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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 enginee
by 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 agoThat's the whole point of their new partnership with Fedora
- charcircuit 3y agoThat 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 agoTo 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 agoBut was the grub issue caused by the 16k page size?
- saagarjha 3y agoOk, but the page size is something they chose themselves?
- vulcan01 3y agoMy understanding is that the chosen page size is optimal for the M-series integrated memory.
- saagarjha 3y agoIt 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]
- dang 3y agoPlease don't post in the flamewar style. We want curious conversation here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- kaba0 3y agoI wonder, wouldn’t a NixOS Asahi fork make sense? It has proper, fail-safe updates (you can select the previous version in the boot menu) and reproducible package builds even for very finicky configs.
- tongueinkek 3y ago[dead]
- mort96 3y agoThe only actual problematic update I'm aware of was the one where grub broke, and if grub breaks, being able to select the previous system state from grub doesn't really help.
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoIt should be noted GRUB itself didn’t break at all. Hector used a bad config which broke things, and the fix was to replace that config with a new one. GRUB did exactly what it was told to do.
- naniwaduni 3y ago[flagged]
- progman32 3y agoSuch accusations should be backed up with facts and examples.
- naniwaduni 3y agoOkay, 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.