Asahi Linux on M3
asahilinux.org487 points by mdp2021 21 hours ago
487 points by mdp2021 21 hours ago
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Asahi-Linux-Official-M3
It is odd that Apple doesn't chip in here... they've originated so much decent stuff in the OSS space. Seems like a huge missed opportunity. Apple are hostile to everything CopyLeft. Why would they "chip in" here? Well, they will get more people buying MacBooks, though they won't really use their services. What makes Apple valuable is precisely its full vertical integration. Nobody else does it at that scale except maybe Sony for consoles and Microsoft but both don't have the same usage coverage and thus integration. It wouldn't be economically rational for Apple to bring down its own moat. Apple isn't Sony. They make an arm and a leg on their hardware. When they switched to x86, it didn't take long for them to release Boot Camp, so they could take Windows users' money, too. They also make an arm and a leg on services, which is why its not in their interest to make it so you cant use them. It's not like users will just stop using the services. Rather Linux users will start considering MacBook as a potential laptop to buy. How could that possibly disrupt their Software/Services infra? Of course they will. Why would you pay for icloud storage you cant use? That statement is true for the users that both bought and didn't buy a Macbook (with Linux support). The difference is, the one who bought has paid money for the Macbook. I am not an Apple user. Do you _have_ to pay for iCloud if you buy the laptop? I don't think so. People whom want Linux on Macs obviously already don't want to be put into Apple's ecosystem. Folks are much better supporting Linux and BSD OEMs than buying Apple than then trying to run Linux on their devices. They don't care about people buying MacBooks. They want you in their ecosystem buying i-everything. I do wonder if the margin on Mac isn’t that high vs the price and the services (iCloud etc) make up for that. Amazon do the same with the fire. The reason this amazing project exists is the same reason my current Mac will be my last Mac. I wish the team every success. I got my first ever Mac relatively recently and I'm shocked by how annoying MacOS is. Maybe the mistake was expecting a proper operating system that puts the user in charge and not something more similar to iOS. Also Mac forums are full of dumb users and aren't much help. Average problem solving experience: There is no solution because Apple doesn't allow it, the workaround doesn't really do what you want and the other users question why you have to do the thing you want to do anyway. "Why not just let Apple wake up your hibernating Macbook at 3:00 AM and drain the battery bro, they know what they're doing" Sadly the hardware is amazing and so much more efficient compared to Intel/AMD x86. We need M-series chips for Linux. Yeah, vanilla MacOS is super focused on the set of "all windows of a given Application" as the useful "unit of work". Whereas in real work, you actually handle individual windows of a set of applications (e.g. firefox window for docs, vscode for code, finder window for project files) as the single unit you are working on. MacOS is, in my experience, incredibly clunky due to this mismatch. You can fix some (e.g. use AltTab for sane alttabbing), but not others (how can i prevent the next application window popping up when minimizing one) It is indeed very strange and annoying. And I don't remember it being so bad ten years ago (although I had to use witcher for alt-tabbing - which actually worked well, unlike AltTab now). Since Linux, and both OG Mac Os, I am used to having multiple Desktops, in total multiple windows of the same applications (browsers, pdf reader, office, file browser). Mac Os is completely hostile towards doing multiple tasks at the same time, and compartmentalizing them into desktops -- you keep getting thrown around to random windows on random desktops (example if you close a window), it's super difficult to find your windows, it's just crazy. You're afraid of ever moving away from a window. I think this paradim is also what's makes the Mac OS feel snappy. If basically having multiple windows for one software open is "holding it wrong", the OS is pushing you into one application, one window paradigm. As long as you do that, everything is pretty quick. But don't dare open two browser windows, or even worse, two windows of a word processor. The performance will degrade (and you'll keep searching for your windows...) My favorite is missing support for face unlock, missing "energy options" (stay on when I close lid, something Windows XP had for 25 years now), and draining the battery empty when you shut the MacBook down while plugged in. Do you mean 'will be my last MacOS?' No. Whilst Apple's hardware is among the best in the world, I simply can't support their direction with respect to increasingly closed hardware. While the Ashahi engineers are working super hard reverse engineering the Apple Silicon, there has been a huge surge in Omarchy circles to get it all