8 ms·

This is great work and I commend it. But in other threads people are acting like Asahi Linux hardware support is 100% complete. My fear is that if I were to g

This is great work and I commend it. But in other threads people are acting like Asahi Linux hardware support is 100% complete. My fear is that if I were to go this route and purchase the hardware I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability I would in Mac OS. To be honest this blog post seems like the project has a long ways to go, not that it is nearly completion. I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be.

rollcat 3y ago
> I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be. I don't think it's hostile, I think they're just hands-off; they throw the hardware over the fence and say, "if you wanna make use of it, here's our software; if you don't like our software, sorry no docs but you're free to write your own". Which is exactly what's happening. I mean it would be nice if Apple had released more documentation, but I totally understand if they don't want the burden of supporting it.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  There's a line somewhere, and I think it's different for every person. For a lot of people, the pricing itself is just outright hostile. 8gb of RAM in a base model Mac is not future-proofed in an age of local AI models, and paying to upgrade it gets expensive, fast. For others the OS is hostile when it unceremoniously drops support for $THING they use, or because it has the gall to show them ads. For others yet, the hardware is hostile because it's basically a black box that Apple withholds documenting to maintain a monopoly on fixing them. Apple is one of the few companies smart enough to deliberately do this. It is both a testament to ability to do brilliant things, and akin to being trapped in a room with a lion that has twice your SAT score. The "golden handcuffs", as they say.
  - kytazo 3y ago
    Well overall if you sum up what even a basic m1 mb air packs, be it the panel, quality peripherals and soc itself its rather reasonable and within reach for almost anyone contemplating of buying a new computer. When you factor in that they were the first ones with an actual capable desktop arm offer I'd even say its cheap. At least this is how I felt 2 years ago back when I bought it and more or less even to this day. I'm wondering how is the market as of now, two years later, and how the $1k arm laptops coming out today compare.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    There is literally no other laptop on the market that would be anywhere close to an M1 air in terms of performance-battery life combo. And it is definitely not even on the upper end in price for that, tiny windows laptops are ridiculously expensive! So, are they really expensive?
  - amon22 3y ago
    Macbooks are really cheap for what they are, not sure what are you on friend. I would never buy one though, still, they are very impressive and its a shame that they are not free.
- thx-2718 3y ago
  First, personally I don't care what hardware or software people use, if they are happy with the tools that they using then that's good. That said, Apple has been very hostile to hackers over the years imo. Hardware being hard to repair, access, upgrade, etc. I think at one point they were making it virtually impossible to replace components because they were serial locked. As far as I am aware, progress Apple as made has been in response to public image issues or changes in consumer laws within the EU. Plus Apple software is heavily indebted to Open Source software so they very easily could be releasing drivers for their hardware instead of relying on community to do backwards engineering.
  - rowanG077 3y ago
    That's not true for Macs. Apple allowed and worked with MS to allow windows to work on Intel macs. That's pretty insane from allowing people to do what they want with their hardware.
    - thx-2718 3y ago
      No offense but that's not even contextually the same thing so I'm not really sure what you're trying to say.
      - rowanG077 3y ago
        You claim Apples Mac line of products is adversarial to hackers. Which I dispute with the example they help alternative OS to run on the Mac. First with Windows and now Asahi.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    > Hardware being hard to repair, access, upgrade, etc. I think at one point they were making it virtually impossible to replace components because they were serial locked You can only have so many flexibility in design with modern hardware — they are not fitting things into 5 cm “thin” chassics anymore. How exactly are such a thin device be repairable? Similarly to how old car motors could be tweaked with, you need special tools to touch anything in a modern engine. This is not against the customers, these are trade offs. But even this way, apple devices have by far the longest lifetimes, macs, iphones will have 2-3 owners easily - so is it really fair to call them out, or is it just baseless emotional reaction? Also, what you heard about locked down components resulted in better security, a much lower risk of theft, and a much more clean second-hand market (where you won’t be sold a phone with a cheap chinese shittier screen for example).
viraptor 3y ago
> I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability You'd temporarily lose some hardware support (documented) while it's being worked on. But I'm not sure why you expect losing performance? This is running native code. Same binary will run the same on both systems (+/- the llvm version differences).
- nightski 3y ago
  Specifically GPU drivers, which can dramatically impact performance. Especially if I am attempting to run any kind of ML workload from Linux. I'm assuming it's basically a non-starter at this point and one is forced to use Mac OS.
  - viraptor 3y ago
    Yes. I put that in the capability rather than performance basket though. As in, you can't access the compute shaders yet, rather than: you can and they're slower.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  E.g. the performance you can get out of the GPU at the moment is a subset of what you can get out of the hardware. Or as another more generic example, until this latest release CPU boost states weren't enabled due to lack of proper cpuidle driver which resulted in regressed single thread performance. There is nothing inherent about running Linux that will require it be slower, in some cases it will/is even faster, but the lack of everything being fully supported does actually impact performance right now. It has been getting better with time.
  - rowanG077 3y ago
    Even with the regressed performance it beat osx in a ton of workloads.
  - kytazo 3y ago
    CPU wise at least its been on par if not better from its first days. At least this is what the various benchmarks at the time showed. Makes you wonder about how the rest of the system components will compare when they're finished.
zamadatix 3y ago
