While I absolutely love the technical write-up from the Asahi team, and being absolutely impressed by their accomplishment, to the risk of being an overly negative contrarian, I remain a bit skeptical.
I'm concerned that after all these years, it's still a separate project and not an effort sustained directly within the kernel mainline and mainstream distributions like Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora.
These kinds of reverse engineering projects are extremely challenging. With skills & field knowledge, it's "easy" to get to "80%" and have something useful for you and the most dedicated users. But reaching the "95%" required for a polished & general public ready experience needs nearly as much effort, often on tedious and time consuming tidbits.
I think there is also the added challenge that ARM macs are a moving target, and Apple has less than no desire to provide any kind of stability or support for Asahi Linux. Unlike the PC space where laptop manufacturers have to maintain broad compatibility over time, Apple will make future changes that are really awkward for Asahi and will not care one bit because they can do the compat work on their own software.
>.. macOS only ever programs CS42L84 to operate at either 48 or 96 kHz, we could only add support for those two sample rates to the Linux driver ..
> However, CS42L42 supports all the other common sample rates, and while the register layout and programming sequence is different, the actual values programmed in for 48 and 96 kHz are the same across both chips. What would happen if we simply took the values for all other sample rates from the CS42L42 datasheet and added those to the CS42L84 driver? As it turns out, you get support for those sample rates!
> The patch to enable hardware support for 44.1, 88.2, 176.4 and 192 kHz sample rates on both the input and output of the headphone jack was submitted directly upstream, and has been merged for 7.1. We also backported this to Asahi kernel 6.19.9, allowing users to take advantage of this immediately.
Nice bit of chip sleuthing and reverse engineering from the Asahi team!
This is presumably what Apple does. You kind of have to anyway or you have the stupid situation Linux used to have where only one app could play audio at a time.
I really hope this project continues to gain momentum. Apple Hardware + Linux is the least fscked OS running on the best hardware. MacOS continues to be a tire fire with endless bugs and churn between versions.
I've run all 3 major OSes before. MacOS by far has the least bugs and kinda just works.
My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility.
My windows days were plagued with battery issues.
I feel like most Linux ricers wishs for a MacOS-like experience, except with more customisation. (Which is entirely possible now with the ricing on Mac)
In my personal experience macOS is fine but updates are often buggy or regress performance. Linux has just been the more polished option. Plus it just has a nicer desktop and apps.
Some people seem to get better battery life with Windows than with Linux.
Most users on any OSes are not ricers. Most of my customisation is functional - panels and widgets placed for practical reasons. A lot of people do not seem to customise at all, or barely.
Ricing is big, but I also like the hackability and development friendly environment of Linux that isn't there on Macbooks (been running MacOS as a secondary for ~5yrs now)
> My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility.
Is that on Mac hardware? I run a 14 year old Mac Book Air, and it works flawlessly with the latest Nixos, and has done for the last 11 years.
If you have issues on random PCs, it's because there are an enormous variety of them out there, with all kinds of incompatibilities that have to be worked around. On Mac hardware, there tends to be a more restricted number of variants, and after a few years, Linux becomes rock solid on them.
So the OP is correct, Linux on Mac hardware is the best combo.
Liquid Ass enters the chat, Apple can’t even make rounded corners anymore.
I was burned by the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard, and once Liquid Ass was announced I knew it was time to get out.
Sold my MacBook Pro M2 Pro, which has a stupid gigantic notch that blocks the menu bar items with no built-in mechanism for getting to them when they overflow.
Now I’m on a Framework 13” and I’ve had zero issues with Linux. Everything just works. KDE Plasma is way more customizable than macOS or Windows. I’m finally able to ditch slow Homebrew and use a real package manager. I can finally play light PC games on my laptop without dealing with streaming or Crossover.
My preorder is in for the Framework 13 Pro, which looks to get even closer to delivering a MacBook Pro for Linux. Meanwhile, Apple hasn’t changed their chassis design in 5 years, while Framework updates their hardware constantly while maintaining cross-compatibility. A company with less than 500 employees is catching up to a trillion dollar corporation.