working with AI writing all the drivers and get all kinds of hardware in M4/M5 and later M6 working as well. It sped up a lot. Is anyone actually actively working on it in Omarchy circles? I see a lot of smoke on X and a lot of "look what I vibecoded over the weekend" shows yet another control panel for sony XMs. https://x.com/wtsnz/status/2096815939027349574?s=20 Yes, I see people working on M4 and every few days it gets better ,,However, there's plenty more work to get it fully supported and working with Hyperland.'' I feel like the growing polarization in that space is pretty much going to kill any chance of collaboration (for example: https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2091229491867594983?s=12&t=JH...). It really boils down to DHH and his conservative worldview clashing over things like the downsides of corporate funding and capitalism, building system software by just throwing more AI cycles at it, rejecting data centers over environmental concerns, and pushing back on AI-generated code due to slop and security issues. I just don't see both sides putting their differences aside to work together. DHH will probably just duplicate unaligned efforts so he can completely bypass and avoid having to deal with the human element. What you are talking about is just simply political polarization which is done on purpose by poiticians, which happened whether DHH or Ashahi Linux devs wanted or not. Also there is real human element in both, I'm just going to an Omarchy meetup that's organized next week, and DHH is also organizing some (just not in my city). I believe eventhough they won't work together directly, with open source they can just use eachothers code (I believe Omarchy is using Ashahi's M1-M3 code, but now people are already creating Omarchy M4 GPU support using AI, and Ashahi devs can look at how it's working and understand it, they just want to take things a bit slower to have less slop). > but now people are already creating Omarchy M4 GPU support using AI, and Ashahi devs can look at how it's working and understand it, they just want to take things a bit slower to have less slop The thing is... it's legal issues in the end. With AI you cannot prove the provenance of your code, and you might get dinged in front of the courts. With the way Asahi Linux, WINE and ReactOS operate - no AI, reverse-engineering has to be very carefully documented - it is much, much less likely someone can complain about violating laws and licenses. I don't think "growing polarisation" is the right framing here. It gives way too much weight and legitimacy to views that have to be subjected to cordon sanitaire [1]. It's not acceptable to associate race with national identity (DHH's London post). It's not acceptable to call for ethnic cleansing (his post on Travellers). It's not "just another view, couldn't we all get along"; we can respectfully disagree on small state vs large state, on low taxes vs high welfare, on isolationism vs interventionism even, but DHH's views have to be unacceptable. What is happening is a number of very rich, powerful, well-connected men (and sometimes women, see AfD) are trying to normalise those views and demolish the cordon sanitaire. "It's just another view" and framing this view as legitimate, just polarised, is one of their tactics. It's a moral duty of anyone remotely believing in the OG liberalism (you know, that people are equal regardless of their skin colour or ethnicity) to not let them. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordon_sanitaire_(politics) > It really boils down to DHH and his conservative worldview That is putting a lot of strain on the word "conservative". To quote Wikipedia [1]: > In 2025, Hansson published a blog post expressing support for far-right British activist Tommy Robinson and the 2025 British anti-immigration protests, as well as mourning that London is "no longer full of native Brits". In response, some members of the Ruby on Rails community called for his removal from project governance. > Hansson published another blog post[36] in July of 2026 comparing the Romani population of Copenhagen to Denmark's struggles with its wolf population growth, stating that "When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them." This isn't "conservative", this is blatant far-right talking here. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson#Contr... This is really incredible work but so frustrating that its necessary Only because some buy Apple instead of supporting Linux OEMs. It turns out people want actually good machines. I have the cheapest M1 Air and it still rocks and isn't power hungry. When Apple stops supporting it I will gladly switch to Asahi if capable. this opens up the options on the used market though. once people start dumping their early Mx Macs, they will turn into wonderful Linux machines instead of becoming landfill or a collector's item that will sit in a display case / shelf Why wouldn’t bringing up an OS on new hardware be necessary? Apple has no obligation or incentive whatsoever to write Linux device drivers… Do you think Apple should be funding