231–240 of 385 posts
While I absolutely love the technical write-up from the Asahi team, and being absolutely impressed by their accomplishment, to the risk of being an overly negative contrarian, I remain a bit skeptical. I'm concerned that after all these years, it's still a separate project and not an effort sustained directly within the kernel mainline and mainstream distributions like Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora. These kinds of reverse…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've run all 3 major OSes before. MacOS by far has the least bugs and kinda just works. My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility. My windows days were plagued with battery issues. I feel like most Linux ricers wishs for a MacOS-like experience, except with more customisation. (Which is entirely possible now with the ricing on Mac)
> My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility. This is the kind of dated argument that really makes me dismiss most of the critics. I was running xubuntu as my main desktop since 2010 at least, switched to Debian + nix + XFCE in 2022 and switched to full-on nixOS in 2024. I never had issues with audio then and had to go out of my way to "break" audio on…
Did you ever do any DAW ? Did you have to use is jackd ?
Stuff like streaming games from my desktop in a non native resolution is a no-go with Wayland. I can't do HDMI 4k/120 with HDR/VRR like I can on windows (I know it's HDMI fault, but that doesn't change the fact it doesn't work).
Oh and I've given up on using Linux for productivity a year ago - one can take only so many full browser crashes for simple stuff like desktop sharing, camera/mic stopping mid call.
I'm running linux on my desktop with about as vanilla hardware as you can imagine - the amount of compromises/stuff that just doesn't work is quite annoying.
It's just nowhere near the level of reliability of MacOS - that's why I use my air for productivity and I SSH into the workstation to do actual work in VMs (with all the recent supply chain compromises no way in hell I'm ever doing dev work outside of a sandbox environment).
I've never used a device that claims first party linux support so maybe it's better.
But honestly I'm not a fan of linux desktop in general - flatpack is nice in theory but comes with so many "gotchas" and installing stuff otherwise is just "here you have all the privileges of my user". MacOS sandboxing/security scoping feels way better for desktop use.
While I absolutely love the technical write-up from the Asahi team, and being absolutely impressed by their accomplishment, to the risk of being an overly negative contrarian, I remain a bit skeptical. I'm concerned that after all these years, it's still a separate project and not an effort sustained directly within the kernel mainline and mainstream distributions like Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora. These kinds of reverse…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've run all 3 major OSes before. MacOS by far has the least bugs and kinda just works. My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility. My windows days were plagued with battery issues. I feel like most Linux ricers wishs for a MacOS-like experience, except with more customisation. (Which is entirely possible now with the ricing on Mac)
> My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility. Is that on Mac hardware? I run a 14 year old Mac Book Air, and it works flawlessly with the latest Nixos, and has done for the last 11 years. If you have issues on random PCs, it's because there are an enormous variety of them out there, with all kinds of incompatibilities that have to be worked around. On…
I really hope this project continues to gain momentum. Apple Hardware + Linux is the least fscked OS running on the best hardware. MacOS continues to be a tire fire with endless bugs and churn between versions.
I've run all 3 major OSes before. MacOS by far has the least bugs and kinda just works. My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility. My windows days were plagued with battery issues. I feel like most Linux ricers wishs for a MacOS-like experience, except with more customisation. (Which is entirely possible now with the ricing on Mac)
>.. macOS only ever programs CS42L84 to operate at either 48 or 96 kHz, we could only add support for those two sample rates to the Linux driver .. > However, CS42L42 supports all the other common sample rates, and while the register layout and programming sequence is different, the actual values programmed in for 48 and 96 kHz are the same across both chips. What would happen if we simply took the values for all oth…
whoa, bit perfect CD/flac playback in 44.1, that's a killer feature.
While I absolutely love the technical write-up from the Asahi team, and being absolutely impressed by their accomplishment, to the risk of being an overly negative contrarian, I remain a bit skeptical. I'm concerned that after all these years, it's still a separate project and not an effort sustained directly within the kernel mainline and mainstream distributions like Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora. These kinds of reverse…
I think there is also the added challenge that ARM macs are a moving target, and Apple has less than no desire to provide any kind of stability or support for Asahi Linux. Unlike the PC space where laptop manufacturers have to maintain broad compatibility over time, Apple will make future changes that are really awkward for Asahi and will not care one bit because they can do the compat work on their own software.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More likely it’s that 48 kHz is a more sensible default, since the majority of non-music digital audio is sampled at 48 kHz, almost anyone who cares about potential audio artifacts introduced by resampling is going to be using an external DAC, and (from an Apple-centric viewpoint) almost anyone concerned about the energy consumption of music playback on their MacBook is going to listen to music on their iPhone instea…
Maybe this is a little pedantic, but we're not talking about a default among the many other available options supported by the chip. We're talking about 48 or 96 kHz being intentionally (or unintentionally) made the only allowed options. So either someone said "we must disallow the other options" or they didn't and it's a bug.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there is also the added challenge that ARM macs are a moving target, and Apple has less than no desire to provide any kind of stability or support for Asahi Linux. Unlike the PC space where laptop manufacturers have to maintain broad compatibility over time, Apple will make future changes that are really awkward for Asahi and will not care one bit because they can do the compat work on their own software.
From an end user perspective, I think the best thing the Asahi team could have done was solely focus on getting the M1 Air/Pro working 100% before moving onto other devices. But that would probably result in burn out from the crazily talented dev team :P
When I think about it, I don't understand why Apple wouldn't want to help this effort and just provide all the documentation. All the classic reasons ("competitive advantage", "secrets", etc) do not hold water in this day and age.
The real answer is probably simpler than anyone here is making it. Apple hardware margins are healthy enough that selling macbooks to linux users is pure profit, so no services lock-in needed. However, the moment they officially acknowledge Linux support, then it becomes a support surface. Every kernel panic becomes a genius bar visit. Every driver bug becomes a tweet at @AppleSupport. It's the value of plausible den…