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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 hig

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
    Because it's necessary for a load of use-cases, and installing a *kernel* extension for it is terrible for deployment
  - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
    Most of the Unix utilities that are included were written by third parties. They're "included by default" because they're useful and take up a negligible amount of space.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      They're included by default because they are standard UNIX userland. FUSE is nowhere near that.
      - peoplearepeople 4y ago
        A machine without FUSE is a toy
      - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
        FUSE is newer than netcat or bzip2. That doesn't mean it isn't expected as standard. Linux, BSD and others all have it.
        mtrower 4y ago
        Where is FUSE in the POSIX or SUS standard?
- octotoad 4y ago
  MacFUSE isn’t even open source anymore, so it would likely involve Apple forking a version prior to the license change and maintaining that themselves.
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  They have their own APIs for it but seem to have assessed that the only mainstream use case is cloud sync, which they always provide a better API for.
mardifoufs 4y ago
I'm wondering if an M1 MacBook would actually have such a good battery life on linux. The processor is very power efficient, but I'd (naively) assume that MacOS's power management probably has a big influence too. In the same way that Linux laptops usually have a bad battery life compared to the same hardware on Windows. How good is Asahi when running similar workloads? And is it possible that it could reach parity with "stock" MacOS? (I'm sure linux is in theory just as power efficient as MacOS or Windows, but distros are just usually not very concerned or capable of tuning it well enough.)
- rektide 4y ago
  Installing Linux has had huge wins for me for power usage. Running powertop --auto-tune helps a good bit. I used to fiddle forever but this gets like 80% of the wins. Things like "do we reduce power state of sata links" used to be extremely conservatively set, for fear of really old hardware from the beginning of sata era that behaved badly, but was an obvious &bhige win for 99.999999% of folk. Linux has finally started turning a bunch of these baseline expected tuning on by default, across the past few years (rather than powertop doing it), so the out of box experience is finally much more reasonable. It's been like this forever but people love throwing shade. I had a Transmeta Crusoe laptop (p1120) amd yes, at first battery life was worde. But I did low hanging fruit optimizations, and Linux got better, and soon I had like an hour more runtime on Linux. Mac famously has a trashburger IO subsystem, so not having that boat anchor hanging off the side should probably let the system hurry-up-and-idle better, saving power.
  - pxc 4y ago
    powertop is way underrated. You don't have to know much to get a lot out of it safely.
  - FooBarWidget 4y ago
    I don't understand why the powertop tunings aren't the default when the distro detects it's running on a laptop.
    - 4y ago
ar_lan 4y ago
I would consider myself quite the power user and use both macOS and Linux daily… I don’t really understand, from the developer perspective, your concerns about macOS? While I prefer the feel of Linux, macOS is more than sufficient for almost any development I do (which also involves a lot of container/VM development and I’ve never felt this was slow).
- moondev 4y ago
  macOS can't run Linux containers because it's not Linux. It requires a vm and additional tooling, configuration, resources and just general considerations because of this. It's also impossible to work with anything KVM related on macOS, which would require a vm inside a vm and is not supported on any M1 or M2 hypervisor.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Maybe it is time to understand the difference between being UNIX and yet another Linux distribution?
- fhd2 4y ago
  I used mostly macOS for the last few years, with the occasional Linux. Recently I switched back to Linux (System76 laptop) completely, and only now do I realise how complacent I've been with macOS. There's stuff like iTunes opening every time I connected BT headphones, and regular attempts to nag me into using Safari. Then there's a boat load of issues I found workarounds for: The window manager with its fullscreen mode and lack of tiling (Spectacle makes that bearable), the unique modifier keys that don't work well out of the box with readline shortcuts in the terminal and such, the often still manual process of installing and updating apps (maybe I could have used Brew or MacPorts more heavily), the inability to debug and fix any OS problems, and a literal hundred small things I can't even remember from the top of my head. These things are all individually so small that I didn't event think about it, but when I realised the sheer quantity, I felt like I was in a codependent relationship with my main tool. Apple doesn't seem to care even remotely about users like me, and that's perfectly within their rights. The logical thing for me was to use something else.
api 4y ago
APFS has some kind of “file provider” API that apparently allows user space file systems. No idea how hard it is to use or if it’s well documented.
princevegeta89 4y ago
Do we know what doesn't work yet? I'm rooting to get Asahi onto my M1 mbp and have fallen out of the loop as to what is pending to be done on the Asahi side of things
- dougall 4y ago
