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Its been more than a year I'm running asahi on my macbook air and I can't stress how grateful I feel for enjoying such wonderful freedom. I don't feel like eve
by kytazo 3y ago
Its been more than a year I'm running asahi on my macbook air and I can't stress how grateful I feel for enjoying such wonderful freedom.
I don't feel like ever going back to x86 to be honest, at this point there is nothing lacking or unable to run and when the neural engine drivers come online now that the GPU is starting to mature people will be able to juice out every last bit of computation this machine is capable of.
For the record, I've switched to the edge branch a couple of months ago and honestly I noticed no actual difference in my day-to-day tasks which is really telling about how powerful even the M1 is when it can handle software rendering in such an effortless manner coupled with anything else running.
Really thank god for asahi being a thing.
- endorphine 3y agoCurious, what do you use it for?
- lucabs 3y ago[dead]
- smoldesu 3y ago> when the neural engine drivers come online now Has there been any ongoing work on this? It's been marked as "WIP" in GitHub for a while now, and I'd imagine it's one of the more complicated things to reverse-engineer.
- dougall 3y agoSome: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35301630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35301630
- kytazo 3y agoYou can check here for some insight https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi/search?q=ane https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi/search?q=ane https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi/search?q=neural https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi/search?q=neural https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi-dev/search?q=ane https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi-dev/search?q=ane
- JCWasmx86 3y agoWould you say buying e.g. a Mac mini for 2.3k€ just to run Asahi Linux is worth it?
- jacquesm 3y agoNot the OP but I got a 13" and a larger model Mac of the x86 variety when they were still reasonably young and even though I eventually got all of the bits and pieces to work it usually pays off to wait until a somewhat larger distro supports the hardware as well. That way you benefit from a much larger crowd of testers and once they have no more issues you should be good to go. Moneywise it was definitely worth it, both machines are still working many years later and have been pretty much trouble free after the initial bugs were ironed out. If I was in the market for a new laptop right now I'd wait for a bit and then pull the trigger on the latest model with broad support.
- jb1991 3y agoI’ve owned both windows and Apple computers, quite many of them, over the last 20 years. On average, the Apple machines last at least twice as long as the windows machines while still being fully usable. One could argue just based on that basic math that they are worth twice the price.
- jabbany 3y agoUnfortunately, Apple machines are usually 4 - 10 times more expensive, making this choice still quite difficult.
- jb1991 3y agoThey are expensive but 10X certainly seems like a stretch. Show me comparably specd hardware only 10% the price of an Apple machine?
- Thews 3y agoA micro ryzen 5600U build with really bad quality components can be half the price of a mac mini with equal CPU performance. If you upgrade all of the mac specs you can probably get a larger divide, but IMO maxed out macs don't make much sense for most people.
- aseipp 3y agoThe compute accelerator story on mainstream, non-patched Linux, with upstream software isn't that good at the moment. You're going to be waiting a while before you can do fun stuff like organize layers across the Neural Engine and GPU for ML models, something CoreML can do today. Compute using graphics APIs exists, but it isn't really the same and loses out on many features people practically want and are used to, and it moves forward much more quickly than graphics APIs e.g. Nvidia just released Heterogeneous Memory Management as stable in the open source GPU driver for x86. The Linux accelerator ecosystem in practice is just held together by Nvidia's effort, honestly. We really need something like Mesa, but for compute accelerator APIs. I'm really hoping that IREE helps smooth out parts of the software stack and can fill in part of this, but the pieces aren't all put in place yet. You'll need the GPU for a substantial amount of accelerator work regardless of Neural Engine support. I disagree that there is nothing lacking on these machines with Asahi, I still run into small nits all the time (from 16k page sizes biting back to software missing features). But my M2 Air is 100%, no-questions-asked usable as a daily driver and on-the-go hacking machine, it is fast as hell and quiet, it has nested virtualization and is the only modern ARM machine on the market, and I love it for that.
- themulticaster 3y agoIs the Neural Engine/CoreML used in "normal" desktop apps on macOS, or is it limited to specialized ML centered apps? In other words, where should I expect performance improvements if there was a hypothetical Mesa for compute accelerators? Spontaneously, I can only think of image editors like Photoshop offering AI-based tools.
- imiric 3y ago> at this point there is nothing lacking or unable to run Sure there is. You just haven't run into it yourself. Faster, cooler and more power efficient hardware is great. I just don't think that it makes up for depending on a small team of volunteers to resolve all hardware issues in an ecosystem hostile to OSS, which might break at any point Apple decides to do so. And the incompatibilities with ARM are not negligible. If all your software runs on it, great. If not, good luck depending on yet another translation layer. I'm sticking with my slow, hot and power-hungry x86 machines with worse build quality for the foreseeable future. The new AMD mobile chips are certainly in the ballpark of what Apple silicon can do, so I won't be missing much.
- fallat 3y ago> I just don't think that it makes up for depending on a small team of volunteers to resolve all hardware issues in an ecosystem hostile to OSS This. The volunteer pool is too small. And you're supporting a shitty company.
- simonh 3y ago[flagged]
- throwaway894345 3y agoI would like to see the volunteer pool grow, but I suspect a lot of things in the Linux kernel are maintained by a small pool of volunteers--it's not like all volunteers (or paid developers) work across the whole kernel, after all. Also, which are the virtuous hardware companies and what's stopping them from making compelling products? And since I'm already a Mac user, I've already supported this evil company, so what does it matter if I change out the operating system?
- fallat 3y agoNot sure why you're fixated on the whole Linux kernel - we're talking about a small pool of volunteers supporting complex modules. There are good laptops out there other than Macs... Lenovo, HP, Dell, etc all have offerings which are supported out of the box by Linux because they aren't using their own hardware or do contribute the necessary code to run FOSS OSs. I'm not asking you to now dump your Mac. That'd be silly. Continue to use your Mac with Asahi, just don't complain if Apple decides to break anything at any time, and expect it. Know that what you type on now is already planned for obsolescence and most likely has intentional design flaws as shown again and again by people like Louis Rossmann. When your Mac dies, I am asking you to not buy Apple for your next laptop. That's all that can be reasonably asked.
- est31 3y agoThe features support page lists the webcam as TBA. How do you do video conferencing? USB webcam? No video?
- mschuster91 3y agoPeople who demand others show their faces in a video call generally aren't fun to be around anyway, and if it's family or friends just use your phone.
- mo_42 3y agoI'm running it on my M1 MBP. Also super happy. How do you use suspend? That’s the only thing I’m really missing currently.