26 ms·

ARM64 Linux Workstation

778 points by jasoneckert 4y ago

steakscience 4y ago
Wayland is great but Sway/any wlroots based window manager can't handle HiDPI properly for X apps :(
leidenfrost 4y ago
Imho the only relevant parts left are: Sleep (which is being tackled right now), USB-C Extra displays (Also WIP) and Hardware Decode for video.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  and audio and screen brightness at least...those don't work on my M2 setup.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Screen brightness works on the beta kernel. Speakers work but are disabled by default because there is a risk it could blow up the hardware
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      > Speakers work but are disabled by default because there is a risk it could blow up the hardware Wait, what? This sounds like a pretty egregious design flaw on Apple's part.
      - Teongot 4y ago
        There's a good write up of it here https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109917995005981968 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109917995005981968
      - eyelidlessness 4y ago
        The (very good) writeup conveys this much better than I could, but briefly for folks not inclined to click/read through: it’s a design trade off. Apple’s solution conditionally sends excess power to the speakers—higher power to achieve better sound under safe conditions, lower power to protect the speakers from damage. It’s quite clever (and quite effective, although I’m sure some audiophiles would disagree), but it’s not the kind of design you’d want to use without an equivalent solution. It’s also an unintuitive benefit of having a whole lot of compute headroom to play with, where you can create an intentional footgun that has meaningful benefits but risks physical consequences, and then spend some of that headroom to disarm the gun. A pure software analogy (because that’s what I know better) would be something like: race a bunch of speculative variant algorithms in parallel, knowing that you’re “wasting” compute time, where the probability of speculation being more optimal than hand tuning is high and pathological cases have a “safe” straightforward deoptimization.
      - Gigachad 4y ago
        The tldr is that Apple drives the speakers way past their “always safe” level and then uses software in the OS to detect and dampen the uncommon sounds which could damage the speakers. Resulting in exceptional audio performance. The Asahi Linux devs have already reverse engineered and implemented this safety system but there is a risk they have made a mistake or it doesn’t get enabled due to a bug.
      - astrange 4y ago
        Speakers are just things that move when you send electricity to them. It's not hard to blow up something like that if you try, especially if they heat up over time.
        josephcsible 4y ago
        Then why isn't this a problem with the built-in speakers of any non-Apple device?
        astrange 4y ago
        It is, you're just not trying hard enough or you're using the official drivers that are software limiting it.
        Gigachad 4y ago
        They either cap them at the “always safe” level which results in much less volume, or you actually can blow them up but you just haven’t played the right sound to trigger it.
  - TacticalCoder 4y ago
    > and audio... Overall tip for anyone using Linux and having issues with audio... USB Audio is magical and works wonder. I never bother with the computer's in-board sound: it's USB Audio immediately through a DAC. Works fine. Apple sells $10 USB-C-to-3.5mmjack DAC which are basically a tiny cable (for anyone lamenting it's "too bulky" to have a full-on DAC next to their laptop). For desktops: problem doesn't even register. Just bypass the audio components on your motherboard and use a proper DAC. As an added bonus computers are particularly electrically noisy and a DAC is a great way to do away with all that the noise. So my advice: just use a DAC with Linux. Plug it in. Marvel at "dmesg" showing "USB Audio" and enjoy quality sound.
    - loeg 4y ago
      Be somewhat careful what USB audio device you buy. I've had multiple of these and some of them have tons of EM noise, which is very obnoxious.
      - TacticalCoder 4y ago
        > I've had multiple of these and some of them have tons of EM noise, which is very obnoxious. Ah darn yup! If there's one thing I'd expect from these is to not be noisy! FWIW I'm using a CambridgeAudio DAC and, well, CambridgeAudio is supposed to be a good brand when it comes to audio stuff (amp is CambridgeAudio too).
        jnsaff2 4y ago
        I've been pretty happy with Dragonfly[0]. Tho they don't come cheap. I have had the black and am currently on the Red, I noticed the difference so I think it's worth it. Have not tried the cobalt. [0] - https://www.audioquest.com/dacs/dragonfly/dragonfly-cobalt https://www.audioquest.com/dacs/dragonfly/dragonfly-cobalt
        loeg 4y ago
        > CambridgeAudio DAC It looks like these start at $250? I'd expect them to work well. I'm more wary of this pricepoint: > Apple sells $10 USB-C-to-3.5mmjack DAC I've gotten a lot less EM noise with builtin soundcards than cheap USB DACs, but YMMV.
- ip26 4y ago
  Linux 2013: Sleep support doesn’t work quite yet, but it’s being worked on right now Linux 2023: Sleep support doesn’t work quite yet, but it’s being worked on right now
  - tadfisher 4y ago
    You can thank Microsoft for the current mess. S0ix (aka "Modern Standby") doesn't even work right on Windows.
    - bionade24 4y ago
      Linux Laptops with no S3 support use S2, not S0 as on Windows. Still buggy as hell. My XPS sometimes loses 70% in 4 hours standby and then just ~5% in 2 days of standby. Most of the time the battery drain is insane. At least the overheating in bag issue never occured to me.
  - antifa 4y ago
    I've still had better experiences with closed laptop lids when using Linux in comparison to windows in the last decade.
eatonphil 4y ago
> Is there anything that doesn’t work? > To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: “No.” > Everything works… and works perfectly. That is impressive and really hard to believe! I guess I'll have to find an M1 mac Mini to try myself!
- gbN025tt2Z1E2E4 4y ago
  Not that hard to believe when you consider the hardware specs for Apple machines are so heavily locked down to a very specific set of mobo, cpu, and only variability in core count, ram amount, hard drive size, etc. It's not like PC world of mix and match everything.
  - runjake 4y ago
    It's hard to believe because virtually none of the proprietary Apple Silicon platform (except the CPU instruction set itself) is documented and involved a tremendous amount of reverse-engineering effort by some very bright volunteers.
    - sixothree 4y ago
      And yet open source community embraces the hardware with fervor.
      - sliken 4y ago
        It's an appealing platform. Entry level is $600, nice memory systems (66GB/sec to 800GB/sec), and nice iGPU. The laptops have nice keyboards, nice trackpads, nice screens, and great battery life. The desktops are built in a solid aluminum chassis and have a single fan (instead of the normal 4-8) and are small and quiet. I do wish apple did a native apple port, but the community is making good progress on that front.
        sixothree 4y ago
        > but the community is making good progress on that front You mean in reverse engineering hardware?
bolangi 4y ago
All sounds good to me. What I don't get is how running on arm64 would speed up i3. I3 is already fast enough to be unnoticeable, hardly performs any expensive operations.
- rarafael 4y ago
  I believe they're commenting on the fact that the sway Wayland compositor seems faster than i3. Might be due to how Wayland handles frame rendering, but switching between the two I tend to notice a more "snappy" effect from sway
  - bolangi 4y ago
    So more likely they are comparing wayland and X.
- darthrupert 4y ago
  Everything you run on it, though?
- deaddodo 4y ago
  I didn’t see OP saying ARM increased performance, just that sway felt more buttery/smooth and easier to configure.
usr1106 4y ago
Depending on the country you live earth overshoot day is pretty soon. 128GB of RAM and other specs for a workstation certainly sound like overshoot. I'd wish smart people would use their brains and saving resources instead of wasting them.
- tracker1 4y ago
  640K aught to be enough for anybody.
  - timbit42 4y ago
    Who said that? No one.
    - tracker1 4y ago
      Bill Gates said that. It's a pretty famous quote.
- detrites 4y ago
  Until you're living in a tree and sending this message with a carrier pigeon there's some criticisms anyone could level at you also. And, what if our future energy saviour just so happened to need 128GB of RAM to prove their model in time?
  - usr1106 4y ago
    I am typing this on a mobile phone. Maybe 7-8 years old. 2 GB of RAM. Sailfish OS, still maintained (not perfectly, but better than the competition). Made as a low cost smart phone for India originally. Works decently well on many Web sites, close to perfectly on HN.
    - kjs3 4y ago
      So a small computer. Full of environmentally problematic stuff. Just small and old. If that's your 'save the planet' plan, keep your condescension to yourself.
silisili 4y ago
That's really impressive! That said, I really wish someone other than Apple would release something like an ARM64 NUC, with good Linux compat. Even something on par with the SD Gen 2 should be plenty to run a desktop day to day.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Not a NUC, but there is the ThinkPad X13s. Linux support seems to be shaping up decently, with some hope that it might be supported by stock ubuntu in ubuntu 23.04.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  I was really tempted to try this out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34027280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34027280 but the 16GB of RAM was too tiny for my day-to-day. It seemed to be a common trend in arm64 things one can buy nowadays
  - throwdbaaway 4y ago
    Good info. After reading this, I bought an Orange Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM, and now it is up and running with Ubuntu 22.04. The spec seems to be similar to a c6g.xlarge.
- the_pwner224 4y ago
  I'm not trying to invalidate your specific use case, but in general, there's not really any practical difference between ARM64 and x86 for desktop use. ARM is generally perceived as being more power efficient, but the latest x86 mobile processors from AMD (and probably also Intel) are very efficient. The Apple M series does have very tightly coupled RAM and onboard ML & video encode accelerators, but when it comes to plain old compute power & efficiency, AMD and Intel have pretty much caught up afaik. There were recently a couple of new NUC-type devices based on the outgoing generation AMD mobile processors. I have the Minisforum UM690, based on the Ryzen 6900HX, and it's been working great as my new desktop computer. The iGPU is pretty good too. The Ryzen 6800U (U = efficient variant, 25 W TDP) is about the same as the M2 for performance and power consumption. The 6900HX in this device is the high power variant, default TDP is 45 W but you can lower it to 25 W in the BIOS which should make it about identical to a 6800U. The newer ones with the latest gen Ryzen chips should be much more efficient.
emilsedgh 4y ago
Asahi Linux is amazing and pretty usable at this point. However, last I tried I couldn't get stuff like Slack and Spotify to work on it because there are no Arm packages for those. Has anyone found a way around that?
- inconceivable 4y ago
  when i run across this issue i just use their web apps in a separate browser. slack's 'native' app is just a sequestered browser instance. not sure about spotify.
  - nicce 4y ago