A car with one seat seems 100% complete if your use cases only involve you driving it alone. Asahi Linux is absolutely in that kind of spot right now. For some people there is 0 reason to wait, for others it's not even worth booting. If you have fear it's not fully complete enough, I'd say trust those feelings. At least right now.
GeekyBear 3y ago
You don't create a new bootloader that allows users the freedom to run an unsigned third party OS without having it degrade the system's security if and when they boot the native OS because you are "hostile to developers and hackers".
- fsflover 3y ago
  My laptop can use TPM and a hardware key with my keys and free software. Where is the degraded security?
  - hedora 3y ago
    I could trick you into adding a hardware key, then install a tampered version of Windows with it. (Also, the last time I looked, TPM keys could be grabbed with ~ $100 of hardware, but I think that's fixed by some newer standard.) But, yeah, it's not a big tradeoff in practice. I think their point was that Apple had to expend effort to enable the use case, which isn't "hostile" toward the use case.
    - GeekyBear 3y ago
      > I could trick you into adding a hardware key, then install a tampered version of Windows with it. There are other issues as well. For instance, on a PC the security settings are applied per machine and not per partition, so you can't mix an unsigned OS on one partition with full security on another partition. Also: > On Wednesday, researchers at security firm ESET presented a deep-dive analysis of the world’s first in-the-wild UEFI bootkit that bypasses Secure Boot on fully updated UEFI systems running fully updated versions of Windows 10 and 11. Despite Microsoft releasing new patched software, the vulnerable signed binaries have yet to be added to the UEFI revocation list that flags boot files that should no longer be trusted. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/unkillable-uefi-malware-bypassing-secure-boot-enabled-by-unpatchable-windows-flaw/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/unkil...
      - hedora 3y ago
jb1991 3y ago
There have been multiple reports of the last couple years that Apple has been informally internally helping the Asahi Linux team to make it run well on their hardware. Apple cannot come out and officially support another operating system of course, but they are aware of the interest and are helping make it happen, in an unofficial capacity.
- freedomben 3y ago
  > Apple cannot come out and officially support another operating system of course Why?
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    Yeah that's nonsense. They already have bootcamp.
    - jb1991 3y ago
      That’s incorrect. Bootcamp has not existed for a while now.
      - IshKebab 3y ago
        Looks like it still exists, they just never ported it to the ARM chips, presumably because nobody wants ARM Windows. In any case that's really irrelevant to the main point which is that Apple appears to have no objection to other OSes running on their laptops. Though I wouldn't be surprised if they don't go out of their way to help and make it de facto impossible through secure boot systems.
- hollerith 3y ago
  >Apple cannot come out and officially support another operating system of course Apple officially supported running Windows on Macs for many years.
  - jb1991 3y ago
kaba0 3y ago
> I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be. As opposed to what company besides those tiny ones? Almost all of them are closed-source only and drivers have been painstakingly reversed engineered over decades.
coldtea 3y ago
>My fear is that if I were to go this route and purchase the hardware I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability I would in Mac OS. The performance is there, it has been running stuff much faster than the vast majority of Intel/AMD laptops for over a year. Regarding the capabilities not sure which one you miss. Do you plan to use it for development, or you want some kind of gaming/multimedia setup? >To be honest this blog post seems like the project has a long ways to go, not that it is nearly completion. It's the other way around. It has been usable as a daily driver for ages. >I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be. Then don't?
- nightski 3y ago
  I don't see why it is unreasonable to desire Apple to provide documentation and open up their hardware. Honestly I'd ask the same as any other hardware vendor. Intel for example provides very detailed technical documents on their new GPUs (A770).
  - coldtea 3y ago
    It's not unreasonable, it's just not gonna happen any time soon.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    > Intel for example provides very detailed technical documents on their new GPUs Intel sells parts to other people, and those buyers expect that kind of documentation. And when it comes to GPUs they’re in 3rd place for high end GPUs and are incentivized to give people as much info as possible to optimize for their hardware. Apple doesn’t sell their computer hardware to any other OEMs, or hsve a 3rd party making their OS, so they don’t need to produce documentation for anyone. I agree it would be nice if it was documented. But absent a law forcing them I don’t see it happening.
- caskstrength 3y ago
  > Regarding the capabilities not sure which one you miss. Do you plan to use it for development, or you want some kind of gaming/multimedia setup? > It's the other way around. It has been usable as a daily driver for ages. Honest questions since I haven't been paying attention to Asahi for some time now: - Does hardware accelerated video decoding work? Including in Firefox? - Does sleep work properly or do I get significant battery drain after leaving it sleeping during the night time? Also, does it wake up from sleep reliably? Like if you open/close the lid 100 times in a row would it crash? - How is wifi? Does it work as fast and reliably on Linux as the Intel cards? Supports latest WiFi standard and 6ghz? This would be my most basic questions to buy MacBook as a daily-driver Linux laptop.
pkulak 3y ago
Yeah, I'm not gonna run out and buy a new Macbook just to wipe it. But these M1 machines are going to be things you just have lying around sometime soon. If my wife upgrades, for example, I know exactly what I'm doing with her M1 Air. :D
- brundolf 3y ago
  Asahi is designed to be dual-booted right now (in fact you have to go off the beaten path to not do that), and it even uses the native Apple boot UI to let you pick your OS
MBCook 3y ago
> I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be. While I understand what you’re saying, the developers of Asahi have said before that Apple appears to be going out of their way to leave things open for them. Apple’s boot security is enough they could easily prevent anyone from ever running a non-Apple blessed OS. But Apple made it fully supported to boot directly into a non-Apple OS as your primary OS. They’re not helping by giving code or documentation, but they’re not putting up roadblocks. Apple seems to be happy with a stance of benevolent indifference. It’s not official support. But a number of PC vendors don’t give official support either.

