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Coming Soon: Fedora for Apple Silicon Macs
- WaffleIronMaker 3y agoThis is so exciting! The Asahi team has done some really impressive work. I can't wait for it to start to make its way into mainstream distributions.
- AdmiralAsshat 3y agoBattery life would be the big thing, I think. There's not a single person I know who wouldn't like having Linux on their M1/M2 Macbooks--they're beautiful devices--but if you're not getting something approaching MacOS's battery life, then there's not that much separating it from another similarly-specced ultrabook.
- brundolf 3y agoFrom anecdotes I've heard, battery life on Asahi Linux is already great
- input_sh 3y agoAnnecdotaly, it'll last you through an entire work day, but probably not into double digits.
- pleb_nz 3y agoMy m1 pro has never has into double digits. 6 to 8 hours is all I get. So if be happy if it stays that with Linux.
- malermeister 3y agoI'd love to see some benchmarks! I have an M1 device and don't really love macOS, but the battery life is just sooo good. I'd be super happy if I could just run Arch on this thing instead.
- aaomidi 3y agoWhy would battery life be impacted? The main reason for bad battery life is hardware acceleration for certain tasks. Once that's settled, the computer shouldn't start producing more heat out of the blue.
- callalex 3y agoHardware acceleration is not some binary state these days, there are a ton of specialized bits of hardware under the Apple M chip umbrella.
- CharlesW 3y agoAdditionally, Apple's always¹ been insanely great at power management even pre-Apple Silicon by virtue of (1) prioritizing it more highly than other vendors, and (2) implementing it in a way that takes advantage of the complete hardware and software stack. ¹ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-does-windows-have-terrible-battery-life/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-does-windows-have-terrible...
- dev_tty01 3y ago>The main reason for bad battery life is hardware acceleration for certain tasks. I guess this was a typo. MacOS/Apple Silicon (and other CPU architectures) save a lot of power via hardware acceleration. For instance, there are dedicated hardware video decoding blocks that use much less power than implementing video decoding with software. The MacOS kernel takes advantage of all of these hardware specifics. MacOS also uses a number of other techniques like process wakeup coalescing, dedicated hardware for memory compression, process specific efficiency/performance core choices, ... Apple is getting a lot of power improvements via codesign of the processor and the OS. To do the same set of tasks with a similar power profile, Asahi will have to include system hooks that take advantage of all the dedicated lower power hardware functions and do a similar set of optimizations. They have done great work so far and will likely continue, but it isn't the simple tradeoff you are suggesting.
- saagarjha 3y ago
- maccard 3y agoI'm perfectly content not having Linux on my M1 MacBook. That said, I don't want that to stop someone else from having it!
- AdmiralAsshat 3y agoI should probably have clarified, there's not a single person I know who uses Linux as their daily driver that wouldn't want the option of having it run on an M1 MacBook. I'll grant that the vast majority of Apple users probably don't care about running Linux on it.
- starfallg 3y agoYeah, all I want for Christmas is just Linux on hardware with good battery life.
- maccard 3y agoI don't own one so Im not speaking from a place of experience, but system76 machines meet that bill.
- maccard 3y agoThat makes sense, apologies for the misunderstanding. I feel like that goes without saying, though. I'm having a hard time imagining someone who is a happy fedora user saying they want to run something else on an M1 Mac
- SxC97 3y ago>There's not a single person I know who wouldn't like having Linux on their M1/M2 Macbooks Well… OP probably doesn’t know you… /s
- psanford 3y agoI've been running Asahi for a full year on my m2 air. The battery life is quite good. Yes, I think macOS has batter battery optimizations than linux, but compared to other laptops running linux it really is quite good.
- a1o 3y agoI imagine a repurposed MacMini M1 will also be like raspberry pi on steroids.
- NovaDudely 3y agoI doubt there would ever be parity but it could be good enough. Have to hand it Apple OS team, they know how to squeeze a lot out of there hardware. A while back I was trying to get an old G5 running and looking at the various OS options, many said just go with MacOS 10.4 - it was the most optimized OS for the system even today. When software and hardware work together, it can be pretty cool.
