I mean the algorithms for that are known, and PipeWire/PulseAudio implements them competently. But it still has to be done.
Just like the mouse that has to be polled 100 times per second or display that is composited from all window buffers at least 60 times per second. It might really be negligible in the grand scheme of things and not worth optimizing for.
You cant imagine how much strain fast-moving mouse cursor put on display server of almost any OS if there a lot of windows open simultaneously. Also non-standard cursor sizes / formats are still such a mess everywhere since even in 2026 there are semi-hardware and software cursors...
They're talking about the new model announced, with a larger battery and ARM architecture. Not released yet, I don't think.
The new Framework Pros are still x86, but the newest Intel generation appears to provide a substantial boost to efficiency.
They have a new type of core on these they refer to as a "low-power efficiency core", which is probably what is enabling these "feats", but as one of the parents to this comment points out we're comparing Windows configured in "Ultra Efficiency" mode to Apple Silicon MacBooks at most configured in Low Power mode...
Anecdotally, comparing to recent (but still older than these) generations of Intel chips I can run my M2 Max MacBook Pro with 78% battery health for longer (without any special considerations) than colleagues running their Windows Intel laptops in Power Saver mode, while performing similar tasks.
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.
Imagine LCD screen capable of emitting from IR to UV and people up in arms because laptop vendor software limits output to visible spectrum.
I would not agree with your analogy. [0] Turns out the movie industry actually uses infrasound in horror movies. [1] It might also explain why people think old buildings are haunted. [2]
If Apple only focuses on audible sounds, their devices lack the ability to maximize the thrill of horror movies.
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.
The huge advantage of x86_64 isn't that it's a stable platform, but that the big hardware vendors maintain their own Linux driver. Nobody needs to reverse engineer how AMD GPUs work, you can just use AMD's driver. Nobody needs to reverse engineer how Intel power states work, just use Intel's pstate driver. Nobody needs to reverse engineer how Broadcom's WiFi driver works, Broadcom maintains their own Linux driver and…
Its more than that, its that x86 vendors know how to maintain hardware backwards compatibility, they don't throw out the entire USB subsystem every time a new phy/whatever shows up because there is a standardized mailbox interface sitting in front of the actual HW. Same with the core platform, which works out of the box using 25+ year old firmware standards that are flexible enough to support simple sensors and behaviors, like lid close notification on a laptop for example across multiple OS's. Even something as simple as the firmware interface for handing off a frame buffer to the OS isn't universally support on arm platforms because a significant fraction don't support uefi. Apple was an early uefi adopter, but whatever internal politics they have, means they tossed even that on the latest mac's.
How does Ubuntu Linux on recent Qualcomm (ex-Apple Nuvia) Arm laptops compare to Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon?
Pretty rude to call this ex Apple Nuvia. I don't think any of those lawsuits by Apple or ARM have been won. Qualcomm declares this to be a new chip. But yes it has talent from those places. Still, let's not try to tip the scales of perception quite so indelicately? I am curious what the boot situation is. It seems like Qualcomm actually has pretty good support for their cores. But since these PC systems sort of lack…
Qualcomm at its heart is a patent troll company. They and Microsoft actually deserve each other. Long-term their partnership will end in tears.
BecauseMicrosoft is at this time in different to the Surface computers they are all in on copilot. It is basically copilot or bust for Microsoft.
Without stirring the pot too much, I’m a bit out of the loop on what the above poster implied and you took slight to. Could you share a little more about this and why you feel what they said was rude?
There's nothing rude about it; the Nuvia CPU core is pretty much the entire selling point of the Snapdragon X Elite product family. Everything else on those chips is underwhelming. But the provenance of the CPU core is really irrelevant to the question of Linux support, which is gated by driver support for the rest of the SoC, which didn't come from Nuvia. So focusing on the Nuvia aspect is a bit of a red herring.
Qualcomm may be a tech company, but they behave more like a pack of lawyers (probably the best in the tech business at extracting money” double dipping”) they will never support Linux in any usable way, not without a huge ongoing fee/payola on their so called partners.
DMIX was typically not an out of the box default, and had multiple shortcomings.
Even so, surely it would have been easier and better to just fix or replace dmix (in kernel, in the existing data path) than introduce a userspace daemon, break API compatibility, and so on. It’s been 20 years and pulseaudio is still flaky / high latency / incomprehensible. Professional flows that care use stuff like jack.
> It’s been 20 years and pulseaudio
PipeWire replaced Pulse like five years ago; who is using Pulse at this point to make statements like "20 years" meaningful? It isn't really an ongoing concern.
This is... literally exactly what they are doing? Of all of the reverse engineering related Linux efforts (and most corporate Linux efforts), Asahi have been the most methodical and relentless about upstreaming changes into the kernel and all of their upstream intermediaries (freedesktop/Mesa etc.), specifically so it's maintained, even at the detriment of the project velocity and contributor health. Asahi is explici…
I would have been happy if all that happened like 3 years ago. Now, it's 5 years in, the Asahi effort is losing momentum. Core developers are going on to do other things, significant chunks (3922 commits) are still not merged upstream and no major distribution has an official build. Sorry, but in my opinion, the project is at risk of becoming a dead and unmaintained branch. Don't get me wrong, the Asahi team did an i…
It is a dying quail effort doomed from the start if those three ex Apple engineers could get a license from Arm to design chips it is still baffling why no one else across the whole wide world didn’t follow in their footsteps. There is a Linux market.
I’m just shocked that it has not happened. With all the money flying around for AI data-centers you would think that this would be a more worthwhile effort?
Where is the European effort in this area? I would think it would be a natural for something to come out of the EU in this area.
> Aren't you contradicting yourself here a bit? If they're very loyal, there isn't much risk of them switching, is there? That needs clarification. They are loyal because they do not try anything else and often make assumptions that other OSes are worse than they actually are. They often assume a lot of features (e.g. shared clipboards across devices) are Apple only. They will not take the risk of buying non-Apple ha…
Well, agreed on all points. I guess the conclusion is time will tell, but I am sure Apple is legitimately looking into this on some level, especially since Steam is doing so well and keeps expanding Linux user-base.
I would be great if they did do it so i hope you are right.