9 ms·
Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19
- sohrob 8mo agoI often wonder whether the folks at Apple have the Asahi team on their radar. Are they in awe of the reverse engineering marvels coming out of the Asahi project, or are they indifferent to it?
- Kenji 8mo agoCertainly they know about it. There is no way they don't.
- Bigpet 8mo agoI think the dev that was responsible for the bootloader or some security chip having the option to be opened posted on twitter a while ago. Pretty sure he implied or mentioned that this was what he was hoping for. Edit: this was what I was remembering: https://x.com/XenoKovah/status/1339914714055368704 https://x.com/XenoKovah/status/1339914714055368704
- bigyabai 8mo agoIn fairness; that decision predates the existence of Asahi. Unless Apple was working with the community before Apple Silicon dropped, this isn't much acknowledgement of their existence.
- worldsavior 8mo agoI don't think they care. It brings more customers to Apple.
- chippiewill 8mo agoIIRC Marcan mentioned something he found that had been deliberately put into the Mac boot loader that made booting alternative operating systems easier and perhaps making it possible altogether.
- jsheard 8mo agoThat's apparent enough from the fact that you don't need a jailbreak exploit to boot non-Apple-signed kernels on a Mac, unlike iPads with exactly the same silicon. They are intentionally configured differently.
- imglorp 8mo agoWhy the locking difference on platforms? I so want to run my os on ipad and save it from the ewaste bin.
- szmarczak 8mo agoiPads are cheaper than MacBooks and more popular. They'd rather prefer if you bought another one instead of using it indefinitely. The same with smartphones. The answer always has been: I like money!
- walletdrainer 8mo agoThis is a weird conspiracy theory because people don’t really do that with macs.
- szmarczak 8mo agoiPads and MacBooks are architecturally different devices with different purposes (but soon the difference may vanish). People tend to upgrade their phones/tablets more often than their PCs/laptops. Macs aren't locked down because they are designed NOT to be locked down. You can write drivers for macOS (otherwise it couldn't compete with Windows or Linux) but not for iPadOS.
- szmarczak 8mo agoThat's weird response because people really did that with Macs. People used to run Windows (Boot Camp) on their Mac devices.
- WD-42 8mo agoThey are aware. They are also aware of the designs sitting in the cabinet right next to them in Cupertino that would make all the reverse engineering instantly unnecessary. Such a monumentally Sisyphean waste of effort in behalf of the Asahi devs in my opinion. If you care about personal computing or Linux, don’t buy a Mac.
- ckbkr10 8mo agoI'm still surprised how much drive this project has, a platform that doesn't want to support it and could introduce breaking changes any day. Just why?
- 12345hn6789 8mo agoThis horse has been beat to death on HN. Because the apple laptop ecosystem is the highest quality laptop you can purchase.
- MarsIronPI 8mo agoMaybe so, but nothing beats the 2008-2013 Thinkpad keyboards. The key travel and tactility are unmatched even by later Thinkpads. Also no trackpoint.
- swiftcoder 8mo ago> nothing beats the 2008-2013 Thinkpad keyboards Maybe so, but 15-20 year old laptops are definitely starting to show their age. An M2 MacBook Pro, on the other hand, is only 4 years old, has a fairly OK keyboard, and is still in striking distance of current high-end ultrabooks when it comes to performance.
- MarsIronPI 8mo agoThe only thing my X230 struggles to do is run LLMs locally. My needs are simple, and I think normal people (i.e. probably not most people on this site) don't have needs that are any more demanding than mine. Granted, this is running GNU/Linux rather than Windows. If you're running Windows then yeah, they show their age.
- coldtea 8mo agoSure they do. They even explicitly made some changes back 2-3 years ago to make it easier for Asahi (or such projects)
- gr4vityWall 8mo agoGreat work. I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years, like the Thinkpad T420 used to be. For different reasons, of course. Do the M4 and M5 GPUs also change a lot from the M3? I hope it's not too much work to get those going once M3 is usable.
- zozbot234 8mo agoPublic information seems to describe the M4 GPU as mostly a performance-oriented refresh of the one from M3. M5 has brought bigger changes, not least neural/tensor accelerators on chip.