I’ve already got my fully modular LPCAMM RAM delivered and ready with no Apple tax. I’ll get better battery life watching YouTube videos than a MacBook Pro and the graphics are just as powerful as the M5 base chip.
And if something breaks I won’t have to deal with the nightmare I went through with my 2016 MacBook Pro.
You should give Framework a try. It's been a flawless experience with Fedora. And with the upcoming Framework 13 Pro, battery life and trackpad are expected to be on par (or in the case of battery, even better than macos)
This is the big one IMHO. Apple is all about control of the stack, top to bottom. Any sort of "help" with linux on macos would be threatening to that control. Apple "helped" even more than I would have expected by not locking alt OSes out of the bootloader. Probably for less than altruistic reasons, but they did do it.
I don't know if that's true. Linux users are curious and will try more stuff but people mistake that they file bug reports (and usually detailed ones...) with complaining more.
Apple's MO is that it's their baby. End of. They don't do open. Their compiler is closed source, and so on.
The real answer is probably simpler than anyone here is making it. Apple hardware margins are healthy enough that selling macbooks to linux users is pure profit, so no services lock-in needed. However, the moment they officially acknowledge Linux support, then it becomes a support surface. Every kernel panic becomes a genius bar visit. Every driver bug becomes a tweet at @AppleSupport. It's the value of plausible deniability. The Asahi team being unofficial is actually the best possible outcome for Apple in that they get hardware sales to Linux enthusiasts without any support burden.
One of the reasons I can see is it’s much easier to say “we don’t play this game” than get a lot of negative press for selective openness and breaking compatibility of non-public interfaces. Maybe it’s even more important internally, as it enables new kind of internal discussions distracting from priority work.
Being the least bad doesn't make something good. macOS is the least bad choice for the majority of people that just want a machine to mostly browse the Internet, look at their photos, do some light productivity work, and participate in their ecosystem. It also arguably hosts has the best software options for creative work (although that's reaping the fruits of seeds planted long ago - not sure there's much about macOS that makes it inherently better for those tasks these days). For development, its advantage is the hardware it's running on. To achieve any level of customization or to define my own workflow that isn't what Apple wants me to do or to work across multiple systems, I have to fight macOS rather than work with it. Linux on the other hand does what I tell it to do.
I was trying to come up with a response but you're right. It would be easy for Apple and Apple would get so much goodwill from the community in return.
And let’s be honest, they still wouldn’t be satisfied. The goal post would move to something else. Why don’t my AirPods seamlessly handoff to my Linux MacBook?
Looking at: https://stats.asahilinux.org/ there is still a pretty large userbase who are so interested in it they go this route. I imagine that count would easily 10x if it would be officially supported. Those numbers are nothing to sneeze at.
I'm running asahi on my macbook. And never touch OSX. I wouldn't even had gotten it if asahi wasn't so well supported.
The vast majority of people that buy Macs for the ecosystem aren't going to switch to Linux. That market will remain untouched. Outside of a few gamers who might want to put up with the x86-to-ARM translation layer and (for most A to AAA games) Proton to run some non-Mac games. And even they'll probably still dual-boot.
There's a portion of another market: people who want to run Linux and want a powerful laptop who buy x86 Laptops right now. Apple could expend very little relative effort while offering no official support by helping Asahi get that to a first class platform. They won't capture them in the ecosystem (and they never would have) but will still benefit from hardware sales to them.
Obviously, if they sold their hardware at a loss and subsidized that with ecosystem capture that would be a non-starter. But from everything we know, the hardware itself is very profitable.
Yeah, and having the only supported OS be MacOS means they can entice people to upgrade when they want. No continuing on with 8+ year old hardware and a lightweight Linux distro even if it's fine for the intended use case.
They do also make a lot of money selling hardware, and as things stand today that business happens to make them look like the first tech giant to actually profit from the AI boom (because the hardware they've been developing internally for years happens to be among the best consumer-grade options for self-hosting LLMs). Making their hardware more attractive to tinkerers could be a winning move right now.
