5 ms·

> 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 hardwa

by 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    Not 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.
    - hedora 3y ago
      > 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. For the love of all that is holy, name one model that has the following properties: - 6 hours real life battery doing C++ development work. - 7+ days suspend battery life - 99.99% success rate resuming from suspend under linux (~ 1 kernel panic per year is OK) - Centered keyboard and trackpad - >> 1080p screen - bluetooth, wifi, webcam, etc, etc, all work reliably (~ 1 device "need to reboot" failure across all categories, per year) - un-noticable fan - less than 10% permanent hardware failure rate per year None of the last ~ $10K worth of intel machines I've used (including high end macs, linux and windows machines) met the above criteria. My M2 macbook actually ticks all the boxes. However, I really, really, dislike MacOS.
      - dmitrygr 3y ago
        Installing "uBar" fixed a lot of my beef with MacOS. (I get no referral bonus, just a happy user)
      - ced 3y ago
        To be clear, is this a description of your experience with Asahi Linux?
        hedora 3y ago
        No; with MacOS running an Ubuntu Multipass VM. :-(
      - fallat 3y ago
        My thinkpad does all those things... I expected really something crazier as a rebuttal. It sounds like you may have bought bad products and then bought a Mac when they had those specs and were happy then...
        throwaway894345 3y ago
psanford 3y ago
> 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 You are describing how most OSS software has been developed. I don't see how this is any different than early linux when no hardware manufacturers had any interest in supporting it. A lot of the work that the asahi team is doing is just fixing Arm issues in the linux kernel (and sadly user space). That work will benefit everyone using Arm systems, not just folks running asahi on Apple hardware. Its good for there to be more hardware architecture competition! I'm glad I can run my server workloads on the Arm servers in AWS that are 20% cheaper than the equivalent x86 machines. I'm glad that I can run the software I like (linux) on legitimately nice hardware (m2 air). You can make different decisions on what architectures are best suited for your needs, but the competition in the market improves the options and prices for everyone. I've been using Asahi since the fall of 2022. When I first started using it a lot of software was broken because of bugs in that software that had never been exposed before (specifically around page sizes larger than 4k). All of that software has now been fixed. Support for linux/arm will only continue to improve as more people use it.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  Point me to the Apple contributed drivers in the kernel please.
  - throwaway894345 3y ago
    The parent already addressed the point that you're trying to make when he said: > I don't see how this is any different than early linux when no hardware manufacturers had any interest in supporting it.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
      This is not early Linux anymore.
  - psanford 3y ago
    Why does Apple need to contribute to this work to make it somehow legitimate or good? I own some nice hardware (an m2-air), I want to run Linux on it. Asahi allows me to do that! Why can we not celebrate that the asahi team is bringing oss to new hardware?
throwaway894345 3y ago
Aren't lots of things in Linux dependent on a small team of volunteers? I know the Linux foundation owns the whole kernel, but in practice how many full time people work on the ext4 driver or whathaveyou?
acomjean 3y ago
I have an AMD Linux laptop I’ve been using for work. It’s great. The battery life is great, it’s quite fast with a lot of cores, when I need to do my genetics runs (plugged in). Build quality isn’t bad, plus affordable and lots of ports. After my initial transition away, not missing my 2015 Mac book pro. Linux is the way to go. I don’t blame people with apple hardware for wanting it. I just don’t feel the x86 side is as bad as the everyone makes it out to be. We’ve come along way since my first Linux laptop and it’s not so great battery life.
- microtonal 3y ago
  Two years ago or so I bought a ThinkPad with an AMD Ryzen CPU, there was a lot of hype about them. How Linux laptops were finally competitive, speed, driver, and battery-wise. The machine was quite a bit slower than an M1 Air, would have loud fans during video meetings, and on Linux the battery would typically last 3 hours (6-7 on Windows, yes I did all the usual power optimizations). In S3 sleep it would discharge overnight and the next day it would refuse to charge with Lenovo’s included USB-C adapter. When waking up the machine from sleep the track point or trackpad wouldn’t come up 1/3rd of the time on Linux. I used the laptop for work and the question ‘does the laptop work’ when having a meeting or having to teach became so stressful, that one day after another Linux hardware episode I immediately went to a store after work and picked up an M1 Air and never looked back (well, got an M1 Max after that). There is no way I am going to touch Linux on laptops within 5 years. (I use a headless Linux GPU machine daily, first used Linux in 1994, and was paid to work on a Linux distribution in the past.)
  - acomjean 3y ago
    Sorry it didn't work for you. I would recommend anyone buying at notebook to get one with linux pre-installed. I did that because I want to use this thing, not futz with it. I'm assuming you're using Asahi Linux on your Macs (though you said you wouldn't touch it..). The lack of hardware diversity should make comparability easier, even if everything need to be reversed engineered. I get 6 hours or so on my machine. Its pretty much silent, unless I push it. Its a Ryzen 7 5700u. We do a lot of parallel compute and genetics code tends massively parallel and x86 optimized. Mostly run on cluster though. I haven't done any maintenance and have had not hardware issues. I don't link I could ever go back to macos, or windows.
endorphine 3y ago
> I'm sticking with my slow, hot and power-hungry x86 machines with worse build quality for the foreseeable future. Nothing wrong with being a late adopter. Nothing wrong with being an early adopter either.
kytazo 3y ago
> And the incompatibilities with ARM are not negligible. Namely?
predictabl3 3y ago
/me glances at their full NixOS desktop that native builds for x86_64-linux and aarch64-linux. Heck, most all of it cross-compiles too. Native riscv64-linux needs more attention (upstream support is missing in places) but most of my config cross-compiles fine as well. Every month that passes, with similar HN comments insisting it's a bad time... I wonder: "am I 'special' or just spoiled by nix(os/pks)". Or maybe, just maybe, people's expectations of their distros are shockingly low. And maybe rightly so at times.