rollcat 3y ago

> I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be. I don't think it's hostile, I think they're just hands-off; they throw the hardware over the fence and say, "if you wanna make use of it, here's our software; if you don't like our software, sorry no docs but you're free to write your own". Which is exactly what's happening. I mean it would be nice if Apple had released more documentation, but I totally understand if they don't want the burden of supporting it.

smoldesu 3y ago
There's a line somewhere, and I think it's different for every person. For a lot of people, the pricing itself is just outright hostile. 8gb of RAM in a base model Mac is not future-proofed in an age of local AI models, and paying to upgrade it gets expensive, fast. For others the OS is hostile when it unceremoniously drops support for $THING they use, or because it has the gall to show them ads. For others yet, the hardware is hostile because it's basically a black box that Apple withholds documenting to maintain a monopoly on fixing them. Apple is one of the few companies smart enough to deliberately do this. It is both a testament to ability to do brilliant things, and akin to being trapped in a room with a lion that has twice your SAT score. The "golden handcuffs", as they say.
- kytazo 3y ago
  Well overall if you sum up what even a basic m1 mb air packs, be it the panel, quality peripherals and soc itself its rather reasonable and within reach for almost anyone contemplating of buying a new computer. When you factor in that they were the first ones with an actual capable desktop arm offer I'd even say its cheap. At least this is how I felt 2 years ago back when I bought it and more or less even to this day. I'm wondering how is the market as of now, two years later, and how the $1k arm laptops coming out today compare.
- kaba0 3y ago
  There is literally no other laptop on the market that would be anywhere close to an M1 air in terms of performance-battery life combo. And it is definitely not even on the upper end in price for that, tiny windows laptops are ridiculously expensive! So, are they really expensive?
- amon22 3y ago
  Macbooks are really cheap for what they are, not sure what are you on friend. I would never buy one though, still, they are very impressive and its a shame that they are not free.
thx-2718 3y ago
First, personally I don't care what hardware or software people use, if they are happy with the tools that they using then that's good. That said, Apple has been very hostile to hackers over the years imo. Hardware being hard to repair, access, upgrade, etc. I think at one point they were making it virtually impossible to replace components because they were serial locked. As far as I am aware, progress Apple as made has been in response to public image issues or changes in consumer laws within the EU. Plus Apple software is heavily indebted to Open Source software so they very easily could be releasing drivers for their hardware instead of relying on community to do backwards engineering.
- rowanG077 3y ago
  That's not true for Macs. Apple allowed and worked with MS to allow windows to work on Intel macs. That's pretty insane from allowing people to do what they want with their hardware.
  - thx-2718 3y ago
    No offense but that's not even contextually the same thing so I'm not really sure what you're trying to say.
    - rowanG077 3y ago
      You claim Apples Mac line of products is adversarial to hackers. Which I dispute with the example they help alternative OS to run on the Mac. First with Windows and now Asahi.
- kaba0 3y ago
  > Hardware being hard to repair, access, upgrade, etc. I think at one point they were making it virtually impossible to replace components because they were serial locked You can only have so many flexibility in design with modern hardware — they are not fitting things into 5 cm “thin” chassics anymore. How exactly are such a thin device be repairable? Similarly to how old car motors could be tweaked with, you need special tools to touch anything in a modern engine. This is not against the customers, these are trade offs. But even this way, apple devices have by far the longest lifetimes, macs, iphones will have 2-3 owners easily - so is it really fair to call them out, or is it just baseless emotional reaction? Also, what you heard about locked down components resulted in better security, a much lower risk of theft, and a much more clean second-hand market (where you won’t be sold a phone with a cheap chinese shittier screen for example).

