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I have been a thinkpad + arch devoted user for the last 10 years. I just want a nice ARM machine now and it seems the best option at the moment is Macbook Air M

I have been a thinkpad + arch devoted user for the last 10 years. I just want a nice ARM machine now and it seems the best option at the moment is Macbook Air M2 + Asahi. I do not know how to feel about it, maybe a bit of sadness, but I wish great luck to Asahi. Also every blog they post are great read!

microtonal 4y ago
Why do you feel sad? Apple Silicon Macs are fairly open hardware, I see it as a win that there are ARM64 machines now that can run Linux and are competitive with x86_64.
- pxc 4y ago
  As another person who loves free software, I'm a little sad that after so much progress has been made in other areas, when it finally looks like x86's dominance of the desktop and laptop CPU markets is starting to slip, the most attractive contender for a non-x86 Linux laptop is any proprietary platform, Apple or otherwise. And I do have a distaste for putting money in Apple's pockets for various personal reasons, from the huge pile of cache they're sitting on to the way they repeatedly updated my long-dead iPod's firmware just to break its compatibility with open-source tools for syncing music to it way back in the day to the upstream-hostile forming of WebKit from KHTML to their utterly cynical use of 'open-source' as a marketing ploy when they launched OS X. So if I do get an Apple Silicon Mac, it will have to be used even though I wouldn't otherwise want it to be. Because most other hardware vendors suck, too, there are still things Apple could do, short of becoming some kind of open hardware company, that would make me reconsider that general sense of hostility I've gotten from them over the years, which I acknowledged in this other comment on this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35233479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35233479 I just wish my interest in the Apple Silicon option could be wholehearted enthusiasm, instead of something complicated by my relationship to a company whose ethos screams that my values are unimportant on a bunch of different levels.
- rubenfiszel 4y ago
  I am neither an Apple lover or an Apple hater. I think Apple produces extremely well polished products thanks to their vertical integration and have innovated in hardware pushing the frontier, especially with the ARM suites. However, they also have a fairly closed ecosystem in which they are trying to overprice things when they can abusing their dominant position. I would feel sad to contribute to its success but I also selfishly really need the best tool available.
  - sbuk 4y ago
    > However, they also have a fairly closed ecosystem in which they are trying to overprice things when they can abusing their dominant position. They have ~16% of the global market. In no way do they have a dominant position.
    - rubenfiszel 4y ago
      Not wanting to start an anti-apple thread but I meant dominant position in their closed garden. Is that an abuse or not, I'll let the litigators decide.
  - smith7018 4y ago
    Apple's computers are actually quite competitive when comparing price-to-performance. Beyond that, they have great build quality, battery life, components, and support which all adds up to being a great package for their cost. Seriously, this whole "Apple is too expensive" talking point died long ago. When the MacBook Air first came out, it was $1,800 ($2,500 adjusted for inflation) with a slow Intel C2D proc. Now you can get an M1 MacBook Air for $1k or an M2 for $1,200.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      The base models are reasonably competitive. But if you want to upgrade anything then they become extortionate.
    - nightski 4y ago
      I'd argue price/performance is where they are the weakest. Especially when you want more than the bare minimum ram or ssd. An Apple replacement for my current notebook would cost over $5k and I spent a fraction of that. Battery life is really the core differentiator at the moment.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rsaxvc 4y ago