This, but also you would be allowing people to learn Linux. Developer with a Mac has to be one of the most common linux defectors. I suspect most people don't realize how doable and comfortable the switch can be.
It’s been my experience that developers running Mac already know how to use Linux and actively choose to use Mac. Unless the company is forcing it at least.
I imagine the real reason is that if they change things they now have an obligation to promptly share technical docs and if they're slow people will whine and bitch online about them. Not worth it. They have zero to gain (and I say this as someone who would love to dual boot Linux on my M4).
Plenty are whining now and that doesn't seem to bother them. I mean, this is one of the largest companies in the world. This is the company that once told people they were holding the phone wrong. I can't see them being particularly more bothered by people complaining in a slightly different way.
Apple's whole thing is hardware + software working together. Endless other options available to Linux users. They'd also need to be prepared for people bringing laptops to stores with hardware problems that aren't running macOS. Again, more burden for Apple for no gain other than winning over a couple of dozen users.
We really need to retire this phrase, it’s become a humblebrag way of calling the other party delusional without even trying to understand.
The list here though is long: priorities, accuracy concerns, blurring the line on official support, IP restrictions with third parties (even Apple uses plenty of licensed cores), etc.
I don't see it that way. It's just the GP poster saying that they don't get it. Usually that means the GP poster isn't experienced enough to understand the rationality. So I generally assume the GP poster is simply naive.
I wonder if there would be interest in an Asahi Remix spin focused on a more Mac-like out-of-the-box experience: cmd as the main modifier key, Mac-like keyboard shortcuts, theming, gestures, etc.
Of course, you can tweak any distro however you want, but I think a curated default experience is a different thing.
These kind of project reports showing consistent breakthroughs and clearly a finger on the pulse of what users are encountering as pain points are a good indication that the Asahi team are real pros :)
Look forward to switching back to Asahi full time soon!!
While I love Asahi as such and am really blown away by the effort, my setup requires an encrypted ZFS root file system, which is unreasonably hard to achieve with a Mac.
The fact, that there has to be a macOS partition for maintenance ruling out ZFSBootMenu somehow is very unfortunate - but I've accepted it.
Maybe the new Framework 13 Pro will be at least in the region of an alternative... :-/
M3 support nearly at alpha is fantastic news, and I'm really looking forward to M4 in the future. I am not looking forward to whatever Apple has planned this year for macOS, or next.
Nothing is stopping you from using LLMs when contributing to their project (I think). One reason might simply be that they would rather spend the (very sparse) donation money on anything else but tokens.
Unfortunately iPhones have locked bootloaders that prohibit installing other operating systems. People have gotten Linux running on iPhones, but it requires jailbreaking and that has gotten much harder over time. And it's not really worth putting effort into developing an OS if nobody is going to be able to install it.
I'm glad they dropped the ban on HN readers[1]. That was my very first impression of Asahi Linux that I ever encountered and it's unfortunately what I think of every time I see it show up here.
Honestly, knowing what I know about marcan, the decision was probably the result of an overwhelming/strong emotional reaction.
Not to just shit all over him or anything, but it really sucks to see someone who is genuinely top-ten-on-earth when it comes to "real hacking" struggle so much with socialisation and mental health.
It is weird to blame the victim for reacting to being harassed by a mob. That is a normal thing to have a reaction to. Perhaps rather than blaming people's social skills and mental health, we should instead blame the culture that normalises harassing people on the internet, even to the point of suicide (as happened in byuu's case). You are basically advocating that it is better for individuals to change to accept a shitty society as a given rather than advocating for society to change to be less shitty.
This marcan person had problem with Go, he had problem with Apple fans, he had problems with linux committers, so much he left internet or something. To say everyone but marcan was wrong is just a kind of fanboyism and it hardly helps marcan.
This person liked to dish out as much as next person but display extreme reaction when served.
I'm genuinely unfamiliar of the harassment campaign that HN launched against him.