- xp84 3y agoI mean, for a kind of museum piece, to get the true experience of using the computer I’d agree for sure just use original OS. But if one wanted to be able to use it for most functional purposes, it’s sad how the complete lack of backcompat in MacOS makes using an old MacOS tough — which is sad because new Linux often can work surprisingly fine on the same hardware. Like, current Debian on a 2008 Core 2 Duo is a fine computer that you can browse the Web and do basic office tasks on. It was shocking to me!
- piyh 3y agoI want to run native containers without the orders of magnitude worse io performance than any other platform
- IntelMiner 3y agoAs a Quad G5 owner, might I recommend OS X "Sorbet" It's an unofficial merging of OS X 10.5 with PowerPC builds of 10.6 components. Even on ancient G3's it out-performs both 10.4 and 10.5 in benchmarks
- hollandheese 3y agoWait... how'd you get it working on G3 machines? As far as I know, 10.4 was the last release for G3s.
- bombcar 3y agoApple is pretty famous for dropping machines before they absolutely have to.
- dangus 3y agoEven if Linux kills 50% of battery life compared to macOS you’re still looking at a system that’s in the top tier of longevity compared to x86 Ultrabooks.
- kbknapp 3y agoThe fact that my M2 has an effectively double size battery from my Fedora based Thinkpad (M2 has a 100Wh battery, while the Thinkpad has a 57Wh) means it just needs to be not terribly less efficient than x86 Fedora laptop for me to be happy, which from the sounds of it is already the case.
- vbezhenar 3y agoI don't care about battery life. By macbook is connected 99% of the time. That said, I'm satisfied with Linux in VM. Especially with Rosetta. It's actually funny that I'd get degraded experience because of the lack of the Rosetta in native Linux.
- e12e 3y agoMy main gripe with macOS is awful window management and missing apis to enable improvement (eg managing desktop/screens/workspaces). And no proper sloppy focus/focus follows mouse.
- based_gigachad2 3y agoI wonder when we'll have fully functional HDR and neural engine so that the creative professionals could try using Linux on their Apple silicon Macs (software support is another story, though Davinci Resolve is already there)
- stirlo 3y agoThere’s a work in progress/prototype Neural engine driver already.
- fredski42 3y agoWould something like KVM work?
- wmf 3y agoYes, KVM works (but only to run ARM VMs).
- dmvdoug 3y agoThis is awesome news. I have been trying to tinker with getting Ubuntu working on both an older Intel Mac and my M1, but it’s an almighty pain in the ass hardware-wise. And I ran across more than one person who felt it necessary to point out that me buying an Apple computer was what the problem was. Like, really? That’s a real effective way to win people over.
- defer 3y agoWell, it's understandable. If you talk about it with other linux-on-MacBook tinkerers I'm sure they'll be more sensible to your cause. But generally, if you pointed that out to me I'd say the same, picking that hardware puts you in a harder path. Also, I'm not sure if Linux users in general have any interest in winning people over.
- dmvdoug 3y agoI’m not talking about Linux users in general. I’m talking about the subset who hang around forums and other online spaces and purport to help newbies with problems. Ironically enough, then, I figured out on my own that the biggest obstacle I was encountering with my Intel MPB was Ubuntu’s distribution of firmware, where they officially pretend not to know about certain non-free device drivers, even though they vaguely gesture at the process of acquiring them in their respective official docs. Whereas Debian straight-up distributes them in their ISOs. Can’t say I’m a big fan of Ubuntu’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge approach to “standing up for free software,” where they get you started down a path then steadfastly refuse to help because VIRTUE! Debian’s approach is saner. And so I’ll be tinkering with Debian, I guess.
- alphanullmeric 3y agoI used to hate on Macs until I was given one by my employer. Then I realized that despite how awful macOS is, the laptop itself is completely unrivalled. There is no Lenovo/xps/framework/tuxbook/tongfang/clevo/whatever that comes close to the overall package of a MacBook. It has the stiffest body, the quietest fans, the biggest battery, the best screen and trackpad, etc. Even worse is the fact that a framework 16 is more than an M2 pro with an education discount. And now, the biggest flaw of a MacBook (macos) is fixed.