  Feature support: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support Asahi is still in Alpha. Expect things to be a bit rough.
CharlesW 4y ago
> 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?). FYI, MacFUSE has a user-space library (`libfuse`). The kernel extension also works fine on macOS 13 if you can persuade your IT department to allow it.
- apatheticonion 4y ago
  I use the user space alternative, yeah - it does the trick though it integrates as a network drive. Unfortunately, MacBooks are limited to being in "restricted" security mode which disallows kernel extensions from being loaded. We are not allowed to use "Permissive" security mode
capableweb 4y ago
> 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. This is why I couldn't justify continuing spending money on Apple (computer) hardware, I don't want to feel like a second-rate citizen on the platform I spend most of my time on. I used and loved MacBooks for a long time, but eventually I got tired of fighting against the one I'm giving money to for hardware, and had to switch away. I'm gonna be honest and say that recent M2 laptops from Apple almost got me to buy one yet again, after a couple of years of hiatus from Apple laptops, but my wife reasonably reminded me about how much I bitched about various things last time I used their laptops for work. Ended up with another Carbon X1, and everything works as expected, battery works OK and so on. But a side of me would love a laptop, but I need the maker to actually want to support me, not make it feel like sometimes they work against me.
- throw10920 4y ago
  > But a side of me would love a laptop, but I need the maker to actually want to support me, not make it feel like sometimes they work against me. Take a look at the Framework - a friend got it and is very happy with it. https://frame.work/ https://frame.work/
jlokier 4y ago
On my x86 MBP, I run GNU/Linux in VMWare Fusion, full screen. That gives me a combination of both worlds, which I can easily switch between with 4-finger swipe. I did battery life tests running the same Linux distro natively vs in a VM on MacOS. What I found surprised me: battery life was better with the VM than native, so I stayed with the VM. When a VM is used, driver issues are effectively absent as Apple drivers handle most devices. (USB devices can be passed through to the VM.) The touch pads are properly calibrated and gestures work. Things like external displays just work. GPU access is not the same as from native Linux but the basic OpenGL support in VMWare Fusion was good enough for what I wanted to do. (That's not true any more though.) Historically I've been more of a Linux user (and developer) on other laptops but it became interesting to get to know the MacOS world as well while still using Linux for dev work.
- titzer 4y ago
  > I run GNU/Linux in VMWare Fusion Just to be clear, is that an arm64 linux? Because emulating x86-64-linux still seems to be not very good.
  - adastra22 4y ago
    > On my x86 MBP
    - titzer 4y ago
      Sorry, missed that part :)
- apatheticonion 4y ago
  I do this also (with Arm64 Linux) but it does ruin your battery.
- vinceguidry 4y ago
  I also run Linux in VWWare Fusion and it's mostly great. But mics just don't pass through well. I have to switch to OSX to run Teams at all, and also to Slack if I need to huddle.
noloblo 4y ago
also No need to use flash usb drive just enter in terminal curl https://alx.sh https://alx.sh | sh to install asahi linux Dual boot on m1 or m2 MacBook apple silicon
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Great idea piping a website straight into a shell.
  - noloblo 4y ago
    seems to be clean bash script http://pastie.org/p/578asRpS0abo92Efj1YGLZ http://pastie.org/p/578asRpS0abo92Efj1YGLZ FWIW so seems safe to me
    - DominoTree 4y ago
      The script that actually does stuff is here https://de.mirror.asahilinux.org/installer/installer-v0.5.3.tar.gz https://de.mirror.asahilinux.org/installer/installer-v0.5.3....
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      *<checks if axl.sh is available for registration>*
  - baq 4y ago
    About as bad as downloading an exe and running it
    - nix23 4y ago
      I did that many times since my laptop has no cd reader anymore.
  - jodrellblank 4y ago
    Installing gigabytes of Linux and applications from people you have no contract with, who have no obligation towards you, is a good idea but running a script to install it, that’s too far?
coldtea 4y ago
>I cannot wait for Linux to be fully usable on my Apple Silicon MBP Since TFA says "everything works" atm, including GPU, Bluetooth, Audio, USB, etc, what's stopping you from doing it now?
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I'd imagine they're talking about like-native support for the GPU and heterogeneous CPU architecture. Plus, the desktop experience in the article avoids some of the less-finished MBP parts like the speakers and brightness controls.
- apatheticonion 4y ago
  Support for multi external monitors and improvements to power efficiency. It's also unlikely that my company's security team will permit Asahi until Apple Silicon support is available in the mainline Linux kernel. I asked and they said currently they don't permit it Native GPU support with support for Vulkan APIs and some games running would also go a long way towards making the switch as I'm permitted to dual boot MacOS and Asahi - allowing me to once again use one device for "work and play". Right now I dual boot Asahi and it's "work and experiment"
- Gigachad 4y ago
  For me it’s the fact you can’t use external displays and the fact it can’t sleep yet so it drains while the lid is closed. All things that should be fixed soon.
ActorNightly 4y ago
