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publlus_enigma 5 days ago [-]
The reason this amazing project exists is the same reason my current Mac will be my last Mac.
I wish the team every success.
trompetenaccoun 5 days ago [-]
I got my first ever Mac relatively recently and I'm shocked by how annoying MacOS is. Maybe the mistake was expecting a proper operating system that puts the user in charge and not something more similar to iOS. Also Mac forums are full of dumb users and aren't much help. Average problem solving experience: There is no solution because Apple doesn't allow it, the workaround doesn't really do what you want and the other users question why you have to do the thing you want to do anyway. "Why not just let Apple wake up your hibernating Macbook at 3:00 AM and drain the battery bro, they know what they're doing"
Sadly the hardware is amazing and so much more efficient compared to Intel/AMD x86. We need M-series chips for Linux.
Phemist 5 days ago [-]
Yeah, vanilla MacOS is super focused on the set of "all windows of a given Application" as the useful "unit of work". Whereas in real work, you actually handle individual windows of a set of applications (e.g. firefox window for docs, vscode for code, finder window for project files) as the single unit you are working on.
MacOS is, in my experience, incredibly clunky due to this mismatch. You can fix some (e.g. use AltTab for sane alttabbing), but not others (how can i prevent the next application window popping up when minimizing one)
ant6n 5 days ago [-]
It is indeed very strange and annoying. And I don't remember it being so bad ten years ago (although I had to use witcher for alt-tabbing - which actually worked well, unlike AltTab now). Since Linux, and both OG Mac Os, I am used to having multiple Desktops, in total multiple windows of the same applications (browsers, pdf reader, office, file browser). Mac Os is completely hostile towards doing multiple tasks at the same time, and compartmentalizing them into desktops -- you keep getting thrown around to random windows on random desktops (example if you close a window), it's super difficult to find your windows, it's just crazy. You're afraid of ever moving away from a window.
I think this paradim is also what's makes the Mac OS feel snappy. If basically having multiple windows for one software open is "holding it wrong", the OS is pushing you into one application, one window paradigm. As long as you do that, everything is pretty quick. But don't dare open two browser windows, or even worse, two windows of a word processor. The performance will degrade (and you'll keep searching for your windows...)
simonra 4 days ago [-]
I don't know, while I miss the super+right click drag to resize window and super+left click drag to move window from KDE on my work machine, I also kinda miss the smoothness of macOS's handling of many windows and desktops utilizing the trackpad on my gaming desktop. The swipe up and down/ctrl+arrow up and down to juggle windows within the desktop, and then left/right to move between desktops even makes their at first awkward handling of fullscreening apps feel right and efficient. What I really miss in KDE though is multiple virtual desktops per display I can switch independently per display. Actually makes me enjoy using multiple monitors slightly slightly more on macOS. What I sadly can't see happening is a merging of KDE, macOS, and the superior i3, as there would be too few few safe shortcut combinations available for programs to rely on.
IgorCRD 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
tiahura 4 days ago [-]
vanilla MacOS is super focused on the set of "all windows of a given Application" as the useful "unit of work". Whereas in real work, you actually handle individual windows of a set of applications (e.g. firefox window for docs, vscode for code, finder window for project files) as the single unit you are working on.
Thank you for articulating this so well.
When I bought a new M1 MacBook Air for my kid, I hadn’t used OSX in years, and was excited to try a super-polished Unix. Holy heck I couldn’t believe how work hostile it was. I want apps tiled so I can quickly jump betwee - not to go to the top of the screen to get bottom tile’s menu.
And the state of finder (other than preview) is something out of Redhat 5.1.
And the response is always “you’re holding it wrong.”
stephbook 5 days ago [-]
My favorite is missing support for face unlock, missing "energy options" (stay on when I close lid, something Windows XP had for 25 years now), and draining the battery empty when you shut the MacBook down while plugged in.
stasomatic 3 days ago [-]
Could you cite a few issues that you've run across, please?
I have used Macs since the late 80s, there have always been teething problems, duds and effups, but nothing that wasn't addressed by independent Mac devs. How can Apple make everyone happy?
But these days? With codex/claude/et al, you can make your Mac sing to whatever tune you prefer. I feel a bit bad for indies, but they still have not-prosumer market to make their living. I now just make my own apps to replace what I've bought in the past.
Cheers
Angostura 4 days ago [-]
Can you give some examples of a goal you can’t accomplish?
hoherd 2 days ago [-]
I am not who you asked, but lately it has been really frustrating for me that macOS locks portions of the filesystem when the screen is locked, which breaks rsync backups because they cannot read those files. I have been unable to find a way around this.
That being said, the security design that creates this problem is quite impressive, and I think much more tight than most people realize is happening on stock macOS. I just wish that I could unlock my whole home directory from the CLI somehow when I do my non-time-machine backup.
Angostura 8 hours ago [-]
Ah, that’s interesting- I wasn’t aware and I can see why it would be annoying
emmelaich 5 days ago [-]
Do you mean 'will be my last MacOS?'
publlus_enigma 5 days ago [-]
No. Whilst Apple's hardware is among the best in the world, I simply can't support their direction with respect to increasingly closed hardware.
martin1975 1 hours ago [-]
freakin Qualcomm isn't faring much better w/the Snapdragon X/X2 Elite... they were supposed to be on board w/Linux, yet I dare someone who's a newb install Ubuntu on a Snapdragon box the same way they would on a ThinkPad.
Funnily enough, none of these companies have issues consuming the 'free' fruits of labor of the open source community.
shmoe 5 days ago [-]
It is odd that Apple doesn't chip in here... they've originated so much decent stuff in the OSS space. Seems like a huge missed opportunity.
happymellon 5 days ago [-]
Apple are hostile to everything CopyLeft.
Why would they "chip in" here?
worldsavior 5 days ago [-]
Well, they will get more people buying MacBooks, though they won't really use their services.
utopiah 5 days ago [-]
What makes Apple valuable is precisely its full vertical integration. Nobody else does it at that scale except maybe Sony for consoles and Microsoft but both don't have the same usage coverage and thus integration.
It wouldn't be economically rational for Apple to bring down its own moat.
deanishe 5 days ago [-]
Apple isn't Sony. They make an arm and a leg on their hardware.
When they switched to x86, it didn't take long for them to release Boot Camp, so they could take Windows users' money, too.
esskay 5 days ago [-]
They also make an arm and a leg on services, which is why its not in their interest to make it so you cant use them.
xnickb 5 days ago [-]
It's not like users will just stop using the services. Rather Linux users will start considering MacBook as a potential laptop to buy.
How could that possibly disrupt their Software/Services infra?
esskay 5 days ago [-]
Of course they will. Why would you pay for icloud storage you cant use?
xnickb 5 days ago [-]
That statement is true for the users that both bought and didn't buy a Macbook (with Linux support). The difference is, the one who bought has paid money for the Macbook.
I am not an Apple user. Do you _have_ to pay for iCloud if you buy the laptop? I don't think so.
coldtea 4 days ago [-]
Windows dual boot meant millions of potential switchers, if not for anything else, as a list item to tell them "you could still dual boot".
Asahi-on-Mac would bring in irrelevant numbers for a company of Apple's size.
Melatonic 4 days ago [-]
They could also dual boot windows for Arm. Just like before. Assuming Apple did the boot camp thing again
worldsavior 5 days ago [-]
People whom want Linux on Macs obviously already don't want to be put into Apple's ecosystem.
utopiah 4 days ago [-]
I don't have numbers on that but I bet purchase of brand new MacOS compatible devices is 99% or more from people who already have at least one or more other Apple devices.
Sure they are probably thousands if not millions of (in the positive sense) nerds and geeks posting on HN about buying a Mac first hand, not second hand, solely to put Linux on it but even then would be a drop in the ocean compared to the remained sales.
Still if you have numbers on that I'd love to be wrong about it.
globular-toast 5 days ago [-]
They don't care about people buying MacBooks. They want you in their ecosystem buying i-everything.
pjmlp 5 days ago [-]
Folks are much better supporting Linux and BSD OEMs than buying Apple than then trying to run Linux on their devices.
vorticalbox 5 days ago [-]
I do wonder if the margin on Mac isn’t that high vs the price and the services (iCloud etc) make up for that.
Amazon do the same with the fire.
coldtea 4 days ago [-]
We know that the Mac has fine margins.
Angostura 4 days ago [-]
From what I can tell from the project team, Apple aren’t being hostile. Just not contributing resource
bel8 4 days ago [-]
The decision to not contribute when you have infinite resources is a hostile action on itself.
pjjpo 4 days ago [-]
I would like to have a great laptop running Linux but the hardware options are just not there.
So I end up with a MacBook with macOS. Some may refuse to do that but I expect that's only a tiny missed opportunity.
LtWorf 4 days ago [-]
Can you make 3 examples of things they originated? I'm honestly asking.
zer0zzz 4 days ago [-]
WebKit, clang, the llvm backend for arm64
LtWorf 4 days ago [-]
webkit is a fork from KDE, so "initiated" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
llvm also existed from before although apple supported the development.
I was curious if apple had actually started any FOSS project.
brewmarche 4 days ago [-]
Swift comes to mind, and this website has more https://opensource.apple.com/projects/ (it lists WebKit, but I guess they count WebKit after it split from KHTML, I’d agree with you there)
Also, Bonjour originated at Apple and it is cross-platform, although Avahi probably is more popular
CUPS is associated with Apple as well, but it seems that it also did not originate there
zer0zzz 4 days ago [-]
I was going to say swift, but I figured someone would undercount that because it is so overly relevant as an iOS/Mac development language even though it really is a pretty good portable language. But man... undercounting webkit and clang+llvm is a new level of ignorance..
LtWorf 4 days ago [-]
It is ignorance to call them apple projects when they really aren't. The copyright notice of webkit is full of emails like @kde.org… wonder why it's not entirely @apple.com?
zer0zzz 3 days ago [-]
The majority of the advancements done to make the standards compliant browser with great js performance were done at Apple. Going by the copyright notice as the the source of a vast majority of the dev in the 2000s seems pretty special.
brewmarche 4 days ago [-]
They asked about ‘originated’ in particular.
zer0zzz 3 days ago [-]
Clang and the arm64 backend did literally originate at Apple. Not sure what you want me to tell you.
LtWorf 3 days ago [-]
That's the first thing I saw in the copyright file
Copyright: 2003-2017 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
zer0zzz 2 days ago [-]
Do you think it was made at Urbana because it uses the uiuc license? I suppose you think everything that uses the mit license originated in cambridge
brewmarche 2 days ago [-]
Apologies, I focused on LLVM as a whole. You are right about clang (and I didn’t know about the arm64 backend)
zer0zzz 2 days ago [-]
Actually the arm64 backend is a grey area. I knew some guys that worked on it in secret at Apple. They definitely created and Developed it at Apple and dropped it on the community after the iPhone 5s launched, replacing the existing aarch64 backend.
I’m not 100% certain if they started with any bits of the previous aarch64 backend or not though.
LtWorf 4 days ago [-]
Last I heard from CUPS they fired the only guy who was working on it?
In both cases you're undercounting apples investment just to make a really dense point on HN.
1) khtml was a really minimal renderer in KDE before apple pumped tens of millions into turning it into the first really modern web2.0 browser, you really can not underestimate the amount of money jobs was willing to pump to make that thing what it became by the time the iphone launched.
2) llvm was essentially apple's bet on a grad student hire and him and his lab's academic project. I knew and worked with several of those former uiuc guys. llvm and clang as we know them today were heavily built at apple.
Also, you are totally (and purposefully probably) misquoting me. I said __clang__ and the __llvm arm64 backend__ were done by apple, and they were almost entirely from scratch from the start at Apple.
LtWorf 3 days ago [-]
I believe the word "originated" has a very precise meaning.
zer0zzz 3 days ago [-]
A meaning which seems definitely lost on you for two of my three examples.
rrr_oh_man 3 days ago [-]
Don’t get baited into discussing with a troll (who’s not discussing to gain a shared understanding)
Lack of sleep and HDMI support is real roadblock for adoption. Hope they gets past soon.
brycewray 5 days ago [-]
It's not just the Apple Silicon Macs, either; I have a 2017-model Intel Mac which runs any number of distros just fine except that sleep just doesn't work right. No amount of keystrokes or mouse-clicks will wake it up if it sleeps.
djfergus 5 days ago [-]
Have you tried very recently? I have a 2018 Macbook Pro with touchbar and the progress on getting T2 macs working lately has been amazing - 3 months ago I was having issues but I reinstalled last week with a 7 kernel and it has been flawless: suspend, restore, touchbar, fan control all great.
brycewray 4 days ago [-]
Sorry I didn't respond earlier. Mine isn't a T2 Mac. Also, I've actually been doing some distro-hopping in recent days --- switching among Fedora, the Arch-based CachyOS, and the Fedora-based (and very-early-stage) RakuOS --- and the sleep problem has been consistent among all three. I also have tried Debian, and Debian-based distros, in the past and seen the same issue. I have a nagging feeling that it's something really simple but have no idea what.
