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Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

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Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#61

Post by markphip »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #10
hbbio wrote: post #3

The progress on all fronts is really impressive, and even the write-up is top notch. The pace at which the team advances is incredible, as it seems Apple support is minimal... Maybe the core tech users is negligible to Apple, but it shouldn't be: Winning over the power users generally precedes larger adoption and I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead.

power users come and go. general population don't need macs, a $ 200 smartphone is more than enough for the majority who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM? only people with lots of money to waste.

These are pure guesses on my part, but I would guess that 99% of laptops that are sold each year are purchased with 16GB or less RAM and 99% of laptops that have been sold all time have never had their RAM upgraded.

So I would also guess the number of people willing to buy one of these is pretty high. I purchased the MacBook Air and love it. So fast, so quiet. Could I afford it? Yes. But I also typically use a Mac for 5-7 years so I did not consider it overly expensive.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#62

Post by Jcowell »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #59
hpen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to a university and look around at all the MacBooks owned by non tech people. You would be surprised by the fact they are everywhere.

I see Apple users all around me. I also live in a country where $500/month is considered a decent salary. It's the power of their very competent marketing department and nothing else; otherwise you wouldn't see so many iPhone users who spent three months of their total income for the privilege of owning this "status symbol".

Why does it matter if your spending three mo the of your total income when you can (and should)?pay it off monthly ?

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#63

Post by marcan_42 »

ur-whale wrote: post #56
RMPR wrote: post #9

This is great and might actually prompt me to get a Mac, as much as I like ThinkPads, this battery life is simply on another level.

> This is great and might actually prompt me to get a Mac Before you jump in, be aware that actually installing a Linux distro on one of these is not exactly trivial (and many "guides" out there are outdated). [EDIT]: as a matter of fact, I've been browsing the Asahi site for a "howto install asahi", and there's basically no such thing.

There's no HOWTO because the experience isn't up to end user standards; I haven't even gotten around to settling on the precise U-Boot config/boot chain yet, and I don't really encourage non-kernel-developers to try to install things at this point (though we have some folks doing it anyway). Right now the focus is very much on kernel developers doing tethered boots via USB. That will change rather soon, as enough core drivers are getting merged or usable to make this actually useful for people without very high standards (e.g. we just merged in proper keyboard/touchpad support), so now it's worth spending more time on the installer, to get it to the point where the stand-alone boot flow is where it needs to be.

(If you're a developer and you want to do tethered boot and you know what you are doing, the guide is simple: make sure you have macOS 12.0.1 or newer, use diskutil to resize macOS to leave at least 3GB of unpartitioned space, boot holding down power / options / terminal, curl -L mrcn.st/alxsh | sh and follow the prompts, once you're booted into m1n1 you can use m1n1.git/proxyclient/tools/linux.py from another machine connected via USB to run a kernel / initramfs).

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#64

Post by minimaul »

It's still not really ready for prime-time, but I've got a M1 mac mini running debian as an arm64 build bot (and a few other small things) now, and I can say that the bits that work, work really well.

Storage is fast, CPU performance is solid, PCIe for ethernet works just fine.

Now if I could just get one with 64G of RAM and 2TB of SSD... ;)

edit: the setup process is still far from polished but that's not unexpected this early, and it's still in a 'build your own kernel' state. But it was easy enough to get going in an hour or two with a pointer or two from IRC and from reading the wiki.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#65

Post by mlindner »

chewyland wrote: post #20

I have been running Ubuntu on my 14 inch Mac for a little while now and it works great. This project here is also really exciting. Also, Windows ARM with the recent updates also works well in the new base 14 inch. I've been using it daily, no issues. I have nothing but praise and swiftly switching between 3 OSs sure is neat. This computer is sooo fast. I can see myself using this Mac for many years ahead.

How are you getting Windows ARM on a mac? I thought it wasn't available yet because of some kind of exclusivity agreement.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#66

Post by gigatexal »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #12
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

power users come and go. general population don't need macs, a $ 200 smartphone is more than enough for the majority who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM? only people with lots of money to waste.

I suspect you'll get downvoted into oblivion for your PoV by the pro-Apple HN crowd and even though I do agree with you to some extent on the the high pricing (a basic M1 MacBook is half my NET take home pay as a dev in Europe, and double my rent costs) but value is subjective to most people, and for most, buying into the Apple ecosystem the value the ecosystem brings to their lives is justified, otherwise they would…

Yes they're expensive. But how many HP/Dell/Lenovo etc laptops do you have from 2013 that still run like new? My 2013 MacBook Pro with an i7 and 16GB of ram still screams. The trackpad works, no keys fail, the screen is still good being retina. The amount of money paid divided by how long it has lasted me makes it a ~300 USD computer!*

*if replaced every year ... or a 900 usd computer if replaced every 3 years.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#67

Post by semi-extrinsic »

dagw wrote: post #47
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price. The price of an M1 Pro it's not justified by a slightly faster CPU, no matter how low the power usage is. I could understand 20% more, but not two times. Also: most of my workflows wouldn't work natively on ARM Macs. That doesn't mean Apple doesn't have a great product with a big market. They simply will never be mainstream. My answer was to I wo…

The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price. But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality. I bought a M1 Pro, not primarily because of its performance, but because it was the cheapest way to get the performance I wanted without sacrificing battery life or build quality in a hardware/software package I could trust to Just Work out of the box.

What do you sacrifice if you get e.g. an Asus ROG Strix G15 ? It is benchmarking pretty close to the M1 Pro, and you can get it for around $1800.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#68

Post by zamadatix »

mlindner wrote: post #65
chewyland wrote: post #20

I have been running Ubuntu on my 14 inch Mac for a little while now and it works great. This project here is also really exciting. Also, Windows ARM with the recent updates also works well in the new base 14 inch. I've been using it daily, no issues. I have nothing but praise and swiftly switching between 3 OSs sure is neat. This computer is sooo fast. I can see myself using this Mac for many years ahead.

How are you getting Windows ARM on a mac? I thought it wasn't available yet because of some kind of exclusivity agreement.

It'll be VM, use Parallels as it has better Windows 11 ARM64 support. You do not want to use Windows 10, it doesn't have x86-64 app compatibility like Windows 11. GPU acceleration is decent but no DX12 support yet.

I've been using Windows ARM on M1 as my primary work PC device since ~January when I got a 13" M1 MacBook Pro. I now have a 16" MacBook Pro M1 Max. Can share particulars of my Parallels config or answer any questions.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#69

Post by [deleted] »

boplicity wrote: post #46
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

power users come and go. general population don't need macs, a $ 200 smartphone is more than enough for the majority who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM? only people with lots of money to waste.

> who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM? Let's say you use a laptop for 6 hours a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year, and that it lasts for 3 years. That's 4,320 hours of usage. For many people, it's worth paying 35 cents per hour to use a machine that's even just a little bit better than one that costs half that. I'm writing this on a high-end Macbook Pro that's 8 y…

[deleted]

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#70

Post by [deleted] »

nix23 wrote: post #60
boplicity wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM? Let's say you use a laptop for 6 hours a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year, and that it lasts for 3 years. That's 4,320 hours of usage. For many people, it's worth paying 35 cents per hour to use a machine that's even just a little bit better than one that costs half that. I'm writing this on a high-end Macbook Pro that's 8 y…

>35 cents per hour to use WOW that's kind allot TBH.

[deleted]
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