I seem to be in the minority, but I honestly don't get how people can develop productively on a laptop. The lack of full size keyboard, screen real estate, and uncomfortable touchpad compared to a mouse just feels horrible to me.
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  I’ve grown to hate using a mouse, and love the MacBook trackpad. Having your hands so close to both keyboard and trackpad means less travel time between.
  - mouse_ 4y ago
    That's why I like trackpoint. Mouse without as much as moving your fingers from the home row.
    - notpushkin 4y ago
      I like the idea behind trackpoint, but I just can't get used to it. Any tips?
      - torgoguys 4y ago
        Force yourself to use it exclusively for a while, no cheating. For better (it's great) AND worse (you have fewer options for laptops), there's no going back after that. I love it and even use Trackpoint with my desktop computer.
        askiiart 4y ago
        Are there any hot-swappaple mechanical keyboards with a trackpoint? The only mechanical keyboard with a trackpoint I can find is the Tex Yoda II, which isn't hot-swappaple, and is also very expensive.
        projektfu 4y ago
duxup 4y ago
> Want to play games? This is an interesting topic. I found a surprising amount of games available that run on my new MBA just fine.
naikrovek 4y ago
> Want to write a program that targets MacOS? Expect a cumbersome CI/CD experience because Apple expects you to manually compile distributables. I'm not sure this is true anymore. I download source and run "make" and the Xcode compilers all do their thing and entitlements are applied and so on. I haven't tried to do any store submissions or anything but it all seems like Apple are aware that CI systems are a thing, now
_cenw 4y ago
Incientally, the best Windows ARM experience is to be had on the MacBook with Parallels. I haven't really used Linux ARM outside of Parallels (except on a Pi 3, and that's not a fair comparison), but I bet the experience is up there.
wraptile 4y ago
I really don't understand the obsession with Apple laptop hardware. There are many alternatives that objective better: more ergonomic, less reflective screens, better keyboards, cheaper, lighter.
- arcosdev 4y ago
  Point me at a processor as good as the M1 and I'll buy it
  - sofixa 4y ago
    Define good? An AMD Ryzen 7 6900HS has similar single-core performance, much better multi-core performance for slightly worse power efficiency, compared to an M2. Add in the added advantage of flexibility (you can buy different hardware and switch it up like add RAM and disk and GPUs to your liking) and the fact you can run more things on it (e.g. game), and it's pretty "good". Is it better than an M2? Depends on what you're looking for.
    - munhitsu 4y ago
      slightly worse power efficiency is a slight understatement ;)
    - neop1x 4y ago
      >> slightly worse power efficiency I don't believe it. My M2 Max maxes at around 40W. x86 just isn't that power efficient. You can idle with only one/few economy core turned on running at the lowest power state for longer battery life but x86 is simply very hungry when running high loads and it can't be magically improved. The arch is just obsolete and legacy.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  Apple's processors are really really good.
- neop1x 4y ago
  I haven't seen a non-apple laptop with a such a great touchpad, sound and display. It is always only one, max two of these criteria. I have been using x86 laptops in the past (terrible clickpad and speakers like a cheap handheld radio from '90 but whatever, I ignored the overpriced Intel Macs). But M2 is something which I couldn't ignore anymore, bought and I am very happy. They are awesome (unless you buy lowest spec 8GB RAM version)! My only complaint is the soldered SSD and apple pricing on SSD. Having a slot there would make so much sense...
skissane 4y ago
> 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?). It exists already - https://threedots.ovh/blog/2022/06/quick-look-at-user-mode-file-systems-on-macos-ventura/ https://threedots.ovh/blog/2022/06/quick-look-at-user-mode-f... - it is just that Apple hasn’t made the API public, and (AFAIK) won’t give you the entitlements necessary to use it. But, both are issues Apple could fix relatively easily - if they wanted to - and here’s to hoping the fix is coming soon However, there is an alternative that works right now - have your user-space filesystem process act as an NFS or SMB server, and mount that. From what I’ve heard - https://lists.nfs-ganesha.org/archives/list/devel@lists.nfs-ganesha.org/thread/JFRLHI2SOMOYNZPZNNJJFP36BJD57DDU/ https://lists.nfs-ganesha.org/archives/list/devel@lists.nfs-... - macOS even supports mounting NFS filesystems over Unix domain sockets, which has performance and security advantages over IP loopback
- saagarjha 4y ago
  Last I heard there are no plans to do this.
  - skissane 4y ago
    If true that's a pity. 20 years ago, Apple cared about macOS as a Unix, they were interested in putting in features that developers and sysadmins wanted, like this. Sadly, today's Apple has a rather different attitude towards that sort of thing
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  I think they're uninterested because they have a documented and supported userspace VFS API. The problem is, it's really designed for cloud drives and so deeply assumes a sync model. Works great for the intended use case, much better than Fuse but if you want to do something unusual, not so hot.
- eproxus 4y ago
  There’s a new FUSE implementation that uses this technique: https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t Worked without problems for sshfs when I tested it briefly.
pjmlp 4y ago
