8 ms·

I got my MacBook Pro M1 exactly 1 year ago. At the time I thought the Linux state was incredible - so much things were usable, the remaining missing bits would

I got my MacBook Pro M1 exactly 1 year ago. At the time I thought the Linux state was incredible - so much things were usable, the remaining missing bits would be quick to come. Fast forward to now. From a pure user point of view nothing has changed. No sound/webcam/microphone, no hdmi, no thunderbolt, battery draining when running and on suspend, wifi/bluetooth need a periodic reboot, etc. Only a (quite good) 3D driver has been added. I wouldn't do it again.

extr 3y ago
Yeah, I think people were overly optimistic given the initial progress. The Asahi team has done incredible work to be sure with just getting it running and the GPU driver. But there is a long tail of things to fix to make it truly usable as a daily driver. For me personally, I thought the project was awesome, installed it, booted it, and realized the trackpad felt really janky. I start playing with the acceleration settings and then caught myself and remembered that not having to deal with that exact thing was why I bought a Mac to begin with.
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  One major problem is in the fact that Hector/Asahi has very little experience with distribution maintenance, and is mainly suited to the role of reverse engineering the M1 chip and implementing the driver. It would be far better if he put all of his focus into the M1 driver itself and let others handle the surrounding distro variants. In fact this recently came up when he misconfigured GRUB during updates and soft-locked Macs until they ran a list of sudo commands to fix the error.
  - NoahKAndrews 3y ago
    That's the whole point of their new partnership with Fedora
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      That didn't help as the parent mentioned as Fedora Asahi Remix shipped a bug that caused people's grub config to be overwritten with one that didn't work preventing the machine from booting. There was no way to remotely fix users and a solution took days to come out for people to manually fix it by typing in commands to the bootloader.
  - mort96 3y ago
    To their credit, this is a more challenging than your standard Linux distro. Lots of software just has a bunch of subtle bugs on arm which don't exist on x86_64. Other software has a bunch of subtle bugs on 16k page sizes. Those problems aren't ones you'll face as a distro maintainer for some x86_64 Linux distro. Then there's the issue that Arch Linux ARM is itself not always super competently managed, so it's not a solid foundation to build on top of. I think it'll be very good for them to leave all the distro responsibilities to Fedora and focus on the hardware specific stuff. But I don't think they'll stop facing weird issues related to not being part of the 4k page size x86_64 monoculture.
    - tedunangst 3y ago
      But was the grub issue caused by the 16k page size?
    - saagarjha 3y ago
      Ok, but the page size is something they chose themselves?
      - vulcan01 3y ago
        My understanding is that the chosen page size is optimal for the M-series integrated memory.
        saagarjha 3y ago
        It doesn't really matter all that much for userspace; the page size really is a choice. It can improve performance in some cases and regress them in a handful of others. That said, the pain of having to deal with apps that need updates is entirely on Asahi by their own volition.
      - slikrick 3y ago
        [flagged]
        3y ago
  - naniwaduni 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - progman32 3y ago
      Such accusations should be backed up with facts and examples.
      - naniwaduni 3y ago
        Okay, so, without pointing fingers, it's not even particularly weird or surprising that a few people gathered up from mostly the RE/console hacking/security scene have a penchant for breaking things and lack releng expertise. There's nothing especially wrong with that, though I'd consider it in itself good reason to side-eye relying on their software, more or less the same way I'd side-eye running suckless or, idk, MAS_AIO.cmd in production.
pleb_nz 3y ago
Those are all fairly critical things for me. Thanks for the comment.
dylan604 3y ago
does the original Apple recovery partition remain so that you could return it back to the original OS if one was to try this but prefer to go back?
- rowanG077 3y ago
  You can just run OSX beside Asahi. You don't need to uninstall OSX if you don't want to.
- wtallis 3y ago
  If you have access to a second Mac, you can restore macOS even after a complete disk wipe, no recovery partition needed: > Will this break my machine? How safe is it? [...] > Apple Silicon machines are almost completely unbrickable: you can boot them in a special burned-in recovery mode and recover them, using another machine connected via a USB cable. For those who don’t have another macOS machine to act as a host, we have open source tools that work on Windows and Linux too. https://asahilinux.org/2022/03/asahi-linux-alpha-release/ https://asahilinux.org/2022/03/asahi-linux-alpha-release/ https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-configurator-mac/revive-or-restore-a-mac-with-apple-silicon-apdd5f3c75ad/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-configurator-mac/reviv...
  - CalChris 3y ago
    Yep, Apple Configurator 2. Been there done that with an unfixable partitioning. Eventually I learned about AC2 and a clean install solved all of my partitioning problems.
    - piperswe 3y ago
      Super handy for resetting other Apple devices in weird states too. I've picked up "bricked" HomePod Minis from eBay, reset them with AC2, and ended up with 100% functional HomePods for a fraction of the price of a new one.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