(I am familiar with some comments debating the validity of Byuu/Near's gender identity, and marcan's extremely strong reaction to that, but no actual harassment campaigns)
This is not a dichotomy. It's not healthy to take random online comments to heart so much. It's also bad to make such ridiculous comments. Both can be true at the same time.
While I absolutely love the technical write-up from the Asahi team, and being absolutely impressed by their accomplishment, to the risk of being an overly negative contrarian, I remain a bit skeptical.
I'm concerned that after all these years, it's still a separate project and not an effort sustained directly within the kernel mainline and mainstream distributions like Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora.
These kinds of reverse engineering projects are extremely challenging. With skills & field knowledge, it's "easy" to get to "80%" and have something useful for you and the most dedicated users. But reaching the "95%" required for a polished & general public ready experience needs nearly as much effort, often on tedious and time consuming tidbits.
I think there is also the added challenge that ARM macs are a moving target, and Apple has less than no desire to provide any kind of stability or support for Asahi Linux. Unlike the PC space where laptop manufacturers have to maintain broad compatibility over time, Apple will make future changes that are really awkward for Asahi and will not care one bit because they can do the compat work on their own software.
>.. macOS only ever programs CS42L84 to operate at either 48 or 96 kHz, we could only add support for those two sample rates to the Linux driver ..
> However, CS42L42 supports all the other common sample rates, and while the register layout and programming sequence is different, the actual values programmed in for 48 and 96 kHz are the same across both chips. What would happen if we simply took the values for all other sample rates from the CS42L42 datasheet and added those to the CS42L84 driver? As it turns out, you get support for those sample rates!
> The patch to enable hardware support for 44.1, 88.2, 176.4 and 192 kHz sample rates on both the input and output of the headphone jack was submitted directly upstream, and has been merged for 7.1. We also backported this to Asahi kernel 6.19.9, allowing users to take advantage of this immediately.
Nice bit of chip sleuthing and reverse engineering from the Asahi team!
whoa, bit perfect CD/flac playback in 44.1, that's a killer feature.
There are many audio resampling libraries available that can convert from 44.1 to 48 kHz with no perceptible quality loss. E.g. see
https://github.com/hasenbanck/resampler#quality-analysis
This is presumably what Apple does. You kind of have to anyway or you have the stupid situation Linux used to have where only one app could play audio at a time.
Hardware often reports supporting 44.1kHz but internally resamples it to 48kHz so you're better off properly resampling it yourself.
I really hope this project continues to gain momentum. Apple Hardware + Linux is the least fscked OS running on the best hardware. MacOS continues to be a tire fire with endless bugs and churn between versions.
I've run all 3 major OSes before. MacOS by far has the least bugs and kinda just works.
My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility.
My windows days were plagued with battery issues.
I feel like most Linux ricers wishs for a MacOS-like experience, except with more customisation. (Which is entirely possible now with the ricing on Mac)
In my personal experience macOS is fine but updates are often buggy or regress performance. Linux has just been the more polished option. Plus it just has a nicer desktop and apps.
MacOS is also optimised for M series chips in a way that realistically no linux distribution ever will be.
Definitely good to have the option, but you'll most likely never get quite the same performance or battery life on linux
Not a problem I have had on Linux.
Some people seem to get better battery life with Windows than with Linux.
Most users on any OSes are not ricers. Most of my customisation is functional - panels and widgets placed for practical reasons. A lot of people do not seem to customise at all, or barely.
Ricing is big, but I also like the hackability and development friendly environment of Linux that isn't there on Macbooks (been running MacOS as a secondary for ~5yrs now)
> My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility.
Is that on Mac hardware? I run a 14 year old Mac Book Air, and it works flawlessly with the latest Nixos, and has done for the last 11 years.
If you have issues on random PCs, it's because there are an enormous variety of them out there, with all kinds of incompatibilities that have to be worked around. On Mac hardware, there tends to be a more restricted number of variants, and after a few years, Linux becomes rock solid on them.
So the OP is correct, Linux on Mac hardware is the best combo.
Liquid Ass enters the chat, Apple can’t even make rounded corners anymore.
I was burned by the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard, and once Liquid Ass was announced I knew it was time to get out.