this work out of revenue? What possible justification could they provide for such a waste of money? This will not sell any more laptops. Even if Asahi didn’t do it, the work would still be necessary by someone inside Apple. Drivers don’t spontaneously appear from the ether. Nobody is complaining about code not being provided. It’s more the schematics that are sitting in a drawer in Cupertino that would make the painstaking reverse engineering unnecessary. Someone at Apple would have a much easier time. Well... every reverse engineering project is a schematic sitting in someone's drawer. All of that IP stolen by OpenAI and they didn’t think to buy some goodwill lifting a copy of an engineer’s manual to their GPUs… They could also hire somebody to sabotage this work in some ways if it helps with the bottom line. That's totally reasonable thing to do that I will defend in that case, because I would love to see the trillion dollar corporation become 10 trillion dollar corporation, because reasons. Apple doesn’t need to hire anyone. It’s a complete waste of their time if three former Apple silicon-engineers can start their own company Nuvia which licensed, designed and engineered Arm chips, said company was later bought out by Qualcomm for 1.2 billion dollars, if they can do it, there are many other smart people in the world that can do the same after all, it has been about 35 years since the birth of Linux. Where are they? Every time something new comes out hardware wise in the tech world , there’s this dying quail chorus of Linux geeks, who cry about it, not having Linux support. The only long-term solution is for a group of smart talented people to get together and take out a license from Arm and proceed to design a chip with Linux support from ground zero however, such an endeavor probably would make everyone in the Linux world mad/unhappy because in order to do something well/professional said group would have to fork Linux in order for it and hardware to have the best chance at success selling to the general public you know the group that just wants to use a computer and not jump underneath the hood to tinker with every little thing to get it working. Of course they do not have the obligation to do so. This is more about Apple doing a nice gesture to the "owners" of their devices They could open source their software so others could utilise the code instead of needing reverse engineering Darwin is open source has been for 25-26 years is it too much hard work? https://github.com/PureDarwin/PureDarwin They've done the userspace bringup for linux since apple silicon servers allegedly exist. The drivers exist already so just throwing the device tree over the wall can't be that hard. Nobody is asking for systemready/UEFI or mainline linux. https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200658399-0645/linux-ke... I suspect that they might be changing their mind about upstreaming? PureDarwin doesn't work on any of the M-series machines, and according to the Github commit log, hasn't been updated since 2024. > Apple has no obligation or incentive whatsoever to write Linux device drivers… In ideal world the society would make it an obligation for general computers to remain free (as in freedom) and accessible. Nobody likes hearing the realpolitik of the Linux/Mac situation but you're not wrong. Apple had no obligation to write Windows drivers for Boot Camp either but did for over a decade. They could do the same for Linux even if they never open sourced them. There was a strong financial incentive to transition Windows users over to MacOS, by giving them a halfway point. I remember overhearing an older person being explained Boot Camp while waiting for my iPhone to be repaired and it was very obviously a way for them to sell a Macbook so they could dual-use windows on it to run some windows apps. The ultimate pull would eventually be MacOS because it was easier (if you already had a macbook and iphone). Apple knew they'd get curious eventually and see how awful the Windows UX was. The main argument for Linux on Macbooks would be developers but that doesn't mean there's a similar strong marketing/sales incentive to do so. Especially since there's no shortage of devs who default to mac (like legacy windows corporate users). Apple clearly doesn't see much money to be made by creating an olive branch offering to Linux users. Lack of sleep and HDMI support is real roadblock for adoption. Hope they gets past soon. It's not just the Apple Silicon Macs, either; I have a 2017-model Intel Mac which runs any number of distros just fine except that sleep just doesn't work right. No amount of keystrokes or mouse-clicks will wake it up if it sleeps. Have you tried very recently? I have a 2018 Macbook Pro with touchbar and the progress on getting T2 macs working lately has been amazing - 3 months ago I was having issues but I reinstalled last week with a 7 kernel and it has been flawless: suspend, restore, touchbar, fan control all great. Wow thank you for saying this. Always thought it’s my problem(because its the same with my 4 OSes), some misconfiguration etc.