viraptor 3y ago

> I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability You'd temporarily lose some hardware support (documented) while it's being worked on. But I'm not sure why you expect losing performance? This is running native code. Same binary will run the same on both systems (+/- the llvm version differences).

nightski 3y ago
Specifically GPU drivers, which can dramatically impact performance. Especially if I am attempting to run any kind of ML workload from Linux. I'm assuming it's basically a non-starter at this point and one is forced to use Mac OS.
- viraptor 3y ago
  Yes. I put that in the capability rather than performance basket though. As in, you can't access the compute shaders yet, rather than: you can and they're slower.
zamadatix 3y ago
E.g. the performance you can get out of the GPU at the moment is a subset of what you can get out of the hardware. Or as another more generic example, until this latest release CPU boost states weren't enabled due to lack of proper cpuidle driver which resulted in regressed single thread performance. There is nothing inherent about running Linux that will require it be slower, in some cases it will/is even faster, but the lack of everything being fully supported does actually impact performance right now. It has been getting better with time.
- rowanG077 3y ago
  Even with the regressed performance it beat osx in a ton of workloads.
- kytazo 3y ago
  CPU wise at least its been on par if not better from its first days. At least this is what the various benchmarks at the time showed. Makes you wonder about how the rest of the system components will compare when they're finished.

zamadatix 3y ago

A car with one seat seems 100% complete if your use cases only involve you driving it alone. Asahi Linux is absolutely in that kind of spot right now. For some people there is 0 reason to wait, for others it's not even worth booting. If you have fear it's not fully complete enough, I'd say trust those feelings. At least right now.

GeekyBear 3y ago

You don't create a new bootloader that allows users the freedom to run an unsigned third party OS without having it degrade the system's security if and when they boot the native OS because you are "hostile to developers and hackers".

fsflover 3y ago
My laptop can use TPM and a hardware key with my keys and free software. Where is the degraded security?
- hedora 3y ago
  I could trick you into adding a hardware key, then install a tampered version of Windows with it. (Also, the last time I looked, TPM keys could be grabbed with ~ $100 of hardware, but I think that's fixed by some newer standard.) But, yeah, it's not a big tradeoff in practice. I think their point was that Apple had to expend effort to enable the use case, which isn't "hostile" toward the use case.
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    > I could trick you into adding a hardware key, then install a tampered version of Windows with it. There are other issues as well. For instance, on a PC the security settings are applied per machine and not per partition, so you can't mix an unsigned OS on one partition with full security on another partition. Also: > On Wednesday, researchers at security firm ESET presented a deep-dive analysis of the world’s first in-the-wild UEFI bootkit that bypasses Secure Boot on fully updated UEFI systems running fully updated versions of Windows 10 and 11. Despite Microsoft releasing new patched software, the vulnerable signed binaries have yet to be added to the UEFI revocation list that flags boot files that should no longer be trusted. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/unkillable-uefi-malware-bypassing-secure-boot-enabled-by-unpatchable-windows-flaw/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/unkil...
    - hedora 3y ago

jb1991 3y ago

There have been multiple reports of the last couple years that Apple has been informally internally helping the Asahi Linux team to make it run well on their hardware. Apple cannot come out and officially support another operating system of course, but they are aware of the interest and are helping make it happen, in an unofficial capacity.