  Not the commenter, but I'm a little sad ThinkPads didn't keep up. They have an ARM64 offering, but it's PlaySkool premium.
- pengaru 4y ago
  > Apple Silicon Macs are fairly open hardware If that were remotely true TFA wouldn't be about reverse engineered GPU support on Apple Silicon. Nor would there really be a need for Asahi Linux to be developed in its own silo while it gets Apple Silicon support hammered out.
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    This isn't really unique to Apple Silicon. The difference here is that most proprietary systems Linux has to work with on PC were reverse engineered many years ago, while AS is being reverse engineered today. The Asahi Linux developers themselves have praised the openness of Apple Silicon, not because they have access to documentation or source code that we don't, but because it seems Apple has gone out of their way to make sure their platform can securely accommodate third party operating systems even though they have no incentive to. It's surprising in contrast to Microsoft, who has been slowly trying to make booting Linux on PCs that ship with Windows harder and harder. I definitely think calling Apple Silicon an "open platform" is a bit of a stretch, but it's not the iron clad walled garden people think it is either.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      > The difference here is that most proprietary systems Linux has to work with on PC were reverse engineered many years ago Such as what, though? Intel and AMD both wrote support for their systems themselves. Nvidia has long offered a proprietary driver for Linux users, and even Intel Macbooks were a shoo-in once the firmware is sorted out. It's been a long time since someone has approached a full-scale reverse engineering project like Asahi, and I think characterizing it as "non-unique" undersells the amount of bespoke work here. Apple made the right move by continuing to allow third-party OSes, but that's not equivalent to building out support. The work required to bring up a black-box SOC is hugely distinct from using first-party drivers to boot into Linux through UEFI.
      - babypuncher 4y ago
        I'm comparing it more to the state of Linux on PC in the '90s and early '00s, when most vendors didn't care about Linux unless you were buying a server. Getting Linux running on a laptop back then was often a mess of hacky reverse engineered drivers, sometimes with incomplete or missing functionality. Of course what Asahi Linux has undertaken still feels like a bigger and more impressive task, I'm just saying that this kind of work is not entirely unprecedented. The current Linux ecosystem on Apple Silicon is more comparable to that of the PC Linux ecosystem from 25 years ago than from today.
leidenfrost 4y ago
A someone with an M1 pro, keep in mind that there's no support for external monitors aside fron the main laptop display, yet.
- oflebbe 4y ago
  using an external monitor on an m1 pro at work.
  - Mike_12345 4y ago
    On Asahi Linux at work?
- tpmoney 4y ago
  Are you talking about support under Asahi because MacOS definitely does have support: > Display Support > Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display > at 1 billion colors and: > > Up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz at over a > billion colors (M1 Pro) or > Up to three external displays with up to 6K resolution and one external > display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Max) > > Thunderbolt 4 digital video output > > Native DisplayPort output over USB‑C > VGA, HDMI, DVI, and Thunderbolt 2 output supported using adapters (sold > separately) > > HDMI digital video output > > Support for one display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz > DVI output using HDMI to DVI Adapter (sold separately) https://support.apple.com/kb/SP854?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/SP854?viewlocale=en_US&locale=e...
  - Mike_12345 4y ago
    The topic here is Asahi Linux. Obviously external displays work on MacOS.

