Live data from Hacker News

Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

asahilinux.org

181–190 of 258 posts

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#181
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a laptop with super-awesome battery life on Linux? I'll buy one if so. I'm not sure it's fair to ding Framework specifically for not being able to make Linux battery life as good as Windows. Is that actually something they could reasonably fix?

It’s not about dinging Framework specifically and more about if you want *nix and top tier battery life, MacBooks remain the best option. My understanding is that the reason why Linux still struggles in this front is that nobody has put in the hardware-specific optimization work to make it happen. There’s also some friction with how the bulk of Linux dev attention is paid to servers rather than portable consumer hard…

[deleted]

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#182
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Torvalds didn't even come close to toxicity shown by marcan on social media, so your diction is downright dishonest and spreading FUD (conveniently, marcan deleted all the generated drama from socials). Asahi founder (plus community community) was heavy with drama and loved to attack and brigade anyone that didn't immediately bow down and listen to demands of their team and social media entourage. This isn't how the…

Re-read my comment dude. I didnt say a fucking thing about Marcan. I simply said I won't contribute to the kernel due to Torvalds' behavior.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#183

I really wish Apple would fund a small team to open source some documentation and drivers to help Asahi along. I know they won't, but I can dream. It would be a drop in the bucket for Apple but would cement their hardware as de facto for silicon valley engineers (even more so than today).

Apple's own hypervisor framework is close enough to what you said that i run Fedora and Arch Linux builds via the UTM app, set to use Apple Silicon virtualization (_not_ emulation), which is a wrapper around said framework. it's excellent, and made me reformat and erase Asahi a couple years ago. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor https://docs.getutm.app/installation/macos/

So osx is just a bootloader for Fedora?

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#184
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a laptop with super-awesome battery life on Linux? I'll buy one if so. I'm not sure it's fair to ding Framework specifically for not being able to make Linux battery life as good as Windows. Is that actually something they could reasonably fix?

It’s not about dinging Framework specifically and more about if you want *nix and top tier battery life, MacBooks remain the best option. My understanding is that the reason why Linux still struggles in this front is that nobody has put in the hardware-specific optimization work to make it happen. There’s also some friction with how the bulk of Linux dev attention is paid to servers rather than portable consumer hard…

Along those lines, IMO these "spec wars" are not that important. I get that some people want the best bang for their buck, but pretty much everything has more than enough speed and battery life for most practical uses in my opinion.

I am probably not competent to improve linux battery life myself (or at least I certainly don't have the time to get into that). But I can choose to spend my money on hardware and companies that explicitly support Linux, even if they aren't at the very top of the spec sheet. This has the best practical chance of convincing big-money companies and Linux kernel experts to actually spend time and money on this. Meanwhile, buying a Macbook and installing Linux on it is fine, I guess, but also invisible to the corporate world.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#185
post #128
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would Apple do that? If they did, I still have macOS, an OS I can easily disable all runtime protections and security on, rig up into a kernel debugger, arbitrarily dump memory of other processes and so on. If Apple takes away our ability to easily boot alternative kernels, the tools are readily available to find...alternative ways around iBoot security, which is not ideal for Apple since iOS iBoot is mostly the…

Kernel debugging on Apple silicon largely does not work in any useful way

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's own hypervisor framework is close enough to what you said that i run Fedora and Arch Linux builds via the UTM app, set to use Apple Silicon virtualization (_not_ emulation), which is a wrapper around said framework. it's excellent, and made me reformat and erase Asahi a couple years ago. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor https://docs.getutm.app/installation/macos/

So osx is just a bootloader for Fedora?

the analogy (even if humorous) isn't exact, since i can have apple silicon's hypervisor running macos and fedora/arm and arch/arm all concurrently, and can have full desktop environments on the linux instances, full-screened to individual macos desktops.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#188
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about dinging Framework specifically and more about if you want *nix and top tier battery life, MacBooks remain the best option. My understanding is that the reason why Linux still struggles in this front is that nobody has put in the hardware-specific optimization work to make it happen. There’s also some friction with how the bulk of Linux dev attention is paid to servers rather than portable consumer hard…

Along those lines, IMO these "spec wars" are not that important. I get that some people want the best bang for their buck, but pretty much everything has more than enough speed and battery life for most practical uses in my opinion. I am probably not competent to improve linux battery life myself (or at least I certainly don't have the time to get into that). But I can choose to spend my money on hardware and compani…

[deleted]

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#189
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M1 support is barely usable, at least on m1 air last time I checked idle battery drain was about 7-8% per hour (in macos battery health is still at 96%). Alt DP mode doesn't operate under kde wayland plasma due to inherent incompatability between implementation design and kwin, everything else is surprisingly good, albeit battery was really hard to ignore to fully switch. Hopefully, they will manage to get it done so…

That's simply not true. I have been daily driving asahi for 2.5 years or so now on an M2 Max macbook. In it's been one of the most reliable and smooth experiences I have had ever using linux. DP alt made is working fine for me. I'm not sure about battery, I never measured.

Do you know how M2 support compares to M1? Trying to figure out if M1 is the better choice for a used macbook to run Asahi on.

Re: Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report

#190
post #96

Asahi could be a viable alternative, however, with this amount of funding, small manpower pool pace of development is doomed to be too slow. There's groundwork that's already been done, as mentioned in the article, which brings some dividends, but, ultimately, there is a new mac every year that comes with a new chip, a plethora of microcontrollers and gpu changes, impossible to keep up with, that is why asahi team is…

> pace of development is doomed to be too slow

When the new leadership team took over, they announced that they would prioritize upstreaming the existing work over adding support for newer hardware.

Upstreaming their changes into the kernel took time.

Now the announced that they had started work on the M3 in February and things are progressing well.

> On top of the above, we also have PCIe, WiFi, Bluetooth, NVMe, keyboard, trackpad, and other core SoC block drivers working in Linux for M3 series machines. Most of this work has come by way of Yureka, who has been very busy hacking on both m1n1 and Linux with her M3 series machines for a while now. We still have a ways to go before we can start enabling Asahi Installer support for these machines, but progress is rapid so watch this space!

That sounds more like talented people doing meticulous work than doom.

Post reply on HN