That is a tremendous update. Thank you for providing a great read about the diligent efforts of an increasing number of talented contributors: Oliver and Janne and Alyssa M and Shiz and Robert and Sven and James and Neal and chaos_princess and Davide and Lina and Michael and Sasha and Alyssa R have been killing.
Great work. I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years, like the Thinkpad T420 used to be. For different reasons, of course.
Do the M4 and M5 GPUs also change a lot from the M3? I hope it's not too much work to get those going once M3 is usable.
> I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years
I doubt it. For one, the SSDs have limited lifespans, and are soldered on the mainboard. They'll be fine enough for the planned life of the laptop, but eventually secondary market laptops will start seeing waves of failures, at which point people learn that purchasing one is a gamble.
The entire Apple silicon lineup is designed for limited lifespan.
SSD can be resoldered and that service is actually becoming popular and inexpensive. It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered. This will become a totally normal thing in a few years from now.
Soldered storage is extremely uncommon for laptops not from Apple. You pretty much only find it in very low-end Chromebook type hardware that's using eMMC for cost reasons, and a small fraction of more expensive Qualcomm-based laptops that use UFS for no good reason. All mainstream PC laptops use M.2 NVMe storage.
> > It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered
> That's simply a lie. No other laptop have soldered SSD. An increasing number do have soldered RAM.
That's simply a lie. Pretty much all laptops using eMMC or eUFS for storage are soldered directly to the mainboard. These are often budget devices and many are things like x86-based tablets or chromebooks but there are models that are very much laptops. I do concede I am unaware of any non-apple laptops with directly soldered NVMe storage, but your claim that no other laptop have soldered SSD is patently false.
Neither the ram nor the ssd is on chip. The ram is on package, the ssd is on board.
On chip means literally on top of the silicon, like how AMD X3D cpus mount the SRAM chip. On modern Apple devices the ram is mounted on the organic package substrate. The difference is significant, and it's shitty that Apple outright lied about it.
I think that particular definition of "on chip" is entirely your invention. I've usually seen it broadly used for anything on-package, whether it's on-die or on a separate die within the same package.
"On chip" definitely does not have much if any history of referring specifically to stacked dies with TSVs, because that has been a very niche packaging technique until recently, and "on chip" is a much more broadly used term.
I've yet to see a desktop SSD wear out from writes. The only dead desktop SSDs I've seen have been due to buggy firmware (early drives or that recent batch of Samsungs) or well before their wear level is down (cheap noname drives off amazon).
It’s really a shame. May last “favorite” MacBook was from 2013 where everything was upgradable. I bought the fastest Core processor with the lowest everything else and upgraded to 16GB of RAM, SSD (granted at SATA speeds) and a second data drive in the optical drive bay. What luxury!
S**, I haven't felt much urge to upgrade from my 16GB M1 Air and I even use it to play some Windows games under Crossover. Quite possibly the best laptop I've ever owned.
Public information seems to describe the M4 GPU as mostly a performance-oriented refresh of the one from M3. M5 has brought bigger changes, not least neural/tensor accelerators on chip.
I just like the build quality and they are reaching the 200€ threshold on the used market. I bought one with 16GB RAM and a small black strip one the side of the screen (don’t bother me) for 230€ last week
>they are reaching the 200€ threshold on the used market.
Where?! I just cheeked the used market in Austria and 2020 M1s go for at least 350 for the 8GB RAM models and 450 for the 16GB model. Your 230 for the 16gb one fells more like a rare exception but not them norm everywhere.
Damn that's lucky. I checked facebook marketplace in Austria and prices are double that of what you're showing, even on Intel macbooks, there's no M1 macs for 200 Euros, only 400 Euros and up. Same on Vinted. No 200 Euro M1s, only at 2x the price.
The ones that I saw similarly low to yours are obvious scams from scam profiles all repeating the same message in the ad.
So maybe the ones you saw are scams as well. Otherwise hungary seems to be a lucky exception for some odd reason. Maybe because people have less disposable income, IDK?
Anyway, I wouldn't spend 400 Euros on a used mac with no warranty. The point of buying an old ThinkPad for cheap was that if something broke on it you could easily swap that part yourself for cheap because it was easily repairable and the used market was flooded with spare parts. But if your used macbook dies out of warranty, then you're shit out of luck, you can't fix anything, it's 400 Euros wasted.
I bought one already so I know it's not a scam. Scams usually communicate badly and they don't want to meet you in a public space (like a McDonald's with free wifi)
Obviously ymmv
>Anyway, I wouldn't spend 400 Euros on a used mac with no warranty.
This I agree with. I still prefer Thinkpads too but these M1s are also pretty good in almost every sense except for repairability
Apparently there's changes to boot that are more or less understood, but require some heavy work to handle.
Basically starting with M4 you have a choice between starting with Apple's page table monitor already running in their guarded mode extension, or all apple extensions disabled on the CPU cores.
In fact, the current state of M3 support is about where M1 support was when we released the first Arch
Linux ARM based beta; keyboard, touchpad, WiFi, NVMe and USB3 are all working, albeit with some local
patches to m1n1 and the Asahi kernel (yet to make their way into a pull request) required. So that
must mean we will have a release ready soon, right?
I often wonder whether the folks at Apple have the Asahi team on their radar. Are they in awe of the reverse engineering marvels coming out of the Asahi project, or are they indifferent to it?
I think the dev that was responsible for the bootloader or some security chip having the option to be opened posted on twitter a while ago. Pretty sure he implied or mentioned that this was what he was hoping for.
In fairness; that decision predates the existence of Asahi. Unless Apple was working with the community before Apple Silicon dropped, this isn't much acknowledgement of their existence.
