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Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

asahilinux.org

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Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#81

Post by jorvi »

Grombobulous wrote: post #51
sneak wrote: post #8

It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this. The goodwill/brand marketing alone is worth their comp, and it will absolutely move units as well. Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10…

Food for thought: Apple’s services make more revenue than Macs and iPads combined, and they do so at a higher profit margin. There’s your answer. I don’t agree that Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. Not anymore, many alternatives are closing the gap. This is aided by the fact that Apple hasn’t touched the MacBook Pro chassis in 5 years, making it quite dated especially with the underutilized, oversized notch…

> Battery life? 20 hours of video playback.

Yeah, they pretty much lied about that. It is only in a special Windows ultra-power saving mode that heavily throttles background tasks, forces the screen to be 30% lower brightness, heavily downclocks the CPU (50%+ less performance!), etc; The MacBook has to do no such tricks.

You're not gonna see Frameworks that equal the perf-per-watt of Apple until they release a model with a Snapdragon chip.

Frameworks have one benefit that other laptops don't: there's only a few parts. So for example for your Framework speakers you can find an EasyEffects / Pipewire (+bankstown?) tune profile that makes them sound better than 99% of laptops on the market. It's basically the Raspberry Pi effect.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#82

Post by nosioptar »

Grombobulous wrote: post #47
leenixx wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The founder of asahi linux famously quit due to how hard it was to upstream patches. It’s not easy to deal with linus’ project.

I can’t see that being a bad thing considering that the kernel is mandatory software in the Linux world. You would want to have high standards for what gets added.

You should have high standards.

Torvalds often crosses that line into outright toxicity. I've written a few kernel patches that I never tried to upstream for that reason.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#83

Post by jasoneckert »

simonmales wrote: post #10

Will this forever exist as a Fedora "remix". Or will we find the support in upstream so I can one day run Debian-based distro? I think the last time I used an RPM-based distro was almost 2 decades ago.

This comment made me smile, as my preference is opposite - I prefer RPM-based distros and primarily use Fedora on everything (including Fedora Asahi Remix on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio), but occasionally use Ubuntu and Debian on some of my cloud instances.

As a result, I understand the desire to stick with a particular distribution that we're already familiar with - it's less work, and less having to remember subtle differences in structure. But when there is a time where I'm forced to use a new distro (e.g., when Asahi was first released exclusively as an Arch Linux ARM distro), I never regret the small learning experiences involved :-)

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#84

Post by bzzzt »

preisschild wrote: post #74
rbits wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? You mean not on Apple hardware? That exists, that's basically every other Linux distro in existence.

Apple could also support open standards like UEFI/dt/acpi. Asahi uses lots of workarounds (including pretending to be MacOS) to be even able to boot the linux kernel. This would projects such as Asahi a lot easier and more reliable. And I'm not even talking about drivers

UEFI or its predecessor ACPI are complicated and support a long list of legacy stuff that has absolutely no value to Apple at all so why should they do the development? It's like asking Tesla for a fuel tank so it would be easier to install a gasoline engine.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#85

Post by rvz »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #32
rvz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this. Why should they when they have macOS already? > Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate. How many…

No one buys Apple Silicon laptops to run Linux because they can barely run Linux. But if they could, Apple would sweep the market for Linux laptops. Macbook hardware completely outclasses even the high end options.

> No one buys Apple Silicon laptops to run Linux because they can barely run Linux.

Almost no-one bought Intel Macs for dual-booting Linux either (Unless you are Linus Torvalds and a tiny amount of people who use Linux on Intel Macs).

> But if they could, Apple would sweep the market for Linux laptops.

Not true. They cannot even run Windows on them.

The entire point of Intel Macs was for running Windows on a Mac which that cohort is just as tiny as the Linux on Intel Mac customers.

Dual booting is generally reserved for those who are highly technical, so I would not expect Apple to care about either customer anyway. So that was tested already and Apple still did not care.

So of course they also do not care about Linux users who have Apple Silicon Macs either.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#86

Post by LtWorf »

GTP wrote: post #52
toxik wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody gets promoted for building open-source software at corpos. It is allowed, at best, not condoned. So what manager is going to go for this? Let's dedicate our limited resources to gratuitous goodwill work. Carrer suicide, I expect. Unfortunately.

How would you fit Red Hat in this picture? I think the situation could be different, if it is about improving some software the company is using for its business. Not that this happens often, but I think the possibility to persuade managment that improving a piece of software crucial for the company's business is there.

You mean the company that rescinds your contract if you exercise the rights granted to you by GPL licenses? What about it?

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#87

Post by bzzzt »

smith7018 wrote: post #73
amelius wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

These people are singlehandedly saving _millions_ of laptops from going to the landfill one day. That's a valiant effort and they're doing it wonderfully. Regardless, one of the points of Linux is to install it on as much hardware as possible. Do you think people that managed to get it installed on iPods, PS5s, Wiis, Chromebooks, routers, Nintendo Switches, etc. should all stop just because they're doing something un…

Those laptops don't need to go to any landfill. They are much too precious to not recycle the metals and other materials and will be taken care of if you return them to the manufacturer. (by law, at least in the EU)

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#88

Post by simonh »

amelius wrote: post #62
JSR_FDED wrote: post #6

I’m in absolute awe that a handful of motivated people can crack these problems

[flagged]

marcan addressed this early on in the project, arguing that Intel platforms including some of those advocated for by the FSF are less open and more at risk of upstream abuse in some very significant ways.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29684585

For example intel systems (and Android) run resident supervisor code you can't get rid of, and that can do remotely initiated updates you have no control over. That's not so on Apple silicon.

>In fact I'm much more sure about that than I would be with the laptops the FSF peddles as "respects your freedom"; last time I looked at the schematics for one of those, it had over a half dozen chips running secret blobs, and at least two or three of them had full access to all system RAM via a DMA capable bus. You'd have to be insane to trust that over an M1, which is designed to sandbox all coprocessors from the main CPU and RAM via IOMMUs, such that even if all firmware is backdoored it can't take over your main CPU.

Also these comments are worth considering.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307836

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307377

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#89

Post by jurip »

MYEUHD wrote: post #20
eru wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any sources for hardware sales vs app store revenue?

https://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-segment iPhone: 50.4% Mac: 8.1% iPad: 6.7% Wearables, home and accessories: 8.6% Services: 26.2% I assume that the majority of service revenue is App store revenue. Other services they provide are iCloud and Apple care

I believe Google's Safari payments are a significant chunk of services revenue too (around $20 billion a year.) Then there's Apple TV and Apple Music, which are not nothing.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#90

Post by preisschild »

bzzzt wrote: post #84
preisschild wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple could also support open standards like UEFI/dt/acpi. Asahi uses lots of workarounds (including pretending to be MacOS) to be even able to boot the linux kernel. This would projects such as Asahi a lot easier and more reliable. And I'm not even talking about drivers

UEFI or its predecessor ACPI are complicated and support a long list of legacy stuff that has absolutely no value to Apple at all so why should they do the development? It's like asking Tesla for a fuel tank so it would be easier to install a gasoline engine.

You don't have to support "legacy stuff", just make sure a modern linux kernel can boot without apple-specific workarounds
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