rowanG077 3y ago
This is my feeling as well. I guess that's just the way it goes once low-hanging fruit has been picked. But I would at the very least have expected one of: External displays, audio or stable bluetooth/WiFi.
heavyset_go 3y ago
And Apple is always releasing a moving target. This was the same case even back when they were running on PC architecture with Intel hardware.
- wtallis 3y ago
  I'm not sure the "moving target" argument holds up to much scrutiny. Asahi has been able to re-use the UART driver from the Samsung SoCs that went into the earliest iPhones, the I2C driver from PA Semi's PowerPC chips, and the GPU reverse engineering was greatly helped by the PowerVR heritage. There's clearly a fair bit of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" in Apple's hardware design strategy. Meanwhile, on the Wintel side the past ~decade has seen a complete overhaul in how systems sleep, and CPU features like TSX and SGX and MPX have come and gone, presenting OS developers with plenty of churn to deal with.
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    I wouldn't say Apple is any less a moving target rather they've only released 2 generations of the M series so far. As an example it's looking like the 3rd generation will swap the GPU architecture you mentioned for something completely new. Sure, there are plenty of things that don't change much, and that I2C driver is a good example, but that doesn't really mean the target as a whole is particularly stable it just means they don't feel the need to rewrite I2C every chip revision. Meanwhile many of the things churning on the x86 side, like memory encryption, don't really matter for projects like this.
    - wtallis 3y ago
      I wasn't trying to say that Apple's platform is remarkably stable, only that there's no evidence it is particularly unstable. Even if their next GPU architecture requires a more or less complete re-write of the drivers, that on its own still wouldn't justify considering Apple's platform to be more of a moving target than the PC/Wintel platform—though it would bolster complaints about the necessity of reverse engineering rather than having documentation available (complaints that apply just as much against NVIDIA's GPUs). It'll probably take at least one or two more generations of Apple hardware before one can reasonably accuse them of being a constantly moving target. For now, the best evidence we have to go on is the fact that it took Asahi about a week to bring M2 support up to parity with the M1 support they had at that time.
prmoustache 3y ago
As a linux user why would you buy hardware from a company that do not provide any modicum of support for it?
- OJFord 3y ago
  I am a Linux user and not a MacBook owner, but I do really like (having used it myself in the past - 2013 Air, 2016 MBP - and seen others' recent stuff) Mac hardware. If my preferred Linux distro (Arch btw) just worked out of the box on Macs I would love one (though I do have a Framework now and the repairability etc. certainly would make me reluctant). Also though, I have a Windows desktop pretty much just for Fusion 360. I really dislike Windows, macOS as a BSD derivative is obviously a bit more comfortable/familiar/usable, I would love to (legitimately) dual-boot macOS and Linux, the former to allow me to run software that's not available on the latter. WINE (even with Lutris etc. recent work) is too fragile and difficult to get working and keep working.
- sneak 3y ago
  To not end up with a PC laptop, the likes of which haven't been meaningfully redesigned save for spec bumps for 15 years. Trackpad, speakers, case, thermals, cpu - the lowest end MBA blows the highest end "ultrabook" out of the water.
  - manderley 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - p1necone 3y ago
    > thermals Apple has been consistently terrible at cooling design, the only reason m1/m2 systems don't have thermal issues is because they sidestepped the problem entirely by building a very thermally efficient chip.
    - sneak 3y ago
      Not having the problem in the first place is the best way to solve it. We are discussing finished products. My M2 air lasts a million hours and doesn't get hot. My XPS lasts 4 or 5 and burns the top of my legs. I'm not sure yours is the criticism you think it is. Ultimately, heat is waste, and the less of it you generate, the better. When I said "thermals" I meant chip design, not cooling system design. This is obviously one of the huge benefits of their vertical integration.
evolve2k 3y ago
This project seems to be progressing the audio, activity from last month. https://github.com/chadmed/asahi-audio https://github.com/chadmed/asahi-audio
nelox 3y ago
This is reminiscent of the state of Linux 20 years ago in the PC world.
- beanjuiceII 3y ago
  Honestly it's still the state of Linux today in the PC world for most people
  - hu3 3y ago
    Maybe I'm that lucky. Or maybe I do my homework before buying a computer for Linux. I don't think a single laptop I owned (7+) ever booted Ubuntu without everything just working. Sound, screen brightness, wifi, touchpad, sleep/suspend. I did have problems with gentoo but those were evidently self-inflicted, and solvable by installing Ubuntu.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
xet7 3y ago
I have Asahi Fedora Remix, at M1 Air with USB-C adapter, that has connected: - Power - Ethernet - USB-C adapter, that has wireless dongles for external mouse, keyboard and headset With Chromium Snap and Chromecast, I cast fullscreen or browser tab to 43" LG LED TV. A little laggy, but better than no HDMI at all. Some wired remote desktop could be less laggy. I like that M1 Air is silent and compiles fast.