    You can make your ”own” slack app with few lines of code by using some WebView library, like Tauri and Rust, for fun :-D
- davidw 4y ago
  Use the web versions?
  - psanford 4y ago
    The web version of spotify doesn't work on my m2 air in either chromium or firefox. The Spotify website errors with: "Playback of protected content is not enabled." Slack works just fine from the browser on Asahi though.
    - cpmsmith 4y ago
      You're likely missing the Widevine DRM plugin. IIRC, many distros don't include it, or don't enable it by default.
      - psanford 4y ago
        Where is the publicly available linux/aarch64 build of widevine drm? The fetch-latest-widevine.sh[0] script says 'Architecture not supported'. [0]: https://github.com/proprietary/chromium-widevine/blob/master/fetch-latest-widevine.sh https://github.com/proprietary/chromium-widevine/blob/master...
waingake 4y ago
> Moreover, running Asahi is perfectly legal because Apple formally allows booting non-macOS operating systems on their Apple Silicon platform. How nice of Apple. #snarc
- ngold 4y ago
  #snarc beats /s anyday. On a serious note. If you want to save on the power bill. Arm anything wins against my 1000 watt xeon workstation. I can heat several rooms with that monster.
  - bogwog 4y ago
    It's a shame Apple is Apple and you can't pay a reasonable price for RAM, otherwise these would make awesome servers.
    - sliken 4y ago
      That's the cost for 10x the memory bandwidth of the Ryzen 7950x.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        That's... comically untrue. The Playstation 5 has faster memory than the M1 (448gb/s vs 200), and it was manufactured by AMD before Zen 3 or Apple Silicon even shipped. Dual-channel DDR5 should smoke the LPDDR4X in Apple Silicon in terms of memory bandwidth.
        sliken 4y ago
        How so? Memory bandwidth (peak, not stream) Ryzen 7950x = 84GB/sec # 128 bit wide ddr5-5200 M1 = 66GB/sec # 128 bit wide ddr5-4800 M2 = 100GB/sec # 128 bit wide ddr5-6400 M1/M2 Pro = 200GB/sec # 256 bit wide M1/M2 Max = 400GB/sec # 512 bit wide M1 Ultra = 800GB/sec # 1024 bit wide, m2 ultra not out 800GB/sec / 84 = 9.5. Although the ARM64 has a more relaxed memory ordering and generally you see a greater fraction of peak in the real world. Also Mac's default to a 16kb page, which helps the TLB with random workloads. Memory bandwidth is part of why the Apple iGPU does so well when compared to Intel and AMDs best iGPUs. Similarly the improved memory system is why the PS5 and XboxX does so well on games. Sadly AMD is reserved the improved memory system for the XboxX and PS5. Both AMD and Intel limit laptops and normal desktops (except for the expensive HEDT segment like the Threadripper) to 128 wide memory.
Avlin67 4y ago
hdmi and workstation doesnt fit, but you can down vote me its fine I dont care.
- lizknope 4y ago
  Okay but it supports 5 monitors. 1 via HDMI and 4 via the Thunderport / DisplayPort Type-C outputs. I've got a Lenovo Thinkpad and I use a $15 Type C to DisplayPort adapter and it works fine at 4K @60Hz The specs say it supports 6K @60Hz over the Type-C ports and 4K for the HDMI port
- MBCook 4y ago
  In general I agree with you, but I think that may be a limitation of Asashi right now. So if you want a display it may be your only choice for a desktop.
jeffbee 4y ago
Blanket statements of "everything works" always leave me a little suspicious. But if sleep/wake, DPMS, power consumption, fans, and those kinds of irritants, which are omnipresent even on x86 Linux, are all good under Asahi that is pretty cool.
hillcrestenigma 4y ago
Does anyone know how cost effective a base M1 Mac Studio would be compared to a PC build with comparable cost? There's also the obvious set of trade offs, such as being quiet, compact, but being unrepairable, while the PCs having nearly the opposite qualities. Is the power efficiency of Apple Silicon still a major advantage in a desktop system?
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I watched one guy build a hackentosh for the same price as a Mac mini and compared them. The intel based one wins in multi threaded workloads but the M1 wins in single threaded, power efficiency, and things which it has hardware acceleration like video encoding.
- gabereiser 4y ago
  It’s about half the cost to build your own based on Ryzen thread ripper and DDR5. I’ve done this before however, it’s not ARM64. It also requires like 1000w power supply. Can you build a machine just as capable? Yes. Will it be as efficient? No. Will it be Arm? Probably not. That said, I run Apple MacBook Air as my daily so YMMV. *edit* ok a bit more than half. Chip shortage has scalpers sitting on threadrippers.
  - danielheath 4y ago
    If you leave it switched on using 5 cents worth of electricity an hour, how long does it take to cost more?
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    Do you need a Threadripper to compete with M1 Ultra? Ryzen 9 7950X seems pretty comparable and doesn't require a 1000W PSU unless you must pair it with a 4090 or something.
    - sliken 4y ago
      Depends, how cache friendly is your workload? The M1 ultra has more than 4x the memory bandwidth of the threadripper. Of course the GPU makes a big difference in cost and power use. If you need a 4090, there's nothing comparable. But if the Apple iGPU is enough you save a ton of power and space.
cjdrake 4y ago
Another Arm64 workstation you can buy today: https://www.ipi.wiki/products/ampere-altra-developer-platform https://www.ipi.wiki/products/ampere-altra-developer-platfor...
- tbrock 4y ago
  Performance isn’t there. Why spend 3k+ on this?
  - eatonphil 4y ago
    What's wrong with the performance?
    - tbrock 4y ago
      A comparable m1 is twice as fast in the above benchmarks? And that’s Apple’s chip from 2 years ago! Core for core this is a dog.
      - zznzz 4y ago
        altra is also > 2 years old, so the age of the apple chip doesn’t matter Neoverse N1 is hardly a dog. It’s a decent enough core in a server processor that has 80 of them. Altra is not intended to compete core for core with any laptop/desktop/workstation processor.
      - tjoff 4y ago
        Surely if you consider apple hardware you don't care about performance, price or supporting an ecosystem that underpins the very essence of you are trying to do. Buying mac hardware for a linux workstation is madness.
        tbrock 4y ago
        I really would like someone else to put out something competitive in that case, I’m rooting for them but haven’t seen it yet.
FlyingSnake 4y ago
> Everything - and I mean everything - is unbelievably fast. As a long time Linux user and someone forced to use MacOS, my hands are itching to buy a 2nd M1/M2 mac and install Asahi linux on it. I've never felt such excitement since the days of Compiz.
- amir734jj 4y ago
  Don't do it. It's tempting. I bought a high-end System 76, and I am very happy with it.
andrewstuart 4y ago
I'd be curious to see properly done benchmarks against top of the line Intel or AMD machines. I'd be surprised if the Mac was faster. I do understand that people want the Mac for the build quality of the laptop, not just for speed.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mikae1 4y ago
  Don't forget that it's the best bang for the watt (at least when running macOS).
  - diffeomorphism 4y ago
    Is it? A mac mini with m2 pro, decent ram, decent storage is $2000+. You can buy quite a few Watt hours for that.
    - mikae1 4y ago
      If the base model M1 has the performance you need, it performs very well for the price and has a very low power usage.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > I do understand that people want the Mac for the build quality of the laptop, not just for speed. I find LG Gram laptops to be of higher build quality than Mac laptops. They may be pricier too depending on which LG Gram and which Mac you buy though. Mac laptops feel and are incredibly brittle. They may look shiny and the screen may look gorgeous, but they're simply brittle. People here and there like to make fun of "MILSPEC" but my MILSPEC LG Gram can sustain quite a beating. Meanwhile my M1 Mac is 1/5th the age of my LG Gram and the M1 Mac's screen is already broken. Mac laptops are very good looking but they are not, to me, of great build quality. They're also heavier than my LG Gram.
  - 4y ago
tombert 4y ago
Forgive a bit of ignorance on my end; does Asahi have x86_64 emulation? It would be cool to play Linux Steam games on Arm.
- hias 4y ago
  Also check this! :) https://box86.org/2022/12/box64-on-asahi-with-experimental-gpu-driver/ https://box86.org/2022/12/box64-on-asahi-with-experimental-g...
- zozbot234 4y ago
  qemu-user can emulate x86_64 hardware, but it's not going to be as fast as Apple's Rosetta.
  - tombert 4y ago
    Yeah, that's what I was afraid of; honestly the reason I haven't seriously attempted moving to Arm Linux full time is because I suspect that it would be great for 99% of stuff, but that 1% of ~30 years of x86 legacy junk would be some huge blocker that forces me to change to something else.
- nicce 4y ago
  Performance will be terrible as you virtualise instructions. You can try it with QEMU for example.
  - zer0zzz 4y ago
    Performance with Rosetta on macos is good enough for most games that shipped for x86 macos. With a decent enough graphics driver implementation it should be feasible to grab the Linux version of Rosetta and use that to play games. A lot of the emulation on Rosetta is straight instruction conversion; the hardware acts like an x86 cpu in most other ways apart from the isa. It’s not that bad as far as performance goes.
- merb 4y ago
  you can copy over rosetta2 but it's not there by default (i.e. you need to dual boot mac into a linux vm with rosetta2 mounted than you can copy the rosetta2 binary)
TacticalCoder 4y ago
Are these ARM64 Mac using ECC? P.S: the 3440x1440 screenshot in TFA looks gorgeous on my system. Everything is using subpixel AA (terminals, code editor, browser, except for the URL, for whatever reason) but not the file manager. I wonder why that is.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > but not the file manager. I wonder why that is. It's documented: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    So that's what happens when you use 3D rendering approaches for 2D text and line drawings. That's too bad. Hopefully we can come up with better approaches to using the GPU's compute hardware for this stuff. Pixel-correct rendering is not a trivial concern;
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Agreed, a 1080p or 1440p screen with good pixel-sharp graphics (which Mac OS does not provide, leaving you with blurry anti-aliasing) is all you need. 4K resolution is overkill.
  - shaunsingh0207 4y ago
    the 1440p screen on my macbook looks incredible on macOS. Apple has been on top of the font rendering game for a long time now
    - bionade24 4y ago
      Because you use a 1st party screen. It's like saying "Linux doesn't have any problems, look at my Pixel phone". Try multiple 3rd-party ones that aren't recommended by Apple and you'll see where the problem lies.
synergy20 4y ago
is the super fast speed mainly due to Linux the OS? is there benchmark done to compare to MacOS? with most recent hardware and 128GB memory I would expect things will run naturally faster no matter what and Linux might not be the key deciding factor. I'm a Linux user, considering to get a M2 Mac Mini these days, and probably load Linux, even better and if possible, dual-boot as I do need MacOS to run some ios apps on emulator.
- deaddodo 4y ago
  I think OP is just saying it’s a very fast/snappy experience, independently (as in the hardware). Not that Linux is necessarily more performant than macOS.
- birken 4y ago