I've also been frustrated by the whole old-Mac-on-Linux problem with internal speakers, as I've written before:
On your post: I really don’t get why a widely used/available and pretty standard (as in there aren’t 5000 weird variations - more or less one per device of 4-5 devices per year, mostly the same controllers for most things) group of hardware doesn’t get more love from the Linux community. It’s the perfect case for showing the superiority of the open source model and the devices are amazing for their age.
Without any bloat it could show that they also perform reasonably well and it also solves the gaming problem on Mac.
I’ve also updated a few patches but it seems to be a pain to submit these.
brycewray 4 days ago [-]
> it also solves the gaming problem on Mac
Yep, I admit that it's my main use of Linux. My daily driver for everything non-games-related is my 2023 (Apple Silicon) Mac Studio, but for Steam stuff I go to the old Intel iMac and whatever distro I'm running on it at the time.
laidoffamazon 5 days ago [-]
Is there anything stopping this from being thrown some investment plus LLM tokens? I wonder what a KVM connected to the machine plus a few thousand in Astra/Fable tokens could do here. It seems funny to think of software feature defects in OSS software now if people are building full recombinations of closed source software daily now!
Gigachad 5 days ago [-]
It's hard to debug sleep in a VM or some self contained system. You need to physically interact with the laptop, reboot it after it gets stuck, etc.
embedding-shape 5 days ago [-]
Add a tool to the harness you use that can ping you on Telegram/whatever when it gets stuck and need you to do stuff physically, tell it to use it in the workflow with you. Used this approach a bunch with Codex to work on and debug hardware stuff. Once every 5-15 minutes I receive my command, and as a good r̶o̶b̶o̶t̶ human I moved the resistor/patch cable in the way the agent instructed me, eventually it got things working in the way I wanted it to.
aspirin 5 days ago [-]
In Soviet Russia, LLM prompts you.
laidoffamazon 5 days ago [-]
Presumably, that would be what the KVM/some kind of power switch would be used for
aslihana 5 days ago [-]
Wow thank you for saying this. Always thought it’s my problem(because its the same with my 4 OSes), some misconfiguration etc.
Mine doesn’t reboot, I am always turning off and on after SSD change; and I thought it’s about that.
harha 4 days ago [-]
Same problem with iMac - got 5k mostly working and a patch for audio using my favorite coding assistant, but that final bit remains tricky. Will post to GitHub if I can solve it.
brycewray 4 days ago [-]
Yep, mine also is an iMac (mid-2017 model).
harha 4 days ago [-]
ChatGPT just found a solution to the sleep problem - but it only works if I deactivate wake on wlan, which would defy the purpose of enabling suspend for me (I use it as my remote development box, want to be able to ssh into it and don’t have any cables in that room).
Will update once I’ve solved this.
sneak 5 days ago [-]
No, lack of GPU acceleration. Give me a laptop with sleep and HDMI output that has no 3d acceleration and I will give you back an unusable laptop.
sfdlkj3jk342a 5 days ago [-]
If you don't want to play 3d games or run local LLMs, why is GPU acceleration important when you have a more than capable CPU for any desktop UI?
dylanger 5 days ago [-]
Without 3D accl basic web browsing can sort of suck, QubesOS has software only rendering and you can really feel it.
sneak 2 days ago [-]
No CPU is sufficient for standard desktop UI these days. All UI is 3d accelerated now. Your statement would have been true 20 years ago.
teaearlgraycold 5 days ago [-]
Depends on your desktop UI. If you install something like Gnome (as I did with Asahi Linux today on an M3 Air) the animated transitions don’t work. You just get a short frozen period and then it cuts straight to the final state. I could try installing a more barebones DE which has no need for animations.
spockz 5 days ago [-]
Can you disable animations completely? At least I could in Gnome. It will become more snappy as a result as well.
teaearlgraycold 5 days ago [-]
I did. Still missing the Vulkan support for Zed. But I noticed my WebGL ray marched shaders run quickly - with glitchy artifacts.
harha 4 days ago [-]
Anything built on Electron can be super slow- had issues with snap packages of VS Code and Slack being super slow because CPU would render.
jdeaton 5 days ago [-]
This is really incredible work but so frustrating that its necessary
pjmlp 5 days ago [-]
Only because some buy Apple instead of supporting Linux OEMs.
walthamstow 4 days ago [-]
When Linux OEMs come out with hardware as good or nearly as good as Apple, people will buy it.
pjmlp 4 days ago [-]
Then don't complain about giving money to Apple for macOS.
asimovDev 5 days ago [-]
this opens up the options on the used market though. once people start dumping their early Mx Macs, they will turn into wonderful Linux machines instead of becoming landfill or a collector's item that will sit in a display case / shelf
WillAdams 4 days ago [-]
That is an interesting argument --- maybe there could be a tax credit for publishing specifications/keys when a product is end-of-lifed and support is cut off? Or, maybe a company could be required to pay for disposal if that is not done?
nextlevelwizard 5 days ago [-]
It turns out people want actually good machines. I have the cheapest M1 Air and it still rocks and isn't power hungry. When Apple stops supporting it I will gladly switch to Asahi if capable.
pjmlp 4 days ago [-]
So much that they rather use another UNIX and then keep complaining it isn't GNU/Linux, go figure.
nextlevelwizard 3 days ago [-]
Yeah... most users do not do that. I would prefer using MacOS forever, but I am under no illusion that it will keep getting supported. But I also use Linux daily so I am not bothered anyway.
Also just please stop fighting against imaginary people.
sneak 5 days ago [-]
Why wouldn’t bringing up an OS on new hardware be necessary? Apple has no obligation or incentive whatsoever to write Linux device drivers…
Do you think Apple should be funding this work out of revenue? What possible justification could they provide for such a waste of money? This will not sell any more laptops.
Even if Asahi didn’t do it, the work would still be necessary by someone inside Apple. Drivers don’t spontaneously appear from the ether.
WD-42 5 days ago [-]
Nobody is complaining about code not being provided. It’s more the schematics that are sitting in a drawer in Cupertino that would make the painstaking reverse engineering unnecessary. Someone at Apple would have a much easier time.
j16sdiz 5 days ago [-]
Well... every reverse engineering project is a schematic sitting in someone's drawer.
WD-42 4 days ago [-]
Not every project needs to be a reverse engineering project, and the future looks pretty bleak if getting Linux to work on every new computer turns into one. Hopefully this remains an Apple problem with their proprietary crap.
sneak 4 days ago [-]
GPU firmware interfaces being proprietary and heavily guarded secrets is in no way whatsoever an Apple thing. Even the Raspberry Pi is in much the same boat.
Most of the time it’s an upstream vendor NDA. In Apple’s case they own the whole stack for the GPU so that doesn’t apply here. But it’s certainly not special to not divulge GPU internals.
teaearlgraycold 5 days ago [-]
All of that IP stolen by OpenAI and they didn’t think to buy some goodwill lifting a copy of an engineer’s manual to their GPUs…
Muromec 5 days ago [-]
They could also hire somebody to sabotage this work in some ways if it helps with the bottom line. That's totally reasonable thing to do that I will defend in that case, because I would love to see the trillion dollar corporation become 10 trillion dollar corporation, because reasons.
Danox 5 days ago [-]
Apple doesn’t need to hire anyone. It’s a complete waste of their time if three former Apple silicon-engineers can start their own company Nuvia which licensed, designed and engineered Arm chips, said company was later bought out by Qualcomm for 1.2 billion dollars, if they can do it, there are many other smart people in the world that can do the same after all, it has been about 35 years since the birth of Linux. Where are they?
Every time something new comes out hardware wise in the tech world , there’s this dying quail chorus of Linux geeks, who cry about it, not having Linux support.
The only long-term solution is for a group of smart talented people to get together and take out a license from Arm and proceed to design a chip with Linux support from ground zero however, such an endeavor probably would make everyone in the Linux world mad/unhappy because in order to do something well/professional said group would have to fork Linux in order for it and hardware to have the best chance at success selling to the general public you know the group that just wants to use a computer and not jump underneath the hood to tinker with every little thing to get it working.
badc0ffee 5 days ago [-]
It would be nice if Apple provided documentation, not even code.
sneak 2 days ago [-]
The production of documentation is not free. As an Apple shareholder why would I want them to spend money doing this?
yencabulator 7 hours ago [-]
The documentation already exists, it's just kept inside Apple.
nijave 5 days ago [-]
They could open source their software so others could utilise the code instead of needing reverse engineering
Danox 5 days ago [-]
Darwin is open source has been for 25-26 years is it too much hard work?
They've done the userspace bringup for linux since apple silicon servers allegedly exist. The drivers exist already so just throwing the device tree over the wall can't be that hard. Nobody is asking for systemready/UEFI or mainline linux.
I suspect that they might be changing their mind about upstreaming?
nijave 3 days ago [-]
Eh, they probably have enough server hardware/infrastructure and potentially custom accelerators and other hardware that staffing a team makes sense
Quick web search says they at least need some kernel developers for virtualized Linux on macOS
Meneth 5 days ago [-]
PureDarwin doesn't work on any of the M-series machines, and according to the Github commit log, hasn't been updated since 2024.
nijave 3 days ago [-]
Which doesn't even boot on modern Apple hardware without all the closed source bits...
wraptile 5 days ago [-]
> Apple has no obligation or incentive whatsoever to write Linux device drivers…
In ideal world the society would make it an obligation for general computers to remain free (as in freedom) and accessible.
bean469 5 days ago [-]
Of course they do not have the obligation to do so. This is more about Apple doing a nice gesture to the "owners" of their devices
dmix 5 days ago [-]
Nobody likes hearing the realpolitik of the Linux/Mac situation but you're not wrong.
wpm 5 days ago [-]
Apple had no obligation to write Windows drivers for Boot Camp either but did for over a decade. They could do the same for Linux even if they never open sourced them.
dmix 5 days ago [-]
There was a strong financial incentive to transition Windows users over to MacOS, by giving them a halfway point.
I remember overhearing an older person being explained Boot Camp while waiting for my iPhone to be repaired and it was very obviously a way for them to sell a Macbook so they could dual-use windows on it to run some windows apps. The ultimate pull would eventually be MacOS because it was easier (if you already had a macbook and iphone). Apple knew they'd get curious eventually and see how awful the Windows UX was.
The main argument for Linux on Macbooks would be developers but that doesn't mean there's a similar strong marketing/sales incentive to do so. Especially since there's no shortage of devs who default to mac (like legacy windows corporate users). Apple clearly doesn't see much money to be made by creating an olive branch offering to Linux users.
tarruda 5 days ago [-]
Amazing project.
My only blocker for installing Asahi on my Mac Studio (M1 ultra) is that llama.cpp performance is very bad when compared to using the Metal backend on the same hardware.
apatheticonion 5 days ago [-]
Right!? Linux can be configured to idle at less than 500mb of ram - by contrast, with some aggressive shenanigans, MacOS can idle at 2-3gb.
When running inference, I would love to use all of my hardware please Apple.
aurareturn 5 days ago [-]
It idles at 2-3GB but when your apps need the RAM, does it free up system memory so that it's closer to 500MB?
tarruda 5 days ago [-]
I use my Mac as a headless server to run LLMs, and never even start a desktop session so it always stays at pre-login state without any applications running. Even so, I never saw it using less than 2G in htop when logged via SSH.
zer0zzz 5 days ago [-]
I have similar issues with my ultra. Have put it on a laptop, but my desk Setup with my multiple desktop computers is usb-c video based ( kind of a poor man’s kvm) , and asahi doesn’t do usb-c video yet
mrheosuper 5 days ago [-]
Thanks for the effort, guys. This makes me think, shouldn't the driver layer be generic now. All the driver does is writing correct data at correct address when needed, there is no need for OS support except triggering driver when to do that.
A true HAL, any OS can run on that HAL.
worldsavior 5 days ago [-]
That data and that address changes, and the logic changes.
mrheosuper 5 days ago [-]
Why should the address and logic change, when both are defined by hardware ?
worldsavior 5 days ago [-]
The firmware sometimes wants more data, different places to set the data, so on. The firmware changes, and you gotta adapt the driver to it. Sometimes it's a complete overhaul.
mrheosuper 5 days ago [-]
I am still not sure why does OS has to be aware of this, if anything, only the HAL should be aware of this FW version to have correct behavior.
Every major OS already has this HAL layer, we just need to decide/design a generic and hope that every player will use it.
colesantiago 5 days ago [-]
This is great news.
Hoping for M4 to the latest chip.
We need Ashai to support more chips.
wingworks 5 days ago [-]
Me too. I've got an M3 Mac Mini running as a linux server with parallels, but it has a weird NIC bug that crashes the mini every few weeks, keen to get of macOS and it's buggy NIC driver. (really don't want to send it into an Apple repair shop, there are non local here, it's a whole thing)
Can't wait to get Linux running on it native.
trueno 5 days ago [-]
we need to be supporting asahi if we want these things. their funding has fallen off.