Sold my MacBook Pro M2 Pro, which has a stupid gigantic notch that blocks the menu bar items with no built-in mechanism for getting to them when they overflow.
Now I’m on a Framework 13” and I’ve had zero issues with Linux. Everything just works. KDE Plasma is way more customizable than macOS or Windows. I’m finally able to ditch slow Homebrew and use a real package manager. I can finally play light PC games on my laptop without dealing with streaming or Crossover.
My preorder is in for the Framework 13 Pro, which looks to get even closer to delivering a MacBook Pro for Linux. Meanwhile, Apple hasn’t changed their chassis design in 5 years, while Framework updates their hardware constantly while maintaining cross-compatibility. A company with less than 500 employees is catching up to a trillion dollar corporation.
I’ve already got my fully modular LPCAMM RAM delivered and ready with no Apple tax. I’ll get better battery life watching YouTube videos than a MacBook Pro and the graphics are just as powerful as the M5 base chip.
And if something breaks I won’t have to deal with the nightmare I went through with my 2016 MacBook Pro.
You should give Framework a try. It's been a flawless experience with Fedora. And with the upcoming Framework 13 Pro, battery life and trackpad are expected to be on par (or in the case of battery, even better than macos)
When I think about it, I don't understand why Apple wouldn't want to help this effort and just provide all the documentation.
All the classic reasons ("competitive advantage", "secrets", etc) do not hold water in this day and age.
Little to no monetary benefit, hardware changes now need to be documented for Linux, loudest and most critical users but smallest volume.
And risk of loss of control on the software ecosystem.
This is the big one IMHO. Apple is all about control of the stack, top to bottom. Any sort of "help" with linux on macos would be threatening to that control. Apple "helped" even more than I would have expected by not locking alt OSes out of the bootloader. Probably for less than altruistic reasons, but they did do it.
I don't know if that's true. Linux users are curious and will try more stuff but people mistake that they file bug reports (and usually detailed ones...) with complaining more.
Apple's MO is that it's their baby. End of. They don't do open. Their compiler is closed source, and so on.
The real answer is probably simpler than anyone here is making it. Apple hardware margins are healthy enough that selling macbooks to linux users is pure profit, so no services lock-in needed. However, the moment they officially acknowledge Linux support, then it becomes a support surface. Every kernel panic becomes a genius bar visit. Every driver bug becomes a tweet at @AppleSupport. It's the value of plausible deniability. The Asahi team being unofficial is actually the best possible outcome for Apple in that they get hardware sales to Linux enthusiasts without any support burden.
> Apple hardware margins are healthy enough that selling macbooks to linux users is pure profit, so no services lock-in needed.
What do you mean by needed? A lock-in is more profitable so is needed to maximise profits.
They don't have to support it, just document the system or release their own kernel code. They don't even have to mention Linux.
They could anonymously drop off a package to the Asahi team.
That’s called support. We count that as support.
One of the reasons I can see is it’s much easier to say “we don’t play this game” than get a lot of negative press for selective openness and breaking compatibility of non-public interfaces. Maybe it’s even more important internally, as it enables new kind of internal discussions distracting from priority work.
They are operating under a patchwork of NDAs. It would take some effort to determine what they can disclose.
> Focus is about saying no to 100 good ideas so you can pursue one great idea.
Important context to understand why.
If they think macOS is one great idea, that's a terrible misjudgment.
And yet it’s incredibly popular and successful. Windows is also ass, and the year of the Linux desktop is perpetually a few years away.
Being the least bad doesn't make something good. macOS is the least bad choice for the majority of people that just want a machine to mostly browse the Internet, look at their photos, do some light productivity work, and participate in their ecosystem. It also arguably hosts has the best software options for creative work (although that's reaping the fruits of seeds planted long ago - not sure there's much about macOS that makes it inherently better for those tasks these days). For development, its advantage is the hardware it's running on. To achieve any level of customization or to define my own workflow that isn't what Apple wants me to do or to work across multiple systems, I have to fight macOS rather than work with it. Linux on the other hand does what I tell it to do.
