While the Ashahi engineers are working super hard reverse engineering the Apple Silicon, there has been a huge surge in Omarchy circles to get it all working with AI writing all the drivers and get all kinds of hardware in M4/M5 and later M6 working as well. It sped up a lot.
Asahi Linux on M3
271–280 of 374 posts
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#272Lack of sleep and HDMI support is real roadblock for adoption. Hope they gets past soon.
It's not just the Apple Silicon Macs, either; I have a 2017-model Intel Mac which runs any number of distros just fine except that sleep just doesn't work right. No amount of keystrokes or mouse-clicks will wake it up if it sleeps.
Wow thank you for saying this. Always thought it’s my problem(because its the same with my 4 OSes), some misconfiguration etc.
Mine doesn’t reboot, I am always turning off and on after SSD change; and I thought it’s about that.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#273My 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 do you think they would be concerned about patent infringements? Like all major tech companies, they are constantly fighting numerous patent lawsuits, mostly from trolls but sometimes other tech companies. It is part of the cost of doing business today. Some Linux enthusiast finding a possible patent infringement is of no concern to Apple.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#274Amazing 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.
It idles at 2-3GB but when your apps need the RAM, does it free up system memory so that it's closer to 500MB?
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when they can just share a pdf. I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You hav…
You describe an exhaustive documention, but some documentation would already be better than none. Perfect is enemy of good, as your comment illustrates.
Apple wouldn't want to be liable or responsible if someone implements an OS based on their incomplete and imperfect and outdated spec and gets hacked.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Add a tool to the harness you use that can ping you on Telegram/whatever when it gets stuck and need you to do stuff physically, tell it to use it in the workflow with you. Used this approach a bunch with Codex to work on and debug hardware stuff. Once every 5-15 minutes I receive my command, and as a good r̶o̶b̶o̶t̶ human I moved the resistor/patch cable in the way the agent instructed me, eventually it got things w…
In Soviet Russia, LLM prompts you.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when they can just share a pdf. I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You hav…
> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. I suspect there would be an element of induced demand here. IMO the MacBook range are the only laptops on the market worth buying - but not having support for gaming (or at least, hilariously bad support for a limited range of games) is compelling enough reason to install Linux for a large portion of users (filling the void left behind by…
If you don't count wine on macOS then Linux without wine has bad support for gaming too.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple's hypervisor.framework lets other OS instances run very very fast with the UTM app (open source on github, but i use the prebuilt version from the App Store). In my case i've used arm native linuxes (arch with various compositors, kde, gnome, fedora) all on M2, M2 Max, M5 and the experience is indistinguishable from native. MacOS is running too. I think hardcore graphics folks might want direct accelerator acce…
This misses the point entirely. What happens when apple inevitably discontinues support for this hardware.
Since the hardware will no longer get security updates for the firmware you should stop using it and move to a newer MacBook.
Linux doesn't solve the issue of not getting security updates anymore. For example the FCC does not allow letting users write arbitrary firmware they can run on their devices so this means you legally can't update the Bluetooth or Wifi firmware and need an update from Apple.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#279While the Ashahi engineers are working super hard reverse engineering the Apple Silicon, there has been a huge surge in Omarchy circles to get it all working with AI writing all the drivers and get all kinds of hardware in M4/M5 and later M6 working as well. It sped up a lot.
I feel like the growing polarization in that space is pretty much going to kill any chance of collaboration (for example: https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2091229491867594983?s=12&t=JH...). It really boils down to DHH and his conservative worldview clashing over things like the downsides of corporate funding and capitalism, building system software by just throwing more AI cycles at it, rejecting data centers over environmental concerns, and pushing back on AI-generated code due to slop and security issues. I just don't see both sides putting their differences aside to work together. DHH will probably just duplicate unaligned efforts so he can completely bypass and avoid having to deal with the human element.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#280This 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…
Of course they do not have the obligation to do so. This is more about Apple doing a nice gesture to the "owners" of their devices