Mine doesn’t reboot, I am always turning off and on after SSD change; and I thought it’s about that. Is there anything stopping this from being thrown some investment plus LLM tokens? I wonder what a KVM connected to the machine plus a few thousand in Astra/Fable tokens could do here. It seems funny to think of software feature defects in OSS software now if people are building full recombinations of closed source software daily now! It's hard to debug sleep in a VM or some self contained system. You need to physically interact with the laptop, reboot it after it gets stuck, etc. Add a tool to the harness you use that can ping you on Telegram/whatever when it gets stuck and need you to do stuff physically, tell it to use it in the workflow with you. Used this approach a bunch with Codex to work on and debug hardware stuff. Once every 5-15 minutes I receive my command, and as a good r̶o̶b̶o̶t̶ human I moved the resistor/patch cable in the way the agent instructed me, eventually it got things working in the way I wanted it to. Presumably, that would be what the KVM/some kind of power switch would be used for No, lack of GPU acceleration. Give me a laptop with sleep and HDMI output that has no 3d acceleration and I will give you back an unusable laptop. If you don't want to play 3d games or run local LLMs, why is GPU acceleration important when you have a more than capable CPU for any desktop UI? Without 3D accl basic web browsing can sort of suck, QubesOS has software only rendering and you can really feel it. Depends on your desktop UI. If you install something like Gnome (as I did with Asahi Linux today on an M3 Air) the animated transitions don’t work. You just get a short frozen period and then it cuts straight to the final state. I could try installing a more barebones DE which has no need for animations. Can you disable animations completely? At least I could in Gnome. It will become more snappy as a result as well. I did. Still missing the Vulkan support for Zed. But I noticed my WebGL ray marched shaders run quickly - with glitchy artifacts. Amazing project. My only blocker for installing Asahi on my Mac Studio (M1 ultra) is that llama.cpp performance is very bad when compared to using the Metal backend on the same hardware. Right!? Linux can be configured to idle at less than 500mb of ram - by contrast, with some aggressive shenanigans, MacOS can idle at 2-3gb. When running inference, I would love to use all of my hardware please Apple. It idles at 2-3GB but when your apps need the RAM, does it free up system memory so that it's closer to 500MB? I use my Mac as a headless server to run LLMs, and never even start a desktop session so it always stays at pre-login state without any applications running. Even so, I never saw it using less than 2G in htop when logged via SSH. I have similar issues with my ultra. Have put it on a laptop, but my desk Setup with my multiple desktop computers is usb-c video based ( kind of a poor man’s kvm) , and asahi doesn’t do usb-c video yet Thanks for the effort, guys. This makes me think, shouldn't the driver layer be generic now. All the driver does is writing correct data at correct address when needed, there is no need for OS support except triggering driver when to do that. A true HAL, any OS can run on that HAL. That data and that address changes, and the logic changes. Why should the address and logic change, when both are defined by hardware ? The firmware sometimes wants more data, different places to set the data, so on. The firmware changes, and you gotta adapt the driver to it. Sometimes it's a complete overhaul. I am still not sure why does OS has to be aware of this, if anything, only the HAL should be aware of this FW version to have correct behavior. Every major OS already has this HAL layer, we just need to decide/design a generic and hope that every player will use it. Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community? So much wasted effort when they can just share a pdf. > when they can just share a pdf. I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You have to work through provided code samples and then eventually get the vendor’s engineers to look into problems that couldn’t be resolved through the documentation, where they would go look into the other teams and their sources to discover the answer. The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. The honest answer is that it’s not worth the huge effort investment needed to document an entire platform for public consumption. I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open. You describe an exhaustive documention, but some documentation would already be better than none. Perfect is enemy of good, as your comment illustrates. Apple wouldn't want to be liable or responsible if someone implements an OS based on their incomplete and imperfect and outdated spec and gets hacked. If you’ve ever tried to lock down a mac and dealt with the 100s of system services, you’d know why. I like the hardware and base os, but I have no idea what those services are doing. Many are undocumented. A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. And, they’re chatty and persistent in trying to communicate out. You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack. I only use my mac for development. I’m a simple man and don’t need all the bloat and hidden behavior. Plus, I always feel like I’m one automatic update away from it becoming unusable. Not to mention coming from something like Niri, or even default Gnome to MacOS Tahoe is just gimping productivity tenfold. It is so incredibly unintuitive in every way for window management and keyboard shortcuts and everything in between. My Mac Mini M4 