  I have a relatively mid-to-top tier linux desktop (i5-13600K, 64 GB ram) and an M2 Macbook pro (M2 max, 32GB ram). The linux desktop comfortably outperforms the M2 in any CPU based benchmarks while also being significantly cheaper (though the M2 desktop machines are cheaper than the laptops, but still more expensive than the alternatives). If I were doing GPU heavy work than I assume the M2 would have a leg up, but then again I could just buy whatever GPU I wanted for the desktop machine and put it in there and I think it would outperform the mac once again. However, if you were concerned about power consumption than the M2 would win by a mile, but for me it wasn't a huge factor in a desktop machine.
  - synergy20 4y ago
    I saw 64GB vs 32GB here, many apps are memory intensive, thus the linux desktop will win no matter how faster M2 is, it will be interesting to run cpu intensive benchmark between them and see how that goes. for ML training or 3D graphics, I wonder how M1 and M2's NPU and GPU are supported under Linux, unless they're optimized and verified to be superior, I will grab a machine with RTX 3090Ti instead.
    - birken 4y ago
      I have a very CPU intensive single threaded program that runs about 15% faster on the intel CPU. Other CPU benchmarks out there show my particular processor is slightly ahead of the M2 (and there are faster intel/amd processors than the one in my machine). But if you look at power consumption I believe the intel CPU uses something like 3-5x the power to generate that slightly better performance. At the high end of performance, the M2 is just light years better than any other chip (other than the M1) in terms of performance per watt. But if that stops being a concern to you then I think most linux desktop users are better off just getting a "normal" intel machine, which also will have 100% driver support for everything, cost less, and probably be faster.
rvz 4y ago
> Everything works… and works perfectly. All the hardware (Bluetooth, audio, HDMI, USB, 10G Ethernet, WiFi, and GPU) performs flawlessly with the drivers created by the Asahi team this past year, and there isn’t a single piece of software I want or need that doesn’t run beautifully in Asahi on this system. So I am expecting everything from proper GPU acceleration, power management and sleep to the Touch ID keyboard to be 100% working perfectly fine, all guaranteed then?
- deaddodo 4y ago
  OP is using a Mac Studio, which is not a laptop. I don’t think you can take their claim of it 100% working on their hardware and apply it to a completely different machine. In addition, it’s open source software. Not some corporate organization selling you a product. Nothing is guaranteed.
  - rvz 4y ago
    > OP is using a Mac Studio, which is not a laptop. You're telling me that the Mac Studio has no "power management" or "sleep" functionality at all? Not even in macOS? Nor does it have a 'GPU' for GPU acceleration either. We both know that it isn't exclusive to laptops. Everyone knows Touch ID doesn't work, both the seperate keyboard and on Apple Silicon laptops (and Intel Macs) and you know it. > I don’t think you can take their claim of it 100% working on their hardware and apply it to a completely different machine. Yes I can, and I just did since Asahi Linux is aimed at specifically supporting all Apple Silicon machines. OPs machine included. Just admit that the OP is getting carried away with the claim that "Everything works… and works perfectly" when we know that isn't true. A dose of skepticism is needed to cut through wild claims during bouts of hype and euphoria. Even some have already questioned [0] the 'everything works' claim and are still waiting for sleep and power management support [1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015538 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35014923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35014923
    - deaddodo 4y ago
      I don’t need to admit anything. You can read into anything as disingenuously as you like, and go rant off into corners; but you’d get equally far yelling at a wall. OP claimed that all of the hardware they tested (with an enumerated list of said hardware) worked as they expected. For you to take that as some guarantee that you should then have a perfect experience on a completely different (or even the exact same) piece of hardware is your issue. It’s an opinion/experience editorial, not a professional expert/authority on the subject.
karmakaze 4y ago
I wasn't planning to switch to ARM anytime soon, but I was looking for a new Linux distro with Ubuntu heading off in it's own 'Canonical' way. Debian seemed to be a natural default but I'm leaning toward an Arch distro so would prepare me if I should switch to ARM down the road.
- smackeyacky 4y ago
  Pop!OS is worth looking at if you like Ubuntu but don't like where Ubuntu is going. Plain debian is fine though - unless you have a recent laptop and need nvidia drivers. You can make it work, but it's fiddly and the Pop! guys already figured everything out for you. I use debian on an old HP deskside server as a workstation and it's been fantastic.
  - karmakaze 4y ago
    This was my I first thought before Debian because I've noticed Debian packages don't always work like the Ubuntu repo ones and the latter is used by the large majority and I don't mean desktop things but rather server things. The concern is how much infulence will Canonical have on the repo contents itself. If distros have to override Ubuntu repo packages what's the point? I could wait and see if things go that way or choose different. I like voting with my feet.
jlarocco 4y ago
It's cool that Arm64 chips are catching up in speed, but the software support has been there for a long time. When I bought my Raspberry Pi several years back, I was able to comfortably develop using Emacs, gcc, and SBCL Common Lisp - the same software I use on my AMD desktop. Everything I needed "just worked"; compiling just wasn't very fast.
- spwhitton 4y ago
  Ha, Emacs, sbcl and gcc are exactly what I've been using for development for the past few months on my Raspberry Pi 4 desktop replacement.
  - abudabi123 4y ago
    If you have two raspi, 4GB and 8Gb models, you can use tmux, btop to check your memory and cpu levels.
Maursault 4y ago
> This January, I installed Asahi Linux on Apple’s most powerful ARM64 system: the Mac Studio with a 20-core M1 Ultra processor and 128GB of RAM Sucker. For the same price, OP could have had TWO Mac Studios Max 10-core with 64GB RAM each, which together would absolutely spank the Mac Studio Ultra 20-core with 128GB RAM. Why are people falling for this!?
- whalesalad 4y ago
  I want to respond but I can’t tell if this is a joke or not.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    It's not. Two Studios Max considerably outperform one Studio Ultra.
    - whalesalad 4y ago
      What workload do you have that is easy to run across two separate hosts? And how easy is it for you to maintain the workflow? Sounds like a pain in the butt unless you’re using them in a headless fashion.
      - Maursault 4y ago
        Unless there is one single never-ending processing task... forever... I see your point. Generally, everyone else has a never-ending series of processing tasks that obviously can be shared between as many processors as are available. Otherwise, we'd only ever need one single computer and one single person operating it.
djha-skin 4y ago
When I saw "ARM64 Linux Workstation" I immediately thought of my raspberry pi 4 at home (arm64). Kind of annoying really, you'd be surprised at the number of developer tool projects that only publish amd64, and I can't watch netflix without bending over backwards. I haven't gotten widevine to work on it yet :(
- oynqr 4y ago
  At least you have the option, since there are armv7 widevine binaries. Can't run those on M1.
rkunde 4y ago
> In some cases, it is too fast. When I installed K3s, all of the containers in the kube-system namespace kept entering the dreaded CrashLoopBackOff state [..] After some investigation, I found out that the Mac Studio was just too fast for the Kubernetes resource timing I’d like to understand what the issue here is. Sounds counterintuitive to me.
- adrianmsmith 4y ago
  Classic that the only thing they reported didn't work was Kubernetes! Kubernetes is really such a complex and fragile system, at least in my experience.
- linsomniac 4y ago
  I read that as "the container ran so fast that the orchestration assumed it was failing".
- taspeotis 4y ago
  It’s called a race condition. They never expected something to complete before another thing.
  - bornfreddy 4y ago
    Yup. It is also a bug and a very difficult one to catch, so original devs would probably be very grateful for report and help in fixing it. I hope OP opened an issue.
    - ofchnofc 4y ago
      [dead]
- moondev 4y ago
  Same here, OP can you share the limits you added? Or is it on namespace level
  - 4y ago
sylware 4y ago
I would prefer serioulsy to jump from my x86_64 workstation to a RISC-V workstation.
apatheticonion 4y ago
I cannot wait for Linux to be fully usable on my Apple Silicon MBP. That is going to be such a killer environment to develop on. Crazy fast hardware, great high refresh screen, insane battery life, fantastic touchpad, gestures and keyboard. There is the potential that Windows games could run on it with some combination of x86 translation and Proton. Using MacOS on it feels like I have a ferrari with square wheels. Want to play games? Not unless the developers use Apple graphics APIs (not happening for new titles and never happening for old titles). Want to run containerized workloads? Enjoy a cumbersome, slow, virtualized experience. Want to use FUSE? Not on your work computer locked to high-sec mode as you cannot install kernel extensions (where is our user space FS Apple?). Want to write a program that targets MacOS? Expect a cumbersome CI/CD experience because Apple expects you to manually compile distributables. I could go on but as someone who has used MacOS for years and generally appreciates it, Apple really doesn't care much for developers. Other than its POSIX shell, MacOS doesn't have much going for it. At least with my Intel MBP I could dual boot Windows so I could carry one laptop and switch between work and play. Now I have to carry around two computers when I travel for extended periods if I want to game.
- vietvu 4y ago
  Agree on MacOS, it feels like I am being held hostage by Apple when using it. The OS was advertised as developer centric but every single aspect for develop is terrible.
- peoplearepeople 4y ago
  > Want to use FUSE? Fuse is infuriating on MacOS - why is it not included by default??
  - coldtea 4y ago
    Because it's a random third party filesystem adaptor module. Why would it be "included by default"?
    - peoplearepeople 4y ago
haberman 4y ago
Only thing that would make this better is if the containers were running under Rosetta instead of QEMU. I'm hoping this is possible at some point on macOS.
- leni536 4y ago
  The author doesn't seem to emulate x64 for his FreeBSD VM.
- nicce 4y ago
  Docker for Desktop supports this, as well co(lima) apparently. There is also new tool orbstack on the way https://orbstack.dev/ https://orbstack.dev/
kristianpaul 4y ago
Interesting too try a rock5b 16G version as a desktop and see how it behaves
hamilyon2 4y ago
The question is, can you run server workloads on it? It feels like it is obvious choice arm server but someone should be first to try and test it
- akdor1154 4y ago
  Yeah.. I really want to get a stack of mac minis and see how far they go as a self hosted k8s environment. Could be a decent approach for cloud cost averse shops with an appetite for DIY.
avidphantasm 4y ago
Cool. Does sleep and hibernation work?
hendry 4y ago
I noticed upon Apple silicon that when you’re emulating x86 via Colima, performance falls off a cliff. Everything is instant for me on dwm on my AMD Thinkpad
- Ruq 4y ago
  Doesn't performance always fall off a cliff when emulating?
