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#apple#linux#asahi#macos#hardware#support#years#still#things#effort
Discussion (125 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
When I got my M3 Pro MBP, I got it with the intention of eventually installing Linux on it. In hindsight I seriously underestimated the amount of effort needed for even partial Linux compatibility, which makes me all the more grateful for the work Asahi contributors have put in! I'll still be keeping macOS installed for iOS dev work(which I plan on doing soonish), but other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life.
Display quality, trackpad quality, overall form factor, and very high RAM space in a laptop would be the primary reasons I'd go with Asahi Linux.
Find me another laptop that has everything, even if it's more expensive ! You can't, some have keyboard as good, some it's the display. In best case you got 2 or 3 things but then it goes downhill on the other, like the trackpad.
I’ve been a big Lenovo fan, settled on the X1 carbon. I’ve had three of them, G5, G6 and G9. The USB-C port broke on both G6 and G9 models. Apparently it’s a common problem. Unfortunately the ports are soldered directly on the motherboard making it difficult to fix(should be a small separate board for easy replacement). I was going to desolder and replace the ports, but haven’t gotten around to it.
I’m now using a MacBook Pro M2.
This
I'm not convinced it's only "several years".
Asahi was launched in January 2021. So 5 and a half years ago. Asahi, as far as I can tell, supports most of M1 and M2 features, so generations launched in November 2020 (6 years ago) and June 2022 (4 years ago).
I would be very surprised if a decade from now the story won't still be the same thing: 90% of features for systems half a decade old with software package gaps in important areas and everything slightly less optimized than MacOS.
Asahi is doing incredible work but it's still 5 people in a garage vs the huge corporation.
Have they? What AMD or Intel laptop with Linux on it can hold a candle to and M4 air or an M4max pro? Genuinely curious, cause I found none...
After 2 years of usage, I still have issues with basic actions like copy paste.
edit: omg, writing this post, i checked if there is some way to use linux shortcuts and there is (Kanesh/KMonad or Karabiner-Elements). Maybe my suffering will finally stop.
I’m either doing it wrong on Windows or the entire world is putting up with unnecessary finger pain because whoever chose Ctrl-C was a masochist.
(to replies, yes, i understand that macos keyboard shortcuts might objectively be better, but if you are using multiple computers and macos is the only one of OSs, those shortcuts become pain in the neck)
Apple's indifference to OSS does not give me much hope.
I sometimes do wonder at what point do ARM find and test these stuff and ask Apple to follow. Obviously this is not the first time we see such thing happened.
See also when Microsoft introduced DocX, Apple products corrupted documents because Apple followed the standard that Microsoft had specified but turns out they didn't follow it themselves.
Sabotage others on things you don't have to do.
By running Linux in a VM on MacOS on Apple silicon, you sacrifice some raw speed but in return you still get to run MacOS apps occasionally and have access to the same data from either MacOS or Linux without having to duplicate everything. And battery life is reasonable, which is not true yet with Asahi.
>and because there's no performant way to share disk space for data with MacOS
Have you tried a ZFS partition? If it's a desktop system use iSCSI to network storage (I'm not running Linux directly on my Studio or M4 mini but I still put my Home folder on the network)?
https://xff.cz/git/libva-v4l2_request/
It’s simply a business decision for Apple. And quite a dumb one at that. Here’s hoping that Ternus reverses that shortsighted decision.
Considering how much better m-series CPUs are, i’d say actually keep thinking different.
And I give some thoughts into may be they are not "much better". And in that case may be sticking to spec and not Thinking Different on certain things matters more.
I think the issue is funding is so low the developers don’t even have access to newer Apple Siicon, let alone funding for token costs, etc.
https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-l...
You have to appreciate the effort Apple puts into security - goes some way to understanding why they won't endorse/support installing an alternative operating system.
> Rumours circulating that Apple are actively hostile towards efforts such as Asahi, or that their security must be bypassed or jailbroken to run untrusted code are unfounded and false. In fact, Apple have expended effort and time on improving their security tooling in ways that only improve the execution of non-macOS binaries. An example of this is giving their Boot Policy configuration tool the ability to wrap raw AArch64 code in a proper Mach-O format starting with macOS 12.1. This is only ever required for enrolling a boot object that is not already a macOS kernelcache.
Tremendous efforts would be to publish reference manuals for all their hardware components.
Apple is doing the bare minimum, which is to not build 10km tall walls around its walled garden.
But in the modern day of walled gardens, that's viewed as generosity.
To be perfectly clear, Apple is like a lifeline to a lot of people. They are one of the last bastions of quality in the hardware and software world. This is why it's such a disappointment that they've been faltering lately: we had high expectations of them, which hasn't been quite so true for the rest of the industry for a while. So it is a big deal that hidden gems like this continue to crop up from them: it is a sign that some of their core values still remain. And I really hope the new CEO will bring back some of what they lost after Steve Jobs.
Intel and AMD set the standard for "tremendous effort" bringing up support for alternative OSes. Nvidia follows behind, and Apple's support is (somehow) behind Nvidia's foot-dragging.
You get a jmp to some arm64 instructions of your choosing, with a bunch of CPU features locked out.
I wish the amount of time and brain power spent on this project was instead used to work on something more friendly to the Linux community.
For example to improve Strix Halo GPU and NPU support.
Most likely they just not interested in working on well maintained drivers that require 1000 times more effort to upstream code.
All the fun of reverse engineering and we know the processors already run Linux...