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Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

asahilinux.org

171–180 of 243 posts

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#171
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life. Then why bother installing a different OS?

There might be no reason while the hardware is latest and greatest, but installing a different OS can keep old hardware going for longer. My 2014 Macbook Pro is uncomfortably slow on the last supported MacOS but works perfectly fine when running the latest Fedora.

This exactly sums up my long term feelings. Even now I’m annoyed by all the background bloat/tasks that are running on it, and I’d prefer being able to have more control over what runs on it for battery/performance reasons. Additionally, even though I’ve had it for years at this point, I think I’d still be more comfortable if I could use i3 with it.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#172
post #5

> Thanks to the combined efforts of mildsunrise and chaos_princess, we discovered that ACE3 has pretty much the same register set as CD3217, only wrapped in a SPMI interface instead of addressed over I2C. Both the SPMI interface and ACE3 itself are now working in Asahi Linux, bringing USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt support to all M3 series devices. When I got my M3 Pro MBP, I got it with the intention of eventually installi…

[flagged]

Unpaid volunteer? Hah! These people want to do it, for reasons unknown to me. They might enjoy it.

I'm not even sure about the unpaid part.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#173
post #21

I have immense respect for the incredible work that the Asahi team does, but at the rate that Intel and AMD have been catching up on power efficiency I wonder whether anyone will really _have_ to run Linux on M series laptops. There was a clear case for it back when Apple silicon absolutely dominated anything else you could buy but with Panther Lake I'm not so sure that Apple's lead will continue to be big enough to…

You can't run an egpu (amd or nvidia) on macos so that's one thing I could see switching for. I did just discover tinygrad though due to a hackernews comment, but not sure its performance.

Also Tahoes absolutely horrendous performance for the last year..

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#174
post #21

I have immense respect for the incredible work that the Asahi team does, but at the rate that Intel and AMD have been catching up on power efficiency I wonder whether anyone will really _have_ to run Linux on M series laptops. There was a clear case for it back when Apple silicon absolutely dominated anything else you could buy but with Panther Lake I'm not so sure that Apple's lead will continue to be big enough to…

Make an example of something comparable to a MacBook Pro M series, and I'll buy it asap!

I really want to go back to linux, but mbp is just too good!

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#175
post #133

I've pretty much given up on Asahi because of the years-long delays, and because there's no performant way to share disk space for data with MacOS. By running Linux in a VM on MacOS on Apple silicon, you sacrifice some raw speed but in return you still get to run MacOS apps occasionally and have access to the same data from either MacOS or Linux without having to duplicate everything. And battery life is reasonable,…

Not saying your VM approach isn't right for you, but: > and because there's no performant way to share disk space for data with MacOS Have you tried a ZFS partition? If it's a desktop system use iSCSI to network storage (I'm not running Linux directly on my Studio or M4 mini but I still put my Home folder on the network)?

I haven't. ZFS might be the answer for my laptops.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#176
post #139
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the Asahi Linux team are pretty insistent that Apple isn't making it particularly hard. Yes the hardware is novel, but hardly any hardware vendors share low level details on the Intel side either, all that has to be reverse engineered anyway.

Intel themselves writes a ton of the software for their own hardware that makes in into the Linux kernel.

Intel is not the only hardware in an Intel CPU-based laptop.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#177
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life. Then why bother installing a different OS?

There might be no reason while the hardware is latest and greatest, but installing a different OS can keep old hardware going for longer. My 2014 Macbook Pro is uncomfortably slow on the last supported MacOS but works perfectly fine when running the latest Fedora.

And mine is as fast as I need, with Sway as my main DE. (With Arch Linux, but I bet Fedora wouldn’t be any worse.) The only reason to switch to M{1,2,3} is battery life. So, as soon as the external Thunderbolt display is going to work, I think I’m making the switch.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not new Anthropic/OpenAI/whatever trained on copyrighted code and leaks (anna's archive). Companies just don't give a shit because you can't prove it. In Asahi Linux specifically, there was not long ago a PR for M3 or similar for removing a big roadblock that existed (and I think still exists). Turns out this whole PR was implemented by an LLM (using copyrighted materials, probably most of it is Apple's) and it…

If you can't prove it, you can't prove it both ways. Either everybody gets to use it or nobody does. Especially that the code getting trained on is for the vast majority copyrighted open source software so if anybody has something to say, it's the opensource community rather than Apple

It's not how the legal system works.

It doesn't matter if they can't prove it, their legal budget is just too big compared to anything Asahi team can do.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#179

This project has been so impressive and exciting. I hope power management is a serious concern once they nail all the reverse engineering and functionality. Battery life would be a huge differentiator for the day to day macbook usage and traditionally Linux has been terrible at that due to lack of proprietary & highly tuned drivers

How likely is such tuning to happen within the practical lifetime of these devices? It's already been years and Linux isn't even feature complete on newer models. Apple's indifference to OSS does not give me much hope.

The new project leadership team prioritized upstreaming the existing work first.

Once the upstreaming was largely done, they first mentioned beginning the work of adding M3 support in the February progress report.

Now we have this:

> With all of this progress coming on top of milestones already reached on M3, we are pleased to announce that we are almost ready to cut an official release! We will have more to say about this in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

I'm not seeing any reason for gloom or doom.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

#180
post #141

We seriously need an open hardware law or something. Like it doesn't have to be regulation necessarily (as by law) but we really need to start very strongly pressuring/forcing companies to open up their hardware and provide all documentation to get any operating system to run on it, and to hell with what the manufacturer wants (to prevent things like attestation requirements). This entire "just let random volunteers…

this seems like it should fall within a right to repair context
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