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    Sometimes translation can do an ok job. Eg Rosetta 1/2, the Alpha thing. Still slower than native though.
wkat4242 4y ago
Nice. My particular poison is FreeBSD and I don't think they're quite there yet in terms of support for Apple's hardware. However once they are I would consider it. Currently using a 10th gen Intel i7 NUC which I'm not unhappy with. But a M2 Mac Mini might be a nice successor eventually.
wkat4242 4y ago
> Asahi is a Linux distribution that can run natively on Apple Silicon-based Macs due to some slick reverse engineering provided by members of the open source community. Moreover, running Asahi is perfectly legal because Apple formally allows booting non-macOS operating systems on their Apple Silicon platform. Umm how would it ever be not legal? Even if Apple doesn't formally allow it, you're free too so with your own hardware whatever you want.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- blihp 4y ago
  I think they were referring to the bootloader not being locked down.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  The DMCA made it illegal to circumvent software locks.
  - notpushkin 4y ago
    That doesn't sound right. Hasn't this been overruled a couple years ago?
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    That's only if it's being used to circumvent copyright?
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Is it ARM64 or aarch64?
- n8henrie 4y ago
  I thought they were synonymous. What's are the most important differences?
  - whalesalad 4y ago
    Ya they’re the same thing.
n8henrie 4y ago
Anyone running M1 NixOS? If so, how's it going? Reasonable for a current asahi user that is semi-new to nix?
- Asdrubalini 4y ago
  I do, no issues at all with the beta Asahi kernel, you basically have to git clone https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon in /etc/nixos/, include a file from that repo in the configuration.nix and configure as you like (beta gpu driver or not, which kernel, 4k pages or not, ecc). The experience then is exactly the same as a stock NixOS installation.
ekianjo 4y ago
Now try Box64 on it
whalesalad 4y ago
I’m torn on whether or not to build a Ryzen 7900X workstation or stick with Apple Silicon. I love my M2 Air but want something beefy for my desk. M1 mini is starting to outgrow 16GB of RAM.
freetime2 4y ago
> Everything works… and works perfectly. How can this possibly be true when Asahi Linux is still in alpha? A quick trip to the project page shows lots of hardware features that are still not supported. [1] It’s not a knock against Asahi Linux - it’s amazing what they have accomplished with a small team. It just seems so misleading for the author to claim that everything works perfectly. [1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
- kalleboo 4y ago
  From your link, what's missing for the OP is: Thunderbolt, DP Alt Mode, Video Decoder/Encoder, SEP, Neural Engine, internal Speaker Thunderbolt seems like the main missing feature. It's easy to see how someone could live a fulfilling life without running into the lack of any of those features. E.g. is there even anything on the Linux desktop that could take advantage of the Neural Engine or Secure Enclave?
  - rcme 4y ago
    Lack of HW video support will ruin battery life if you do conference calls or watch YouTube. It’s surprisingly important.
    - masklinn 4y ago
      OP is working on a Mac Studio, which they upgraded to from a mini. I don't think battery life is their concern.
    - colonwqbang 4y ago
      The mac studio has no battery
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      Considering the absolutely awful performance of "modern" web/Electron based communications software (aka all of them), I'd be surprised if they used hardware video encoding/decoding to begin with?
realworldperson 4y ago
[dead]
bornfreddy 4y ago
A bit off-topic: does anyone know what the best new laptop, available in EU, would be for Linux (exclusively)? Preferably something with a keyboard similar to the old ThinkPads (T480)?
- steakscience 4y ago
  Framework laptops also have the repairability and very good Linux support.
- ht_th 4y ago
  I like my NovaCustom I got at the end of last year, but I'm not sure how it compares to the ThinkPads.
  - bornfreddy 4y ago
    Thank you, I wasn't aware of them. IIUC the laptops are made by Clevo? It looks like a very interesting option, I'll check them out.
- rishav_sharan 4y ago
  The Tuxedo Infinity book is the one device that I've got my eyes on. But haven't used it personally though
amelius 4y ago
All this free work to get Linux working on Apple hardware is only getting more people to vote with their dollars for Apple's locked down ecosystem.
diffeomorphism 4y ago
Just so that I understand this correctly: he bought a $6000+ Mac Studio with a 20-core M1 Ultra processor and 128GB of RAM. But all these cores, ram, bandwidth, storage are not important, but rather the fact it is an "ARM64" workstation is what was the game changer. Seriously? Would a $6000+ x64 workstation be noticeably slower?
- dijit 4y ago
  Not sure, but anecdotally I have a machine running linux that was $6,000 and definitely feels slower than my M2 macbook air. Mostly its a question of latency I would imagine. My machine: Archlinux “Zen” (lower latency kernel). Threadripper 3970x 256G DDR4 2666MHz 3x4TiB NVMe (PCIe Gen3) in RAID0 Radeon VII GFX card (more than enough for 2D render of terminals).
  - znpy 4y ago
    > Archlinux “Zen” (lower latency kernel). that might be the problem low latency kernels aren't of any help unless you're running realtime (or near-realtime) workloads. not only that, in order to guarantee high priority tasks they will hurt regular process performances. for desktop usage running a "low latency" kernel is probably a bad idea (no wonder "low latency" kernel config are not the default choice).
    - dijit 4y ago
      I think you have it backwards. The lower latency kernels are great for desktops (and the default for desktop distros typically). They sacrifice raw power for lower latency. So my compiles take a bit longer as the kernel will switch tasks more often, but keypresses will be captured with reduced latency from my perspective. I have tested this, the stock arch kernel has considerable more latency on inputs.
      - diffeomorphism 4y ago
        "Lower latency" usually means lower peak, not average. E.g. <5 99% of the time and 25 1% of the time is "high" but much better for desktops than <15 100% of the time (made up numbers). So you usually avoid low latency or real time kernels unless you need the <15 guarantee.
philliphaydon 4y ago
I’m pretty pissed at Apple at the moment. March 4th and I still cannot buy a MacBook 14” m2 in Taiwan.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  I guess people down voting are showing how upset they are that the new MBP is not released world wide yet.
nix23 4y ago
If i where Apple i would completely opensource the PC-Hardware (documentation, firmware etc). I bet ~everyone would buy a M*-Mac, just let the customer install Windows/Linux/BSD. They could wipe out every other laptop producer in one snip.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jacknews 4y ago
To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: “No.” lol
DeathArrow 4y ago
I am reading this on my X86 Windows workstation which I continue to enjoy. :)
cycomanic 4y ago
I don't get the hype around apple silicon for desktop computers. I sort of understand the power efficiency argument for laptops (although it is often overstated IMO, I could work for >10h straight with my X1 carbon 6 years ago), but for Desktop it is trivial to build a PC that runs significantly faster, with much more upgradability and flexibility for a fraction of the price. So if I want performance on a Linux system why would I choose Apple silicon?
- LeBit 4y ago
  Are you making use of Cunningham's Law?
- recuter 4y ago
  What if you don't want to build a PC and a need for ARM64 (lets say at work they run stuff on ARM64 servers for whatever reason, those fools!)? What if I just want to buy a thing. And then later also be able to sell it maybe.
- neoromantique 4y ago
  >for Desktop it is trivial to build a PC that runs significantly faster <...> for a fraction of the price. Is it though?
  - diffeomorphism 4y ago
    Mac Mini m2 pro with decent ram and storage starts at 2000. According to apple current intel and amd chips are faster but much less efficient (ignoring how to define that for now). If you are the "mini" target customer, 2000 will buy you lots of PC hardware. The article list an m1 ultra with 128gb of ram, so 6000 or so. Not sure what the target market for this is, but the intersection of "4000 does not cut it" and "I don't need high performance computing, clusters, multiple GPUs, no ECC,no more ram than that" to me seems almost empty.
    - neoromantique 4y ago
      >current intel and amd chips are faster These are close to 2k for CPU alone AFAIK. I must admit though I am biased as I am yet to find a fault or reason for an upgrade in my original M1 machine, and I had dual xeon workstation prior to that.
JimmaDaRustla 4y ago
Check out Hyprland
hernantz 4y ago
We need more devs to use linux. It is a better experience IMHO. I've been donating to the asahi project every month hoping apple hardware gets finally liberated.
OJFord 4y ago
Is anything interesting happening for non-Apple desktop/laptop Arm? At the moment building for aarch64 pretty much means embedded, Mac users on the team, or Graviton/other Arm servers. Are we going to reach a point where there's a meaningful mix of architectures, but it doesn't point to the brand of device? Of course Apple will continue with only one thing, but that Lenovo might have options from Arm licensees as well as Intel/AMD?
- gfiorav 4y ago
  I use a thinkpad x13s and i’m happy with it
  - OJFord 4y ago
    Oh I didn't realise they existed! Nice. Performance/specs-wise, I haven't looked in-depth, but seems they compete more with iPads/other tablets + keyboard cases than with Macbook Pros/x86 options in that class and price point though? Thanks though, seems promising. I've been interested in Asahi since I first saw it here, but I can't help wondering if long-term the better buy might not be a ThinkPad, Framework or whatever that only ever expected (Windows or) Linux. (The Framework has probably been enough to quash the draw of Mac hardware/build quality but Linux for me.)
    - gfiorav 4y ago
      Performance sucks comprared to the m1 :) I use it for dev so I don’t care. Don’t expect to train any models with it. It’s very snappy for media consumption though, no issues at all there (if you stick to ARM native apps).
chriscappuccio 4y ago
"Moreover, running Asahi is perfectly legal because Apple formally allows booting non-macOS operating systems on their Apple Silicon platform." As if you were actually violating the law by running non-vendorOS on a vendor locked computer. What a ridiculous concept.
xiwenc 4y ago
> In some cases, it is too fast. When I installed K3s, all of the containers in the kube-system namespace kept entering the dreaded CrashLoopBackOff state (something I’ve never seen before outside a production container). After some investigation, I found out that the Mac Studio was just too fast for the Kubernetes resource timing, and I had to add resource limits to each pod to remedy the situation. You should consider to submit a bug report to k8s project.
axelthegerman 4y ago
That's great - still would love to see if it brings any improvement when using "modern" SPAs. Everything except those work great on my 2013 MBP. Sure compiling will take a bit longer than on that machine but I'm not doing that very often - nor do I occasionally run 48 core kubernetes microservices clusters, but to each their own. Happy to hear about the HW support for Linux though.