by imiric 3y ago

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 ago
I 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 ago
  Not 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.
  - hedora 3y ago
    > 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. For the love of all that is holy, name one model that has the following properties: - 6 hours real life battery doing C++ development work. - 7+ days suspend battery life - 99.99% success rate resuming from suspend under linux (~ 1 kernel panic per year is OK) - Centered keyboard and trackpad - >> 1080p screen - bluetooth, wifi, webcam, etc, etc, all work reliably (~ 1 device "need to reboot" failure across all categories, per year) - un-noticable fan - less than 10% permanent hardware failure rate per year None of the last ~ $10K worth of intel machines I've used (including high end macs, linux and windows machines) met the above criteria. My M2 macbook actually ticks all the boxes. However, I really, really, dislike MacOS.
    - dmitrygr 3y ago
      Installing "uBar" fixed a lot of my beef with MacOS. (I get no referral bonus, just a happy user)
    - ced 3y ago
      To be clear, is this a description of your experience with Asahi Linux?
      - hedora 3y ago
        No; with MacOS running an Ubuntu Multipass VM. :-(
    - fallat 3y ago
      My thinkpad does all those things... I expected really something crazier as a rebuttal. It sounds like you may have bought bad products and then bought a Mac when they had those specs and were happy then...
      - throwaway894345 3y ago

