Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19

asahilinux.org

336 points by mkurz 9 hours ago


xbar - 5 hours ago

That 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.

bsimpson - 21 minutes ago

I 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.

gr4vityWall - 8 hours ago

Great 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.

signa11 - 7 hours ago

the 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?
sohrob - 9 hours ago

I 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?

ARandomerDude - an hour ago

This 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.

burner420042 - 6 hours ago

I 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.

navigate8310 - 5 hours ago

I 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.

notepad0x90 - 5 hours ago

It 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.

lame-robot-hoax - 7 hours ago

Man, 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.

giancarlostoro - 4 hours ago

Anyone 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.

rishav_sharan - 5 hours ago

Would anyone knows if asahi is ready to be a daily driver on the m1 sir tet? How is the battery life against stock macos?

Retr0id - 8 hours ago

120Hz is awesome! That was the last feature I personally felt was missing from my M1 Pro MBP.

ForHackernews - 8 hours ago

This 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.

ziofill - 3 hours ago

I’m asking out of pure curiosity, no ill intent: what makes hdmi/usb-c support hard to implement?

small_model - 3 hours ago

Couldn'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.

Noaidi - 7 hours ago

Just 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?

amelius - 6 hours ago

Wasted effort. Apple will just lock down their hardware more in their coming releases.