- totallywrong 3y agoStill rocking a 2015 MBP with Fedora here. Screen, body, keyboard, and trackpad are so good. This news make me consider buying Apple silicon, which I'd never do if I had to use MacOS.
- unethical_ban 3y agoDoes the trackpad function mac-like? Is it still overall better than a Lenovo, for example, or does the software bring it down?
- totallywrong 3y agoIt's better than a Lenovo (I've used many) because the trackpad itself is better, the software doesn't have an impact. It's just the usual synaptics driver so you could configure it the way you like.
- mdasen 3y agoPart of it is that Apple has the margins that they can spend a little more on parts. They know they don't have to compete on price as much as PCs do. People aren't going to ditch the Mac over $25 or $50. However, people do regularly compare prices on PC laptops looking to save small amounts of money. That means that Apple can spend a little more designing and ordering a fan that's quieter with a better design and more premium parts. Also, because there are so many PC laptops, it's really hard to get a good review of a PC laptop. There are so many configurations and PC makers often make small (but meaningful) changes to designs during a product's lifecycle. All of a sudden, the one you bought has a less bright display or the cooling system isn't as good or whatever. It makes it hard to reward companies for creating good products. There are premium PC laptops, but they still suffer from some of these decisions and they often cost about the same. I've looked for alternatives to the Mac, but at this point I've stopped. I'm sick of doing research on junk to try and save a few bucks, I'm sick of trackpads that are unusable, and with the new M-series processors I simply never want to go back to a high-wattage processor. I actually like macOS, but I'm really glad happy to see Linux advancing on Apple hardware. The Asahi Linux developers are amazing and I love reading their write-ups.
- omgmajk 3y agoHell yeah, might finally buy a mac if I can run native linux on it. I like the hardware but am allergic to MacOS.
- Octabrain 3y agoAfter the painful experience I've had with the last ThinkPad I purchased (and before that, a Dell XPS, if Linux reaches a point where widely used distros are able to run on Mac M* flawlessly...personally I'm not gonna think it twice.
- favadi 3y agoSomething is very off with ThinkPad development recently. A few years ago, I could pick any T-Series ThinkPad and expect them to have excellent Linux support. My last two ThinkPads have various annoying issues: battery drain when sleeping, trackpoint freezing after a while, fan kicking in for no reasons. I have used a System76 laptop in the past, everything is working as it should, but the hardware quality is not comparable to Thinkpads.
- Octabrain 3y ago> battery drain when sleeping, trackpoint freezing after a while, fan kicking in for no reasons. With the exception of the trackpoint freezing I've had exactly those issues. I even had to send the laptop to the repair service because the battery thing was unbearable. I was tempted to get a System76 but went for a ThinkPad mostly due to fear of the unknown. Lesson learned, I guess.
- bodge5000 3y agoI doubt you're looking to burn more money but you could also try the framework laptops, I hear they're very well supported. Older Thinkpads also work if you want something cheaper (I don't really use my X220 anymore but I could never get rid of it), but then you do lose some performance.
- Octabrain 3y agoI had a look to the Framework one, however, I've read (here, on HN, mostly) things about the battery life, the screen size and the feeling of flimsyness due to its DYI nature that were a turn off for me.
- jasoneckert 3y agoYou can watch the FlockToFedora announcement here (starts at 6:25:15): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD2R4Yt8m88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD2R4Yt8m88
- gavinsyancey 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD2R4Yt8m88&t=23115s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD2R4Yt8m88&t=23115s
- jasoneckert 3y agoI've been using Asahi based on Arch as my daily driver for over a year (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/ultimate-linux-arm64-workstation/ https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/ultimate-linux-arm64-wo...) and should mention that the experience has been stellar overall. This is mainly because I've used it on a desktop (Mac Mini, later Mac Studio), where hardware support came faster and is practically complete for M1 models. That being said, I fully plan on moving entirely to Asahi Fedora at the end of August when it's fully released. Fedora has a stronger team and less issues as noted by Hector Martin: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109971521711413167 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109971521711413167
- c-hendricks 3y agoI installed Arch to prep myself for the Steam Deck, and ended up liking it so much it's on all my machines. Arch Linux Arm, however, ugh. It works, sure. That post explains it pretty well.