is for building the Mac/iOS apps, other than that it's useless as a daily driver. I will patiently wait for Asahi while I use my other computers that can run serious operating systems. > A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. Sure you can > You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack. No No, really you can't disable all of the services with SIP disabled, at least not the latest Tahoe. Maybe there's a better tool than launchctl, but I don't know what that is. Plus, you disable one, and it crashes and you have to debug it for an hour. Yes, I'm exaggerating about the networking. Yes, you can lock it down by turning off all of the devices, but honestly, I'm still not 100% on that. It was a surprise to me after I disabled ethernet and wifi and turned off everything in system settings, and someone passed by with an ios device. However, if you're an expert - please save me a year of trial and error and point me to the minimal list of services and daemons. So many daemons. And while a lot can be disabled, some of them cause important stuff to break if you disable them, or even cause the OS to crash in a Heisenbugian fashion. And there's no documentation. So debugging this crap is anything but simple. > The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. I suspect there would be an element of induced demand here. IMO the MacBook range are the only laptops on the market worth buying - but not having support for gaming (or at least, hilariously bad support for a limited range of games) is compelling enough reason to install Linux for a large portion of users (filling the void left behind by the widely adopted Bootcamp). > but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. Yeah, GPU ISA, controllers, power management, NPU, and who knows what else. I still believe that companies should be compelled by regulators to offer documentation and support necessary to write drivers as I believe it is part of the "right to repair" (M1 will lose support in 2 years, it's still a great platform). > They chose to leave it open. I _really_ wonder on this point. It's so uncharacteristic of Apple. Were they concerned about potential anti-competitive lawsuits and maliciously did the bare minimum to avoid them? "It's technically open hardware, but good luck figuring out how it works" If you don't count wine on macOS then Linux without wine has bad support for gaming too. This is nonsense. Chinese vendors like Rockchip and Allwinner provide fairly halfassed docs at times, but they try. It's housnads of pages, total, sure. But even this along with public code samples allows to create almost perfectly FOSS supported implementations for their HW. And it's a complex HW similar to what Apple has. I've worked with all kinds of just annoyingly incomplete and badly written datasheets, and if you put some work into it having at least something helps tremendously, even if the manufacturer ignores you completely and you have no field engineer access, and just throws incomplete crap over the public fence. No docs is clear statement Apple hates FOSS. "how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop" argument is very weak considering that only consumer platforms that engage in a complete lockdown are maybe some gaming consoles, and those are basically appliances and not a general computing machines. Darwin is open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
https://www.puredarwin.org/ > The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. It's only going to grow every year as apple stops releasing OS updates for perfectly functioning hardware. At the point its vintage people will just buy something new as it will perform better. > The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. Right now, yes. But Linux support is like freedom of speech in a dictatorship. Everyone makes fun of it and says it's useless but fundamentally the powers that be are deathly afraid of it ever turning the tide. Sure but that's not really their point. They're not saying that Linux is a joke nor that it's useless; they're saying that the amount of people installing Linux on their Macs is so small that it wouldn't make financial sense for Apple to support them. Knowing how much an engineer gets paid, even staffing a small team to supporting Linux would cost Apple a couple million each year. That's not even taking support into account. They had a revenue of $416 billion in 2025. That would be like you buying something at the dollar store. If Apple doubled their Mac revenue, the financial benefit of Linux would remain the same. That means it would then be effectively half as important for their business, but the operational challenges and risks remain the same. At some point the ongoing maintenance and support as well as coordination and organizational distraction mean it wouldn't get approved if internal engineers offered to start it off for free. That's not why they're avoiding it, though. They're avoiding it because installing Linux (or Windows, even), would actually decrease their income. I doubt people running Windows on Intel Macs were avid Apple Music subscribers. would actually decrease their income per device, but they would still make money on the device. or are you saying apple devices are loss-leader prior the app store revenue ? that's the model taken to the extreme No, they're not loss leaders, but in 2015 services were about 9% of Apple revenue. Now they're about 28%. It's fairly clear which direction the wind is blowing. Also, hardware - software integration pushes more hardware sales. People with iPhones are a lot more likely to buy Macs than people with Android phones. Same story for Airpods & co. I've also