Danox 5 days ago [-]
I wish they would get an Arm license and start the process like those three guys that worked at Apple and started Nuvia…
4 days ago [-]
whatever1 5 days ago [-]
Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community? So much wasted effort when they can just share a pdf.
Aurornis 5 days ago [-]
> when they can just share a pdf.
I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You have to work through provided code samples and then eventually get the vendor’s engineers to look into problems that couldn’t be resolved through the documentation, where they would go look into the other teams and their sources to discover the answer.
The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. The honest answer is that it’s not worth the huge effort investment needed to document an entire platform for public consumption.
I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
raphinou 5 days ago [-]
You describe an exhaustive documention, but some documentation would already be better than none. Perfect is enemy of good, as your comment illustrates.
aurareturn 5 days ago [-]
Apple wouldn't want to be liable or responsible if someone implements an OS based on their incomplete and imperfect and outdated spec and gets hacked.
yencabulator 7 hours ago [-]
Apple is not liable today if someone gets hacked while using macOS.
afpx 5 days ago [-]
If you’ve ever tried to lock down a mac and dealt with the 100s of system services, you’d know why. I like the hardware and base os, but I have no idea what those services are doing.
Many are undocumented. A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. And, they’re chatty and persistent in trying to communicate out. You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.
I only use my mac for development. I’m a simple man and don’t need all the bloat and hidden behavior. Plus, I always feel like I’m one automatic update away from it becoming unusable.
ThePinion 5 days ago [-]
Not to mention coming from something like Niri, or even default Gnome to MacOS Tahoe is just gimping productivity tenfold. It is so incredibly unintuitive in every way for window management and keyboard shortcuts and everything in between.
My Mac Mini M4 is for building the Mac/iOS apps, other than that it's useless as a daily driver. I will patiently wait for Asahi while I use my other computers that can run serious operating systems.
saagarjha 5 days ago [-]
> A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled.
Sure you can
> You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.
No
afpx 5 days ago [-]
No, really you can't disable all of the services with SIP disabled, at least not the latest Tahoe. Maybe there's a better tool than launchctl, but I don't know what that is. Plus, you disable one, and it crashes and you have to debug it for an hour.
Yes, I'm exaggerating about the networking. Yes, you can lock it down by turning off all of the devices, but honestly, I'm still not 100% on that. It was a surprise to me after I disabled ethernet and wifi and turned off everything in system settings, and someone passed by with an ios device.
However, if you're an expert - please save me a year of trial and error and point me to the minimal list of services and daemons.
saagarjha 4 days ago [-]
That would of course depend on what you plan to do with the machine, no?
afpx 2 days ago [-]
Bare minimum means I want it to boot have have input and display
saagarjha 2 days ago [-]
Maybe boot in safe mode and see if that gives you a good baseline
dreamcompiler 5 days ago [-]
So many daemons. And while a lot can be disabled, some of them cause important stuff to break if you disable them, or even cause the OS to crash in a Heisenbugian fashion. And there's no documentation. So debugging this crap is anything but simple.
saagarjha 4 days ago [-]
I didn't say it was easy, I just said it was possible. Obviously ripping out random parts of the OS is not guaranteed to produce something reasonable
megous 5 days ago [-]
This is nonsense. Chinese vendors like Rockchip and Allwinner provide fairly halfassed docs at times, but they try. It's housnads of pages, total, sure. But even this along with public code samples allows to create almost perfectly FOSS supported implementations for their HW. And it's a complex HW similar to what Apple has. I've worked with all kinds of just annoyingly incomplete and badly written datasheets, and if you put some work into it having at least something helps tremendously, even if the manufacturer ignores you completely and you have no field engineer access, and just throws incomplete crap over the public fence.
No docs is clear statement Apple hates FOSS. "how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop" argument is very weak considering that only consumer platforms that engage in a complete lockdown are maybe some gaming consoles, and those are basically appliances and not a general computing machines.
> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.
Right now, yes. But Linux support is like freedom of speech in a dictatorship.
Everyone makes fun of it and says it's useless but fundamentally the powers that be are deathly afraid of it ever turning the tide.
smith7018 5 days ago [-]
Sure but that's not really their point. They're not saying that Linux is a joke nor that it's useless; they're saying that the amount of people installing Linux on their Macs is so small that it wouldn't make financial sense for Apple to support them. Knowing how much an engineer gets paid, even staffing a small team to supporting Linux would cost Apple a couple million each year. That's not even taking support into account.
oblio 5 days ago [-]
That's not why they're avoiding it, though.
They're avoiding it because installing Linux (or Windows, even), would actually decrease their income. I doubt people running Windows on Intel Macs were avid Apple Music subscribers.
gjvc 5 days ago [-]
would actually decrease their income per device, but they would still make money on the device.
or are you saying apple devices are loss-leader prior the app store revenue ?
that's the model taken to the extreme
oblio 5 days ago [-]
No, they're not loss leaders, but in 2015 services were about 9% of Apple revenue. Now they're about 28%.
It's fairly clear which direction the wind is blowing.
Also, hardware - software integration pushes more hardware sales. People with iPhones are a lot more likely to buy Macs than people with Android phones. Same story for Airpods & co. I've also basically never seen an Apple keyboard used with non-Apple computers.
dwaite 5 days ago [-]
Also Apple stops supporting the hardware and the software at the same time. The case that Linux support lets hardware be used longer is a harder sell when the company stops manufacturing/stocking parts for servicing at the point where someone would consider Linux.
conradfr 5 days ago [-]
They had a revenue of $416 billion in 2025.
That would be like you buying something at the dollar store.
dwaite 5 days ago [-]
If Apple doubled their Mac revenue, the financial benefit of Linux would remain the same. That means it would then be effectively half as important for their business, but the operational challenges and risks remain the same.
At some point the ongoing maintenance and support as well as coordination and organizational distraction mean it wouldn't get approved if internal engineers offered to start it off for free.
waterTanuki 5 days ago [-]
> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.
It's only going to grow every year as apple stops releasing OS updates for perfectly functioning hardware.
commandersaki 5 days ago [-]
At the point its vintage people will just buy something new as it will perform better.
apatheticonion 5 days ago [-]
> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.
I suspect there would be an element of induced demand here. IMO the MacBook range are the only laptops on the market worth buying - but not having support for gaming (or at least, hilariously bad support for a limited range of games) is compelling enough reason to install Linux for a large portion of users (filling the void left behind by the widely adopted Bootcamp).
> but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF.
Yeah, GPU ISA, controllers, power management, NPU, and who knows what else. I still believe that companies should be compelled by regulators to offer documentation and support necessary to write drivers as I believe it is part of the "right to repair" (M1 will lose support in 2 years, it's still a great platform).
> They chose to leave it open.
I _really_ wonder on this point. It's so uncharacteristic of Apple. Were they concerned about potential anti-competitive lawsuits and maliciously did the bare minimum to avoid them? "It's technically open hardware, but good luck figuring out how it works"
charcircuit 5 days ago [-]
If you don't count wine on macOS then Linux without wine has bad support for gaming too.
izacus 5 days ago [-]
> I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
Oh please - Apple provided a full suite of Bootcamp drivers for their hardware just a couple of years ago, not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.
GeekyBear 5 days ago [-]
In the beginning, Bootcamp had a real job.
It allowed a machine running Intel's EFI firmware (as Intel Macs have always done) to boot an OS that only understood the older BIOS standard.
Once Microsoft and the various PC vendors started supporting UEFI directly, Bootcamp was just a bundle of existing Windows drivers from the component vendors.
If you put a specific Broadcom Wi-Fi chip in the Mac, Bootcamp included Broadcom's Windows driver that was best suited for that chip.
izacus 5 days ago [-]
And Linux support on M Macs would also have a "real job", what is your point exactly?
I find it so bizarre that some of you here are defending a megacorporation that could have easily afforded to provide drivers for Linux Kernel like their competitors do.
You're clapping for free volunteers to spend hundreds of hours reverse engineering Thunderbolt controllers when companies like Intel outright contribute them.
lokar 5 days ago [-]
The reverse of that argument is why are you applauding Intel for doing something they had to do well in order to get any sales?
GeekyBear 5 days ago [-]
I'm pretty sure Intel is providing Xenon CPUs for free when they are used in Linux servers, so they have no financial interest in providing first party Linux drivers.
Sure, they relied on community Linux drivers in the past, but that didn't have anything to do with money.
izacus 5 days ago [-]
There is no "applause" in my post - please learn to read before you take up your bigcorp defender shield and think for a second why you're fighting against your own benefit.
lokar 5 days ago [-]
Wft?
biorach 5 days ago [-]
> not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.
The person you're replying to didn't say that. Please don't misrepresent and please keep it respectful
bel8 5 days ago [-]
Regardless, saying it would be too much effort for Apple is laughable at best. Even more so when Apple used to release such docs in the past when it was much less financially capable.
They just don't care.
smith7018 5 days ago [-]
Bootcamp on Intel Macs was a different story because Apple's hardware was mostly an assortment of other vendors' hardware (with some custom components and set up). That means they could bundle drivers for Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, Realtek, Marvell, Synaptics, etc plus a couple of their own (the camera, the touchpad, the mouse, etc) and call it a day. Since the hardware was x86-64 it mostly just worked. That's an immensely different world from their custom hardware. They would need to write Linux drivers for all of their networking chips, each of their processors, their GPUs, work around Linux/Windows' 16KB memory page issues, their neural engines, the SEP, their DCP, the interrupt controller, IOMMU, their custom storage drivers, etc. You're vastly underselling or misunderstanding the size of the situation.
They were also in a different place back when they made Bootcamp. They were fighting a "Mac vs PC" battle head on and trying to convert other OS users to macOS. Now they don't really seem to care about that because their strategy is converting iPhone users into ecosystem members.
biorach 5 days ago [-]
> Regardless, saying it would be too much effort for Apple
That's not what they said. Please don't misrepresent
> is laughabe
And this disparaging language about commenters is not OK. Please stop.
Dylan16807 5 days ago [-]
The implication of saying it's a "huge effort" is that the effort is too much. You're nitpicking at this point and the flat refusal is just as much a problem as tossing out "laughable" in a sentence focused on calling Apple bad.
izacus 5 days ago [-]
> And this disparaging language about commenters is not OK. Please stop.
Nothing about that statement is disparaging - just because you don't want to hear it, doesn't make it insulting.
Calling out nonsense is important, especially on this website.
dwaite 5 days ago [-]
Apple until a few years ago had killed off all first party monitors because they thought that business line was a distraction.
The challenge isn't finding an engineer. It is picking what project doesn't get done in its place.
Danox 5 days ago [-]
Darwin is out there and you too can license Arm and design something from the ground up if you have the ability and the will…
It’s all there and it’s been 25-26 years no one has bothered maybe that’s Apple is still the only vertical computer company left from the 1980s.
At one time there were many choices in hardware and OS software combined with that hardware that era is basically gone because no one wants to take the bull by the horns and do anything they want someone else to give it to them free.
jjtheblunt 5 days ago [-]
Apple's hypervisor.framework lets other OS instances run very very fast with the UTM app (open source on github, but i use the prebuilt version from the App Store). In my case i've used arm native linuxes (arch with various compositors, kde, gnome, fedora) all on M2, M2 Max, M5 and the experience is indistinguishable from native. MacOS is running too. I think hardcore graphics folks might want direct accelerator access, or there'd be curiously little reason for Asahi (other than that it's awesome work).
I use UTM in emulation mode, NOT Qemu simulation mode, which is wasteful.
just my $0.02.
smashed 5 days ago [-]
What is the purpose here? You are still stuck with a full blown MacOS running the system no? That is what Asahi tries to replace, not the other way around.
jjtheblunt 5 days ago [-]
I'd recommend reading up on it, and perhaps trying it, because it's very useful.
For folks lamenting that the (awesome) Asahi efforts are challenged by reverse engineering of changes from M2 to M3, and so on, those changes vanish into the abstraction, but their benefits do not. That's why i switched from Asahi a couple years ago to UTM in apple silicon hypervisor mode.
The point is some people who want to run Linux mostly do not want MacOS. You suggest to "just run MacOS" (the thing they want to avoid) and virtualize Linux. That defeats the entire purpose, then you could just as well skip the VM and run Mac apps. Yes, there are a few specialized applications people might need Linux for but that's mostly not why they install an entirely different OS. For the occasional obscure programm that doesn't exist in the Apple ecosystem VMs are a good option, absolutely. Everything you do in the VM still runs on Mac though and you depend on Apple for security, privacy and trust in general.
jjtheblunt 4 days ago [-]
yeah i get it, and run native linux myself, but also have apple silicon. for some, but not everyone (to your point), the apple hypervisor.framework is itself an adequate trick.