microtonal 4y ago

Why do you feel sad? Apple Silicon Macs are fairly open hardware, I see it as a win that there are ARM64 machines now that can run Linux and are competitive with x86_64.

pxc 4y ago
As another person who loves free software, I'm a little sad that after so much progress has been made in other areas, when it finally looks like x86's dominance of the desktop and laptop CPU markets is starting to slip, the most attractive contender for a non-x86 Linux laptop is any proprietary platform, Apple or otherwise. And I do have a distaste for putting money in Apple's pockets for various personal reasons, from the huge pile of cache they're sitting on to the way they repeatedly updated my long-dead iPod's firmware just to break its compatibility with open-source tools for syncing music to it way back in the day to the upstream-hostile forming of WebKit from KHTML to their utterly cynical use of 'open-source' as a marketing ploy when they launched OS X. So if I do get an Apple Silicon Mac, it will have to be used even though I wouldn't otherwise want it to be. Because most other hardware vendors suck, too, there are still things Apple could do, short of becoming some kind of open hardware company, that would make me reconsider that general sense of hostility I've gotten from them over the years, which I acknowledged in this other comment on this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35233479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35233479 I just wish my interest in the Apple Silicon option could be wholehearted enthusiasm, instead of something complicated by my relationship to a company whose ethos screams that my values are unimportant on a bunch of different levels.
rubenfiszel 4y ago
I am neither an Apple lover or an Apple hater. I think Apple produces extremely well polished products thanks to their vertical integration and have innovated in hardware pushing the frontier, especially with the ARM suites. However, they also have a fairly closed ecosystem in which they are trying to overprice things when they can abusing their dominant position. I would feel sad to contribute to its success but I also selfishly really need the best tool available.
- sbuk 4y ago
  > However, they also have a fairly closed ecosystem in which they are trying to overprice things when they can abusing their dominant position. They have ~16% of the global market. In no way do they have a dominant position.
  - rubenfiszel 4y ago
    Not wanting to start an anti-apple thread but I meant dominant position in their closed garden. Is that an abuse or not, I'll let the litigators decide.
- smith7018 4y ago
  Apple's computers are actually quite competitive when comparing price-to-performance. Beyond that, they have great build quality, battery life, components, and support which all adds up to being a great package for their cost. Seriously, this whole "Apple is too expensive" talking point died long ago. When the MacBook Air first came out, it was $1,800 ($2,500 adjusted for inflation) with a slow Intel C2D proc. Now you can get an M1 MacBook Air for $1k or an M2 for $1,200.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    The base models are reasonably competitive. But if you want to upgrade anything then they become extortionate.
  - nightski 4y ago
    I'd argue price/performance is where they are the weakest. Especially when you want more than the bare minimum ram or ssd. An Apple replacement for my current notebook would cost over $5k and I spent a fraction of that. Battery life is really the core differentiator at the moment.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rsaxvc 4y ago
Not the commenter, but I'm a little sad ThinkPads didn't keep up. They have an ARM64 offering, but it's PlaySkool premium.
pengaru 4y ago
> Apple Silicon Macs are fairly open hardware If that were remotely true TFA wouldn't be about reverse engineered GPU support on Apple Silicon. Nor would there really be a need for Asahi Linux to be developed in its own silo while it gets Apple Silicon support hammered out.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  This isn't really unique to Apple Silicon. The difference here is that most proprietary systems Linux has to work with on PC were reverse engineered many years ago, while AS is being reverse engineered today. The Asahi Linux developers themselves have praised the openness of Apple Silicon, not because they have access to documentation or source code that we don't, but because it seems Apple has gone out of their way to make sure their platform can securely accommodate third party operating systems even though they have no incentive to. It's surprising in contrast to Microsoft, who has been slowly trying to make booting Linux on PCs that ship with Windows harder and harder. I definitely think calling Apple Silicon an "open platform" is a bit of a stretch, but it's not the iron clad walled garden people think it is either.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    > The difference here is that most proprietary systems Linux has to work with on PC were reverse engineered many years ago Such as what, though? Intel and AMD both wrote support for their systems themselves. Nvidia has long offered a proprietary driver for Linux users, and even Intel Macbooks were a shoo-in once the firmware is sorted out. It's been a long time since someone has approached a full-scale reverse engineering project like Asahi, and I think characterizing it as "non-unique" undersells the amount of bespoke work here. Apple made the right move by continuing to allow third-party OSes, but that's not equivalent to building out support. The work required to bring up a black-box SOC is hugely distinct from using first-party drivers to boot into Linux through UEFI.
    - babypuncher 4y ago
      I'm comparing it more to the state of Linux on PC in the '90s and early '00s, when most vendors didn't care about Linux unless you were buying a server. Getting Linux running on a laptop back then was often a mess of hacky reverse engineered drivers, sometimes with incomplete or missing functionality. Of course what Asahi Linux has undertaken still feels like a bigger and more impressive task, I'm just saying that this kind of work is not entirely unprecedented. The current Linux ecosystem on Apple Silicon is more comparable to that of the PC Linux ecosystem from 25 years ago than from today.

leidenfrost 4y ago

A someone with an M1 pro, keep in mind that there's no support for external monitors aside fron the main laptop display, yet.

oflebbe 4y ago
using an external monitor on an m1 pro at work.
- Mike_12345 4y ago
  On Asahi Linux at work?
tpmoney 4y ago
Are you talking about support under Asahi because MacOS definitely does have support: > Display Support > Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display > at 1 billion colors and: > > Up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz at over a > billion colors (M1 Pro) or > Up to three external displays with up to 6K resolution and one external > display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Max) > > Thunderbolt 4 digital video output > > Native DisplayPort output over USB‑C > VGA, HDMI, DVI, and Thunderbolt 2 output supported using adapters (sold > separately) > > HDMI digital video output > > Support for one display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz > DVI output using HDMI to DVI Adapter (sold separately) https://support.apple.com/kb/SP854?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/SP854?viewlocale=en_US&locale=e...
- Mike_12345 4y ago
  The topic here is Asahi Linux. Obviously external displays work on MacOS.