- haunter 8mo agoI just like the build quality and they are reaching the 200€ threshold on the used market. I bought one with 16GB RAM and a small black strip one the side of the screen (don’t bother me) for 230€ last week
- joe_mamba 8mo ago>they are reaching the 200€ threshold on the used market. Where?! I just cheeked the used market in Austria and 2020 M1s go for at least 350 for the 8GB RAM models and 450 for the 16GB model. Your 230 for the 16gb one fells more like a rare exception but not them norm everywhere.
- haunter 8mo agoI’m in Hungary and usually check Facebook Marketplace, Vinted, and another two local sites Here is another one from today, just messeged them. 230€ rose gold one, and that's without any bargaining offer https://files.catbox.moe/exbrfc.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/exbrfc.jpg
- joe_mamba 8mo agoDamn that's lucky. I checked facebook marketplace in Austria and prices are double that of what you're showing, even on Intel macbooks, there's no M1 macs for 200 Euros, only 400 Euros and up. Same on Vinted. No 200 Euro M1s, only at 2x the price. The ones that I saw similarly low to yours are obvious scams from scam profiles all repeating the same message in the ad. So maybe the ones you saw are scams as well. Otherwise hungary seems to be a lucky exception for some odd reason. Maybe because people have less disposable income, IDK? Anyway, I wouldn't spend 400 Euros on a used mac with no warranty. The point of buying an old ThinkPad for cheap was that if something broke on it you could easily swap that part yourself for cheap because it was easily repairable and the used market was flooded with spare parts. But if your used macbook dies out of warranty, then you're shit out of luck, you can't fix anything, it's 400 Euros wasted.
- Retr0id 8mo ago120Hz is awesome! That was the last feature I personally felt was missing from my M1 Pro MBP.
- thunder_under 8mo agoFor me lack of thunderbolt is a showstopper, when it’s supported a lot of needed peripherals will be supported automatically. They have apparently been working on tb support since the m1 was released 4 years ago.
- 306bobby 8mo agoTo be frank, TB support on Linux in general is kinda crap. I'm not surprised this might take them a while, and I'm sure it's lower priority compared to other things on the road map
- ForHackernews 8mo agoThis is incredibly impressive and also quite sad. Six years later, we have a very-nearly-right kernel for the M1. Apple is launching the M5. It seems like the future is going to be a world of closed systems and custom silicon, with any free software lagging far behind.
- torben-friis 8mo agoThankfully, hardware progress is relatively slow in a way that makes the m1 still a perfectly capable machine. Maybe we’ll have a future of “flagship community devices” where only one of every X is chosen as the supported option.
- madduci 8mo agoBut we have still the power of choice: moving consumers away from such closed platforms would affect their business.
- NetMageSCW 8mo agoFirst you have to convince consumers to give up on systems that work with support to development kits that are build it yourself with (lots of) caveats, which is why the year of the Linux desktop still hasn’t arrived.
- madduci 8mo agoNot really true. There are platforms and systems that are stable and open.
- jsheard 8mo agoAnd that's with Apple deliberately leaving the bootloader open on Macs. If they had locked it down like they do on every other product then it would be even more of a struggle, and there's always the looming possibility that they'll just change their mind with future models.
- 8mo ago
- lame-robot-hoax 8mo agoMan, I know it’s probably going to be a while longer, but I’m really looking forward to the day I can run Asahi on my M4 Air.
- signa11 8mo agothe money quote (at least for some) In fact, the current state of M3 support is about where M1 support was when we released the first Arch Linux ARM based beta; keyboard, touchpad, WiFi, NVMe and USB3 are all working, albeit with some local patches to m1n1 and the Asahi kernel (yet to make their way into a pull request) required. So that must mean we will have a release ready soon, right?
- Noaidi 8mo agoJust came to praise the seven heroic souls who are working on this wonderful project that my M1 is just waiting to install once battery life meets my needs. And may I ask why, with all the crypto and tech money floating around, does Asahi not have a fully funded staff of fifty people?
- secondcoming 8mo agoPerhaps you should make the first step towards funding?
- Noaidi 8mo agoWell, wish I could contribute something which could help, but I am homeless living with Schzioaffective disorder and the inflation and wealth inequity caused by the tech industry has left my life on a razors edge when it comes to money. But I would gladly match my 1% of my monthly income to anyone here who can pledge the same 1% who makes over $500k a year. So that would be my $20/month vs their $416/month.