778 points by jasoneckert 4y ago

Wayland is great but Sway/any wlroots based window manager can't handle HiDPI properly for X apps :(

Imho the only relevant parts left are: Sleep (which is being tackled right now), USB-C Extra displays (Also WIP) and Hardware Decode for video.

jjtheblunt 4y ago
and audio and screen brightness at least...those don't work on my M2 setup.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Screen brightness works on the beta kernel. Speakers work but are disabled by default because there is a risk it could blow up the hardware
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    > Speakers work but are disabled by default because there is a risk it could blow up the hardware Wait, what? This sounds like a pretty egregious design flaw on Apple's part.
    - Teongot 4y ago
      There's a good write up of it here https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109917995005981968 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109917995005981968
    - eyelidlessness 4y ago
      The (very good) writeup conveys this much better than I could, but briefly for folks not inclined to click/read through: it’s a design trade off. Apple’s solution conditionally sends excess power to the speakers—higher power to achieve better sound under safe conditions, lower power to protect the speakers from damage. It’s quite clever (and quite effective, although I’m sure some audiophiles would disagree), but it’s not the kind of design you’d want to use without an equivalent solution. It’s also an unintuitive benefit of having a whole lot of compute headroom to play with, where you can create an intentional footgun that has meaningful benefits but risks physical consequences, and then spend some of that headroom to disarm the gun. A pure software analogy (because that’s what I know better) would be something like: race a bunch of speculative variant algorithms in parallel, knowing that you’re “wasting” compute time, where the probability of speculation being more optimal than hand tuning is high and pathological cases have a “safe” straightforward deoptimization.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      The tldr is that Apple drives the speakers way past their “always safe” level and then uses software in the OS to detect and dampen the uncommon sounds which could damage the speakers. Resulting in exceptional audio performance. The Asahi Linux devs have already reverse engineered and implemented this safety system but there is a risk they have made a mistake or it doesn’t get enabled due to a bug.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Speakers are just things that move when you send electricity to them. It's not hard to blow up something like that if you try, especially if they heat up over time.
      - josephcsible 4y ago
        Then why isn't this a problem with the built-in speakers of any non-Apple device?
        astrange 4y ago
        It is, you're just not trying hard enough or you're using the official drivers that are software limiting it.
        Gigachad 4y ago
        They either cap them at the “always safe” level which results in much less volume, or you actually can blow them up but you just haven’t played the right sound to trigger it.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > and audio... Overall tip for anyone using Linux and having issues with audio... USB Audio is magical and works wonder. I never bother with the computer's in-board sound: it's USB Audio immediately through a DAC. Works fine. Apple sells $10 USB-C-to-3.5mmjack DAC which are basically a tiny cable (for anyone lamenting it's "too bulky" to have a full-on DAC next to their laptop). For desktops: problem doesn't even register. Just bypass the audio components on your motherboard and use a proper DAC. As an added bonus computers are particularly electrically noisy and a DAC is a great way to do away with all that the noise. So my advice: just use a DAC with Linux. Plug it in. Marvel at "dmesg" showing "USB Audio" and enjoy quality sound.
  - loeg 4y ago
    Be somewhat careful what USB audio device you buy. I've had multiple of these and some of them have tons of EM noise, which is very obnoxious.
    - TacticalCoder 4y ago
      > I've had multiple of these and some of them have tons of EM noise, which is very obnoxious. Ah darn yup! If there's one thing I'd expect from these is to not be noisy! FWIW I'm using a CambridgeAudio DAC and, well, CambridgeAudio is supposed to be a good brand when it comes to audio stuff (amp is CambridgeAudio too).
      - jnsaff2 4y ago
        I've been pretty happy with Dragonfly[0]. Tho they don't come cheap. I have had the black and am currently on the Red, I noticed the difference so I think it's worth it. Have not tried the cobalt. [0] - https://www.audioquest.com/dacs/dragonfly/dragonfly-cobalt https://www.audioquest.com/dacs/dragonfly/dragonfly-cobalt
      - loeg 4y ago
        > CambridgeAudio DAC It looks like these start at $250? I'd expect them to work well. I'm more wary of this pricepoint: > Apple sells $10 USB-C-to-3.5mmjack DAC I've gotten a lot less EM noise with builtin soundcards than cheap USB DACs, but YMMV.
ip26 4y ago
Linux 2013: Sleep support doesn’t work quite yet, but it’s being worked on right now Linux 2023: Sleep support doesn’t work quite yet, but it’s being worked on right now
- tadfisher 4y ago
  You can thank Microsoft for the current mess. S0ix (aka "Modern Standby") doesn't even work right on Windows.
  - bionade24 4y ago
    Linux Laptops with no S3 support use S2, not S0 as on Windows. Still buggy as hell. My XPS sometimes loses 70% in 4 hours standby and then just ~5% in 2 days of standby. Most of the time the battery drain is insane. At least the overheating in bag issue never occured to me.
- antifa 4y ago
  I've still had better experiences with closed laptop lids when using Linux in comparison to windows in the last decade.

eatonphil 4y ago

> Is there anything that doesn’t work? > To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: “No.” > Everything works… and works perfectly. That is impressive and really hard to believe! I guess I'll have to find an M1 mac Mini to try myself!

gbN025tt2Z1E2E4 4y ago
Not that hard to believe when you consider the hardware specs for Apple machines are so heavily locked down to a very specific set of mobo, cpu, and only variability in core count, ram amount, hard drive size, etc. It's not like PC world of mix and match everything.
- runjake 4y ago
  It's hard to believe because virtually none of the proprietary Apple Silicon platform (except the CPU instruction set itself) is documented and involved a tremendous amount of reverse-engineering effort by some very bright volunteers.
  - sixothree 4y ago
    And yet open source community embraces the hardware with fervor.
    - sliken 4y ago
      It's an appealing platform. Entry level is $600, nice memory systems (66GB/sec to 800GB/sec), and nice iGPU. The laptops have nice keyboards, nice trackpads, nice screens, and great battery life. The desktops are built in a solid aluminum chassis and have a single fan (instead of the normal 4-8) and are small and quiet. I do wish apple did a native apple port, but the community is making good progress on that front.
      - sixothree 4y ago
        > but the community is making good progress on that front You mean in reverse engineering hardware?

bolangi 4y ago

All sounds good to me. What I don't get is how running on arm64 would speed up i3. I3 is already fast enough to be unnoticeable, hardly performs any expensive operations.

rarafael 4y ago
I believe they're commenting on the fact that the sway Wayland compositor seems faster than i3. Might be due to how Wayland handles frame rendering, but switching between the two I tend to notice a more "snappy" effect from sway
- bolangi 4y ago
  So more likely they are comparing wayland and X.
darthrupert 4y ago
Everything you run on it, though?
deaddodo 4y ago
I didn’t see OP saying ARM increased performance, just that sway felt more buttery/smooth and easier to configure.

usr1106 4y ago

Depending on the country you live earth overshoot day is pretty soon. 128GB of RAM and other specs for a workstation certainly sound like overshoot. I'd wish smart people would use their brains and saving resources instead of wasting them.

tracker1 4y ago
640K aught to be enough for anybody.
- timbit42 4y ago
  Who said that? No one.
  - tracker1 4y ago
    Bill Gates said that. It's a pretty famous quote.
detrites 4y ago
Until you're living in a tree and sending this message with a carrier pigeon there's some criticisms anyone could level at you also. And, what if our future energy saviour just so happened to need 128GB of RAM to prove their model in time?
- usr1106 4y ago
  I am typing this on a mobile phone. Maybe 7-8 years old. 2 GB of RAM. Sailfish OS, still maintained (not perfectly, but better than the competition). Made as a low cost smart phone for India originally. Works decently well on many Web sites, close to perfectly on HN.
  - kjs3 4y ago
    So a small computer. Full of environmentally problematic stuff. Just small and old. If that's your 'save the planet' plan, keep your condescension to yourself.

silisili 4y ago

That's really impressive! That said, I really wish someone other than Apple would release something like an ARM64 NUC, with good Linux compat. Even something on par with the SD Gen 2 should be plenty to run a desktop day to day.

wongarsu 4y ago
Not a NUC, but there is the ThinkPad X13s. Linux support seems to be shaping up decently, with some hope that it might be supported by stock ubuntu in ubuntu 23.04.
mdaniel 4y ago
I was really tempted to try this out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34027280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34027280 but the 16GB of RAM was too tiny for my day-to-day. It seemed to be a common trend in arm64 things one can buy nowadays
- throwdbaaway 4y ago
  Good info. After reading this, I bought an Orange Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM, and now it is up and running with Ubuntu 22.04. The spec seems to be similar to a c6g.xlarge.
the_pwner224 4y ago
I'm not trying to invalidate your specific use case, but in general, there's not really any practical difference between ARM64 and x86 for desktop use. ARM is generally perceived as being more power efficient, but the latest x86 mobile processors from AMD (and probably also Intel) are very efficient. The Apple M series does have very tightly coupled RAM and onboard ML & video encode accelerators, but when it comes to plain old compute power & efficiency, AMD and Intel have pretty much caught up afaik. There were recently a couple of new NUC-type devices based on the outgoing generation AMD mobile processors. I have the Minisforum UM690, based on the Ryzen 6900HX, and it's been working great as my new desktop computer. The iGPU is pretty good too. The Ryzen 6800U (U = efficient variant, 25 W TDP) is about the same as the M2 for performance and power consumption. The 6900HX in this device is the high power variant, default TDP is 45 W but you can lower it to 25 W in the BIOS which should make it about identical to a 6800U. The newer ones with the latest gen Ryzen chips should be much more efficient.

emilsedgh 4y ago

Asahi Linux is amazing and pretty usable at this point. However, last I tried I couldn't get stuff like Slack and Spotify to work on it because there are no Arm packages for those. Has anyone found a way around that?

inconceivable 4y ago
when i run across this issue i just use their web apps in a separate browser. slack's 'native' app is just a sequestered browser instance. not sure about spotify.
- nicce 4y ago
  You can make your ”own” slack app with few lines of code by using some WebView library, like Tauri and Rust, for fun :-D
davidw 4y ago
Use the web versions?
- psanford 4y ago
  The web version of spotify doesn't work on my m2 air in either chromium or firefox. The Spotify website errors with: "Playback of protected content is not enabled." Slack works just fine from the browser on Asahi though.
  - cpmsmith 4y ago
    You're likely missing the Widevine DRM plugin. IIRC, many distros don't include it, or don't enable it by default.
    - psanford 4y ago
      Where is the publicly available linux/aarch64 build of widevine drm? The fetch-latest-widevine.sh[0] script says 'Architecture not supported'. [0]: https://github.com/proprietary/chromium-widevine/blob/master/fetch-latest-widevine.sh https://github.com/proprietary/chromium-widevine/blob/master...