psanford 3y ago

> 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 You are describing how most OSS software has been developed. I don't see how this is any different than early linux when no hardware manufacturers had any interest in supporting it. A lot of the work that the asahi team is doing is just fixing Arm issues in the linux kernel (and sadly user space). That work will benefit everyone using Arm systems, not just folks running asahi on Apple hardware. Its good for there to be more hardware architecture competition! I'm glad I can run my server workloads on the Arm servers in AWS that are 20% cheaper than the equivalent x86 machines. I'm glad that I can run the software I like (linux) on legitimately nice hardware (m2 air). You can make different decisions on what architectures are best suited for your needs, but the competition in the market improves the options and prices for everyone. I've been using Asahi since the fall of 2022. When I first started using it a lot of software was broken because of bugs in that software that had never been exposed before (specifically around page sizes larger than 4k). All of that software has now been fixed. Support for linux/arm will only continue to improve as more people use it.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Point me to the Apple contributed drivers in the kernel please.
- throwaway894345 3y ago
  The parent already addressed the point that you're trying to make when he said: > I don't see how this is any different than early linux when no hardware manufacturers had any interest in supporting it.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    This is not early Linux anymore.
- psanford 3y ago
  Why does Apple need to contribute to this work to make it somehow legitimate or good? I own some nice hardware (an m2-air), I want to run Linux on it. Asahi allows me to do that! Why can we not celebrate that the asahi team is bringing oss to new hardware?

throwaway894345 3y ago

Aren't lots of things in Linux dependent on a small team of volunteers? I know the Linux foundation owns the whole kernel, but in practice how many full time people work on the ext4 driver or whathaveyou?

acomjean 3y ago

I have an AMD Linux laptop I’ve been using for work. It’s great. The battery life is great, it’s quite fast with a lot of cores, when I need to do my genetics runs (plugged in). Build quality isn’t bad, plus affordable and lots of ports. After my initial transition away, not missing my 2015 Mac book pro. Linux is the way to go. I don’t blame people with apple hardware for wanting it. I just don’t feel the x86 side is as bad as the everyone makes it out to be. We’ve come along way since my first Linux laptop and it’s not so great battery life.

microtonal 3y ago
Two years ago or so I bought a ThinkPad with an AMD Ryzen CPU, there was a lot of hype about them. How Linux laptops were finally competitive, speed, driver, and battery-wise. The machine was quite a bit slower than an M1 Air, would have loud fans during video meetings, and on Linux the battery would typically last 3 hours (6-7 on Windows, yes I did all the usual power optimizations). In S3 sleep it would discharge overnight and the next day it would refuse to charge with Lenovo’s included USB-C adapter. When waking up the machine from sleep the track point or trackpad wouldn’t come up 1/3rd of the time on Linux. I used the laptop for work and the question ‘does the laptop work’ when having a meeting or having to teach became so stressful, that one day after another Linux hardware episode I immediately went to a store after work and picked up an M1 Air and never looked back (well, got an M1 Max after that). There is no way I am going to touch Linux on laptops within 5 years. (I use a headless Linux GPU machine daily, first used Linux in 1994, and was paid to work on a Linux distribution in the past.)
- acomjean 3y ago
  Sorry it didn't work for you. I would recommend anyone buying at notebook to get one with linux pre-installed. I did that because I want to use this thing, not futz with it. I'm assuming you're using Asahi Linux on your Macs (though you said you wouldn't touch it..). The lack of hardware diversity should make comparability easier, even if everything need to be reversed engineered. I get 6 hours or so on my machine. Its pretty much silent, unless I push it. Its a Ryzen 7 5700u. We do a lot of parallel compute and genetics code tends massively parallel and x86 optimized. Mostly run on cluster though. I haven't done any maintenance and have had not hardware issues. I don't link I could ever go back to macos, or windows.

endorphine 3y ago

> I'm sticking with my slow, hot and power-hungry x86 machines with worse build quality for the foreseeable future. Nothing wrong with being a late adopter. Nothing wrong with being an early adopter either.

kytazo 3y ago

> And the incompatibilities with ARM are not negligible. Namely?

predictabl3 3y ago

/me glances at their full NixOS desktop that native builds for x86_64-linux and aarch64-linux. Heck, most all of it cross-compiles too. Native riscv64-linux needs more attention (upstream support is missing in places) but most of my config cross-compiles fine as well. Every month that passes, with similar HN comments insisting it's a bad time... I wonder: "am I 'special' or just spoiled by nix(os/pks)". Or maybe, just maybe, people's expectations of their distros are shockingly low. And maybe rightly so at times.