GeekyBear 5 days ago [-]
It serves the exact same purpose that WSL does in Windows.
You can run any flavor of Linux you like in a virtual machine, while booted into the native OS.
MomsAVoxell 5 days ago [-]
The purpose is to be able to run a decent Linux setup while also having MacOS for things. Not everyone is stuck on the anti-Apple train; some of us put software on all the platforms and thus using the hypervisor for this use case is quite comfortable. Disclaimer: personal experience - I too use UTM for highly productive things..
nsonha 5 days ago [-]
Wanting to run a single OS at a time is anti Apple now? Run MacOS or run Linux, why run both and create more problems than it solves and waste resources?
MomsAVoxell 5 days ago [-]
Run both when you need to build for both. Why not run both when you need to?
nsonha 5 days ago [-]
yes, but you're arguing for running both whenever you need (only) linux?
MomsAVoxell 5 days ago [-]
I’d need both, so I’d use both.
dylanger 5 days ago [-]
I just don't trust macOS enough to run the hw, AsahiLinux/Linux Kernel I do, I love Apple hardware but want to run Linux.
codethief 5 days ago [-]
I spent this past weekend giving UTM w/ Apple Virtualization a shot and can confirm that it really does work fantastically well! The only downside seems to be that it's not possible to pass USB devices through to the VM guest yet?
boredatoms 5 days ago [-]
This misses the point entirely. What happens when apple inevitably discontinues support for this hardware.
charcircuit 5 days ago [-]
Since the hardware will no longer get security updates for the firmware you should stop using it and move to a newer MacBook.
Linux doesn't solve the issue of not getting security updates anymore. For example the FCC does not allow letting users write arbitrary firmware they can run on their devices so this means you legally can't update the Bluetooth or Wifi firmware and need an update from Apple.
yencabulator 7 hours ago [-]
> Linux doesn't solve the issue of not getting security updates anymore. For example the FCC does not allow letting users write arbitrary firmware they can run on their devices so this means you legally can't update the Bluetooth or Wifi firmware and need an update from Apple.
My laptop has a wifi+bluetooth card that I can replace in 10 minutes. If and when that card is abandoned by its manufacturer (as Broadcom has done before), I can replace it with a better one.
boredatoms 4 days ago [-]
Absurdism
charcircuit 4 days ago [-]
>§ 2.944 Software defined radios.
>(a) Manufacturers must take steps to ensure that only software that has been approved with a software defined radio can be loaded into the radio.
The same thing that has previously happened with discontinued Intel Macs or PC hardware that is no longer supported by Windows.
You can still boot Linux natively on it.
jjtheblunt 5 days ago [-]
i have no idea how you think apple silicon will discontinue support for itself.
the hypervisor framework documentation, that i linked above, is pretty clear; the linux builds for arm run extremely fast on apple silicon because hypervisor framework gives them hardware access, in some subsystems directly (memory mapping for example), in other systems through a shim (graphics hardware).
vlovich123 5 days ago [-]
Apple discontinues support for this HW, not Apple discontinues support for running Linux in a hypervisor.
jjtheblunt 5 days ago [-]
when apple discontinues support for older hardware, it doesn't get OS software updates. that doesn't disable the hardware from running the latest OS before OS updates for the hardware were ended. On the frozen-in-time OS, you'd still have a working instance of apple silicon hypervisor wrapping optimized drivers that make whatever linux arm build you're running still see the hardware.
vlovich123 5 days ago [-]
Some people would like to keep running a system that’s connected to the internet that’s still receiving security updates. Running an outdated host isn’t the best idea.
happymellon 5 days ago [-]
So you are wrapping Linux in an insecure and never updating wrapper connected to the internet?
Sounds awesome!
VCFundedGenYer 5 days ago [-]
I don't think you understand what Asahi Linux is.
This isn't about running VMs.
jjtheblunt 5 days ago [-]
I used Asahi linux on M1 for a couple years, and dual booted, and worked as an engineer in an inner part of Apple. I definitely know what Asahi is.
alt227 5 days ago [-]
So that you have to keep buying Macs every few years of course. If they gave you a way to install linux easily then you could use it far past their intended lifespan and wouldnt keep you locked into the apple ecosystem. They have proved time and time again that Apple hardware running anything but MacOS or iOS is something they will work very hard to stop you doing.
dymk 5 days ago [-]
> every few years of course
That sounds like a you thing; I've kept my macs for at least 5 years. My M1 is still going strong and I haven't felt any pressure to upgrade.
alt227 5 days ago [-]
2 more years and your mac will not install the latest MacOS version, which then means you will no longer be able to update any software on your own computer or install any new software either. If you could install linux or any other OS on it you would be able to use it for decades to come, but instead you will be forced to buy another new shiny Apple box.
You will probably argue thats ok because you would have wanted one anyway by that time or some such point, but the fact remains that Apple will force you to upgrade your hardware not very long away by not allowing you to install anything on it.
dymk 5 days ago [-]
That's not how macs work. You don't suddenly lose the ability to run new binaries just because they're not on the latest MacOS version.
Using your own conservative estimate, 8 years seems like a fine lifespan for a laptop, far longer than the "few years" you initially said. And in practice, there are plenty of macbooks that have been running even longer.
edschofield 5 days ago [-]
The parent commenter described exactly how Macs work. I have a beautiful 10-core iMac 27” with 72 GB of RAM from 2020 that Apple has now decided to turn into a lemon. macOS Tahoe runs as slow as molasses and no more macOS upgrades will be forthcoming. I downgraded to Sonoma (which cost me hours) and the machine runs well again for now but the App Store has already started refusing to update apps like Pages because macOS is old. Soon I won’t be able to install a single app through the App Store and Linux (T2 Linux in my case, not Asahi) will be the only option to keep using this terrific hardware.
Gigachad 5 days ago [-]
Intel macs suddenly will lose the ability to run programs because Apple has dropped the requirement to ship an intel build. And from experience, as soon as Apple stops requiring devs support old hardware, nothing works anymore.
dymk 5 days ago [-]
That only affects new software, the stuff that runs on those macs now will continue to run on them in the future
testing22321 5 days ago [-]
Which will make it 7 years old. That is hardly a machine that must be replaced “every few years”
MYEUHD 5 days ago [-]
> past their intended lifespan
Thanks to the community, you can install macOS 15 (or older) on unsupported macs (as old as 18 years)
It's a bit awkward where newer Intel models with T2 chips don't support OpenCore, so e.g. the 2019 MBA is going to run out of security updates with macOS 14, sooner than a 2008 MBA that OpenCore will update up to macOS 15.
alsetmusic 5 days ago [-]
> past their intended lifespan
This bullshit needs to die. The products are designed to last.
alt227 5 days ago [-]
The hardware is designed to last, the software is designed to force you to buy a new device after 7 years at most.
dymk 5 days ago [-]
Is it a "a few years" or 7 years?
Gigachad 5 days ago [-]
Depends on your expectations. Throwing a perfectly working laptop out after 7 years because apple cut off software support is wasteful to me. It might not be for you.
dymk 5 days ago [-]
Why would you throw it out after 7 years? The software that’s already on it will continue to work just as it always has.
Gigachad 5 days ago [-]
My experience with iPads losing Apple support is every app just shows you an error message saying your app is out of date and can't be used, while the app store won't let you update it because the latest api version doesn't support your device. Unless you are using all FOSS software, most apps want to connect to some server, and that connection breaks rapidly without updates.
If you can load Linux on it it's still usable, but Apple OSs degrade rapidly after Apple stops supporting them. Apple is better about keeping devices on the latest OS version, but much worse about support after that period.
dymk 4 days ago [-]
iPads are a different device so I really have no idea why you’re bringing those up. Macs work fine even when the stop receiving updates 7 years doesn’t the line.
5 days ago [-]
wa2flq 5 days ago [-]
My iMac Pro 2017 is an Energizer Bunny. I got almost 10 years from by MacBook Pro.
specialist 5 days ago [-]
My family continues to use my old 2009 MacBook Pro.
YMMV
IshKebab 5 days ago [-]
I expect they don't actually care whether or not people run Linux on macs. I mean they used to let you run Windows!
Probably the real reason is just that it's extra work - both in terms of producing the docs, and in dealing with complaints when they change things. From their point of view it's extra work with no benefit to them.
cosmic_cheese 5 days ago [-]
Yep, I suspect the goal is to reduce support footprint/burden to the absolute minimum possible, which is also why they don't maintain their legacy virtualization/translation layers indefinitely (Classic mode, Rosetta 1 (PPC → x86), Rosetta 2 (x86 → ARM)). The benefit is being able to make major changes, refactors, etc with relatively little delay and encumbrance.
This applies on both the software and hardware layers. In the past, CPU suppliers dragging their feet and/or being unable to deliver on promises were the chief motivation for switching architectures, and now that they're their own supplier they can banish that issue entirely so long as they're not beholden to any kind of external behavioral contracts or expectations.
If the OS teams need some new capability or discover substantial benefit from redesigning some part of the SoC, the SoC/hardware team can just implement it and not have to care about breaking anything. That's a major competitive advantage that practically nobody else in the computer or mobile device industries has.
philistine 5 days ago [-]
This is it; why make your own CPU, if you can't make large breaking changes because you've promised Linux support?
Apple is not interested in tying their hardware design to Linus Torvalds.
Danox 5 days ago [-]
Why would they? Linux on the desktop still has trouble with user friendliness for the general computer using public.
ajross 5 days ago [-]
> they used to let you run Windows!
They let you run Windows when they were losing in the market and needed a path to migration for users of the winning platform. Once they started winning, they stopped.
Conversely, Microsoft refused to interoperate with Linux. Until Linux became the clear winner in the datacenter space. Now they have WSL and actually work pretty well as a cross-platform development environment.
VCFundedGenYer 5 days ago [-]
Microsoft is being all kumbaya right now for those exact same reasons - they are hemorrhaging users to Linux and macOS. WSL only exists because of this.
In the 90s and 2000s, they considered Linux a cancer, and only kept macOS alive for antitrust reasons.
bel8 5 days ago [-]
"Developers developers developers!"
yencabulator 7 hours ago [-]
> producing the docs
The docs already exist inside Apple.
Retr0id 5 days ago [-]
Aside from the "they have no incentive" answer, I imagine it's not so easy even if they wanted to. I suspect most of it won't be solely Apple's IP to share in the first place.
5 days ago [-]
apatheticonion 5 days ago [-]
I'd imagine it's for IP protection.
There's a lot of documentation required to write drivers for hardware; for the GPU, they'd need to share the instruction set of the GPU along with the specifications of the controller. Lots of weird things like power management too.
If shared, that's probably enough to create copycat hardware or at least an emulator.
Personally, I just want to run Linux on my latest MacBook Pro on day 1 with full hardware acceleration. If it was supported, MacOS would be on the device for as long as it took to install Linux.
I think the only way that would happen is if the EU extended "the right to repair" to include software, compelling companies to release documentation sufficient to produce drivers with. I'm sure Apple would maliciously comply, like provide the ISA but not power management specs - but that would still cut the work required by the Asahi team by 80%.
Danox 5 days ago [-]
You can get a team together and do the work… Nothing worth doing is free.
apatheticonion 5 days ago [-]
I'd love to. Want to join?
meerita 5 days ago [-]
It wouldn’t even be a problem for Apple to support Linux. Linux’s desktop market share has never been a threat to Apple at all. I hope Ternus, being the engineer he is, opens this up.
ChocolateGod 5 days ago [-]
The sad part is that it's known that Apple internally maintains Linux ports to their SoCs
Hmm, odd listing. Looks like an embedded linux job working on a BSP, but they don't have any hardware I know of which ships with Linux. Even their constrained environments use things like their own L4 variant or RTKit.
5 days ago [-]
kylec 5 days ago [-]
I don't think Linus Torvalds has any sway on what Apple does. Or do you mean John Ternus, the new CEO?
meerita 5 days ago [-]
My phone autocorrected Ternus to Torvalds, what a catch!
alsetmusic 5 days ago [-]
> My phone autocorrected Termus to Torvalds, what a catch!
Kinda funny and definitely a word suggestion that will be locked in future code.
kylec 5 days ago [-]
Also it's "Ternus" with an "n"
meerita 5 days ago [-]
Fixed. Thanks!
whatever1 5 days ago [-]
This message would be so badass if you were Ternus himself!
carlosjobim 5 days ago [-]
Community... is what you have with family, neighbors and such. Being a user of a mass produced thing is not a community.
But to answer your question: Why would they? Apple hasn't asked anybody to put Linux on their machines. They deliver them with a fully functional OS already and there are thousands of other computer models you can purchase instead of a Mac.
sansah 5 days ago [-]
They want control on the walled garden. When was the last time apple did anything for public unless forced by FCC. Now there is no hope since they can simply donate to trump.
novafunc 5 days ago [-]
Apple made some changes specifically for Asahi Linux to make it more robust.
