This is great news. Hoping for M4 to the latest chip. We need Ashai to support more chips.
we need to be supporting asahi if we want these things. their funding has fallen off.
Asahi Linux on M3
231–240 of 360 posts
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, not sure why you are being downvoted. Contribute to open source with the energy you have to call out missing features.
Apple could contribute as well, like Intel does for their Thunderbolt controllers. Why are you demanding a user does that for free instead of the big corp that made the platform?
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why wouldn’t bringing up an OS on new hardware be necessary? Apple has no obligation or incentive whatsoever to write Linux device drivers… Do you think Apple should be funding this work out of revenue? What possible justification could they provide for such a waste of money? This will not sell any more laptops. Even if Asahi didn’t do it, the work would still be necessary by someone inside Apple. Drivers don’t spont…
Apple had no obligation to write Windows drivers for Boot Camp either but did for over a decade. They could do the same for Linux even if they never open sourced them.
I remember overhearing an older person being explained Boot Camp while waiting for my iPhone to be repaired and it was very obviously a way for them to sell a Macbook so they could dual-use windows on it to run some windows apps. The ultimate pull would eventually be MacOS because it was easier (if you already had a macbook and iphone). Apple knew they'd get curious eventually and see how awful the Windows UX was.
The main argument for Linux on Macbooks would be developers but that doesn't mean there's a similar strong marketing/sales incentive to do so. Especially since there's no shortage of devs who default to mac (like legacy windows corporate users). Apple clearly doesn't see much money to be made by creating an olive branch offering to Linux users.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#234I'm not sure I understand the target user for Asahi. Is this someone that only wants to run Linux and wants to use their GPU on Linux? Seems like this is not the case, yet. Or, is this for someone that wants to dual boot and use Linux sometimes, and then reboot into MacOS when they want to use the GPU?
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there anything stopping this from being thrown some investment plus LLM tokens? I wonder what a KVM connected to the machine plus a few thousand in Astra/Fable tokens could do here. It seems funny to think of software feature defects in OSS software now if people are building full recombinations of closed source software daily now!
It's hard to debug sleep in a VM or some self contained system. You need to physically interact with the laptop, reboot it after it gets stuck, etc.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#236My 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?
Why would they even care? 99% of people aren't going to be installing Linux on their Macbook. If Apple did care, they'd have stopped allowing dual booting a long time ago.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#237My 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
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could open source their software so others could utilise the code instead of needing reverse engineering
Darwin is open source has been for 25-26 years is it too much hard work? https://github.com/PureDarwin/PureDarwin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system) https://www.puredarwin.org/
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200658399-0645/linux-ke...
I suspect that they might be changing their mind about upstreaming?
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#239This is really incredible work but so frustrating that its necessary
Why wouldn’t bringing up an OS on new hardware be necessary? Apple has no obligation or incentive whatsoever to write Linux device drivers… Do you think Apple should be funding this work out of revenue? What possible justification could they provide for such a waste of money? This will not sell any more laptops. Even if Asahi didn’t do it, the work would still be necessary by someone inside Apple. Drivers don’t spont…
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple discontinues support for this HW, not Apple discontinues support for running Linux in a hypervisor.
when apple discontinues support for older hardware, it doesn't get OS software updates. that doesn't disable the hardware from running the latest OS before OS updates for the hardware were ended. On the frozen-in-time OS, you'd still have a working instance of apple silicon hypervisor wrapping optimized drivers that make whatever linux arm build you're running still see the hardware.