I was trying to come up with a response but you're right. It would be easy for Apple and Apple would get so much goodwill from the community in return.
They get more public goodwill from a single ad. The chronically online Linux-using engineer community is too small to matter.
And let’s be honest, they still wouldn’t be satisfied. The goal post would move to something else. Why don’t my AirPods seamlessly handoff to my Linux MacBook?
Developers build many of the applications that make the platform desirable. Steve Ballmer at least seem to get that part. ;)
The developers for their platforms. Which, crucially, Linux developers are not.
Looking at: https://stats.asahilinux.org/ there is still a pretty large userbase who are so interested in it they go this route. I imagine that count would easily 10x if it would be officially supported. Those numbers are nothing to sneeze at.
I'm running asahi on my macbook. And never touch OSX. I wouldn't even had gotten it if asahi wasn't so well supported.
The cynical take is that they make a shit ton of money from services and Linux running on a MacBook won’t help them do that.
The vast majority of people that buy Macs for the ecosystem aren't going to switch to Linux. That market will remain untouched. Outside of a few gamers who might want to put up with the x86-to-ARM translation layer and (for most A to AAA games) Proton to run some non-Mac games. And even they'll probably still dual-boot.
There's a portion of another market: people who want to run Linux and want a powerful laptop who buy x86 Laptops right now. Apple could expend very little relative effort while offering no official support by helping Asahi get that to a first class platform. They won't capture them in the ecosystem (and they never would have) but will still benefit from hardware sales to them.
Obviously, if they sold their hardware at a loss and subsidized that with ecosystem capture that would be a non-starter. But from everything we know, the hardware itself is very profitable.
Yeah, and having the only supported OS be MacOS means they can entice people to upgrade when they want. No continuing on with 8+ year old hardware and a lightweight Linux distro even if it's fine for the intended use case.
They do also make a lot of money selling hardware, and as things stand today that business happens to make them look like the first tech giant to actually profit from the AI boom (because the hardware they've been developing internally for years happens to be among the best consumer-grade options for self-hosting LLMs). Making their hardware more attractive to tinkerers could be a winning move right now.
This, but also you would be allowing people to learn Linux. Developer with a Mac has to be one of the most common linux defectors. I suspect most people don't realize how doable and comfortable the switch can be.
It’s been my experience that developers running Mac already know how to use Linux and actively choose to use Mac. Unless the company is forcing it at least.
Linux users don't pay for anything anyway
I imagine the real reason is that if they change things they now have an obligation to promptly share technical docs and if they're slow people will whine and bitch online about them. Not worth it. They have zero to gain (and I say this as someone who would love to dual boot Linux on my M4).
Plenty are whining now and that doesn't seem to bother them. I mean, this is one of the largest companies in the world. This is the company that once told people they were holding the phone wrong. I can't see them being particularly more bothered by people complaining in a slightly different way.
so they don't care about users, they care about themself?
I think a more accurate statement is that they don’t want to take on the outsized burden relative to the number of users it would actually affect.
I’d love to dual boot Linux too but I’m under no delusions about being a very small segment of the Mac population.
Apple's whole thing is hardware + software working together. Endless other options available to Linux users. They'd also need to be prepared for people bringing laptops to stores with hardware problems that aren't running macOS. Again, more burden for Apple for no gain other than winning over a couple of dozen users.
Do you seriously think someone who installed Asahi is gonna walk into a genius bar and ask them to help, to the point where it becomes a burden??
And according to their stats page that sibling linked it’s more like a few tens of thousands of users.
> I don't understand
We really need to retire this phrase, it’s become a humblebrag way of calling the other party delusional without even trying to understand.
The list here though is long: priorities, accuracy concerns, blurring the line on official support, IP restrictions with third parties (even Apple uses plenty of licensed cores), etc.
I don't see it that way. It's just the GP poster saying that they don't get it. Usually that means the GP poster isn't experienced enough to understand the rationality. So I generally assume the GP poster is simply naive.
"Amaze, amaze, amaze!"
