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Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

asahilinux.org

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Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#101

Post by t-3 »

outadoc wrote: post #97
smith7018 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should Apple care if a modern Linux kernel boots without workarounds on their hardware? Should they also ensure Windows and Android can boot on the hardware easily?

> Why should Apple care if a modern Linux kernel boots without workarounds on their hardware? To sell more hardware? Obviously I get your point, but there's a bunch of customers who would like good ARM hardware but can't accomplish their work with macOS. It's not like Apple needs this tiny market, but it wouldn't hurt them either.

> Obviously I get your point, but there's a bunch of customers who would like good ARM hardware but can't accomplish their work with macOS.

Citation needed.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#102

Post by Grombobulous »

jorvi wrote: post #81
Grombobulous wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is well-documented that Panther Lake is highly power efficient. I wouldn’t personally argue against that.

The days of assuming that Apple has the best chip efficiency are coming to an end, especially if the Windows/Qualcomm platform is a workable choice for your needs (maybe someday Linux support will get better).

Apple still has a lead but it’s small enough that it’s not a good reason to choose an Apple system on its own. The M1 MacBook systems got double the battery life of competitors, now 5 years later, Apple systems are at best getting ~10% better battery life than competitors, and some systems like the XPS 14 have Apple beat entirely.

Obviously getting 20 hours in real world productivity use was never realistic, and it’s not realistic on a MacBook Pro, either. I disagree that framework was “basically lying.” They live-streamed the laptop hitting 20 hours, it doesn’t matter that they changed settings to get there. MacBooks have a brightness slider, too. You aren’t getting anywhere close to 20 hours on a MacBook without turning the screen brightness down.

IIRC the MacBook Air/Pro can’t even make it to 20 hours regardless of settings.

The point is that the new framework 13 Pro laptop isn’t a 5-7 hour battery life experience like the previous models. Instead, you can expect 10+ hours depending on what you’re doing it, so it’s a full work day.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#103

Post by cosmic_cheese »

GTP wrote: post #60
carlosjobim wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's over 10 years of service. But if it's a Pro, then the latest OS officially supported is Monterey, which received its last update in 2024. So I would consider that very fair of Apple, even impressive.

It is fair if you compare Apple with other manufacturers, but it is still unfair in absolute terms. The hardware still works, and the work they're doing to support other models would let macOS work on that laptop as well, as proven by tools that let you do the upgrade unofficially.

Eh, with prebuilt PCs it’s muddy because the bulk of heavy lifting is done by Microsoft, not the manufacturer. It’s not unusual at all to pull up the firmware/drivers/etc page for a random laptop and find that updates stopped rolling out about 2 years after its introduction to the market, despite Reddit and similar being filled with reports of firmware bugs for that particular model.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#104

Post by panick21_ »

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]

Yeah should they design their own computer chips? And do literally everything need for such a platform. That is literally 10000x the effort. There is no change the same group of people could create such an open solution. Hardware is just much harder in so many ways and no comparable OpenPlatform exists.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#105

Post by hparadiz »

weikju wrote: post #15
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.

You can still run Arch, and Ubuntu Asahi also exists. (1) They’re working hard on upstreaming everything exactly so it’s easier for any distribution to be ported. 1- https://ubuntuasahi.org/

I wish more people on HN learned how to build their own kernel and run it.

A distro is just window dressing and flavor.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#106

Post by Grombobulous »

spockz wrote: post #59
Grombobulous wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I checked a 16” framework last week comparing to the 24/48GiB MBP. The ssd is significantly faster, the RAM is almost twice as fast, the CPU has more cores. The only benefit is having a dedicated gpu. At more or less the same price. Admittedly, the screen ratio is better with the framework. But prefer the matte screen of the MacBook.

I personally think the 13 Pro is the one that’s truly competitive, the 16” is a very different story and not something I recommend specifically.

Someone looking that machine who wants strong GPU performance, I’d probably send over to a Zephyrus G16 or something like that, and give up the modularity.

SSD and RAM speed specs aren’t really something that impacts the user experience unless you’re doing local LLM work.

What does impact the user experience, for example, is having access to hundreds of thousands of PC games by not being platform locked. Or maybe your user experience is impacted by having upgradable storage.

This obviously depends on individual needs, and I’m certainly not saying either system is bad. But I am saying that the Apple “experience” is often assumed to be the best when it does have some downsides.

Even the fact that there’s no charge port on the right side of the MacBook Air/Neo is a user experience downside (of course, not every PC laptop has that feature, but you can find them in the same price category as the Air).

I sold my MacBook Pro because I needed 2TB and couldn’t afford it from Apple. Being stuck with 512GB when 2TB drives cost under $200 at the time was stifling.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#107

Post by simonh »

amelius wrote: post #98
simonh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project? Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use? Wishful thinking if you ask me.

>What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project?

How could they do that? They could cease providing the facilities the project relies on in newer chips, but the existing chips, er, exist. They could stop making chips all together and go back to intel. It's not a useful hypothetical.

>Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use?

It's possible such a thing exists, of course, it's possible on intel, or AMD, or any ARM chips, or any chip at all. However such a back door, if discovered, would not be accessible only to them. It would have the same problem that all such backdoors have, in that if Apple can exploit it, others can exploit it. Apple very heavily relies on the claim that they have no such back door, and they have relied on this as a legal defence, and frankly it's hard to see how they would benefit from having such a back door. A chunk of their business model and legal liability protection depends on not having such a back door.

>Wishful thinking if you ask me.

If you say so, this is all about relative risk. However what reason might anyone have for thinking that any other platform, such as Intel with it's proprietary supervisor code with remote updatability, is more under the control of the user? There may be platforms that have a better security architecture that's more under the control of the user, but I can't think of any of the major ones that does. Which would you suggest?

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#108

Post by cosmic_cheese »

amelius wrote: post #98
simonh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project? Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use? Wishful thinking if you ask me.

What good would it do Apple to shut down the project?

There’s no IP misuse and the ability to boot an arbitrary OS is an intentional part of the design of M-series Macs. The built in lag time of the current situation ensures that macOS will never have its position as the dominant OS for Mac hardware challenged. Further, doing this would stoke the flames of the already red-hot internet Apple haters and unnecessarily burn goodwill. It’d be a loss across the board.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#109

Post by WD-42 »

simonh wrote: post #88
amelius wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 no…

> last time I looked at the schematics for one of those

When was the last time they looked at the schematics for one of the Apple machines? Oh, wait.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#110

Post by GTP »

LtWorf wrote: post #86
GTP wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They still have people working on FOSS, right? I didn't know about what your saying,but if this is the problem, then what if I gave Canonical as an example?
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