A ferrari with square wheels, that is a good one. A UNIX descendent of NextSTEP tooling, versus the distribution of the month in GNU/Linux world, preaching they will get the desktop this year, for 20 plus years, and the road for gaming relies on pretending to be Windows. Treat macOS as Mac OS, not as a Linux distribution. A proper set of UI frameworks, not stuck in pre-history C and C++ workloads or even worse Electron, a 3D graphics API that doesn't require one to become a graphics driver programmer to draw a triangle, proper attention to UI/UX,... "They said a Unix weenie was code for software engineers who hated what we were doing to Unix (the operating system we licensed)—putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers. They heckled Steve about his efforts to destroy it. His nightmare would be to speak to a crowd of them." https://web.archive.org/web/20180628214613/https://www.cake.co/conversations/rZXhqtP/that-time-i-had-steve-jobs-keynote-at-unix-expo https://web.archive.org/web/20180628214613/https://www.cake....
- baq 4y ago
  I’m paid to develop apps which deploy on Linux containers. macOS is uniquely incapable of providing a good development experience for that use case. Even Windows with WSL2 is leaps and bounds ahead.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Then don't buy a Mac, that simple. WSL 2 is a Hyper V VM for running Linux distributions, while WSL emulated Linux syscalls. Surely some of that salary can be used to make OEMs selling Linux hardware happy, instead of buying Apple and then complaining macOS isn't yet another Linux distribution. If you want WSL like experience on Mac, VMWare is happy to provide it to you. It is like complaining using Playstation SDK isn't fit to target Nintendo Switch, go figure!
    - tinco 4y ago
      Or you know, take off the square wheels and put some round wheels on.
satysin 4y ago
> Using MacOS on it feels like I have a ferrari with square wheels. Indeed macOS is the weakest part when working on Apple Silicon. Sure it’s quite pretty but it stumbles over itself with terrible quality of life features. macOS looks modern but feels around ten years behind other desktops now. Apple love to talk about how professionals and power users can get so much work done with the amazing Apple Silicon but ignore the fact window management is garbage. The UI still frequently stutters/judders when just resizing a window. There is no true virtual desktop management. Etc. I do love macOS but Windows and Linux desktop environments are evolving much faster with excellent quality of life and productivity improvements that macOS badly needs but Apple ignore or worse over engineer other “solutions” such as Stage Manager. Honestly who at Apple signed off on Stage Manager before basic window snapping?! Does nobody at Apple have an ultrawide monitor? macOS is painful to work with on anything not 16:9 (or :10).
- mtrower 4y ago
  > ignore the fact window management is garbage. All I can say is that I'm flabbergasted by this statement. Expose was lightyears ahead of Windows window management at the time (10.4!), and it took Microsoft until Windows 10 to include it in Windows (same for virtual desktop functionality). > no true virtual desktop management Not sure what you consider "true" virtual desktops; OS X 10.5 had classic workspaces with Spaces; Mission control later localized workspaces to monitors. Both approaches have their pros and cons. What exactly is it that has Windows 10 years ahead of MacOS in window management? > before basic window snapping I can snap two windows side by side in a fullscreen split (the most common use case for snapping). I would certainly call that "basic window snapping". > Does nobody at Apple have an ultrawide monitor? macOS is painful to work with on anything not 16:9 (or :10). I don't know. They don't sell any, right? Apple designs their user experience for their own hardware. It's just table stakes with them. tl;dr -- these are your opinions. They differ from those of others. That's how Apple can ignore the fact that their window management is "garbage" --- they likely don't see it that way.
- greggsy 4y ago
  > Honestly who at Apple signed off on Stage Manager before basic window snapping?! My money is that the iPad team are steering a lot of these decisions as part of a broader strategy to converge their desktop and mobile platforms.
trvz 4y ago
> not happening for new titles Resident Evil Village, Baldur's Gate 3. > and never happening for old titles World of Warcraft.
DeathArrow 4y ago
>Using MacOS on it feels like I have a ferrari with square wheels. Probably they care more about iOS since iPhone is their money maker. They might release iOS on MacBooks, too.
jacknews 4y ago
"Using MacOS on it feels like I have a ferrari with square wheels." LOL. There was a time when mac/macos was the premium choice for a development environment, but I think that time has gone. Apple spent too much focus on iOS.
_448 4y ago
> insane battery life Is it just hardware that helps extend battery life or is it the combination of hardware and software? One advantage for Apple is that they are both the hardware and software designer hence they can optimise both to take advantage of each other.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  It’s always the sum of all that extends battery life but even when Linux support was just “CPU only rendering and minimal powersave functionality using unmodified DE components” the battery life was still decent. Brute force is quite the force.
andrewstuart 4y ago
For desktop why wouldn’t you use Intel or AMD? They’re faster and cheaper and more compatible and better software support. I can understand people who want a Mac laptop, but seems weird to choose a slower, more expensive, less mainstream machine for desktop.