waingake 4y ago

> Moreover, running Asahi is perfectly legal because Apple formally allows booting non-macOS operating systems on their Apple Silicon platform. How nice of Apple. #snarc

ngold 4y ago
#snarc beats /s anyday. On a serious note. If you want to save on the power bill. Arm anything wins against my 1000 watt xeon workstation. I can heat several rooms with that monster.
- bogwog 4y ago
  It's a shame Apple is Apple and you can't pay a reasonable price for RAM, otherwise these would make awesome servers.
  - sliken 4y ago
    That's the cost for 10x the memory bandwidth of the Ryzen 7950x.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      That's... comically untrue. The Playstation 5 has faster memory than the M1 (448gb/s vs 200), and it was manufactured by AMD before Zen 3 or Apple Silicon even shipped. Dual-channel DDR5 should smoke the LPDDR4X in Apple Silicon in terms of memory bandwidth.
      - sliken 4y ago
        How so? Memory bandwidth (peak, not stream) Ryzen 7950x = 84GB/sec # 128 bit wide ddr5-5200 M1 = 66GB/sec # 128 bit wide ddr5-4800 M2 = 100GB/sec # 128 bit wide ddr5-6400 M1/M2 Pro = 200GB/sec # 256 bit wide M1/M2 Max = 400GB/sec # 512 bit wide M1 Ultra = 800GB/sec # 1024 bit wide, m2 ultra not out 800GB/sec / 84 = 9.5. Although the ARM64 has a more relaxed memory ordering and generally you see a greater fraction of peak in the real world. Also Mac's default to a 16kb page, which helps the TLB with random workloads. Memory bandwidth is part of why the Apple iGPU does so well when compared to Intel and AMDs best iGPUs. Similarly the improved memory system is why the PS5 and XboxX does so well on games. Sadly AMD is reserved the improved memory system for the XboxX and PS5. Both AMD and Intel limit laptops and normal desktops (except for the expensive HEDT segment like the Threadripper) to 128 wide memory.

Avlin67 4y ago

hdmi and workstation doesnt fit, but you can down vote me its fine I dont care.

lizknope 4y ago
Okay but it supports 5 monitors. 1 via HDMI and 4 via the Thunderport / DisplayPort Type-C outputs. I've got a Lenovo Thinkpad and I use a $15 Type C to DisplayPort adapter and it works fine at 4K @60Hz The specs say it supports 6K @60Hz over the Type-C ports and 4K for the HDMI port
MBCook 4y ago
In general I agree with you, but I think that may be a limitation of Asashi right now. So if you want a display it may be your only choice for a desktop.

jeffbee 4y ago

Blanket statements of "everything works" always leave me a little suspicious. But if sleep/wake, DPMS, power consumption, fans, and those kinds of irritants, which are omnipresent even on x86 Linux, are all good under Asahi that is pretty cool.

hillcrestenigma 4y ago

Does anyone know how cost effective a base M1 Mac Studio would be compared to a PC build with comparable cost? There's also the obvious set of trade offs, such as being quiet, compact, but being unrepairable, while the PCs having nearly the opposite qualities. Is the power efficiency of Apple Silicon still a major advantage in a desktop system?

Gigachad 4y ago
I watched one guy build a hackentosh for the same price as a Mac mini and compared them. The intel based one wins in multi threaded workloads but the M1 wins in single threaded, power efficiency, and things which it has hardware acceleration like video encoding.
gabereiser 4y ago
It’s about half the cost to build your own based on Ryzen thread ripper and DDR5. I’ve done this before however, it’s not ARM64. It also requires like 1000w power supply. Can you build a machine just as capable? Yes. Will it be as efficient? No. Will it be Arm? Probably not. That said, I run Apple MacBook Air as my daily so YMMV. *edit* ok a bit more than half. Chip shortage has scalpers sitting on threadrippers.
- danielheath 4y ago
  If you leave it switched on using 5 cents worth of electricity an hour, how long does it take to cost more?
- goosedragons 4y ago
  Do you need a Threadripper to compete with M1 Ultra? Ryzen 9 7950X seems pretty comparable and doesn't require a 1000W PSU unless you must pair it with a 4090 or something.
  - sliken 4y ago
    Depends, how cache friendly is your workload? The M1 ultra has more than 4x the memory bandwidth of the threadripper. Of course the GPU makes a big difference in cost and power use. If you need a 4090, there's nothing comparable. But if the Apple iGPU is enough you save a ton of power and space.

cjdrake 4y ago

Another Arm64 workstation you can buy today: https://www.ipi.wiki/products/ampere-altra-developer-platform https://www.ipi.wiki/products/ampere-altra-developer-platfor...

tbrock 4y ago
Performance isn’t there. Why spend 3k+ on this?
- eatonphil 4y ago
  What's wrong with the performance?
  - tbrock 4y ago
    A comparable m1 is twice as fast in the above benchmarks? And that’s Apple’s chip from 2 years ago! Core for core this is a dog.
    - zznzz 4y ago
      altra is also > 2 years old, so the age of the apple chip doesn’t matter Neoverse N1 is hardly a dog. It’s a decent enough core in a server processor that has 80 of them. Altra is not intended to compete core for core with any laptop/desktop/workstation processor.
    - tjoff 4y ago
      Surely if you consider apple hardware you don't care about performance, price or supporting an ecosystem that underpins the very essence of you are trying to do. Buying mac hardware for a linux workstation is madness.
      - tbrock 4y ago
        I really would like someone else to put out something competitive in that case, I’m rooting for them but haven’t seen it yet.

FlyingSnake 4y ago

> Everything - and I mean everything - is unbelievably fast. As a long time Linux user and someone forced to use MacOS, my hands are itching to buy a 2nd M1/M2 mac and install Asahi linux on it. I've never felt such excitement since the days of Compiz.

amir734jj 4y ago
Don't do it. It's tempting. I bought a high-end System 76, and I am very happy with it.

andrewstuart 4y ago

I'd be curious to see properly done benchmarks against top of the line Intel or AMD machines. I'd be surprised if the Mac was faster. I do understand that people want the Mac for the build quality of the laptop, not just for speed.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mikae1 4y ago
Don't forget that it's the best bang for the watt (at least when running macOS).
- diffeomorphism 4y ago
  Is it? A mac mini with m2 pro, decent ram, decent storage is $2000+. You can buy quite a few Watt hours for that.
  - mikae1 4y ago
    If the base model M1 has the performance you need, it performs very well for the price and has a very low power usage.
TacticalCoder 4y ago
> I do understand that people want the Mac for the build quality of the laptop, not just for speed. I find LG Gram laptops to be of higher build quality than Mac laptops. They may be pricier too depending on which LG Gram and which Mac you buy though. Mac laptops feel and are incredibly brittle. They may look shiny and the screen may look gorgeous, but they're simply brittle. People here and there like to make fun of "MILSPEC" but my MILSPEC LG Gram can sustain quite a beating. Meanwhile my M1 Mac is 1/5th the age of my LG Gram and the M1 Mac's screen is already broken. Mac laptops are very good looking but they are not, to me, of great build quality. They're also heavier than my LG Gram.
- 4y ago

tombert 4y ago

Forgive a bit of ignorance on my end; does Asahi have x86_64 emulation? It would be cool to play Linux Steam games on Arm.

hias 4y ago
Also check this! :) https://box86.org/2022/12/box64-on-asahi-with-experimental-gpu-driver/ https://box86.org/2022/12/box64-on-asahi-with-experimental-g...
zozbot234 4y ago
qemu-user can emulate x86_64 hardware, but it's not going to be as fast as Apple's Rosetta.
- tombert 4y ago
  Yeah, that's what I was afraid of; honestly the reason I haven't seriously attempted moving to Arm Linux full time is because I suspect that it would be great for 99% of stuff, but that 1% of ~30 years of x86 legacy junk would be some huge blocker that forces me to change to something else.
nicce 4y ago
Performance will be terrible as you virtualise instructions. You can try it with QEMU for example.
- zer0zzz 4y ago
  Performance with Rosetta on macos is good enough for most games that shipped for x86 macos. With a decent enough graphics driver implementation it should be feasible to grab the Linux version of Rosetta and use that to play games. A lot of the emulation on Rosetta is straight instruction conversion; the hardware acts like an x86 cpu in most other ways apart from the isa. It’s not that bad as far as performance goes.
merb 4y ago
you can copy over rosetta2 but it's not there by default (i.e. you need to dual boot mac into a linux vm with rosetta2 mounted than you can copy the rosetta2 binary)

TacticalCoder 4y ago

Are these ARM64 Mac using ECC? P.S: the 3440x1440 screenshot in TFA looks gorgeous on my system. Everything is using subpixel AA (terminals, code editor, browser, except for the URL, for whatever reason) but not the file manager. I wonder why that is.

smoldesu 4y ago
> but not the file manager. I wonder why that is. It's documented: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787
- zozbot234 4y ago
  So that's what happens when you use 3D rendering approaches for 2D text and line drawings. That's too bad. Hopefully we can come up with better approaches to using the GPU's compute hardware for this stuff. Pixel-correct rendering is not a trivial concern;
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
zozbot234 4y ago
Agreed, a 1080p or 1440p screen with good pixel-sharp graphics (which Mac OS does not provide, leaving you with blurry anti-aliasing) is all you need. 4K resolution is overkill.
- shaunsingh0207 4y ago
  the 1440p screen on my macbook looks incredible on macOS. Apple has been on top of the font rendering game for a long time now
  - bionade24 4y ago
    Because you use a 1st party screen. It's like saying "Linux doesn't have any problems, look at my Pixel phone". Try multiple 3rd-party ones that aren't recommended by Apple and you'll see where the problem lies.

synergy20 4y ago

is the super fast speed mainly due to Linux the OS? is there benchmark done to compare to MacOS? with most recent hardware and 128GB memory I would expect things will run naturally faster no matter what and Linux might not be the key deciding factor. I'm a Linux user, considering to get a M2 Mac Mini these days, and probably load Linux, even better and if possible, dual-boot as I do need MacOS to run some ios apps on emulator.