- OO000oo 3y agoIt's such a magnificent failure of the human race that this was possible but Photoshop for Linux is eternally out of the picture.
- brucethemoose2 3y agohttps://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=17 https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio... Some say Wine is "cheating," but I say Wine is a platform. A good platform. That being said, I feel like the various editors integrating Stable Diffusion eat into a whole bunch of Photoshop functionality.
- OO000oo 3y agoThe current state of Wine Photoshop for the past 5 years is that it's unusable alongside other modern graphics software on modern hardware. The only high dpi version that you can expect to get working is CC2018 and it has a lot of bugs when running on Wine. CS6 runs perfectly and it's an excellent version of Photoshop, but it doesn't support high dpi so you'll have to lower your display resolution until you can read the menu text.
- gigatexal 3y agoA thousand hugs and thank you’s to the team behind this. I’ve been waiting for this very thing!!! And once more and more devs get this going they’ll be more likely to have more work being reverse engineered and added to keep Linux on the m series going for years and years! Edit: the reason I’m stoked I because fedora is the distro of Linux that I run on everything.
- gigatexal 3y agoHonestly Apple should open up the hardware specs and make this easier for devs because I wasn’t in the market for an m1 mini if it was going to run macOS but now with my favorite distro with a remix available?! I’ll give Apple my duckets
- dividedbyzero 3y agoI'd like to see them do that, but the fraction of their (potential) users that would care at all must be microscopic.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kaba0 3y agoI’m like 98% sure that your current hardware has no open specs, why should apple open theirs? Of course, idealistally I am all for it, but realistically that ship has sailed a long time ago, plus most companies have a jungle of patents that disallow them from doing so even if they wanted to.
- gigatexal 3y agoWell the GPU for example AMD has been happy to work with the open source community. Sure the open driver still ships a giant blob iirc but it’s still better than nothing. Such an approach would be dope from Apple. Of course they don’t have to. It would be nice if they did. I would argue they’d sell even more devices this way.
- fsckboy 3y agoI'm only looking for facts, not trying to stimulate FUD etc: didn't RedHat announce something that seemed to decrease their commitment to Fedora, or was that just RHEL and CentOS type enterprise stuff? (I'm a Fedora user, and I do/would not look forward to switching.)
- bubblethink 3y agoNo, Fedora is upstream. Nothing changes for Fedora. Original CentOS is discontinued, CentOS Stream is downstream of Fedora but upstream of RHEL. RH has taken measures to thwart clones of RHEL.
- noizejoy 3y ago> No, Fedora is upstream. Nothing changes for Fedora. I sincerely hope so - but after 2 significant rug-pulls, I'm not so sure of any forward looking statements by RH or about the RH ecosystem anymore ...
- broodbucket 3y agoThe worst RH can do is pull funding (which would be a massive deal, of course) but they can't just close off source access like they could with RHEL
- 9front 3y agoThe issue with AsahiLinux is its dependency on macOS.
- nextos 3y agoAnd patchy support for M2, which is understandable. A shame, as the basic Mac Mini M2 is really competitive in terms of pricing and energy usage for a home desktop or server. It is below $600 with an education discount.
- dev_tty01 3y agoThat is its core feature. The only reason Asahi exists is to run linux natively on Apple Silicon Macs. There are plenty of linux variants for other systems. What dependency are you speaking of? It uses the external OS hooks built into the firmware. Is that the issue you are referring to? After boot, MacOS is not running in any way.