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
  Because it's necessary for a load of use-cases, and installing a *kernel* extension for it is terrible for deployment
- AnthonyMouse 4y ago
  Most of the Unix utilities that are included were written by third parties. They're "included by default" because they're useful and take up a negligible amount of space.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    They're included by default because they are standard UNIX userland. FUSE is nowhere near that.
    - peoplearepeople 4y ago
      A machine without FUSE is a toy
    - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
      FUSE is newer than netcat or bzip2. That doesn't mean it isn't expected as standard. Linux, BSD and others all have it.
      - mtrower 4y ago
        Where is FUSE in the POSIX or SUS standard?
octotoad 4y ago
MacFUSE isn’t even open source anymore, so it would likely involve Apple forking a version prior to the license change and maintaining that themselves.
fidgewidge 4y ago
They have their own APIs for it but seem to have assessed that the only mainstream use case is cloud sync, which they always provide a better API for.

mardifoufs 4y ago

I'm wondering if an M1 MacBook would actually have such a good battery life on linux. The processor is very power efficient, but I'd (naively) assume that MacOS's power management probably has a big influence too. In the same way that Linux laptops usually have a bad battery life compared to the same hardware on Windows. How good is Asahi when running similar workloads? And is it possible that it could reach parity with "stock" MacOS? (I'm sure linux is in theory just as power efficient as MacOS or Windows, but distros are just usually not very concerned or capable of tuning it well enough.)

rektide 4y ago
Installing Linux has had huge wins for me for power usage. Running powertop --auto-tune helps a good bit. I used to fiddle forever but this gets like 80% of the wins. Things like "do we reduce power state of sata links" used to be extremely conservatively set, for fear of really old hardware from the beginning of sata era that behaved badly, but was an obvious &bhige win for 99.999999% of folk. Linux has finally started turning a bunch of these baseline expected tuning on by default, across the past few years (rather than powertop doing it), so the out of box experience is finally much more reasonable. It's been like this forever but people love throwing shade. I had a Transmeta Crusoe laptop (p1120) amd yes, at first battery life was worde. But I did low hanging fruit optimizations, and Linux got better, and soon I had like an hour more runtime on Linux. Mac famously has a trashburger IO subsystem, so not having that boat anchor hanging off the side should probably let the system hurry-up-and-idle better, saving power.
- pxc 4y ago
  powertop is way underrated. You don't have to know much to get a lot out of it safely.
- FooBarWidget 4y ago
  I don't understand why the powertop tunings aren't the default when the distro detects it's running on a laptop.
  - 4y ago

ar_lan 4y ago

I would consider myself quite the power user and use both macOS and Linux daily… I don’t really understand, from the developer perspective, your concerns about macOS? While I prefer the feel of Linux, macOS is more than sufficient for almost any development I do (which also involves a lot of container/VM development and I’ve never felt this was slow).

moondev 4y ago
macOS can't run Linux containers because it's not Linux. It requires a vm and additional tooling, configuration, resources and just general considerations because of this. It's also impossible to work with anything KVM related on macOS, which would require a vm inside a vm and is not supported on any M1 or M2 hypervisor.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Maybe it is time to understand the difference between being UNIX and yet another Linux distribution?
fhd2 4y ago
I used mostly macOS for the last few years, with the occasional Linux. Recently I switched back to Linux (System76 laptop) completely, and only now do I realise how complacent I've been with macOS. There's stuff like iTunes opening every time I connected BT headphones, and regular attempts to nag me into using Safari. Then there's a boat load of issues I found workarounds for: The window manager with its fullscreen mode and lack of tiling (Spectacle makes that bearable), the unique modifier keys that don't work well out of the box with readline shortcuts in the terminal and such, the often still manual process of installing and updating apps (maybe I could have used Brew or MacPorts more heavily), the inability to debug and fix any OS problems, and a literal hundred small things I can't even remember from the top of my head. These things are all individually so small that I didn't event think about it, but when I realised the sheer quantity, I felt like I was in a codependent relationship with my main tool. Apple doesn't seem to care even remotely about users like me, and that's perfectly within their rights. The logical thing for me was to use something else.

api 4y ago

APFS has some kind of “file provider” API that apparently allows user space file systems. No idea how hard it is to use or if it’s well documented.

princevegeta89 4y ago

Do we know what doesn't work yet? I'm rooting to get Asahi onto my M1 mbp and have fallen out of the loop as to what is pending to be done on the Asahi side of things

dougall 4y ago
Feature support: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support Asahi is still in Alpha. Expect things to be a bit rough.