extr 3y ago

Yeah, I think people were overly optimistic given the initial progress. The Asahi team has done incredible work to be sure with just getting it running and the GPU driver. But there is a long tail of things to fix to make it truly usable as a daily driver. For me personally, I thought the project was awesome, installed it, booted it, and realized the trackpad felt really janky. I start playing with the acceleration settings and then caught myself and remembered that not having to deal with that exact thing was why I bought a Mac to begin with.

tourmalinetaco 3y ago
One major problem is in the fact that Hector/Asahi has very little experience with distribution maintenance, and is mainly suited to the role of reverse engineering the M1 chip and implementing the driver. It would be far better if he put all of his focus into the M1 driver itself and let others handle the surrounding distro variants. In fact this recently came up when he misconfigured GRUB during updates and soft-locked Macs until they ran a list of sudo commands to fix the error.
- NoahKAndrews 3y ago
  That's the whole point of their new partnership with Fedora
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    That didn't help as the parent mentioned as Fedora Asahi Remix shipped a bug that caused people's grub config to be overwritten with one that didn't work preventing the machine from booting. There was no way to remotely fix users and a solution took days to come out for people to manually fix it by typing in commands to the bootloader.
- mort96 3y ago
  To their credit, this is a more challenging than your standard Linux distro. Lots of software just has a bunch of subtle bugs on arm which don't exist on x86_64. Other software has a bunch of subtle bugs on 16k page sizes. Those problems aren't ones you'll face as a distro maintainer for some x86_64 Linux distro. Then there's the issue that Arch Linux ARM is itself not always super competently managed, so it's not a solid foundation to build on top of. I think it'll be very good for them to leave all the distro responsibilities to Fedora and focus on the hardware specific stuff. But I don't think they'll stop facing weird issues related to not being part of the 4k page size x86_64 monoculture.
  - tedunangst 3y ago
    But was the grub issue caused by the 16k page size?
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    Ok, but the page size is something they chose themselves?
    - vulcan01 3y ago
      My understanding is that the chosen page size is optimal for the M-series integrated memory.
      - saagarjha 3y ago
        It doesn't really matter all that much for userspace; the page size really is a choice. It can improve performance in some cases and regress them in a handful of others. That said, the pain of having to deal with apps that need updates is entirely on Asahi by their own volition.
    - slikrick 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - 3y ago
- naniwaduni 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - progman32 3y ago
    Such accusations should be backed up with facts and examples.
    - naniwaduni 3y ago
      Okay, so, without pointing fingers, it's not even particularly weird or surprising that a few people gathered up from mostly the RE/console hacking/security scene have a penchant for breaking things and lack releng expertise. There's nothing especially wrong with that, though I'd consider it in itself good reason to side-eye relying on their software, more or less the same way I'd side-eye running suckless or, idk, MAS_AIO.cmd in production.

pleb_nz 3y ago

Those are all fairly critical things for me. Thanks for the comment.

dylan604 3y ago

does the original Apple recovery partition remain so that you could return it back to the original OS if one was to try this but prefer to go back?

rowanG077 3y ago
You can just run OSX beside Asahi. You don't need to uninstall OSX if you don't want to.
wtallis 3y ago
If you have access to a second Mac, you can restore macOS even after a complete disk wipe, no recovery partition needed: > Will this break my machine? How safe is it? [...] > Apple Silicon machines are almost completely unbrickable: you can boot them in a special burned-in recovery mode and recover them, using another machine connected via a USB cable. For those who don’t have another macOS machine to act as a host, we have open source tools that work on Windows and Linux too. https://asahilinux.org/2022/03/asahi-linux-alpha-release/ https://asahilinux.org/2022/03/asahi-linux-alpha-release/ https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-configurator-mac/revive-or-restore-a-mac-with-apple-silicon-apdd5f3c75ad/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-configurator-mac/reviv...
- CalChris 3y ago
  Yep, Apple Configurator 2. Been there done that with an unfixable partitioning. Eventually I learned about AC2 and a clean install solved all of my partitioning problems.
  - piperswe 3y ago
    Super handy for resetting other Apple devices in weird states too. I've picked up "bricked" HomePod Minis from eBay, reset them with AC2, and ended up with 100% functional HomePods for a fraction of the price of a new one.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

rowanG077 3y ago

This is my feeling as well. I guess that's just the way it goes once low-hanging fruit has been picked. But I would at the very least have expected one of: External displays, audio or stable bluetooth/WiFi.

