My bet: Apple is going to close it down. It is too much of a legal risk. What if some Linux enthusiast finds patent infringements in Apple's undocumented APIs?
Asahi Linux on M3
171–180 of 360 posts
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#172My bet: Apple is going to close it down. It is too much of a legal risk. What if some Linux enthusiast finds patent infringements in Apple's undocumented APIs?
Asahi linux has been going on for a few years now
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#173My bet: Apple is going to close it down. It is too much of a legal risk. What if some Linux enthusiast finds patent infringements in Apple's undocumented APIs?
Man… they absolutely do not care. An Apple engineer made the boot loader for Mac open in the first place.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#174My bet: Apple is going to close it down. It is too much of a legal risk. What if some Linux enthusiast finds patent infringements in Apple's undocumented APIs?
Asahi linux has been going on for a few years now
I recently read somewhere that someone wrote a letter/email to Apple's legal team, explaining the risks. Sorry if I cannot be more specific, I already went through my browser history and cannot find it back right now. PS: Browsers really need to improve here, it is crazy that I cannot search through my history in a meaningful way.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#175Amazing 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.
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
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#176Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asahi linux has been going on for a few years now
I recently read somewhere that someone wrote a letter/email to Apple's legal team, explaining the risks. Sorry if I cannot be more specific, I already went through my browser history and cannot find it back right now. PS: Browsers really need to improve here, it is crazy that I cannot search through my history in a meaningful way.
On the topic of browsers, I feel your pain. There were a good few years where they were shipping new and useful features, but they plateaued and started removing features. I can't remember the last time I was excited about browser features.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 computer…
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.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#180Amazing 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.