I wonder if there would be interest in an Asahi Remix spin focused on a more Mac-like out-of-the-box experience: cmd as the main modifier key, Mac-like keyboard shortcuts, theming, gestures, etc.
Of course, you can tweak any distro however you want, but I think a curated default experience is a different thing.
Cmd as a “main” modifier?
Ok typical X/Wayland setups, Cmd is already the main modifier for DE features, while Ctrl is the modifier used at an application level.
There would be a lot of weird overlap with changing that.
I've managed to get close enough w/ kde. I just asked claude code to implement it for me, and it web searched and built config files.
Cmd as main modifier is lost battle. I've tried it multiple times. In the end just accepted ctrl life and sold my last macbook.
These kind of project reports showing consistent breakthroughs and clearly a finger on the pulse of what users are encountering as pain points are a good indication that the Asahi team are real pros :)
Look forward to switching back to Asahi full time soon!!
While I love Asahi as such and am really blown away by the effort, my setup requires an encrypted ZFS root file system, which is unreasonably hard to achieve with a Mac.
The fact, that there has to be a macOS partition for maintenance ruling out ZFSBootMenu somehow is very unfortunate - but I've accepted it.
Maybe the new Framework 13 Pro will be at least in the region of an alternative... :-/
M3 support nearly at alpha is fantastic news, and I'm really looking forward to M4 in the future. I am not looking forward to whatever Apple has planned this year for macOS, or next.
Is anybody running Linux headlessly on the m4 mac minis successfully? I'm seeing them flying around used now at tempting prices...
Genuine question: can't LLMs be used to accelerate this project?
Nothing is stopping you from using LLMs when contributing to their project (I think). One reason might simply be that they would rather spend the (very sparse) donation money on anything else but tokens.
I run Asahi (the previous release) on an M2 Air and it works great except for high power drain when sleeping.
I still want to run it on an M3 MBP so it's nice to hear progress on that is happening.
Fascinating project like always. Thank you Asahi team!
Does anyone knows if it runs on M4 Mac machines?
It runs only on M1 and M2. M3 is being worked on.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m4/
Thanks! That is a good page for me to monitor!
Is there an equivalent of this for iphones so we can give them a second life?
Unfortunately iPhones have locked bootloaders that prohibit installing other operating systems. People have gotten Linux running on iPhones, but it requires jailbreaking and that has gotten much harder over time. And it's not really worth putting effort into developing an OS if nobody is going to be able to install it.
Running what exactly? Older iOS versions? Android?
Linux.
I'm glad they dropped the ban on HN readers[1]. That was my very first impression of Asahi Linux that I ever encountered and it's unfortunately what I think of every time I see it show up here.
[1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/commit/e0...
Because they got a lot of trolls and Apple fans. The decision was not made lightly.
Honestly, knowing what I know about marcan, the decision was probably the result of an overwhelming/strong emotional reaction.
Not to just shit all over him or anything, but it really sucks to see someone who is genuinely top-ten-on-earth when it comes to "real hacking" struggle so much with socialisation and mental health.
It is weird to blame the victim for reacting to being harassed by a mob. That is a normal thing to have a reaction to. Perhaps rather than blaming people's social skills and mental health, we should instead blame the culture that normalises harassing people on the internet, even to the point of suicide (as happened in byuu's case). You are basically advocating that it is better for individuals to change to accept a shitty society as a given rather than advocating for society to change to be less shitty.
This marcan person had problem with Go, he had problem with Apple fans, he had problems with linux committers, so much he left internet or something. To say everyone but marcan was wrong is just a kind of fanboyism and it hardly helps marcan.
This person liked to dish out as much as next person but display extreme reaction when served.
I'm genuinely unfamiliar of the harassment campaign that HN launched against him.
(I am familiar with some comments debating the validity of Byuu/Near's gender identity, and marcan's extremely strong reaction to that, but no actual harassment campaigns)
This is not a dichotomy. It's not healthy to take random online comments to heart so much. It's also bad to make such ridiculous comments. Both can be true at the same time.
How is that a ban?