- wongarsu 8mo ago> why, with all the crypto and tech money floating around, does Asahi not have a fully funded staff of fifty people? Because all that crypto and tech money is trying to turn money into much more money, and Asahi isn't a great candidate for doing that
- burner420042 8mo agoI was watching Bladerunner last night, specifically the part where Ford is zooming in on the photograph using voice commands. Above the display is an amber horizontal bar that changes in sync with the activity on the display and my first thought was, "Finally they found a use for the Mac Touch Bar!" The Touch Bar has so many uses in Linux I can't wait for it to work.
- api 8mo agoYeah it could have been useful but I feel like they nerfed it from the start. Still wasn’t a big fan. I was hoping it was a tease for a fully software defined haptic feedback based keyboard. There’s the obvious usefulness and coolness of that, and then the fact that you could make a laptop closer to the sealed clean-ability of a phone. Probably not quite submersible/waterproof due to ports and fans but able to survive a spill and be cleaned well.
- burner420042 8mo ago100% agree. They nerfed it hard and so we just politely ignored it until we no longer even knew it was there.
- Etheryte 8mo agoMy favorite feature of the Touch Bar was that, if memory serves well, force push was right next to cancel in one of the IDEs, can't recall if Xcode or Intellij.
- bayindirh 8mo agoIt's a shame that Apple discontinued 3D touch. That thing was so cool and working so well, but not enough developers used it apparently.
- dijit 8mo agoThe issue was discoverability. If your design language is “flat as we can make it” how can you visualise a third dimension? You have to already know which things are 3D touch ready. I blame the software refresh of Apple after the 5-series UI language was removed. Minimal mechanical design with rich complex software is a beautiful contrast that strengthens how both feel.
- amelius 8mo agoWasted effort. Apple will just lock down their hardware more in their coming releases.
- notepad0x90 8mo agoIt would be nice if projects like this were more willing to take on paid devs, and accept regular payment. have some sort of a subscription? I don't say that because my money is burning a whole in my pocket, but because I want to see more hardware support and stability. more testing, QA, but hunting. With the attention this project is getting, I'd be surprised if they can't get the equivalent of a small startup's seed round, just by crowdfunding. Do they have all the funding and resources they need or not? that's really my ultimate question. I know you can't just throw money at these things and make them happen faster sometimes.
- Sayrus 8mo agoThey accept financial help on OpenCollective: https://opencollective.com/asahilinux https://opencollective.com/asahilinux
- navigate8310 8mo agoI don't own Apple hardware, but just reading through it made me appreciate how gifted these souls are, doing the god's work. I hope they succeed with upstreaming their contributions and have a first-class Linux on ARM support.
- rishav_sharan 8mo agoWould anyone knows if asahi is ready to be a daily driver on the m1 sir tet? How is the battery life against stock macos?
- rishav_sharan 8mo agoSorry, typo. Meant macbook air m1.
- throw-qqqqq 8mo agoDepends A LOT on what exactly you need for day to day usage. E.g. some have higher requirements than others.
- rishav_sharan 8mo agoMostly good battery life. I am on the move a lot and can use a laptop with full day battery for mostly youtube and web dev.
- neobrain 8mo agoFor me, it has been ready as a daily driver for more than a year. Battery life is shorter than macos but still long enough that I don't have to think about it (which I can't say about any x86 laptops, even when they use iGPUs). The notable missing features are external displays (an experimental kernel branch is publicly available though) and the fingerprint sensor. That's about it, though. Given the amount of polish combined with the hardware, it's arguably the most polished Linux laptop experience you'll get.
- aj_hackman 8mo ago`sudo cpupower frequency-set -g conservative` might help a bit with battery life.
- xbar 8mo agoThat is a tremendous update. Thank you for providing a great read about the diligent efforts of an increasing number of talented contributors: Oliver and Janne and Alyssa M and Shiz and Robert and Sven and James and Neal and chaos_princess and Davide and Lina and Michael and Sasha and Alyssa R have been killing.
