahi developers have also stated that Apple tends to keep hardware peripheral interfaces stable across generations (they speculate that this is to keep things easy for their own OS dev teams) It's crazy what happens when hardware designers collaborate with software developers. The current de-facto standard of working in silos with no regard for how the other party gets their part done is what's led us to the current global status quo.