CharlesW 4y ago

> 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?). FYI, MacFUSE has a user-space library (`libfuse`). The kernel extension also works fine on macOS 13 if you can persuade your IT department to allow it.

apatheticonion 4y ago
I use the user space alternative, yeah - it does the trick though it integrates as a network drive. Unfortunately, MacBooks are limited to being in "restricted" security mode which disallows kernel extensions from being loaded. We are not allowed to use "Permissive" security mode

capableweb 4y ago

> 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. This is why I couldn't justify continuing spending money on Apple (computer) hardware, I don't want to feel like a second-rate citizen on the platform I spend most of my time on. I used and loved MacBooks for a long time, but eventually I got tired of fighting against the one I'm giving money to for hardware, and had to switch away. I'm gonna be honest and say that recent M2 laptops from Apple almost got me to buy one yet again, after a couple of years of hiatus from Apple laptops, but my wife reasonably reminded me about how much I bitched about various things last time I used their laptops for work. Ended up with another Carbon X1, and everything works as expected, battery works OK and so on. But a side of me would love a laptop, but I need the maker to actually want to support me, not make it feel like sometimes they work against me.

throw10920 4y ago
> But a side of me would love a laptop, but I need the maker to actually want to support me, not make it feel like sometimes they work against me. Take a look at the Framework - a friend got it and is very happy with it. https://frame.work/ https://frame.work/

jlokier 4y ago

On my x86 MBP, I run GNU/Linux in VMWare Fusion, full screen. That gives me a combination of both worlds, which I can easily switch between with 4-finger swipe. I did battery life tests running the same Linux distro natively vs in a VM on MacOS. What I found surprised me: battery life was better with the VM than native, so I stayed with the VM. When a VM is used, driver issues are effectively absent as Apple drivers handle most devices. (USB devices can be passed through to the VM.) The touch pads are properly calibrated and gestures work. Things like external displays just work. GPU access is not the same as from native Linux but the basic OpenGL support in VMWare Fusion was good enough for what I wanted to do. (That's not true any more though.) Historically I've been more of a Linux user (and developer) on other laptops but it became interesting to get to know the MacOS world as well while still using Linux for dev work.

titzer 4y ago
> I run GNU/Linux in VMWare Fusion Just to be clear, is that an arm64 linux? Because emulating x86-64-linux still seems to be not very good.
- adastra22 4y ago
  > On my x86 MBP
  - titzer 4y ago
    Sorry, missed that part :)
apatheticonion 4y ago
I do this also (with Arm64 Linux) but it does ruin your battery.
vinceguidry 4y ago
I also run Linux in VWWare Fusion and it's mostly great. But mics just don't pass through well. I have to switch to OSX to run Teams at all, and also to Slack if I need to huddle.

noloblo 4y ago

also No need to use flash usb drive just enter in terminal curl https://alx.sh https://alx.sh | sh to install asahi linux Dual boot on m1 or m2 MacBook apple silicon

wkat4242 4y ago
Great idea piping a website straight into a shell.
- noloblo 4y ago
  seems to be clean bash script http://pastie.org/p/578asRpS0abo92Efj1YGLZ http://pastie.org/p/578asRpS0abo92Efj1YGLZ FWIW so seems safe to me
  - DominoTree 4y ago
    The script that actually does stuff is here https://de.mirror.asahilinux.org/installer/installer-v0.5.3.tar.gz https://de.mirror.asahilinux.org/installer/installer-v0.5.3....
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    *<checks if axl.sh is available for registration>*
- baq 4y ago
  About as bad as downloading an exe and running it
  - nix23 4y ago
    I did that many times since my laptop has no cd reader anymore.
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  Installing gigabytes of Linux and applications from people you have no contract with, who have no obligation towards you, is a good idea but running a script to install it, that’s too far?

coldtea 4y ago

>I cannot wait for Linux to be fully usable on my Apple Silicon MBP Since TFA says "everything works" atm, including GPU, Bluetooth, Audio, USB, etc, what's stopping you from doing it now?

smoldesu 4y ago
I'd imagine they're talking about like-native support for the GPU and heterogeneous CPU architecture. Plus, the desktop experience in the article avoids some of the less-finished MBP parts like the speakers and brightness controls.
apatheticonion 4y ago
Support for multi external monitors and improvements to power efficiency. It's also unlikely that my company's security team will permit Asahi until Apple Silicon support is available in the mainline Linux kernel. I asked and they said currently they don't permit it Native GPU support with support for Vulkan APIs and some games running would also go a long way towards making the switch as I'm permitted to dual boot MacOS and Asahi - allowing me to once again use one device for "work and play". Right now I dual boot Asahi and it's "work and experiment"
Gigachad 4y ago
For me it’s the fact you can’t use external displays and the fact it can’t sleep yet so it drains while the lid is closed. All things that should be fixed soon.