heavyset_go 3y ago

And Apple is always releasing a moving target. This was the same case even back when they were running on PC architecture with Intel hardware.

wtallis 3y ago
I'm not sure the "moving target" argument holds up to much scrutiny. Asahi has been able to re-use the UART driver from the Samsung SoCs that went into the earliest iPhones, the I2C driver from PA Semi's PowerPC chips, and the GPU reverse engineering was greatly helped by the PowerVR heritage. There's clearly a fair bit of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" in Apple's hardware design strategy. Meanwhile, on the Wintel side the past ~decade has seen a complete overhaul in how systems sleep, and CPU features like TSX and SGX and MPX have come and gone, presenting OS developers with plenty of churn to deal with.
- zamadatix 3y ago
  I wouldn't say Apple is any less a moving target rather they've only released 2 generations of the M series so far. As an example it's looking like the 3rd generation will swap the GPU architecture you mentioned for something completely new. Sure, there are plenty of things that don't change much, and that I2C driver is a good example, but that doesn't really mean the target as a whole is particularly stable it just means they don't feel the need to rewrite I2C every chip revision. Meanwhile many of the things churning on the x86 side, like memory encryption, don't really matter for projects like this.
  - wtallis 3y ago
    I wasn't trying to say that Apple's platform is remarkably stable, only that there's no evidence it is particularly unstable. Even if their next GPU architecture requires a more or less complete re-write of the drivers, that on its own still wouldn't justify considering Apple's platform to be more of a moving target than the PC/Wintel platform—though it would bolster complaints about the necessity of reverse engineering rather than having documentation available (complaints that apply just as much against NVIDIA's GPUs). It'll probably take at least one or two more generations of Apple hardware before one can reasonably accuse them of being a constantly moving target. For now, the best evidence we have to go on is the fact that it took Asahi about a week to bring M2 support up to parity with the M1 support they had at that time.

prmoustache 3y ago

As a linux user why would you buy hardware from a company that do not provide any modicum of support for it?

OJFord 3y ago
I am a Linux user and not a MacBook owner, but I do really like (having used it myself in the past - 2013 Air, 2016 MBP - and seen others' recent stuff) Mac hardware. If my preferred Linux distro (Arch btw) just worked out of the box on Macs I would love one (though I do have a Framework now and the repairability etc. certainly would make me reluctant). Also though, I have a Windows desktop pretty much just for Fusion 360. I really dislike Windows, macOS as a BSD derivative is obviously a bit more comfortable/familiar/usable, I would love to (legitimately) dual-boot macOS and Linux, the former to allow me to run software that's not available on the latter. WINE (even with Lutris etc. recent work) is too fragile and difficult to get working and keep working.
sneak 3y ago
To not end up with a PC laptop, the likes of which haven't been meaningfully redesigned save for spec bumps for 15 years. Trackpad, speakers, case, thermals, cpu - the lowest end MBA blows the highest end "ultrabook" out of the water.
- manderley 3y ago
  [flagged]
- p1necone 3y ago
  > thermals Apple has been consistently terrible at cooling design, the only reason m1/m2 systems don't have thermal issues is because they sidestepped the problem entirely by building a very thermally efficient chip.
  - sneak 3y ago
    Not having the problem in the first place is the best way to solve it. We are discussing finished products. My M2 air lasts a million hours and doesn't get hot. My XPS lasts 4 or 5 and burns the top of my legs. I'm not sure yours is the criticism you think it is. Ultimately, heat is waste, and the less of it you generate, the better. When I said "thermals" I meant chip design, not cooling system design. This is obviously one of the huge benefits of their vertical integration.

evolve2k 3y ago

This project seems to be progressing the audio, activity from last month. https://github.com/chadmed/asahi-audio https://github.com/chadmed/asahi-audio

nelox 3y ago

This is reminiscent of the state of Linux 20 years ago in the PC world.

beanjuiceII 3y ago
Honestly it's still the state of Linux today in the PC world for most people
- hu3 3y ago
  Maybe I'm that lucky. Or maybe I do my homework before buying a computer for Linux. I don't think a single laptop I owned (7+) ever booted Ubuntu without everything just working. Sound, screen brightness, wifi, touchpad, sleep/suspend. I did have problems with gentoo but those were evidently self-inflicted, and solvable by installing Ubuntu.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

xet7 3y ago

I have Asahi Fedora Remix, at M1 Air with USB-C adapter, that has connected: - Power - Ethernet - USB-C adapter, that has wireless dongles for external mouse, keyboard and headset With Chromium Snap and Chromecast, I cast fullscreen or browser tab to 43" LG LED TV. A little laggy, but better than no HDMI at all. Some wired remote desktop could be less laggy. I like that M1 Air is silent and compiles fast.