freedomben 3y ago
> Apple cannot come out and officially support another operating system of course Why?
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Yeah that's nonsense. They already have bootcamp.
  - jb1991 3y ago
    That’s incorrect. Bootcamp has not existed for a while now.
    - IshKebab 3y ago
      Looks like it still exists, they just never ported it to the ARM chips, presumably because nobody wants ARM Windows. In any case that's really irrelevant to the main point which is that Apple appears to have no objection to other OSes running on their laptops. Though I wouldn't be surprised if they don't go out of their way to help and make it de facto impossible through secure boot systems.
hollerith 3y ago
>Apple cannot come out and officially support another operating system of course Apple officially supported running Windows on Macs for many years.
- jb1991 3y ago

kaba0 3y ago

> I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be. As opposed to what company besides those tiny ones? Almost all of them are closed-source only and drivers have been painstakingly reversed engineered over decades.

coldtea 3y ago

>My fear is that if I were to go this route and purchase the hardware I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability I would in Mac OS. The performance is there, it has been running stuff much faster than the vast majority of Intel/AMD laptops for over a year. Regarding the capabilities not sure which one you miss. Do you plan to use it for development, or you want some kind of gaming/multimedia setup? >To be honest this blog post seems like the project has a long ways to go, not that it is nearly completion. It's the other way around. It has been usable as a daily driver for ages. >I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be. Then don't?

nightski 3y ago
I don't see why it is unreasonable to desire Apple to provide documentation and open up their hardware. Honestly I'd ask the same as any other hardware vendor. Intel for example provides very detailed technical documents on their new GPUs (A770).
- coldtea 3y ago
  It's not unreasonable, it's just not gonna happen any time soon.
- MBCook 3y ago
  > Intel for example provides very detailed technical documents on their new GPUs Intel sells parts to other people, and those buyers expect that kind of documentation. And when it comes to GPUs they’re in 3rd place for high end GPUs and are incentivized to give people as much info as possible to optimize for their hardware. Apple doesn’t sell their computer hardware to any other OEMs, or hsve a 3rd party making their OS, so they don’t need to produce documentation for anyone. I agree it would be nice if it was documented. But absent a law forcing them I don’t see it happening.
caskstrength 3y ago
> Regarding the capabilities not sure which one you miss. Do you plan to use it for development, or you want some kind of gaming/multimedia setup? > It's the other way around. It has been usable as a daily driver for ages. Honest questions since I haven't been paying attention to Asahi for some time now: - Does hardware accelerated video decoding work? Including in Firefox? - Does sleep work properly or do I get significant battery drain after leaving it sleeping during the night time? Also, does it wake up from sleep reliably? Like if you open/close the lid 100 times in a row would it crash? - How is wifi? Does it work as fast and reliably on Linux as the Intel cards? Supports latest WiFi standard and 6ghz? This would be my most basic questions to buy MacBook as a daily-driver Linux laptop.

pkulak 3y ago

Yeah, I'm not gonna run out and buy a new Macbook just to wipe it. But these M1 machines are going to be things you just have lying around sometime soon. If my wife upgrades, for example, I know exactly what I'm doing with her M1 Air. :D

brundolf 3y ago
Asahi is designed to be dual-booted right now (in fact you have to go off the beaten path to not do that), and it even uses the native Apple boot UI to let you pick your OS

MBCook 3y ago

> I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be. While I understand what you’re saying, the developers of Asahi have said before that Apple appears to be going out of their way to leave things open for them. Apple’s boot security is enough they could easily prevent anyone from ever running a non-Apple blessed OS. But Apple made it fully supported to boot directly into a non-Apple OS as your primary OS. They’re not helping by giving code or documentation, but they’re not putting up roadblocks. Apple seems to be happy with a stance of benevolent indifference. It’s not official support. But a number of PC vendors don’t give official support either.