ActorNightly 4y ago

I seem to be in the minority, but I honestly don't get how people can develop productively on a laptop. The lack of full size keyboard, screen real estate, and uncomfortable touchpad compared to a mouse just feels horrible to me.

mgkimsal 4y ago
I’ve grown to hate using a mouse, and love the MacBook trackpad. Having your hands so close to both keyboard and trackpad means less travel time between.
- mouse_ 4y ago
  That's why I like trackpoint. Mouse without as much as moving your fingers from the home row.
  - notpushkin 4y ago
    I like the idea behind trackpoint, but I just can't get used to it. Any tips?
    - torgoguys 4y ago
      Force yourself to use it exclusively for a while, no cheating. For better (it's great) AND worse (you have fewer options for laptops), there's no going back after that. I love it and even use Trackpoint with my desktop computer.
      - askiiart 4y ago
        Are there any hot-swappaple mechanical keyboards with a trackpoint? The only mechanical keyboard with a trackpoint I can find is the Tex Yoda II, which isn't hot-swappaple, and is also very expensive.
        projektfu 4y ago

duxup 4y ago

> Want to play games? This is an interesting topic. I found a surprising amount of games available that run on my new MBA just fine.

naikrovek 4y ago

> Want to write a program that targets MacOS? Expect a cumbersome CI/CD experience because Apple expects you to manually compile distributables. I'm not sure this is true anymore. I download source and run "make" and the Xcode compilers all do their thing and entitlements are applied and so on. I haven't tried to do any store submissions or anything but it all seems like Apple are aware that CI systems are a thing, now

_cenw 4y ago

Incientally, the best Windows ARM experience is to be had on the MacBook with Parallels. I haven't really used Linux ARM outside of Parallels (except on a Pi 3, and that's not a fair comparison), but I bet the experience is up there.

wraptile 4y ago

I really don't understand the obsession with Apple laptop hardware. There are many alternatives that objective better: more ergonomic, less reflective screens, better keyboards, cheaper, lighter.

arcosdev 4y ago
Point me at a processor as good as the M1 and I'll buy it
- sofixa 4y ago
  Define good? An AMD Ryzen 7 6900HS has similar single-core performance, much better multi-core performance for slightly worse power efficiency, compared to an M2. Add in the added advantage of flexibility (you can buy different hardware and switch it up like add RAM and disk and GPUs to your liking) and the fact you can run more things on it (e.g. game), and it's pretty "good". Is it better than an M2? Depends on what you're looking for.
  - munhitsu 4y ago
    slightly worse power efficiency is a slight understatement ;)
  - neop1x 4y ago
    >> slightly worse power efficiency I don't believe it. My M2 Max maxes at around 40W. x86 just isn't that power efficient. You can idle with only one/few economy core turned on running at the lowest power state for longer battery life but x86 is simply very hungry when running high loads and it can't be magically improved. The arch is just obsolete and legacy.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
Apple's processors are really really good.
neop1x 4y ago
I haven't seen a non-apple laptop with a such a great touchpad, sound and display. It is always only one, max two of these criteria. I have been using x86 laptops in the past (terrible clickpad and speakers like a cheap handheld radio from '90 but whatever, I ignored the overpriced Intel Macs). But M2 is something which I couldn't ignore anymore, bought and I am very happy. They are awesome (unless you buy lowest spec 8GB RAM version)! My only complaint is the soldered SSD and apple pricing on SSD. Having a slot there would make so much sense...

skissane 4y ago

> 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?). It exists already - https://threedots.ovh/blog/2022/06/quick-look-at-user-mode-file-systems-on-macos-ventura/ https://threedots.ovh/blog/2022/06/quick-look-at-user-mode-f... - it is just that Apple hasn’t made the API public, and (AFAIK) won’t give you the entitlements necessary to use it. But, both are issues Apple could fix relatively easily - if they wanted to - and here’s to hoping the fix is coming soon However, there is an alternative that works right now - have your user-space filesystem process act as an NFS or SMB server, and mount that. From what I’ve heard - https://lists.nfs-ganesha.org/archives/list/devel@lists.nfs-ganesha.org/thread/JFRLHI2SOMOYNZPZNNJJFP36BJD57DDU/ https://lists.nfs-ganesha.org/archives/list/devel@lists.nfs-... - macOS even supports mounting NFS filesystems over Unix domain sockets, which has performance and security advantages over IP loopback

saagarjha 4y ago
Last I heard there are no plans to do this.
- skissane 4y ago
  If true that's a pity. 20 years ago, Apple cared about macOS as a Unix, they were interested in putting in features that developers and sysadmins wanted, like this. Sadly, today's Apple has a rather different attitude towards that sort of thing
fidgewidge 4y ago
I think they're uninterested because they have a documented and supported userspace VFS API. The problem is, it's really designed for cloud drives and so deeply assumes a sync model. Works great for the intended use case, much better than Fuse but if you want to do something unusual, not so hot.
eproxus 4y ago
There’s a new FUSE implementation that uses this technique: https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t https://github.com/macos-fuse-t/fuse-t Worked without problems for sshfs when I tested it briefly.