I believe it was Hector Martin who discussed it on Mastodon a while ago.
Discussed there, but shame the original linked tweet is deleted
vallerie 5 days ago [-]
Would you happen to have a link to this? I would like to learn about this but unfortunately treehouse.systems doesn't seem to be very well indexed by search engines, and Mastodon's search is failing me.
bitpush 5 days ago [-]
Source? It's a welcome thing but very much not like Apple.
robertoandred 5 days ago [-]
Apple has a long long history of supporting open source.
cute_boi 5 days ago [-]
can you please tell us what have they done for open source except LLVM.
mikestew 5 days ago [-]
Probably took me less time to search “Apple open source” and click the first link than it did to type your question:
I mean, if you can’t read I could see how one might walk away with that impression.
cute_boi 5 days ago [-]
My argument was apple is doing nothing much for open source, then you suddenly come with link that shows Apple has done nothing for open source compared to other company like Microsoft or Google or even Meta.
mikestew 4 days ago [-]
…compared to other company like Microsoft or Google or even Meta.
So you can read, you just moved the goalposts when you were shown to be mistaken.
cute_boi 4 days ago [-]
mistaken? Looks like you can't comprehend goalposts with common sense. Apple isn't random acme company we are comparing here.
Sure, but other then language tools, databases, printing, container orchestration, what have the Roman’s ever done for us?
bigyabai 4 days ago [-]
~85% of the things they mentioned were Mac-exclusive software, so that's more of a question for yourself than the greater FOSS community.
Danox 5 days ago [-]
If you have the will, and the knowledge all of those tools can be used to your advantage but no one has for the most part they want someone else to do it for them for free.
cute_boi 5 days ago [-]
If you see google and microsoft contribution to OSS, apple contribution to OSS is basically nothing.
gehsty 5 days ago [-]
LLVM / Swift / Webkit & XNU (I don’t really know of anything using Xnu up stream but the others are large open source projects?)
5 days ago [-]
GeekyBear 5 days ago [-]
Clang, OpenCL, MLX
cozzyd 5 days ago [-]
Don't they ship a propetietary clang variant with weirdass version numbers? That was true at least at some point. Fortunately most Mac users on my experiments have given up attempting to compile any code in their Macs after SIP etc made it too annoying so rarely have to support them anymore.
bigyabai 4 days ago [-]
> "What has Apple ever done for Open Source?"
> proceeds to name three of the worst-managed projects in the history of FOSS software
burtness 5 days ago [-]
and CUPS
specialist 5 days ago [-]
Yes but: Apple has no incentive to open up.
Absent that, it'd take some kind of sustained right-to-repair, EU morality, many sternly worded letters pressure campaign.
Plus, once they did (officially), they're kinda committed to keep doing it. That's explains why they remain okay with emoloyees helping on their own time; all the upside, none of the down.
seanmcdirmid 5 days ago [-]
The FCC? I guess you mean their wifi chips or cellular modems or something? I can’t see the FCC having jurisdiction over anything else that Apple does. Maybe you meant the FTC?
Aurornis 5 days ago [-]
> They want control on the walled garden.
It would have been trivial for them to lock out other operating systems entirely.
Even the Asahi team has been much more appreciative of Apple leaving this open.
xorcist 5 days ago [-]
> It would have been trivial for them to lock out other operating systems entirely.
It is trivial for them to lock out other operating systems entirely.
Because that's not their business model. How is that not obvious?
varispeed 5 days ago [-]
Competition could use it as well. Why make it easy.
amelius 5 days ago [-]
Legal reasons. Lawyers say "no".
amazingamazing 5 days ago [-]
Why would they?
SoftTalker 5 days ago [-]
When Intel-based Macs debuted they touted their support for dual-booting Windows (Bootcamp).
Apple makes money selling hardware.
amazingamazing 5 days ago [-]
Yeah, they abandoned that, though.
ajross 5 days ago [-]
> Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community?
Because then they'll have to compete with Linux, which opens them up to someone else making a cheaper computer that does the same stuff.
I mean, I'm typing this on a junky Raptor Lake laptop I found on eBay for $220. Would I buy a Neo or MBP to replace it just to run the same software stack? Probably not.
If you believe OS X is the best environment and Apple Silicon will remain the best hardware in perpetuity, it seems silly for Apple not to allow some experimentation. Apple executives, to be blunt, know better. Lean times are always ahead.
smashed 5 days ago [-]
Apple silicon is winning in performance and power consumption. It's not quite the same as the old Intel based generation, where they were more like premium/well built machines with good screens and hardware.
Now some people would like to use that top of the line Apple silicon but without MacOS that comes with it. I doubt this is a huge threat to apple but it's also not a huge market for them. From what I understand they are not actively impeding it but not actively helping it either.
I actually won a M2 laptop a while ago. I resold it, new in box still shrink wrapped because I did not care for MacOS, just a personal preference. People like me are a minority though.
nosioptar 5 days ago [-]
I'm in the same boat.
Hell, I was given a bunch of old iphones recently, all of which are newer and better hardware than my phone. I wiped them and donated them to charity.
ajross 5 days ago [-]
> It's not quite the same as the old Intel based generation, where they were more like premium/well built machines with good screens and hardware.
Not sure what generation you're talking about? Intel c. 18-25 years ago was wildly ahead on everything, much more so than Apple is now, in fact.[1] Apple Computer, quite famously, straight up abandoned their previous CPU architecture and started shipping Intel chips just to have something competitive in the market.
Again, everything goes in cycles in this industry and Apple's executive decisionmaking is 100% not placing bets on being the best forever just to make a bunch of Linux nerds happy.
[1] Process innovation mattered more at the time, where now we're hitting the scaling limit and chips are much more comparable.
Danox 5 days ago [-]
Intel have a chance to be relevant today, but they couldn’t imagine a future with smaller better faster, computers the same applies to IBM and Motorola of Schaumburg, Illinois. They just couldn’t imagine anything beyond.
Intel was asked to design a chip for a new smartphone. They said no, which was the end…
Note: Intel and Microsoft have trouble competing when the playing field is level.
Danox 5 days ago [-]
The 1980s was filled with many companies that made the operating system and the hardware, Apple is basically the last vertical company left from that era. Why would they sacrifice that?
Many of those companies from the 1980s were very very good companies, but they gave up in the face of Wintel, Sun, SGI, Digital, Acorn (Arm processor), Amiga, Atari, etc… I would take any of those systems updated to today over Linux.
Only Apple with a mad man at the controls was able to survive (no Microsoft isn’t the reason). I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall when Intel said no to designing iPhone chips and then Steve Jobs still mad told his manager group that we have to design a new processor in house that would’ve been interesting, of course everyone in the room probably, said it can’t be done and many are probably saying the same thing about in house memory today which needs to be done.
wat10000 5 days ago [-]
How does providing the specs to run Linux on a MacBook open them them up to competition from junky used eBay laptops?
5 days ago [-]
xiphias2 5 days ago [-]
While the Ashahi engineers are working super hard reverse engineering the Apple Silicon, there has been a huge surge in Omarchy circles to get it all working with AI writing all the drivers and get all kinds of hardware in M4/M5 and later M6 working as well. It sped up a lot.
Oreols 5 days ago [-]
Is anyone actually actively working on it in Omarchy circles? I see a lot of smoke on X and a lot of "look what I vibecoded over the weekend" shows yet another control panel for sony XMs.
asimovDev 5 days ago [-]
I am sure the Omarchy team is throwing their best agents on the case.
Yes, I see people working on M4 and every few days it gets better
,,However, there's plenty more work to get it fully supported and working with Hyperland.''
chem83 5 days ago [-]
I feel like the growing polarization in that space is pretty much going to kill any chance of collaboration (for example: https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2091229491867594983?s=12&t=JH...). It really boils down to DHH and his conservative worldview clashing over things like the downsides of corporate funding and capitalism, building system software by just throwing more AI cycles at it, rejecting data centers over environmental concerns, and pushing back on AI-generated code due to slop and security issues. I just don't see both sides putting their differences aside to work together. DHH will probably just duplicate unaligned efforts so he can completely bypass and avoid having to deal with the human element.
dgroshev 5 days ago [-]
I don't think "growing polarisation" is the right framing here. It gives way too much weight and legitimacy to views that have to be subjected to cordon sanitaire [1].
It's not acceptable to associate race with national identity (DHH's London post). It's not acceptable to call for ethnic cleansing (his post on Travellers). It's not "just another view, couldn't we all get along"; we can respectfully disagree on small state vs large state, on low taxes vs high welfare, on isolationism vs interventionism even, but DHH's views have to be unacceptable.
What is happening is a number of very rich, powerful, well-connected men (and sometimes women, see AfD) are trying to normalise those views and demolish the cordon sanitaire. "It's just another view" and framing this view as legitimate, just polarised, is one of their tactics. It's a moral duty of anyone remotely believing in the OG liberalism (you know, that people are equal regardless of their skin colour or ethnicity) to not let them.
> It really boils down to DHH and his conservative worldview
That is putting a lot of strain on the word "conservative". To quote Wikipedia [1]:
> In 2025, Hansson published a blog post expressing support for far-right British activist Tommy Robinson and the 2025 British anti-immigration protests, as well as mourning that London is "no longer full of native Brits". In response, some members of the Ruby on Rails community called for his removal from project governance.
> Hansson published another blog post[36] in July of 2026 comparing the Romani population of Copenhagen to Denmark's struggles with its wolf population growth, stating that "When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them."
This isn't "conservative", this is blatant far-right talking here.
What you are talking about is just simply political polarization which is done on purpose by poiticians, which happened whether DHH or Ashahi Linux devs wanted or not. Also there is real human element in both, I'm just going to an Omarchy meetup that's organized next week, and DHH is also organizing some (just not in my city).
I believe eventhough they won't work together directly, with open source they can just use eachothers code (I believe Omarchy is using Ashahi's M1-M3 code, but now people are already creating Omarchy M4 GPU support using AI, and Ashahi devs can look at how it's working and understand it, they just want to take things a bit slower to have less slop).
fl0id 5 days ago [-]
asahi will for sure never use their code.
mschuster91 5 days ago [-]
> but now people are already creating Omarchy M4 GPU support using AI, and Ashahi devs can look at how it's working and understand it, they just want to take things a bit slower to have less slop
The thing is... it's legal issues in the end. With AI you cannot prove the provenance of your code, and you might get dinged in front of the courts.
With the way Asahi Linux, WINE and ReactOS operate - no AI, reverse-engineering has to be very carefully documented - it is much, much less likely someone can complain about violating laws and licenses.
KptMarchewa 4 days ago [-]
It's already established that no one cares. Laundering through AI is okay.
zbentley 4 days ago [-]
Case law citation needed.
benoau 5 days ago [-]
Some big caveats but still amazing progress!
simonebrunozzi 5 days ago [-]
What would be the best way to dual boot MacOS and Asahi on a Macbook M2 ?
jonesy827 5 days ago [-]
The Asahi installer does this automatically, it guides you through sizing. You run it in a macOS terminal. By default, Asahi will be the default boot option, and to get to macOS you hold the power button on boot until it says "Loading startup options..."
I have two M1 pro asahi macbooks, and I only use macOS for VirtualDJ or AirPlay.
I am wondering how much the spec changes per M-chip iteration? I think that after some iterations, the spec stays the same, no?
dagmx 5 days ago [-]
Your intuition here is wrong.
Processors, not just Apple’s, change constantly between generations. The core instruction set doesn’t change, but they get new capabilities, not just with new instruction sets.
Remember the SoC isn’t just the CPU. It’s display engines, GPUs, storage controllers, video decoders and more.
Even outside of Apple, you’ll see hardware vendors provide Linux patches for their latest CPUs to keep working well. There’s some baseline functionality that works out of the box but it’s never a free ride.
Krish1577 5 days ago [-]
Reverse-engineering Apple's custom silicon is basically the modern equivalent of repairing a spaceship while it's actively launching. Incredible work by the Asahi team!
bigyabai 5 days ago [-]
Makes you wonder who's choice it was to launch a half-finished rocket. AMD and Intel's rockets sit on the launch pad with GPU/CPU drivers shipped for Linux before T-10.
MBCook 5 days ago [-]
They publish documentation because they need OEMs to be willing to support their products.
Apple doesn’t. Apple consumes it, so Apple always has a customer.
GeekyBear 5 days ago [-]
If selling Linux servers (or parts used in Linux servers) is a major chunk of your revenue, your company is likely to start providing first party Linux drivers?
This is a shocking development.
bigyabai 4 days ago [-]
Apple's PCC standard supports Linux. It's just that Apple doesn't, so Apple Silicon plays second fiddle to Grace ARM cores and TPU hardware in the datacenter market.
Nothing prevents Apple Silicon from competing with Nvidia's ARM datacenter hardware, besides Apple. The only reason the rackmount Mac had to be depreciated is because Apple realized they were LARPing as a server hardware business.