- giancarlostoro 8mo agoAnyone know if the M4 GPU support has improved? I might not use Asahi "today" but I'm sure the day will come when my M4 laptop will be deemed "vintage" despite being perfectly fine hardware, and on that day I am most likely to flip over. Hopefully by then the GPU support is much richer.
- philodeon 8mo agoThere is no support for M3/M4/M5 GPUs, period. Asahi Linux is only installable on M1 and M2 Macs.
- ziofill 8mo agoI’m asking out of pure curiosity, no ill intent: what makes hdmi/usb-c support hard to implement?
- Bratmon 8mo agoI read a great article that explained that. It's called "The one we're commenting on"
- networkbug 8mo agoThere was a good talk at ccc by one of the people facing down the difficulties: https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-apple-silicon https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...
- small_model 8mo agoCouldn't Apple make a change that renders all this work a waste of time? i.e. lock out other OSe's from booting for example. I applaud the effort but given MacOs is already a capable unix I don't see the rewards being worth it.
- jasoneckert 8mo agomacOS is a capable UNIX, but it's not Linux - which has since become the standard platform for most cloud/web/ML development. As a developer myself who uses Fedora Asahi Remix as my daily driver, I can also tell you that Linux runs 2x faster (often much more) for everything compared to macOS - on the same hardware! And that performance gain is also important for my work :-)
- small_model 8mo agoTotally, I have a mini forums pc that runs void linux that I ssh into from my MB air. My worry is hitching your wagon to a project that could stop working one day through no fault of the devs.
- MBCook 8mo agoThey could have done that day 1 of Apple Silicon. It’s clear Apple went out of their way to make Asahi possible in a secure way. I believe people on the Asahi project have said as much.
- hu3 8mo agoOut of their way? They have been watching talented folks waste their lives away reverse engineering hardware/software that they possess all the schematics of. If they really wanted to help, all they had to do is send a single e-mail with a zip file. The distortion field is unbelievable.
- Teever 8mo agoThey could which is ultimately why we need regulators in the EU to premeptively ban those kinds of anti-repair anti-ownership kinds of business decisions. Consumers should be allowed to install whatever software they want on decides they own.
- ARandomerDude 8mo agoThis is amazing work, and I certainly respect the talent of those involved. That said, my question to those interested is why? I've been a daily user of both Ubuntu since 2005 and Mac since 2012. There are some edge case differences but for the most part they are so similar that I nearly always run the same code on both without modification. Clearly I'm missing something important but I'm curious what it is. Thanks in advance.
- matthew28845 8mo agoOne reason is for continued software support after Apple drops macOS compatibility for your machine. Intel Macs could be patched to run newer, unsupported OS versions (essentially hackintoshing your real Mac) but from my understanding that's basically impossible for Apple Silicon Macs.
- smith7018 8mo agoApple makes some of (if not) the best hardware around. It makes sense that some people would want to buy a Macbook Pro for its hardware and run their favorite OS on it.
- bsimpson 8mo agoI wonder how this will be impacted by the Steam Frame et. al. Apple is probably the most mainstream supplier of ARM computers at the moment, but Valve is likely to soon have the most mindshare amongst ARM-shippers who actively support Linux. I expect that will improve ARM support in the ecosystem, which should be good for Asahi also.
- znnajdla 8mo agoIf “long running agents” have any use, this feels like the kind of project where they should be put to work. You have an oracle implementation (macOS) and a well defined problem with lots of grueling trial and error.
- Lerc 8mo agoIf one were to grab a second hand (is there much of an ex-lease market?) mac. What is the sweet spot for performance,battery life, and Asahi support?
- e12e 8mo agoThe main thing that held me back from using Asahi on my M2 MacBook air - was missing external display. If I read TFA correctly - that should now work with a custom kernel. If that's true - I'd say MacBook air M2 is probably the new sweetspot - depending on how cheap you could get an M1. My impression is that until now, MacBook air M1 was the sweetspot.
- rowanG077 8mo agoyep it should work on M2 Macbook Air.
- cromka 8mo agoIf Apple decided to bring back BootCamp and allow to boot Windows Arm and Linux with their full support... they would wipe out the competition. And I actually think they'll do this soon, especially now that Windows Arm is getting better and Linux more popular, especially for gaming. This would also shield them from antitrust laws, to some extent.