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Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19

asahilinux.org

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Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19

#11

Post by zozbot234 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #6

This is incredibly impressive and also quite sad. Six years later, we have a very-nearly-right kernel for the M1. Apple is launching the M5. It seems like the future is going to be a world of closed systems and custom silicon, with any free software lagging far behind.

M1 and M2 hardware isn't going anywhere. They're still great machines. And progress will be faster once the project finishes getting their code merged into the existing Linux kernel and distros. They have a first alpha of M3 ready, they're just refraining from releasing it in that state because they're so busy with everything else they're doing - a key difference compared to when they first came out with alpha support for the M1.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19

#12

Post by joleyj »

ForHackernews wrote: post #6

This is incredibly impressive and also quite sad. Six years later, we have a very-nearly-right kernel for the M1. Apple is launching the M5. It seems like the future is going to be a world of closed systems and custom silicon, with any free software lagging far behind.

Most of my software development career was spent working at a small company that sold a product that emulated the operating system developed and sold by a much, much larger company. The work was interesting and when you had a breakthrough or a small victory, it sure felt good. The challenge of keeping up was exhilarating and kept folks motivated to keep pressing forward.

But eventually it wears you down. It's nearly impossible to keep up in the long-term. Normal product evolution, the sheer size of the behemoth and sometimes even malice on their part to thwart the little guy make it really tough to stay current.

Think of Wine vis-a-vis Windows. They will never catch up.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19

#13

Post by zozbot234 »

gr4vityWall wrote: post #3

Great work. I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years, like the Thinkpad T420 used to be. For different reasons, of course. Do the M4 and M5 GPUs also change a lot from the M3? I hope it's not too much work to get those going once M3 is usable.

Public information seems to describe the M4 GPU as mostly a performance-oriented refresh of the one from M3. M5 has brought bigger changes, not least neural/tensor accelerators on chip.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19

#14

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #6

This is incredibly impressive and also quite sad. Six years later, we have a very-nearly-right kernel for the M1. Apple is launching the M5. It seems like the future is going to be a world of closed systems and custom silicon, with any free software lagging far behind.

What do you expect when you nerds keep buying their closed systems?

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19

#15

Post by Bigpet »

sohrob wrote: post #2

I often wonder whether the folks at Apple have the Asahi team on their radar. Are they in awe of the reverse engineering marvels coming out of the Asahi project, or are they indifferent to it?

I think the dev that was responsible for the bootloader or some security chip having the option to be opened posted on twitter a while ago. Pretty sure he implied or mentioned that this was what he was hoping for.

Edit: this was what I was remembering: https://x.com/XenoKovah/status/1339914714055368704

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19

#16

Post by ForHackernews »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #14
ForHackernews wrote: post #6

This is incredibly impressive and also quite sad. Six years later, we have a very-nearly-right kernel for the M1. Apple is launching the M5. It seems like the future is going to be a world of closed systems and custom silicon, with any free software lagging far behind.

What do you expect when you nerds keep buying their closed systems?

I've never bought any Mac, but I've been issued several at jobs. At one company, I scandalized the Apple fans by wiping OSX and installing Linux on a 10th gen Macbook Pro.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19

#17

Post by qdotme »

joleyj wrote: post #12
ForHackernews wrote: post #6

This is incredibly impressive and also quite sad. Six years later, we have a very-nearly-right kernel for the M1. Apple is launching the M5. It seems like the future is going to be a world of closed systems and custom silicon, with any free software lagging far behind.

Most of my software development career was spent working at a small company that sold a product that emulated the operating system developed and sold by a much, much larger company. The work was interesting and when you had a breakthrough or a small victory, it sure felt good. The challenge of keeping up was exhilarating and kept folks motivated to keep pressing forward. But eventually it wears you down. It's nearly…

Except they did with Wine, in a way. They got to the point where sufficient number of third party software developers target the common base between Wine and Windows (Steam/Proton), electing to have broader compatibility rather than catching all the newest Windows-only APIs.

I wonder how much similar behavior influence other buying choices. I’ve been eyeing an upgrade from M1 for a while - so far punting on it, mostly because of Asahi.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19

#18

Post by imiric »

jsheard wrote: post #9
ForHackernews wrote: post #6

This is incredibly impressive and also quite sad. Six years later, we have a very-nearly-right kernel for the M1. Apple is launching the M5. It seems like the future is going to be a world of closed systems and custom silicon, with any free software lagging far behind.

And that's with Apple deliberately leaving the bootloader open on Macs. If they had locked it down like they do on every other product then it would be even more of a struggle, and there's always the looming possibility that they'll just change their mind with future models.

This is my main concern. I applaud the effort that the Asahi team is doing, but there's no way that I would rely on a small team of inarguably passionate and talented hackers to maintain a system that uses reverse engineered software running on hardware manufactured by a company historically opposed to everything they're doing, even if they left this small door open for that.

It would be like going back to the days of early Linux and all the Windows-specific hardware we had to deal with, but extrapolated to the entire system. As impressive as all of their work is, it's not worth the IMO minor UX benefits of Apple's hardware.

Mainline Linux on ARM is solid these days; new x86 chips from Intel perform very well and are reasonably power efficient; and battery life of most professional laptops in Linux is quite good. For example, I get a good ~12 hours of work done on an X1 Carbon Gen 13 from a single charge. This may not be as impressive as Macbooks, and the packaging certainly isn't as sleek, but it's good enough for me. The tradeoff for a solid software experience, modulo the usual Linux shenanigans, is worth it to me.

Re: Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19

#20

Post by signa11 »

the money quote (at least for some)

    In fact, the current state of M3 support is about where M1 support was when we released the first Arch
    Linux ARM based beta; keyboard, touchpad, WiFi, NVMe and USB3 are all working, albeit with some local 
    patches to m1n1 and the Asahi kernel (yet to make their way into a pull request) required. So that 
    must mean we will have a release ready soon, right?
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