BloodyIron 5 days ago [-]
Their Silicon was written to be OS agnostic, Apple's was not.
fsckboy 5 days ago [-]
>Their Silicon was written to be OS agnostic, Apple's was not.
i don't think that's accurate. the M series chips and memory architecture enable capabilities for the OS software to take advantage of, and the software and hardware teams get to collaborate to be ready for a simultaneously launch, but nothing about that is macos specific, just that they're on the same side of a walled garden.
bayindirh 5 days ago [-]
Apple silicon has features specifically designed for macOS or software running on macOS. e.g.: Rosetta 2.
From Wikipedia:
One of the key reasons why Rosetta 2 provides such a high level of translation efficiency is the support of x86-64 memory ordering in the M1 SoC.[12] The SoC also has dedicated instructions for computing x86 flags.
So, Apple always adds one more thing to their hardware to enable their magic.
The reason Apple has the in house ability to run on multiple chip systems is because of their history going all the way back to Next and that little handheld from the early 1990s under Scully and all their work with Motorola and IBM over the years, that ability is what separates them from Microsoft who is having trouble getting Windows working with multiple CPU chips. Apple is simply better at it.
charcircuit 5 days ago [-]
Windows in the 90s was ported from x86 to MIPS, DEC Alpha, PowerPC, and SPARC.
yencabulator 7 hours ago [-]
Windows NT was originally developed for Intel i860XR, then ported to MIPS R3000. 386 was its third supported platform. Danox is just a hopeless Apple fanboy.
tensegrist 5 days ago [-]
i wonder if this is not something that asahi could eventually make use of
macOS ships with full working drivers for everything. They're unfortunately not under AGPLv3.
5 days ago [-]
Retr0id 5 days ago [-]
You're replying to an LLM-written comment.
menno-sh 5 days ago [-]
Why do you believe that comment was LLM-generated?
Retr0id 5 days ago [-]
The dubious metaphor is what tipped me off in the first place, but then I looked at the account activity. Dormant for over a year, submits vibecoded AI project to Show HN (which gets immediately downvoted and flagged due to being slop), then leaves two LLM-style comments.
Not quite there yet though. No PCI or DisplayPort (latter is working but unstable). But at least they seem to be on it.
MYEUHD 5 days ago [-]
You can contribute support for it
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BowBun 5 days ago [-]
Indeed, not sure why you are being downvoted. Contribute to open source with the energy you have to call out missing features.
basisword 5 days ago [-]
Because it's a lazy response. OP might not be a software developer. Should they learn complex software engineering to try and contribute or should they call out a missing feature that's important to them so the actual developers have some data on what to prioritise?
saghm 5 days ago [-]
It's no lazier than saying "Still no <feature> support"
basisword 5 days ago [-]
a) that's feedback
b) it's useful in a comment thread like this so people can quickly see what the 'caveats' mentioned in the title of the post are
saghm 5 days ago [-]
Feedback in a forum stating something the developers are probably well aware people want in a location the developers might not even be reading is not particularly useful feedback. As for the comment thread utility, sure, I guess if you think that not reading the article is valuable for the HN community, but I could just as easily argue that pushing back against comments like that could be seen as valuable for a community that values more thoughtful feedback.
basisword 5 days ago [-]
It was valuable for me. I've been waiting for Asahi on M3 and quickly wanted to know what the 'caveat' was. Saved me some time.
saghm 5 days ago [-]
You're entitled to your opinion that scrolling to the last comment on the page is preferable to reading the article. I'm also entitled to mine that it's a net loss to the quality of conversation.
izacus 5 days ago [-]
Apple could contribute as well, like Intel does for their Thunderbolt controllers.
Why are you demanding a user does that for free instead of the big corp that made the platform?
Danox 5 days ago [-]
Did Intel push thunderbolt five hard in PC land? Most of the PC vendors seem to be taking a slow boat to China in that area.
wat10000 5 days ago [-]
The platform already supports it.
alt227 5 days ago [-]
To be fair this is the thing that is likely to be the most difficult due to it being closed proprietary apple/intel tech.
bigyabai 5 days ago [-]
Intel and AMD both support Thunderbolt on Linux, it's not impossible per-se.
MBCook 5 days ago [-]
And it’s not. They’re working on it, I just saw a post about it today.
But Intel and AMD post documents to explain how to use their hardware. Apple doesn’t. So it’s not an equivalent effort by any stretch.
pcunite 5 days ago [-]
Let me know when we get M4 support.
smm11 5 days ago [-]
I don't understand this. Buy something else to run Linux, as in anything other than Apple M series laptops. And if you want to do AI stuff, suffer with OSX using too much RAM, or again, buy something appropriate.
pantulis 5 days ago [-]
Well I think the challenge is in the challenge itself, that's good old open-source at work and I wish both the Asahi and Omarchy teams the best of luck in this endeavor.
But I agree with you that if I wanted to run Linux, I would get non-Apple hardware, will probably get better support and spend less time fixing things. The interesting thing would be having proper full M* support in Linux as this would allow for more efficient virtualization as a guest.
xrd 5 days ago [-]
I'm not sure I understand the target user for Asahi.
Is this someone that only wants to run Linux and wants to use their GPU on Linux? Seems like this is not the case, yet.
Or, is this for someone that wants to dual boot and use Linux sometimes, and then reboot into MacOS when they want to use the GPU?
bjackman 5 days ago [-]
I don't think it makes much sense to expect such a cohesive/specific philosophy from an open source project like this.
The goal is "Linux on Mac". In a commercial product, specific details of what gets built usually stem from a more detailed vision that can be articulated as one. In open source projects those details are determined by what individual contributors are motivated to work on.
That doesn't means a cohesive vision can't emerge, there might be one for Asahi actually. But I think the default position is that it's kinda just a mob of people doing what they each feel like doing.
nottorp 5 days ago [-]
I don't think it matters that Asashi is a generation or three behind, because the moment you really need it is when Apple stops updating the OS for your hardware.
When M1 drops out of support I bet Asashi for the M1 machines will be pretty polished.
zer0zzz 5 days ago [-]
Another thing is, the M1 and later hardware is still years later some of the best arm64 hardware youre going to find. Combine that with the really affordable prices you can find on the used market and Linux arm64 on this kind of great hardware at a low price is quite appealing.
brundolf 5 days ago [-]
Asahi on previous M-series chips supports the GPU, they just don't support it on M3 yet (they have to reverse-engineer the GPU to write the driver)
Oh, so an M2 will support GPU usage? Can you run CoreML and unsloth models in the same way you would use them on regular MacOS? Are there benefits to using Linux/Asahi for running models on Apple hardware?
simcop2387 5 days ago [-]
You wouldnt be using coreml since thats apples software, but likely vulkan versions of llama.cpp or pytorch or what have you. How well that works at the moment i dont know
brundolf 5 days ago [-]
To my understanding the M1 and M2 have very functional GPU drivers. I don't know about the other specifics you asked
fwn 5 days ago [-]
I bought a Mac mini M4 simply because it was very cheap and the M4 chip offers great performance. It is currently mounted on the back of my TV and serves as a media station.
It runs macOS, but I have no particular interest in the operating system, nor do I own any other Apple hardware. (So no synergies.) It is alright (and better than Win11) but the preinstalled software does not even properly update without an Apple account. As soon as I can switch over to Linux, I will. ... I would just wait for all the ports to work.
contingencies 5 days ago [-]
Me too, M4 and keen to run Linux, partly because every damn system update bloats the system by 20GB but no memorably useful novel feature actually emerges and partly because it's long term stable. That said, at this stage in my career I appreciate a working system that doesn't require umpteen kernel recompiles!
wingworks 5 days ago [-]
Same same. I love Mac, and macOS, but as a server, macOS is terrible, and bloated, and a pain to run docker/podman.
herrkanin 5 days ago [-]
I have an M2 Macbook Air that i sometimes boot into Asahi to play Steam games that doesn't work natively on mac. It works unreasonably well given that there is something like five different translation layers to make it work!
dylanger 5 days ago [-]
I have an M2 Macbook Air that I love, it's the best machine to read news from and access other machines over SSH, I only use macOS to use rekordbox, 99% of the time I'm booting into AsahiLinux
menno-sh 5 days ago [-]
Huh, I thought Asahi would still be too unpolished on M2 to play games reliably. Could you elaborate on your setup a little? What kind of games do you play? What is performance like? Is it really better than Crossover for example?
xrd 5 days ago [-]
Steam is incredible on Linux. I'm amazed my kids can play so many games using proton on Ubuntu.
So, if there are five translation layers, why not run a Linux VM using UTM and play there? Is there a technical reason that does not work?
teaearlgraycold 5 days ago [-]
It’s cooler to run Linux on bare metal
cfstras 5 days ago [-]
It‘s going to be a godsend for people with M1 macs when Apple or App vendors decide to drop support for them.
The hardware is super capable and will make a great fileserver, TV box or HomeAssistant instance once I‘m done using it as daily driver.
Similarly, because of distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, I can keep using a 15y old Samsung notebook with a modern firefox, whereas Windows 8 already broke Samsung‘s display brightness driver and thermal management, and 10&11 are entirely unusable.
eikenberry 5 days ago [-]
I think it is more the technical challenge of doing it that drives development than any target users.
zer0zzz 5 days ago [-]
Target user is someone that wants to use Linux on good hardware. Apple hardware has some of the best perf-per-single-thread-perf-per-watt there is. Also, apple desktops are really compact and easy to keep out of the way while having really good performance too.
My current linux PC cuda machine is the latest Intel Ultra 9 mini PC from minisforum, and it still isnt quite as fast as a years old M1/M2. The only thing it has that the mac doesnt is cuda egpu support.
GeekyBear 5 days ago [-]
> I'm not sure I understand the target user for Asahi.
If you want to run bare metal Linux on Apple's hardware (instead of running it in a virtual machine) you are the target audience.
Danox 5 days ago [-]
They are envious towards Apple Silicon and think Apple owes them something once again take the ball by the horns and build an Arm processor with a fork of Linux running on it. If three former engineers from Apple can start a company called Nuvia it can be done.
kristianp 5 days ago [-]
Are you talking about using a thunderbolt dock and GPU? I doubt that's a use case high in the developers minds. I'm curious though, I wonder if the open source NVIDIA driver can be built for it.
tiffanyh 5 days ago [-]
Why does it have to be for anyone other than the people involved in it?
(Though I’m sure people outside the project get value from it as well, like OpenBSD using Asahi bootloader)
raverbashing 5 days ago [-]
Honestly I wouldn't waste any of my time trying to run a worse OS than MacOS in a hardware that wasn't completely supported by the sw
As much as I like Linux this kind of tinkering is only for people with more time and less expectations about the experience
If I need Linux I can always go for UTM or something similar
zer0zzz 5 days ago [-]
Sounds like you haven't used Asahi. I found the kde remix to be pretty nice to use. Literally the only thing that I found frustrating was:
1) for the longest time, but no longer, Google did not ship an official chrome linux arm64 package. Chromium Browser also has not included google sync for years now. But now, google chrome does ship for arm64 linux so its all good.
2) usb-c video still doesn't work, so not ideal for a laptop without hdmi that you'd want to dock
Otherwise, it works really well.
raverbashing 5 days ago [-]
Good to know, but even in a well rounded Linux it seems you hit several mini-annoyances every day
Case in point, any form of package management. Or then you have Flatpack, with its own list of issues
zer0zzz 4 days ago [-]
That’s broadly the problem with all distros on all platforms though. I meant to highlight that as far as distros go asahi is not bad.
raverbashing 3 days ago [-]
Yes I understand, it does seem like it's one of the most rounded ones
amelius 5 days ago [-]
My bet: Apple is going to close it down. It is too much of a legal risk. What if some Linux enthusiast finds patent infringements in Apple's undocumented APIs?
ravenstine 5 days ago [-]
Why would they even care? 99% of people aren't going to be installing Linux on their Macbook. If Apple did care, they'd have stopped allowing dual booting a long time ago.
Danox 5 days ago [-]
It works for now, but one day it won’t then what?
zer0zzz 5 days ago [-]
FUD based in no actual facts. Recently with the new Golden Gate OS update, Asahi boot was made inoperable. Apple basically helped the Asahi folks work around a flag in the boot loader that they had not figured out how to handle in their reverse engineering. This doesnt strike me as the actions of an organization that is planning to close down the ability for asahi to boot after years of allowing it.
hurricanepootis 5 days ago [-]
Asahi linux has been going on for a few years now
amelius 5 days ago [-]
I recently read somewhere that someone wrote a letter/email to Apple's legal team, explaining the risks. Sorry if I cannot be more specific, I already went through my browser history and cannot find it back right now. PS: Browsers really need to improve here, it is crazy that I cannot search through my history in a meaningful way.