basically never seen an Apple keyboard used with non-Apple computers. Also Apple stops supporting the hardware and the software at the same time. The case that Linux support lets hardware be used longer is a harder sell when the company stops manufacturing/stocking parts for servicing at the point where someone would consider Linux. > I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open. Oh please - Apple provided a full suite of Bootcamp drivers for their hardware just a couple of years ago, not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here. In the beginning, Bootcamp had a real job. It allowed a machine running Intel's EFI firmware (as Intel Macs have always done) to boot an OS that only understood the older BIOS standard. Once Microsoft and the various PC vendors started supporting UEFI directly, Bootcamp was just a bundle of existing Windows drivers from the component vendors. If you put a specific Broadcom Wi-Fi chip in the Mac, Bootcamp included Broadcom's Windows driver that was best suited for that chip. And Linux support on M Macs would also have a "real job", what is your point exactly? I find it so bizarre that some of you here are defending a megacorporation that could have easily afforded to provide drivers for Linux Kernel like their competitors do. You're clapping for free volunteers to spend hundreds of hours reverse engineering Thunderbolt controllers when companies like Intel outright contribute them. The reverse of that argument is why are you applauding Intel for doing something they had to do well in order to get any sales? I'm pretty sure Intel is providing Xenon CPUs for free when they are used in Linux servers, so they have no financial interest in providing first party Linux drivers. Sure, they relied on community Linux drivers in the past, but that didn't have anything to do with money. There is no "applause" in my post - please learn to read before you take up your bigcorp defender shield and think for a second why you're fighting against your own benefit. > not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here. The person you're replying to didn't say that. Please don't misrepresent and please keep it respectful Regardless, saying it would be too much effort for Apple is laughable at best. Even more so when Apple used to release such docs in the past when it was much less financially capable. They just don't care. Bootcamp on Intel Macs was a different story because Apple's hardware was mostly an assortment of other vendors' hardware (with some custom components and set up). That means they could bundle drivers for Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, Realtek, Marvell, Synaptics, etc plus a couple of their own (the camera, the touchpad, the mouse, etc) and call it a day. Since the hardware was x86-64 it mostly just worked. That's an immensely different world from their custom hardware. They would need to write Linux drivers for all of their networking chips, each of their processors, their GPUs, work around Linux/Windows' 16KB memory page issues, their neural engines, the SEP, their DCP, the interrupt controller, IOMMU, their custom storage drivers, etc. You're vastly underselling or misunderstanding the size of the situation. They were also in a different place back when they made Bootcamp. They were fighting a "Mac vs PC" battle head on and trying to convert other OS users to macOS. Now they don't really seem to care about that because their strategy is converting iPhone users into ecosystem members. Darwin is out there and you too can license Arm and design something from the ground up if you have the ability and the will… It’s all there and it’s been 25-26 years no one has bothered maybe that’s Apple is still the only vertical computer company left from the 1980s. At one time there were many choices in hardware and OS software combined with that hardware that era is basically gone because no one wants to take the bull by the horns and do anything they want someone else to give it to them free. > Regardless, saying it would be too much effort for Apple That's not what they said. Please don't misrepresent > is laughabe And this disparaging language about commenters is not OK. Please stop. The implication of saying it's a "huge effort" is that the effort is too much. You're nitpicking at this point and the flat refusal is just as much a problem as tossing out "laughable" in a sentence focused on calling Apple bad. > And this disparaging language about commenters is not OK. Please stop. Nothing about that statement is disparaging - just because you don't want to hear it, doesn't make it insulting. Calling out nonsense is important, especially on this website. Apple until a few years ago had killed off all first party monitors because they thought that business line was a distraction. The challenge isn't finding an engineer. It is picking what project doesn't get done in its place. Apple's hypervisor.framework lets other OS instances run very very fast with the UTM app (open source on github, but i use the prebuilt version from the App Store). In my case i've used arm native linuxes (arch with various compositors, kde, gnome, fedora) all on M2, M2 Max, M5 and the experience is indistinguishable from native. MacOS is running too. I think hardcore graphics folks might want direct accelerator access, or there'd be curiously little reason for Asahi (other than that it's awesome work). I use UTM in emulation mode, NOT Qemu simulation mode, which is wasteful. just my $0.02. What is the purpose here? You are still stuck with a full blown MacOS running the system no? That is what Asahi tries to replace, not the other way around. I'd recommend reading up on it, and perhaps trying it, because it's very useful. For folks lamenting that the (awesome) Asahi efforts are challenged by reverse engineering of changes from M2 to M3, and so on, those changes vanish into the abstraction, but their benefits do not. That's why i switched from Asahi a couple years ago to UTM in apple silicon hypervisor mode. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/utm-virtual-machines The point is some people who want to run Linux mostly do not want MacOS. You suggest to "just run MacOS" (the thing they want to avoid) and virtualize Linux. That defeats the entire purpose, then you could just as well skip the VM and run Mac apps. Yes, there are a few specialized applications people might need Linux for but that's mostly not why they install an entirely different OS. For the occasional obscure programm that doesn't exist in the Apple ecosystem VMs are a good option, absolutely. Everything you do in the VM still runs on Mac though and you depend on Apple for security, privacy and trust in general. It serves the exact same purpose that WSL does in Windows. You can run any flavor of Linux you like in a virtual machine, while booted into the native OS. The purpose is to be able to run a decent Linux setup while also having MacOS for things. Not everyone is stuck on the anti-Apple train; some of us put software on all the platforms and thus using the hypervisor for this use case is quite comfortable. Disclaimer: personal experience - I too use UTM for highly productive things.. Wanting to run a single OS at a time is anti Apple now? Run MacOS or run Linux, why run both and create more problems than it solves and waste resources? Run both when you need to build for both. Why not run both when you need to? I just don't trust macOS enough to run the hw, AsahiLinux/Linux Kernel I do, I love Apple hardware but want to run Linux. I spent this past weekend giving UTM w/ Apple Virtualization a shot and can confirm that it really does work fantastically well! The only downside seems to be that it's not possible to pass USB devices through to the VM guest yet? This misses the point entirely. What happens when apple inevitably discontinues support for this hardware. The same thing that has previously happened with discontinued Intel Macs or PC hardware that is no longer supported by Windows. You can still boot Linux natively on it. i have no idea how you think apple silicon will discontinue support for itself. the hypervisor framework documentation, that i linked above, is pretty clear; the linux builds for arm run extremely fast on apple silicon because hypervisor framework gives them hardware access, in some subsystems directly (memory mapping for example), in other systems through a shim (graphics hardware). Apple discontinues support for this HW, not Apple discontinues support for running Linux in a hypervisor. when apple discontinues support for older hardware, it doesn't get OS software updates. that doesn't disable the hardware from running the latest OS before OS updates for the hardware were ended. On the frozen-in-time OS, you'd still have a working instance of apple silicon hypervisor wrapping optimized drivers that make whatever linux arm build you're running still see the hardware. Some people would like to keep running a system that’s connected to the internet that’s still receiving security updates. Running an outdated host isn’t the best idea. So you are wrapping Linux in an insecure and never updating wrapper connected to the internet? Sounds awesome! Since the hardware will no longer get security updates for the firmware you should stop using it and move to a newer MacBook. Linux doesn't solve the issue of not getting security updates anymore. For example the FCC does not allow letting users write arbitrary firmware they can run on their devices so this means you legally can't update the Bluetooth or Wifi firmware and need an update from Apple. I don't think you understand what Asahi Linux is. This isn't about running VMs. I used Asahi linux on M1 for a couple years, and dual booted, and worked as an engineer in an inner part of Apple. I definitely know what Asahi is. I'd imagine it's for IP protection. There's a lot of documentation required to write drivers for hardware; for the GPU, they'd need to share the instruction set of the GPU along with the specifications of the controller. Lots of weird things like power management too. If shared, that's probably enough to create copycat hardware or at least an emulator. Personally, I just want to run Linux on my latest MacBook Pro on day 1 with full hardware acceleration. If it was supported, MacOS would be on the device for as long as it took to install Linux. I think the only way that would happen is if the EU extended "the right to repair" to include software, compelling companies to release documentation sufficient to produce drivers with. I'm sure Apple would maliciously comply, like provide the ISA but not power management specs - but that would still cut the work required by the Asahi team by 80%. Aside from the "they have no incentive" answer, I imagine it's not so easy even if they wanted to. I suspect most of it won't be solely Apple's IP to share in the first place. So that you have to keep buying Macs every few years of course. If they gave you a way to install linux easily then you could use it far past their intended lifespan and wouldnt keep you locked into the apple ecosystem. They have proved time and time again that Apple hardware running anything but MacOS or iOS is something they will work very hard to stop you doing. > every few years of course That sounds like a you thing; I've kept my macs for at least 5 years. My M1 is still going strong and I haven't felt any pressure to upgrade. 