deaddodo 4y ago
I think OP is just saying it’s a very fast/snappy experience, independently (as in the hardware). Not that Linux is necessarily more performant than macOS.
birken 4y ago
I have a relatively mid-to-top tier linux desktop (i5-13600K, 64 GB ram) and an M2 Macbook pro (M2 max, 32GB ram). The linux desktop comfortably outperforms the M2 in any CPU based benchmarks while also being significantly cheaper (though the M2 desktop machines are cheaper than the laptops, but still more expensive than the alternatives). If I were doing GPU heavy work than I assume the M2 would have a leg up, but then again I could just buy whatever GPU I wanted for the desktop machine and put it in there and I think it would outperform the mac once again. However, if you were concerned about power consumption than the M2 would win by a mile, but for me it wasn't a huge factor in a desktop machine.
- synergy20 4y ago
  I saw 64GB vs 32GB here, many apps are memory intensive, thus the linux desktop will win no matter how faster M2 is, it will be interesting to run cpu intensive benchmark between them and see how that goes. for ML training or 3D graphics, I wonder how M1 and M2's NPU and GPU are supported under Linux, unless they're optimized and verified to be superior, I will grab a machine with RTX 3090Ti instead.
  - birken 4y ago
    I have a very CPU intensive single threaded program that runs about 15% faster on the intel CPU. Other CPU benchmarks out there show my particular processor is slightly ahead of the M2 (and there are faster intel/amd processors than the one in my machine). But if you look at power consumption I believe the intel CPU uses something like 3-5x the power to generate that slightly better performance. At the high end of performance, the M2 is just light years better than any other chip (other than the M1) in terms of performance per watt. But if that stops being a concern to you then I think most linux desktop users are better off just getting a "normal" intel machine, which also will have 100% driver support for everything, cost less, and probably be faster.

rvz 4y ago

> Everything works… and works perfectly. All the hardware (Bluetooth, audio, HDMI, USB, 10G Ethernet, WiFi, and GPU) performs flawlessly with the drivers created by the Asahi team this past year, and there isn’t a single piece of software I want or need that doesn’t run beautifully in Asahi on this system. So I am expecting everything from proper GPU acceleration, power management and sleep to the Touch ID keyboard to be 100% working perfectly fine, all guaranteed then?

deaddodo 4y ago
OP is using a Mac Studio, which is not a laptop. I don’t think you can take their claim of it 100% working on their hardware and apply it to a completely different machine. In addition, it’s open source software. Not some corporate organization selling you a product. Nothing is guaranteed.
- rvz 4y ago
  > OP is using a Mac Studio, which is not a laptop. You're telling me that the Mac Studio has no "power management" or "sleep" functionality at all? Not even in macOS? Nor does it have a 'GPU' for GPU acceleration either. We both know that it isn't exclusive to laptops. Everyone knows Touch ID doesn't work, both the seperate keyboard and on Apple Silicon laptops (and Intel Macs) and you know it. > I don’t think you can take their claim of it 100% working on their hardware and apply it to a completely different machine. Yes I can, and I just did since Asahi Linux is aimed at specifically supporting all Apple Silicon machines. OPs machine included. Just admit that the OP is getting carried away with the claim that "Everything works… and works perfectly" when we know that isn't true. A dose of skepticism is needed to cut through wild claims during bouts of hype and euphoria. Even some have already questioned [0] the 'everything works' claim and are still waiting for sleep and power management support [1]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35015538 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35014923 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35014923
  - deaddodo 4y ago
    I don’t need to admit anything. You can read into anything as disingenuously as you like, and go rant off into corners; but you’d get equally far yelling at a wall. OP claimed that all of the hardware they tested (with an enumerated list of said hardware) worked as they expected. For you to take that as some guarantee that you should then have a perfect experience on a completely different (or even the exact same) piece of hardware is your issue. It’s an opinion/experience editorial, not a professional expert/authority on the subject.

karmakaze 4y ago

I wasn't planning to switch to ARM anytime soon, but I was looking for a new Linux distro with Ubuntu heading off in it's own 'Canonical' way. Debian seemed to be a natural default but I'm leaning toward an Arch distro so would prepare me if I should switch to ARM down the road.

smackeyacky 4y ago
Pop!OS is worth looking at if you like Ubuntu but don't like where Ubuntu is going. Plain debian is fine though - unless you have a recent laptop and need nvidia drivers. You can make it work, but it's fiddly and the Pop! guys already figured everything out for you. I use debian on an old HP deskside server as a workstation and it's been fantastic.
- karmakaze 4y ago
  This was my I first thought before Debian because I've noticed Debian packages don't always work like the Ubuntu repo ones and the latter is used by the large majority and I don't mean desktop things but rather server things. The concern is how much infulence will Canonical have on the repo contents itself. If distros have to override Ubuntu repo packages what's the point? I could wait and see if things go that way or choose different. I like voting with my feet.

jlarocco 4y ago

It's cool that Arm64 chips are catching up in speed, but the software support has been there for a long time. When I bought my Raspberry Pi several years back, I was able to comfortably develop using Emacs, gcc, and SBCL Common Lisp - the same software I use on my AMD desktop. Everything I needed "just worked"; compiling just wasn't very fast.

spwhitton 4y ago
Ha, Emacs, sbcl and gcc are exactly what I've been using for development for the past few months on my Raspberry Pi 4 desktop replacement.
- abudabi123 4y ago
  If you have two raspi, 4GB and 8Gb models, you can use tmux, btop to check your memory and cpu levels.

Maursault 4y ago

> This January, I installed Asahi Linux on Apple’s most powerful ARM64 system: the Mac Studio with a 20-core M1 Ultra processor and 128GB of RAM Sucker. For the same price, OP could have had TWO Mac Studios Max 10-core with 64GB RAM each, which together would absolutely spank the Mac Studio Ultra 20-core with 128GB RAM. Why are people falling for this!?

whalesalad 4y ago
I want to respond but I can’t tell if this is a joke or not.
- Maursault 4y ago
  It's not. Two Studios Max considerably outperform one Studio Ultra.
  - whalesalad 4y ago
    What workload do you have that is easy to run across two separate hosts? And how easy is it for you to maintain the workflow? Sounds like a pain in the butt unless you’re using them in a headless fashion.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      Unless there is one single never-ending processing task... forever... I see your point. Generally, everyone else has a never-ending series of processing tasks that obviously can be shared between as many processors as are available. Otherwise, we'd only ever need one single computer and one single person operating it.

djha-skin 4y ago

When I saw "ARM64 Linux Workstation" I immediately thought of my raspberry pi 4 at home (arm64). Kind of annoying really, you'd be surprised at the number of developer tool projects that only publish amd64, and I can't watch netflix without bending over backwards. I haven't gotten widevine to work on it yet :(

oynqr 4y ago
At least you have the option, since there are armv7 widevine binaries. Can't run those on M1.

rkunde 4y ago

> In some cases, it is too fast. When I installed K3s, all of the containers in the kube-system namespace kept entering the dreaded CrashLoopBackOff state [..] After some investigation, I found out that the Mac Studio was just too fast for the Kubernetes resource timing I’d like to understand what the issue here is. Sounds counterintuitive to me.

adrianmsmith 4y ago
Classic that the only thing they reported didn't work was Kubernetes! Kubernetes is really such a complex and fragile system, at least in my experience.
linsomniac 4y ago
I read that as "the container ran so fast that the orchestration assumed it was failing".
taspeotis 4y ago
It’s called a race condition. They never expected something to complete before another thing.
- bornfreddy 4y ago
  Yup. It is also a bug and a very difficult one to catch, so original devs would probably be very grateful for report and help in fixing it. I hope OP opened an issue.
  - ofchnofc 4y ago
    [dead]
moondev 4y ago
Same here, OP can you share the limits you added? Or is it on namespace level
- 4y ago

sylware 4y ago

I would prefer serioulsy to jump from my x86_64 workstation to a RISC-V workstation.

apatheticonion 4y ago

I cannot wait for Linux to be fully usable on my Apple Silicon MBP. That is going to be such a killer environment to develop on. Crazy fast hardware, great high refresh screen, insane battery life, fantastic touchpad, gestures and keyboard. There is the potential that Windows games could run on it with some combination of x86 translation and Proton. Using MacOS on it feels like I have a ferrari with square wheels. Want to play games? Not unless the developers use Apple graphics APIs (not happening for new titles and never happening for old titles). Want to run containerized workloads? Enjoy a cumbersome, slow, virtualized experience. Want to use FUSE? Not on your work computer locked to high-sec mode as you cannot install kernel extensions (where is our user space FS Apple?). Want to write a program that targets MacOS? Expect a cumbersome CI/CD experience because Apple expects you to manually compile distributables. I could go on but as someone who has used MacOS for years and generally appreciates it, Apple really doesn't care much for developers. Other than its POSIX shell, MacOS doesn't have much going for it. At least with my Intel MBP I could dual boot Windows so I could carry one laptop and switch between work and play. Now I have to carry around two computers when I travel for extended periods if I want to game.

vietvu 4y ago
Agree on MacOS, it feels like I am being held hostage by Apple when using it. The OS was advertised as developer centric but every single aspect for develop is terrible.
peoplearepeople 4y ago
> Want to use FUSE? Fuse is infuriating on MacOS - why is it not included by default??
- coldtea 4y ago
  Because it's a random third party filesystem adaptor module. Why would it be "included by default"?
  - peoplearepeople 4y ago

haberman 4y ago

Only thing that would make this better is if the containers were running under Rosetta instead of QEMU. I'm hoping this is possible at some point on macOS.

leni536 4y ago
The author doesn't seem to emulate x64 for his FreeBSD VM.
nicce 4y ago
Docker for Desktop supports this, as well co(lima) apparently. There is also new tool orbstack on the way https://orbstack.dev/ https://orbstack.dev/

kristianpaul 4y ago

Interesting too try a rock5b 16G version as a desktop and see how it behaves

hamilyon2 4y ago

The question is, can you run server workloads on it? It feels like it is obvious choice arm server but someone should be first to try and test it

akdor1154 4y ago
Yeah.. I really want to get a stack of mac minis and see how far they go as a self hosted k8s environment. Could be a decent approach for cloud cost averse shops with an appetite for DIY.

avidphantasm 4y ago

Cool. Does sleep and hibernation work?

hendry 4y ago

I noticed upon Apple silicon that when you’re emulating x86 via Colima, performance falls off a cliff. Everything is instant for me on dwm on my AMD Thinkpad

Ruq 4y ago
Doesn't performance always fall off a cliff when emulating?
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  Sometimes translation can do an ok job. Eg Rosetta 1/2, the Alpha thing. Still slower than native though.

wkat4242 4y ago

Nice. My particular poison is FreeBSD and I don't think they're quite there yet in terms of support for Apple's hardware. However once they are I would consider it. Currently using a 10th gen Intel i7 NUC which I'm not unhappy with. But a M2 Mac Mini might be a nice successor eventually.

wkat4242 4y ago

> Asahi is a Linux distribution that can run natively on Apple Silicon-based Macs due to some slick reverse engineering provided by members of the open source community. Moreover, running Asahi is perfectly legal because Apple formally allows booting non-macOS operating systems on their Apple Silicon platform. Umm how would it ever be not legal? Even if Apple doesn't formally allow it, you're free too so with your own hardware whatever you want.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
blihp 4y ago
I think they were referring to the bootloader not being locked down.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
The DMCA made it illegal to circumvent software locks.
- notpushkin 4y ago
  That doesn't sound right. Hasn't this been overruled a couple years ago?
- wkat4242 4y ago
  That's only if it's being used to circumvent copyright?