On the topic of browsers, I feel your pain. There were a good few years where they were shipping new and useful features, but they plateaued and started removing features. I can't remember the last time I was excited about browser features.
zer0zzz 5 days ago [-]
Man… they absolutely do not care. An Apple engineer made the boot loader for Mac open in the first place.
Danox 5 days ago [-]
Darwin is still sitting there all these years. It’s called market inertia.
zer0zzz 5 days ago [-]
What is the context here? I am saying, if they cared what OS users booted on their mac they would have used the same boot process the iPad has. They wouldn't have gone out of their way to make it possible to boot systems not signed by Apple.
dylanger 5 days ago [-]
There used to be a rule in some of the AsahiLinux channels that no RE discussion was allowed, not sure why.
I also know the AsahiLinux team is very aware if there are any unintended things that cross the Linux-macOS boundary Apple would very likely just shut it down.
Apparently even the macbook neo has the ability to run AsahiLinux, so they can definitely allow access to running alt OSs pretty easily
dev_tty01 5 days ago [-]
Why do you think they would be concerned about patent infringements? Like all major tech companies, they are constantly fighting numerous patent lawsuits, mostly from trolls but sometimes other tech companies. It is part of the cost of doing business today. Some Linux enthusiast finding a possible patent infringement is of no concern to Apple.
I wish the team every success.
Sadly the hardware is amazing and so much more efficient compared to Intel/AMD x86. We need M-series chips for Linux.
MacOS is, in my experience, incredibly clunky due to this mismatch. You can fix some (e.g. use AltTab for sane alttabbing), but not others (how can i prevent the next application window popping up when minimizing one)
I think this paradim is also what's makes the Mac OS feel snappy. If basically having multiple windows for one software open is "holding it wrong", the OS is pushing you into one application, one window paradigm. As long as you do that, everything is pretty quick. But don't dare open two browser windows, or even worse, two windows of a word processor. The performance will degrade (and you'll keep searching for your windows...)
Thank you for articulating this so well.
When I bought a new M1 MacBook Air for my kid, I hadn’t used OSX in years, and was excited to try a super-polished Unix. Holy heck I couldn’t believe how work hostile it was. I want apps tiled so I can quickly jump betwee - not to go to the top of the screen to get bottom tile’s menu.
And the state of finder (other than preview) is something out of Redhat 5.1.
And the response is always “you’re holding it wrong.”
I have used Macs since the late 80s, there have always been teething problems, duds and effups, but nothing that wasn't addressed by independent Mac devs. How can Apple make everyone happy?
But these days? With codex/claude/et al, you can make your Mac sing to whatever tune you prefer. I feel a bit bad for indies, but they still have not-prosumer market to make their living. I now just make my own apps to replace what I've bought in the past.
Cheers
That being said, the security design that creates this problem is quite impressive, and I think much more tight than most people realize is happening on stock macOS. I just wish that I could unlock my whole home directory from the CLI somehow when I do my non-time-machine backup.
Funnily enough, none of these companies have issues consuming the 'free' fruits of labor of the open source community.
Why would they "chip in" here?
It wouldn't be economically rational for Apple to bring down its own moat.
When they switched to x86, it didn't take long for them to release Boot Camp, so they could take Windows users' money, too.
How could that possibly disrupt their Software/Services infra?
I am not an Apple user. Do you _have_ to pay for iCloud if you buy the laptop? I don't think so.
Asahi-on-Mac would bring in irrelevant numbers for a company of Apple's size.
Sure they are probably thousands if not millions of (in the positive sense) nerds and geeks posting on HN about buying a Mac first hand, not second hand, solely to put Linux on it but even then would be a drop in the ocean compared to the remained sales.
Still if you have numbers on that I'd love to be wrong about it.
Amazon do the same with the fire.
So I end up with a MacBook with macOS. Some may refuse to do that but I expect that's only a tiny missed opportunity.
llvm also existed from before although apple supported the development.
I was curious if apple had actually started any FOSS project.
Also, Bonjour originated at Apple and it is cross-platform, although Avahi probably is more popular
CUPS is associated with Apple as well, but it seems that it also did not originate there
Copyright: 2003-2017 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
I’m not 100% certain if they started with any bits of the previous aarch64 backend or not though.
last thing i found https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/26/apples-dormant-cups/
1) khtml was a really minimal renderer in KDE before apple pumped tens of millions into turning it into the first really modern web2.0 browser, you really can not underestimate the amount of money jobs was willing to pump to make that thing what it became by the time the iphone launched.
2) llvm was essentially apple's bet on a grad student hire and him and his lab's academic project. I knew and worked with several of those former uiuc guys. llvm and clang as we know them today were heavily built at apple.
Also, you are totally (and purposefully probably) misquoting me. I said __clang__ and the __llvm arm64 backend__ were done by apple, and they were almost entirely from scratch from the start at Apple.
I've also been frustrated by the whole old-Mac-on-Linux problem with internal speakers, as I've written before:
https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/09/sound-reasoning/
Without any bloat it could show that they also perform reasonably well and it also solves the gaming problem on Mac.
I’ve also updated a few patches but it seems to be a pain to submit these.
Yep, I admit that it's my main use of Linux. My daily driver for everything non-games-related is my 2023 (Apple Silicon) Mac Studio, but for Steam stuff I go to the old Intel iMac and whatever distro I'm running on it at the time.
Will update once I’ve solved this.
Also just please stop fighting against imaginary people.
Do you think Apple should be funding this work out of revenue? What possible justification could they provide for such a waste of money? This will not sell any more laptops.
Even if Asahi didn’t do it, the work would still be necessary by someone inside Apple. Drivers don’t spontaneously appear from the ether.
Most of the time it’s an upstream vendor NDA. In Apple’s case they own the whole stack for the GPU so that doesn’t apply here. But it’s certainly not special to not divulge GPU internals.
Every time something new comes out hardware wise in the tech world , there’s this dying quail chorus of Linux geeks, who cry about it, not having Linux support.
The only long-term solution is for a group of smart talented people to get together and take out a license from Arm and proceed to design a chip with Linux support from ground zero however, such an endeavor probably would make everyone in the Linux world mad/unhappy because in order to do something well/professional said group would have to fork Linux in order for it and hardware to have the best chance at success selling to the general public you know the group that just wants to use a computer and not jump underneath the hood to tinker with every little thing to get it working.
https://github.com/PureDarwin/PureDarwin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
https://www.puredarwin.org/
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200658399-0645/linux-ke...
I suspect that they might be changing their mind about upstreaming?
Quick web search says they at least need some kernel developers for virtualized Linux on macOS
In ideal world the society would make it an obligation for general computers to remain free (as in freedom) and accessible.
I remember overhearing an older person being explained Boot Camp while waiting for my iPhone to be repaired and it was very obviously a way for them to sell a Macbook so they could dual-use windows on it to run some windows apps. The ultimate pull would eventually be MacOS because it was easier (if you already had a macbook and iphone). Apple knew they'd get curious eventually and see how awful the Windows UX was.
The main argument for Linux on Macbooks would be developers but that doesn't mean there's a similar strong marketing/sales incentive to do so. Especially since there's no shortage of devs who default to mac (like legacy windows corporate users). Apple clearly doesn't see much money to be made by creating an olive branch offering to Linux users.
My only blocker for installing Asahi on my Mac Studio (M1 ultra) is that llama.cpp performance is very bad when compared to using the Metal backend on the same hardware.
When running inference, I would love to use all of my hardware please Apple.
A true HAL, any OS can run on that HAL.
Every major OS already has this HAL layer, we just need to decide/design a generic and hope that every player will use it.
Hoping for M4 to the latest chip.
We need Ashai to support more chips.
Can't wait to get Linux running on it native.
I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You have to work through provided code samples and then eventually get the vendor’s engineers to look into problems that couldn’t be resolved through the documentation, where they would go look into the other teams and their sources to discover the answer.
The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. The honest answer is that it’s not worth the huge effort investment needed to document an entire platform for public consumption.
I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
Many are undocumented. A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. And, they’re chatty and persistent in trying to communicate out. You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.
I only use my mac for development. I’m a simple man and don’t need all the bloat and hidden behavior. Plus, I always feel like I’m one automatic update away from it becoming unusable.
My Mac Mini M4 is for building the Mac/iOS apps, other than that it's useless as a daily driver. I will patiently wait for Asahi while I use my other computers that can run serious operating systems.
Sure you can
> You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.
No
Yes, I'm exaggerating about the networking. Yes, you can lock it down by turning off all of the devices, but honestly, I'm still not 100% on that. It was a surprise to me after I disabled ethernet and wifi and turned off everything in system settings, and someone passed by with an ios device.
However, if you're an expert - please save me a year of trial and error and point me to the minimal list of services and daemons.
No docs is clear statement Apple hates FOSS. "how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop" argument is very weak considering that only consumer platforms that engage in a complete lockdown are maybe some gaming consoles, and those are basically appliances and not a general computing machines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system) https://www.puredarwin.org/
Right now, yes. But Linux support is like freedom of speech in a dictatorship.
Everyone makes fun of it and says it's useless but fundamentally the powers that be are deathly afraid of it ever turning the tide.
They're avoiding it because installing Linux (or Windows, even), would actually decrease their income. I doubt people running Windows on Intel Macs were avid Apple Music subscribers.
or are you saying apple devices are loss-leader prior the app store revenue ?
that's the model taken to the extreme
It's fairly clear which direction the wind is blowing.
Also, hardware - software integration pushes more hardware sales. People with iPhones are a lot more likely to buy Macs than people with Android phones. Same story for Airpods & co. I've also basically never seen an Apple keyboard used with non-Apple computers.
That would be like you buying something at the dollar store.
At some point the ongoing maintenance and support as well as coordination and organizational distraction mean it wouldn't get approved if internal engineers offered to start it off for free.
It's only going to grow every year as apple stops releasing OS updates for perfectly functioning hardware.
I suspect there would be an element of induced demand here. IMO the MacBook range are the only laptops on the market worth buying - but not having support for gaming (or at least, hilariously bad support for a limited range of games) is compelling enough reason to install Linux for a large portion of users (filling the void left behind by the widely adopted Bootcamp).
> but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF.
Yeah, GPU ISA, controllers, power management, NPU, and who knows what else. I still believe that companies should be compelled by regulators to offer documentation and support necessary to write drivers as I believe it is part of the "right to repair" (M1 will lose support in 2 years, it's still a great platform).
> They chose to leave it open.
I _really_ wonder on this point. It's so uncharacteristic of Apple. Were they concerned about potential anti-competitive lawsuits and maliciously did the bare minimum to avoid them? "It's technically open hardware, but good luck figuring out how it works"
Oh please - Apple provided a full suite of Bootcamp drivers for their hardware just a couple of years ago, not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.
It allowed a machine running Intel's EFI firmware (as Intel Macs have always done) to boot an OS that only understood the older BIOS standard.
Once Microsoft and the various PC vendors started supporting UEFI directly, Bootcamp was just a bundle of existing Windows drivers from the component vendors.
If you put a specific Broadcom Wi-Fi chip in the Mac, Bootcamp included Broadcom's Windows driver that was best suited for that chip.
I find it so bizarre that some of you here are defending a megacorporation that could have easily afforded to provide drivers for Linux Kernel like their competitors do.
You're clapping for free volunteers to spend hundreds of hours reverse engineering Thunderbolt controllers when companies like Intel outright contribute them.
Sure, they relied on community Linux drivers in the past, but that didn't have anything to do with money.
The person you're replying to didn't say that. Please don't misrepresent and please keep it respectful
They just don't care.
They were also in a different place back when they made Bootcamp. They were fighting a "Mac vs PC" battle head on and trying to convert other OS users to macOS. Now they don't really seem to care about that because their strategy is converting iPhone users into ecosystem members.
That's not what they said. Please don't misrepresent
> is laughabe
And this disparaging language about commenters is not OK. Please stop.
Nothing about that statement is disparaging - just because you don't want to hear it, doesn't make it insulting.
Calling out nonsense is important, especially on this website.
The challenge isn't finding an engineer. It is picking what project doesn't get done in its place.
It’s all there and it’s been 25-26 years no one has bothered maybe that’s Apple is still the only vertical computer company left from the 1980s.
At one time there were many choices in hardware and OS software combined with that hardware that era is basically gone because no one wants to take the bull by the horns and do anything they want someone else to give it to them free.
I use UTM in emulation mode, NOT Qemu simulation mode, which is wasteful.
just my $0.02.
For folks lamenting that the (awesome) Asahi efforts are challenged by reverse engineering of changes from M2 to M3, and so on, those changes vanish into the abstraction, but their benefits do not. That's why i switched from Asahi a couple years ago to UTM in apple silicon hypervisor mode.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor https://apps.apple.com/us/app/utm-virtual-machines
You can run any flavor of Linux you like in a virtual machine, while booted into the native OS.
Linux doesn't solve the issue of not getting security updates anymore. For example the FCC does not allow letting users write arbitrary firmware they can run on their devices so this means you legally can't update the Bluetooth or Wifi firmware and need an update from Apple.