2 more years and your mac will not install the latest MacOS version, which then means you will no longer be able to update any software on your own computer or install any new software either. If you could install linux or any other OS on it you would be able to use it for decades to come, but instead you will be forced to buy another new shiny Apple box. You will probably argue thats ok because you would have wanted one anyway by that time or some such point, but the fact remains that Apple will force you to upgrade your hardware not very long away by not allowing you to install anything on it. That's not how macs work. You don't suddenly lose the ability to run new binaries just because they're not on the latest MacOS version. Using your own conservative estimate, 8 years seems like a fine lifespan for a laptop, far longer than the "few years" you initially said. And in practice, there are plenty of macbooks that have been running even longer. The parent commenter described exactly how Macs work. I have a beautiful 10-core iMac 27” with 72 GB of RAM from 2020 that Apple has now decided to turn into a lemon. macOS Tahoe runs as slow as molasses and no more macOS upgrades will be forthcoming. I downgraded to Sonoma (which cost me hours) and the machine runs well again for now but the App Store has already started refusing to update apps like Pages because macOS is old. Soon I won’t be able to install a single app through the App Store and Linux (T2 Linux in my case, not Asahi) will be the only option to keep using this terrific hardware. Intel macs suddenly will lose the ability to run programs because Apple has dropped the requirement to ship an intel build. And from experience, as soon as Apple stops requiring devs support old hardware, nothing works anymore. That only affects new software, the stuff that runs on those macs now will continue to run on them in the future Which will make it 7 years old. That is hardly a machine that must be replaced “every few years” > past their intended lifespan Thanks to the community, you can install macOS 15 (or older) on unsupported macs (as old as 18 years) https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht... It's a bit awkward where newer Intel models with T2 chips don't support OpenCore, so e.g. the 2019 MBA is going to run out of security updates with macOS 14, sooner than a 2008 MBA that OpenCore will update up to macOS 15. > past their intended lifespan This bullshit needs to die. The products are designed to last. The hardware is designed to last, the software is designed to force you to buy a new device after 7 years at most. Is it a "a few years" or 7 years? Depends on your expectations. Throwing a perfectly working laptop out after 7 years because apple cut off software support is wasteful to me. It might not be for you. Why would you throw it out after 7 years? The software that’s already on it will continue to work just as it always has. My experience with iPads losing Apple support is every app just shows you an error message saying your app is out of date and can't be used, while the app store won't let you update it because the latest api version doesn't support your device. Unless you are using all FOSS software, most apps want to connect to some server, and that connection breaks rapidly without updates. If you can load Linux on it it's still usable, but Apple OSs degrade rapidly after Apple stops supporting them. Apple is better about keeping devices on the latest OS version, but much worse about support after that period. My iMac Pro 2017 is an Energizer Bunny. I got almost 10 years from by MacBook Pro. It wouldn’t even be a problem for Apple to support Linux. Linux’s desktop market share has never been a threat to Apple at all. I hope Ternus, being the engineer he is, opens this up. The sad part is that it's known that Apple internally maintains Linux ports to their SoCs > https://talents.vaia.com/companies/apple-inc/software-engine... Hmm, odd listing. Looks like an embedded linux job working on a BSP, but they don't have any hardware I know of which ships with Linux. Even their constrained environments use things like their own L4 variant or RTKit. I don't think Linus Torvalds has any sway on what Apple does. Or do you mean John Ternus, the new CEO? My phone autocorrected Ternus to Torvalds, what a catch! > My phone autocorrected Termus to Torvalds, what a catch! Kinda funny and definitely a word suggestion that will be locked in future code. Darwin is open source has been for 25-26 years is it too much hard work?
https://github.com/PureDarwin/PureDarwin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
https://www.puredarwin.org/ They want control on the walled garden. When was the last time apple did anything for public unless forced by FCC. Now there is no hope since they can simply donate to trump. Apple made some changes specifically for Asahi Linux to make it more robust. I believe it was Hector Martin who discussed it on Mastodon a while ago. Would you happen to have a link to this? I would like to learn about this but unfortunately treehouse.systems doesn't seem to be very well indexed by search engines, and Mastodon's search is failing me. Source? It's a welcome thing but very much not like Apple. Apple has a long long history of supporting open source. can you please tell us what have they done for open source except LLVM. Probably took me less time to search “Apple open source” and click the first link than it did to type your question: Basically nothing except swift and llvm. I mean, if you can’t read I could see how one might walk away with that impression.
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