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

Is it ARM64 or aarch64?

n8henrie 4y ago
I thought they were synonymous. What's are the most important differences?
- whalesalad 4y ago
  Ya they’re the same thing.

n8henrie 4y ago

Anyone running M1 NixOS? If so, how's it going? Reasonable for a current asahi user that is semi-new to nix?

Asdrubalini 4y ago
I do, no issues at all with the beta Asahi kernel, you basically have to git clone https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon https://github.com/tpwrules/nixos-apple-silicon in /etc/nixos/, include a file from that repo in the configuration.nix and configure as you like (beta gpu driver or not, which kernel, 4k pages or not, ecc). The experience then is exactly the same as a stock NixOS installation.

ekianjo 4y ago

Now try Box64 on it

whalesalad 4y ago

I’m torn on whether or not to build a Ryzen 7900X workstation or stick with Apple Silicon. I love my M2 Air but want something beefy for my desk. M1 mini is starting to outgrow 16GB of RAM.

freetime2 4y ago

> Everything works… and works perfectly. How can this possibly be true when Asahi Linux is still in alpha? A quick trip to the project page shows lots of hardware features that are still not supported. [1] It’s not a knock against Asahi Linux - it’s amazing what they have accomplished with a small team. It just seems so misleading for the author to claim that everything works perfectly. [1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support

kalleboo 4y ago
From your link, what's missing for the OP is: Thunderbolt, DP Alt Mode, Video Decoder/Encoder, SEP, Neural Engine, internal Speaker Thunderbolt seems like the main missing feature. It's easy to see how someone could live a fulfilling life without running into the lack of any of those features. E.g. is there even anything on the Linux desktop that could take advantage of the Neural Engine or Secure Enclave?
- rcme 4y ago
  Lack of HW video support will ruin battery life if you do conference calls or watch YouTube. It’s surprisingly important.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    OP is working on a Mac Studio, which they upgraded to from a mini. I don't think battery life is their concern.
  - colonwqbang 4y ago
    The mac studio has no battery
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Considering the absolutely awful performance of "modern" web/Electron based communications software (aka all of them), I'd be surprised if they used hardware video encoding/decoding to begin with?

realworldperson 4y ago

[dead]

bornfreddy 4y ago

A bit off-topic: does anyone know what the best new laptop, available in EU, would be for Linux (exclusively)? Preferably something with a keyboard similar to the old ThinkPads (T480)?

steakscience 4y ago
Framework laptops also have the repairability and very good Linux support.
ht_th 4y ago
I like my NovaCustom I got at the end of last year, but I'm not sure how it compares to the ThinkPads.
- bornfreddy 4y ago
  Thank you, I wasn't aware of them. IIUC the laptops are made by Clevo? It looks like a very interesting option, I'll check them out.
rishav_sharan 4y ago
The Tuxedo Infinity book is the one device that I've got my eyes on. But haven't used it personally though

amelius 4y ago

All this free work to get Linux working on Apple hardware is only getting more people to vote with their dollars for Apple's locked down ecosystem.

diffeomorphism 4y ago

Just so that I understand this correctly: he bought a $6000+ Mac Studio with a 20-core M1 Ultra processor and 128GB of RAM. But all these cores, ram, bandwidth, storage are not important, but rather the fact it is an "ARM64" workstation is what was the game changer. Seriously? Would a $6000+ x64 workstation be noticeably slower?

dijit 4y ago
Not sure, but anecdotally I have a machine running linux that was $6,000 and definitely feels slower than my M2 macbook air. Mostly its a question of latency I would imagine. My machine: Archlinux “Zen” (lower latency kernel). Threadripper 3970x 256G DDR4 2666MHz 3x4TiB NVMe (PCIe Gen3) in RAID0 Radeon VII GFX card (more than enough for 2D render of terminals).
- znpy 4y ago
  > Archlinux “Zen” (lower latency kernel). that might be the problem low latency kernels aren't of any help unless you're running realtime (or near-realtime) workloads. not only that, in order to guarantee high priority tasks they will hurt regular process performances. for desktop usage running a "low latency" kernel is probably a bad idea (no wonder "low latency" kernel config are not the default choice).
  - dijit 4y ago
    I think you have it backwards. The lower latency kernels are great for desktops (and the default for desktop distros typically). They sacrifice raw power for lower latency. So my compiles take a bit longer as the kernel will switch tasks more often, but keypresses will be captured with reduced latency from my perspective. I have tested this, the stock arch kernel has considerable more latency on inputs.
    - diffeomorphism 4y ago
      "Lower latency" usually means lower peak, not average. E.g. <5 99% of the time and 25 1% of the time is "high" but much better for desktops than <15 100% of the time (made up numbers). So you usually avoid low latency or real time kernels unless you need the <15 guarantee.

philliphaydon 4y ago

I’m pretty pissed at Apple at the moment. March 4th and I still cannot buy a MacBook 14” m2 in Taiwan.

philliphaydon 4y ago
I guess people down voting are showing how upset they are that the new MBP is not released world wide yet.

nix23 4y ago

If i where Apple i would completely opensource the PC-Hardware (documentation, firmware etc). I bet ~everyone would buy a M*-Mac, just let the customer install Windows/Linux/BSD. They could wipe out every other laptop producer in one snip.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jacknews 4y ago

To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: “No.” lol

DeathArrow 4y ago

I am reading this on my X86 Windows workstation which I continue to enjoy. :)

cycomanic 4y ago

I don't get the hype around apple silicon for desktop computers. I sort of understand the power efficiency argument for laptops (although it is often overstated IMO, I could work for >10h straight with my X1 carbon 6 years ago), but for Desktop it is trivial to build a PC that runs significantly faster, with much more upgradability and flexibility for a fraction of the price. So if I want performance on a Linux system why would I choose Apple silicon?

LeBit 4y ago
Are you making use of Cunningham's Law?
recuter 4y ago
What if you don't want to build a PC and a need for ARM64 (lets say at work they run stuff on ARM64 servers for whatever reason, those fools!)? What if I just want to buy a thing. And then later also be able to sell it maybe.
neoromantique 4y ago
>for Desktop it is trivial to build a PC that runs significantly faster <...> for a fraction of the price. Is it though?
- diffeomorphism 4y ago
  Mac Mini m2 pro with decent ram and storage starts at 2000. According to apple current intel and amd chips are faster but much less efficient (ignoring how to define that for now). If you are the "mini" target customer, 2000 will buy you lots of PC hardware. The article list an m1 ultra with 128gb of ram, so 6000 or so. Not sure what the target market for this is, but the intersection of "4000 does not cut it" and "I don't need high performance computing, clusters, multiple GPUs, no ECC,no more ram than that" to me seems almost empty.
  - neoromantique 4y ago
    >current intel and amd chips are faster These are close to 2k for CPU alone AFAIK. I must admit though I am biased as I am yet to find a fault or reason for an upgrade in my original M1 machine, and I had dual xeon workstation prior to that.

JimmaDaRustla 4y ago

Check out Hyprland

hernantz 4y ago

We need more devs to use linux. It is a better experience IMHO. I've been donating to the asahi project every month hoping apple hardware gets finally liberated.

OJFord 4y ago

Is anything interesting happening for non-Apple desktop/laptop Arm? At the moment building for aarch64 pretty much means embedded, Mac users on the team, or Graviton/other Arm servers. Are we going to reach a point where there's a meaningful mix of architectures, but it doesn't point to the brand of device? Of course Apple will continue with only one thing, but that Lenovo might have options from Arm licensees as well as Intel/AMD?

gfiorav 4y ago
I use a thinkpad x13s and i’m happy with it
- OJFord 4y ago
  Oh I didn't realise they existed! Nice. Performance/specs-wise, I haven't looked in-depth, but seems they compete more with iPads/other tablets + keyboard cases than with Macbook Pros/x86 options in that class and price point though? Thanks though, seems promising. I've been interested in Asahi since I first saw it here, but I can't help wondering if long-term the better buy might not be a ThinkPad, Framework or whatever that only ever expected (Windows or) Linux. (The Framework has probably been enough to quash the draw of Mac hardware/build quality but Linux for me.)
  - gfiorav 4y ago
    Performance sucks comprared to the m1 :) I use it for dev so I don’t care. Don’t expect to train any models with it. It’s very snappy for media consumption though, no issues at all there (if you stick to ARM native apps).

chriscappuccio 4y ago

"Moreover, running Asahi is perfectly legal because Apple formally allows booting non-macOS operating systems on their Apple Silicon platform." As if you were actually violating the law by running non-vendorOS on a vendor locked computer. What a ridiculous concept.

xiwenc 4y ago

> In some cases, it is too fast. When I installed K3s, all of the containers in the kube-system namespace kept entering the dreaded CrashLoopBackOff state (something I’ve never seen before outside a production container). After some investigation, I found out that the Mac Studio was just too fast for the Kubernetes resource timing, and I had to add resource limits to each pod to remedy the situation. You should consider to submit a bug report to k8s project.

axelthegerman 4y ago

That's great - still would love to see if it brings any improvement when using "modern" SPAs. Everything except those work great on my 2013 MBP. Sure compiling will take a bit longer than on that machine but I'm not doing that very often - nor do I occasionally run 48 core kubernetes microservices clusters, but to each their own. Happy to hear about the HW support for Linux though.