My laptop has a wifi+bluetooth card that I can replace in 10 minutes. If and when that card is abandoned by its manufacturer (as Broadcom has done before), I can replace it with a better one.
>(a) Manufacturers must take steps to ensure that only software that has been approved with a software defined radio can be loaded into the radio.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/2.944
You can still boot Linux natively on it.
the hypervisor framework documentation, that i linked above, is pretty clear; the linux builds for arm run extremely fast on apple silicon because hypervisor framework gives them hardware access, in some subsystems directly (memory mapping for example), in other systems through a shim (graphics hardware).
Sounds awesome!
This isn't about running VMs.
That sounds like a you thing; I've kept my macs for at least 5 years. My M1 is still going strong and I haven't felt any pressure to upgrade.
You will probably argue thats ok because you would have wanted one anyway by that time or some such point, but the fact remains that Apple will force you to upgrade your hardware not very long away by not allowing you to install anything on it.
Using your own conservative estimate, 8 years seems like a fine lifespan for a laptop, far longer than the "few years" you initially said. And in practice, there are plenty of macbooks that have been running even longer.
Thanks to the community, you can install macOS 15 (or older) on unsupported macs (as old as 18 years)
https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht...
https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher
This bullshit needs to die. The products are designed to last.
If you can load Linux on it it's still usable, but Apple OSs degrade rapidly after Apple stops supporting them. Apple is better about keeping devices on the latest OS version, but much worse about support after that period.
YMMV
Probably the real reason is just that it's extra work - both in terms of producing the docs, and in dealing with complaints when they change things. From their point of view it's extra work with no benefit to them.
This applies on both the software and hardware layers. In the past, CPU suppliers dragging their feet and/or being unable to deliver on promises were the chief motivation for switching architectures, and now that they're their own supplier they can banish that issue entirely so long as they're not beholden to any kind of external behavioral contracts or expectations.
If the OS teams need some new capability or discover substantial benefit from redesigning some part of the SoC, the SoC/hardware team can just implement it and not have to care about breaking anything. That's a major competitive advantage that practically nobody else in the computer or mobile device industries has.
Apple is not interested in tying their hardware design to Linus Torvalds.
They let you run Windows when they were losing in the market and needed a path to migration for users of the winning platform. Once they started winning, they stopped.
Conversely, Microsoft refused to interoperate with Linux. Until Linux became the clear winner in the datacenter space. Now they have WSL and actually work pretty well as a cross-platform development environment.
In the 90s and 2000s, they considered Linux a cancer, and only kept macOS alive for antitrust reasons.
The docs already exist inside Apple.
There's a lot of documentation required to write drivers for hardware; for the GPU, they'd need to share the instruction set of the GPU along with the specifications of the controller. Lots of weird things like power management too.
If shared, that's probably enough to create copycat hardware or at least an emulator.
Personally, I just want to run Linux on my latest MacBook Pro on day 1 with full hardware acceleration. If it was supported, MacOS would be on the device for as long as it took to install Linux.
I think the only way that would happen is if the EU extended "the right to repair" to include software, compelling companies to release documentation sufficient to produce drivers with. I'm sure Apple would maliciously comply, like provide the ISA but not power management specs - but that would still cut the work required by the Asahi team by 80%.
> https://talents.vaia.com/companies/apple-inc/software-engine...
Kinda funny and definitely a word suggestion that will be locked in future code.
But to answer your question: Why would they? Apple hasn't asked anybody to put Linux on their machines. They deliver them with a fully functional OS already and there are thousands of other computer models you can purchase instead of a Mac.
I believe it was Hector Martin who discussed it on Mastodon a while ago.
https://opensource.apple.com/
So you can read, you just moved the goalposts when you were shown to be mistaken.
> proceeds to name three of the worst-managed projects in the history of FOSS software
Absent that, it'd take some kind of sustained right-to-repair, EU morality, many sternly worded letters pressure campaign.
Plus, once they did (officially), they're kinda committed to keep doing it. That's explains why they remain okay with emoloyees helping on their own time; all the upside, none of the down.
It would have been trivial for them to lock out other operating systems entirely.
Even the Asahi team has been much more appreciative of Apple leaving this open.
It is trivial for them to lock out other operating systems entirely.
Apple makes money selling hardware.
Because then they'll have to compete with Linux, which opens them up to someone else making a cheaper computer that does the same stuff.
I mean, I'm typing this on a junky Raptor Lake laptop I found on eBay for $220. Would I buy a Neo or MBP to replace it just to run the same software stack? Probably not.
If you believe OS X is the best environment and Apple Silicon will remain the best hardware in perpetuity, it seems silly for Apple not to allow some experimentation. Apple executives, to be blunt, know better. Lean times are always ahead.
Now some people would like to use that top of the line Apple silicon but without MacOS that comes with it. I doubt this is a huge threat to apple but it's also not a huge market for them. From what I understand they are not actively impeding it but not actively helping it either.
I actually won a M2 laptop a while ago. I resold it, new in box still shrink wrapped because I did not care for MacOS, just a personal preference. People like me are a minority though.
Hell, I was given a bunch of old iphones recently, all of which are newer and better hardware than my phone. I wiped them and donated them to charity.
Not sure what generation you're talking about? Intel c. 18-25 years ago was wildly ahead on everything, much more so than Apple is now, in fact.[1] Apple Computer, quite famously, straight up abandoned their previous CPU architecture and started shipping Intel chips just to have something competitive in the market.
Again, everything goes in cycles in this industry and Apple's executive decisionmaking is 100% not placing bets on being the best forever just to make a bunch of Linux nerds happy.
[1] Process innovation mattered more at the time, where now we're hitting the scaling limit and chips are much more comparable.
Intel was asked to design a chip for a new smartphone. They said no, which was the end…
Note: Intel and Microsoft have trouble competing when the playing field is level.
Many of those companies from the 1980s were very very good companies, but they gave up in the face of Wintel, Sun, SGI, Digital, Acorn (Arm processor), Amiga, Atari, etc… I would take any of those systems updated to today over Linux.
Only Apple with a mad man at the controls was able to survive (no Microsoft isn’t the reason). I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall when Intel said no to designing iPhone chips and then Steve Jobs still mad told his manager group that we have to design a new processor in house that would’ve been interesting, of course everyone in the room probably, said it can’t be done and many are probably saying the same thing about in house memory today which needs to be done.
Yes, I see people working on M4 and every few days it gets better
,,However, there's plenty more work to get it fully supported and working with Hyperland.''
It's not acceptable to associate race with national identity (DHH's London post). It's not acceptable to call for ethnic cleansing (his post on Travellers). It's not "just another view, couldn't we all get along"; we can respectfully disagree on small state vs large state, on low taxes vs high welfare, on isolationism vs interventionism even, but DHH's views have to be unacceptable.
What is happening is a number of very rich, powerful, well-connected men (and sometimes women, see AfD) are trying to normalise those views and demolish the cordon sanitaire. "It's just another view" and framing this view as legitimate, just polarised, is one of their tactics. It's a moral duty of anyone remotely believing in the OG liberalism (you know, that people are equal regardless of their skin colour or ethnicity) to not let them.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordon_sanitaire_(politics)
That is putting a lot of strain on the word "conservative". To quote Wikipedia [1]:
> In 2025, Hansson published a blog post expressing support for far-right British activist Tommy Robinson and the 2025 British anti-immigration protests, as well as mourning that London is "no longer full of native Brits". In response, some members of the Ruby on Rails community called for his removal from project governance.
> Hansson published another blog post[36] in July of 2026 comparing the Romani population of Copenhagen to Denmark's struggles with its wolf population growth, stating that "When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them."
This isn't "conservative", this is blatant far-right talking here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson#Contr...
I believe eventhough they won't work together directly, with open source they can just use eachothers code (I believe Omarchy is using Ashahi's M1-M3 code, but now people are already creating Omarchy M4 GPU support using AI, and Ashahi devs can look at how it's working and understand it, they just want to take things a bit slower to have less slop).
The thing is... it's legal issues in the end. With AI you cannot prove the provenance of your code, and you might get dinged in front of the courts.
With the way Asahi Linux, WINE and ReactOS operate - no AI, reverse-engineering has to be very carefully documented - it is much, much less likely someone can complain about violating laws and licenses.
I have two M1 pro asahi macbooks, and I only use macOS for VirtualDJ or AirPlay.
the devs strongly discourage single-booting
Weird. Do you know why?
Processors, not just Apple’s, change constantly between generations. The core instruction set doesn’t change, but they get new capabilities, not just with new instruction sets.
Remember the SoC isn’t just the CPU. It’s display engines, GPUs, storage controllers, video decoders and more.
Even outside of Apple, you’ll see hardware vendors provide Linux patches for their latest CPUs to keep working well. There’s some baseline functionality that works out of the box but it’s never a free ride.
Apple doesn’t. Apple consumes it, so Apple always has a customer.
This is a shocking development.
Nothing prevents Apple Silicon from competing with Nvidia's ARM datacenter hardware, besides Apple. The only reason the rackmount Mac had to be depreciated is because Apple realized they were LARPing as a server hardware business.
i don't think that's accurate. the M series chips and memory architecture enable capabilities for the OS software to take advantage of, and the software and hardware teams get to collaborate to be ready for a simultaneously launch, but nothing about that is macos specific, just that they're on the same side of a walled garden.
From Wikipedia:
One of the key reasons why Rosetta 2 provides such a high level of translation efficiency is the support of x86-64 memory ordering in the M1 SoC.[12] The SoC also has dedicated instructions for computing x86 flags.
So, Apple always adds one more thing to their hardware to enable their magic.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)#Rosetta_2
you can find more apple-specific stuff by digging around in these docs: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/subsystems/
edit: https://lwn.net/Articles/970907/
Not quite there yet though. No PCI or DisplayPort (latter is working but unstable). But at least they seem to be on it.
b) it's useful in a comment thread like this so people can quickly see what the 'caveats' mentioned in the title of the post are
Why are you demanding a user does that for free instead of the big corp that made the platform?
But Intel and AMD post documents to explain how to use their hardware. Apple doesn’t. So it’s not an equivalent effort by any stretch.
But I agree with you that if I wanted to run Linux, I would get non-Apple hardware, will probably get better support and spend less time fixing things. The interesting thing would be having proper full M* support in Linux as this would allow for more efficient virtualization as a guest.
Is this someone that only wants to run Linux and wants to use their GPU on Linux? Seems like this is not the case, yet.
Or, is this for someone that wants to dual boot and use Linux sometimes, and then reboot into MacOS when they want to use the GPU?
The goal is "Linux on Mac". In a commercial product, specific details of what gets built usually stem from a more detailed vision that can be articulated as one. In open source projects those details are determined by what individual contributors are motivated to work on.
That doesn't means a cohesive vision can't emerge, there might be one for Asahi actually. But I think the default position is that it's kinda just a mob of people doing what they each feel like doing.
When M1 drops out of support I bet Asashi for the M1 machines will be pretty polished.
More info: https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html
It runs macOS, but I have no particular interest in the operating system, nor do I own any other Apple hardware. (So no synergies.) It is alright (and better than Win11) but the preinstalled software does not even properly update without an Apple account. As soon as I can switch over to Linux, I will. ... I would just wait for all the ports to work.
So, if there are five translation layers, why not run a Linux VM using UTM and play there? Is there a technical reason that does not work?
The hardware is super capable and will make a great fileserver, TV box or HomeAssistant instance once I‘m done using it as daily driver.
Similarly, because of distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, I can keep using a 15y old Samsung notebook with a modern firefox, whereas Windows 8 already broke Samsung‘s display brightness driver and thermal management, and 10&11 are entirely unusable.
My current linux PC cuda machine is the latest Intel Ultra 9 mini PC from minisforum, and it still isnt quite as fast as a years old M1/M2. The only thing it has that the mac doesnt is cuda egpu support.
If you want to run bare metal Linux on Apple's hardware (instead of running it in a virtual machine) you are the target audience.
(Though I’m sure people outside the project get value from it as well, like OpenBSD using Asahi bootloader)
As much as I like Linux this kind of tinkering is only for people with more time and less expectations about the experience
If I need Linux I can always go for UTM or something similar
1) for the longest time, but no longer, Google did not ship an official chrome linux arm64 package. Chromium Browser also has not included google sync for years now. But now, google chrome does ship for arm64 linux so its all good.
2) usb-c video still doesn't work, so not ideal for a laptop without hdmi that you'd want to dock
Otherwise, it works really well.
Case in point, any form of package management. Or then you have Flatpack, with its own list of issues
I also know the AsahiLinux team is very aware if there are any unintended things that cross the Linux-macOS boundary Apple would very likely just shut it down.
Apparently even the macbook neo has the ability to run AsahiLinux, so they can definitely allow access to running alt OSs pretty easily