- KennyFromIT 3y agoSo other than less battery performance, what other notable differences should I expect from Fedora on M2 vs the native MacOS. (I'm not being snarky, just trying to get a feel for how similar I should expect the performance and peripheral support to be; not focused on differences between gnome and the MacOS UI)
- Espionage724 3y agoI think getting information about devices in and connected to the system would be easier from Linux; might be nice for device and board programming or diagnosing USB devices. I don't remember specifics but terminal use felt odd on macOS to me. I do Terminal no problem from Linux, but maybe it was the file structure or command syntax on macOS that felt different. Niche hardware stuff is likely cheaper to manage on Linux. I had to buy SwitchResX to set a higher resolution for my monitor, but I can do it from kernel parameter (video=), xrandr, or EDID override all for free on Linux. eGPUs acted notably differently from macOS vs Linux on the same laptop, and iirc it had to do with the Apple firmware doing something differently when booting non-macOS. I preferred it on Linux because it shut-off the iGPU completely but required full shutdowns to switch to internal; hot-swap worked fine from macOS even on unsupported TB2. Iirc there was also some EFI binary that could be booted first before Linux in order to trick the Apple firmware in keeping macOS-specific config, and I kept that on a flash drive to boot from the rare times when I wanted dual graphics. Windows was even more different in that the eGPU straight up didn't work.
- sbuk 3y ago> I don't remember specifics but terminal use felt odd on macOS to me. I do Terminal no problem from Linux, but maybe it was the file structure or command syntax on macOS that felt different. That'll be the GNU coreutils vs macOS's BSD userland. You'd likely have a similar frustration if you were to use FreeBSD. You can replace these with coreutils from Homebrew or MacPorts on the Mac. Also, the file system layout is different, again, much like the BSDs vs Linux/GNU. Even Linux distros vary slightly.
- stirlo 3y agoUnfortunately no Asahi release has support for Thunderbolt currently so eGPU will not work yet
- mixmastamyk 3y agoCan you install it without connecting to Apple/iCloud first? Like from flash drive to obliterate macOS, or does a partition have to be kept around still?
- mort96 3y agoYou don't have to connect to iCloud or have an Apple account to set up macOS, you just click "skip" or "set up later" in necessary places in the setup flow. It's not like Windows where installing it without connecting to your Microsoft account is hard.
- Aldo_MX 3y agoApple requires a hardware activation, especially if you forgot to sign out from Find My Mac before a factory reset. So the answer is no.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pengaru 3y agoI'm excited about this despite not owning any Apple hardware, nor intending to own any in the future. Just to see what a mature native Linux port does in terms of performance and battery life numbers. We've had to suffer so much Apple fanboy b.s. ever since Apple Silicon became a thing, touting how special the software optimizations are for making this TSMC node's product so fast and efficient. Let's get a sense of what really happens without Apple's software, with an alternative unix-like OS that has similarly modern compositing desktops. My money is it's 90% TSMC that made Apple Silicon so much better than the Intel trash Apple was stuck with, they never even tasted the AMD+TSMC glory first.
- wtallis 3y ago> touting how special the software optimizations are for making this TSMC node's product so fast and efficient. > My money is it's 90% TSMC that made Apple Silicon so much better than the Intel trash Apple was stuck with, This comes across as quite bizarre, as though you believe Apple Silicon Macs are a combination of TSMC chips and Apple software, rather than Apple chips (manufactured by TSMC) with Apple software. Is it really that hard for you to believe that Apple could have come up with chip designs that are genuinely good even when fab process differences are not a factor? How will running Linux instead of macOS shed any new light on how much credit for the hardware quality should go to TSMC rather than to Apple?
- pengaru 3y ago> This comes across as quite bizarre, as though you believe Apple Silicon Macs are a combination of TSMC chips and Apple software, rather than Apple chips (manufactured by TSMC) with Apple software. No, it's deliberately bizarre. I'm speaking to specifically all the ridiculous nonsense I've read on HN from Apple fanbois trying to convince the world that these are so good because of magical synergies of Apple software with Apple Silicon. Apple seems to have designed a good chip, TSMC manufactured it. I don't deny either of those things. The same can be said of AMD.
- kaba0 3y agoWtf, it has nothing to do with fanboys, and noone said that software optimizations are the reason why the M-series chips are so good - otherwise why did the intel ones not perform better under macs? What was highlighted on the software side is the way Rosetta works/performs.
- meeho 3y agoNow do a battery test and compare it with macos.