pjmlp 4y ago

A ferrari with square wheels, that is a good one. A UNIX descendent of NextSTEP tooling, versus the distribution of the month in GNU/Linux world, preaching they will get the desktop this year, for 20 plus years, and the road for gaming relies on pretending to be Windows. Treat macOS as Mac OS, not as a Linux distribution. A proper set of UI frameworks, not stuck in pre-history C and C++ workloads or even worse Electron, a 3D graphics API that doesn't require one to become a graphics driver programmer to draw a triangle, proper attention to UI/UX,... "They said a Unix weenie was code for software engineers who hated what we were doing to Unix (the operating system we licensed)—putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers. They heckled Steve about his efforts to destroy it. His nightmare would be to speak to a crowd of them." https://web.archive.org/web/20180628214613/https://www.cake.co/conversations/rZXhqtP/that-time-i-had-steve-jobs-keynote-at-unix-expo https://web.archive.org/web/20180628214613/https://www.cake....

baq 4y ago
I’m paid to develop apps which deploy on Linux containers. macOS is uniquely incapable of providing a good development experience for that use case. Even Windows with WSL2 is leaps and bounds ahead.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Then don't buy a Mac, that simple. WSL 2 is a Hyper V VM for running Linux distributions, while WSL emulated Linux syscalls. Surely some of that salary can be used to make OEMs selling Linux hardware happy, instead of buying Apple and then complaining macOS isn't yet another Linux distribution. If you want WSL like experience on Mac, VMWare is happy to provide it to you. It is like complaining using Playstation SDK isn't fit to target Nintendo Switch, go figure!
  - tinco 4y ago
    Or you know, take off the square wheels and put some round wheels on.

satysin 4y ago

> Using MacOS on it feels like I have a ferrari with square wheels. Indeed macOS is the weakest part when working on Apple Silicon. Sure it’s quite pretty but it stumbles over itself with terrible quality of life features. macOS looks modern but feels around ten years behind other desktops now. Apple love to talk about how professionals and power users can get so much work done with the amazing Apple Silicon but ignore the fact window management is garbage. The UI still frequently stutters/judders when just resizing a window. There is no true virtual desktop management. Etc. I do love macOS but Windows and Linux desktop environments are evolving much faster with excellent quality of life and productivity improvements that macOS badly needs but Apple ignore or worse over engineer other “solutions” such as Stage Manager. Honestly who at Apple signed off on Stage Manager before basic window snapping?! Does nobody at Apple have an ultrawide monitor? macOS is painful to work with on anything not 16:9 (or :10).

mtrower 4y ago
> ignore the fact window management is garbage. All I can say is that I'm flabbergasted by this statement. Expose was lightyears ahead of Windows window management at the time (10.4!), and it took Microsoft until Windows 10 to include it in Windows (same for virtual desktop functionality). > no true virtual desktop management Not sure what you consider "true" virtual desktops; OS X 10.5 had classic workspaces with Spaces; Mission control later localized workspaces to monitors. Both approaches have their pros and cons. What exactly is it that has Windows 10 years ahead of MacOS in window management? > before basic window snapping I can snap two windows side by side in a fullscreen split (the most common use case for snapping). I would certainly call that "basic window snapping". > Does nobody at Apple have an ultrawide monitor? macOS is painful to work with on anything not 16:9 (or :10). I don't know. They don't sell any, right? Apple designs their user experience for their own hardware. It's just table stakes with them. tl;dr -- these are your opinions. They differ from those of others. That's how Apple can ignore the fact that their window management is "garbage" --- they likely don't see it that way.
greggsy 4y ago
> Honestly who at Apple signed off on Stage Manager before basic window snapping?! My money is that the iPad team are steering a lot of these decisions as part of a broader strategy to converge their desktop and mobile platforms.

trvz 4y ago

> not happening for new titles Resident Evil Village, Baldur's Gate 3. > and never happening for old titles World of Warcraft.

DeathArrow 4y ago

>Using MacOS on it feels like I have a ferrari with square wheels. Probably they care more about iOS since iPhone is their money maker. They might release iOS on MacBooks, too.

jacknews 4y ago

"Using MacOS on it feels like I have a ferrari with square wheels." LOL. There was a time when mac/macos was the premium choice for a development environment, but I think that time has gone. Apple spent too much focus on iOS.

_448 4y ago

> insane battery life Is it just hardware that helps extend battery life or is it the combination of hardware and software? One advantage for Apple is that they are both the hardware and software designer hence they can optimise both to take advantage of each other.

zamadatix 4y ago
It’s always the sum of all that extends battery life but even when Linux support was just “CPU only rendering and minimal powersave functionality using unmodified DE components” the battery life was still decent. Brute force is quite the force.

andrewstuart 4y ago

For desktop why wouldn’t you use Intel or AMD? They’re faster and cheaper and more compatible and better software support. I can understand people who want a Mac laptop, but seems weird to choose a slower, more expensive, less mainstream machine for desktop.