They are aware. They are also aware of the designs sitting in the cabinet right next to them in Cupertino that would make all the reverse engineering instantly unnecessary.
Such a monumentally Sisyphean waste of effort in behalf of the Asahi devs in my opinion.
If you care about personal computing or Linux, don’t buy a Mac.
I'm sure Apple has data showing that their extremely lockdown strategy is good for their business but I feel like I'm one of the potential customers Apple could gain if they didn't have that.
They're a fantastic hardware company. But my admittedly very limited experience with Apple software, from iPad to their streaming service website, has been miserable. The UX doesn't work for me, the software just doesn't do what I want. Understandable, Apple very much designs their software to work for a particular workflow they come up with, if you like that workflow it's great, for someone like me it's miserable. But I would gladly buy their hardware if I could freely run an OS of my own choosing.
I doubt that any company actually cares about what any of the myriad of metrics they collect mean at the C-suite level. I mean, "maybe" I just think it is unlikely. I bet 9/10 times someone just makes a decision about how things "ought" to be and then that's the way it is going forward.
The assumption that this is a triangulated and well researched strategy doesn't match my experience in "real-job" world. I mean, maybe Apple is different because of their history, but I am not convinced anyone listens to anyone that articulates any math ideas beyond Algebra outside of some niche specialties because they don't understand it. And it's not that I'm some math god - I mean, that's what I studied, but there are people SO much more knowledgeable and capable, and they seem to get ignored too.
Like, I'm sure the guy who runs an insurance company listens to the actuaries about relative risk, but mostly, what I've just seen is someone makes a decision, and then finds post hoc ergo proctor hoc rationales for why this was a good decision down the line when they have to account for their choices.
For instance, it took my like a year at my old job, but I finally got most of the KPIs we were using to set strategy cancelled. The data we were using to generate those KPIs? Well in a few cases, after you seasonally differenced the data was no different than white noise. No autocorrelation whatsoever. In ALL the cases the autocorrelation was weak and it was all evaporated after a month or 2. You could MAYBE fit an MA model to it, but that seemed dodgy to me. And like, I'm not a major expert - I took 1 time series class in gradschool, and frankly, time series is kind of hard. But management had ZERO idea of what I was talking about when I was like, "hey, I don't think these numbers actually mean anything at all? Did anyone run an ACF?"
Then each month someone higher up the chain would say, "why is this number low?" And then they go out and search through the reams of data they had to come up with an answer that plausibly explained things. Was the number particularly "low?" No, it was within expected statistical noise thresholds, you are probably going to have at least have 1 number out of whack every 20 cycles or so... You still had to spend an hour in a meeting coming up with reasons for why it was low that went beyond "ummm, well, this is kind of random, and we'd expect to see this sort of thing ever couple years once or twice, we won't know if it's a trend for a few more months."
Anyway, this is a long anecdote to explain why I have no confidence that most companies do any sort of actual introspection. CEO creates targets and underlings build models that show how they're meeting or not meeting those targets. Now, hilariously, with Apple in particular I might be wrong, because in Tim Cook's defense, I'm pretty sure his education is in Industrial Engineering? So if any CEO is thinking about that stuff, it's him. Still, I am totally and completely unimpressed with the C-Suite sort of thinkers.
They're not dumb - like I've never really had a straight up dumbass manager outside of shitty lower jobs or small-mom-and-pop businesses? But I have seldom met any company that actually cared about the numbers - most say they do, but most just use those numbers to justify decisions they've already made.
Am I just unlucky? I'm I the witch in church here?
As opposed to what hardware, then? Because this is pretty much how most other drivers became a thing in the first place. Linux has come a long way and due to it "winning the cloud" many hardware vendors started properly supporting it, but this was absolutely not the case for the longest times.
You don't need an arm processor, many modern x86 chips match or outcompete m series on power efficiency and performance. Mainly lunar lake gen 1 and the new gen 3 (arrow lake not really).
The efficiency of arm chips was never arm, really, it was the manufacturing node and SOC design. Well, Intel and AMD can make SOCs, and they do.
There are millions of Macbooks out there that will be out of MacOS support one day. If this project diverts just a fraction of them from becoming e-waste for a little, it will be a win.
And then beyond that, there is simply no laptop manufacturer that meets the quality of Apple's hardware design. I like Macs for their hardware, the software is a compromise. A linux macbook would be my ideal laptop.
Maybe so, but 15-20 year old laptops are definitely starting to show their age.
An M2 MacBook Pro, on the other hand, is only 4 years old, has a fairly OK keyboard, and is still in striking distance of current high-end ultrabooks when it comes to performance.
The only thing my X230 struggles to do is run LLMs locally. My needs are simple, and I think normal people (i.e. probably not most people on this site) don't have needs that are any more demanding than mine.
Granted, this is running GNU/Linux rather than Windows. If you're running Windows then yeah, they show their age.
I think an X230 would be performant enough for 95% of the things I do, but a 14 year old CPU is going to have pretty terrible battery life for anything more than very light usage. And things that would be light usage on a recent PC, like watching video encoded with a modern codec, would be fairly taxing on an old CPU with no hardware decode.
True. By the time I upgraded from my X200 (fantastic machine, noticeably outdated), the lack of software support for hardware decoding H264 was noticeable. Also being stuck with OpenGL 2.1 isn't the best either.
I don't know what I'll do if and when my X230 stops being sufficient. If I could buy an Apple motherboard in an X200 chassis I'd do it in a heartbeat.
>The only thing my X230 struggles to do is run LLMs locally. My needs are simple, and I think normal people (i.e. probably not most people on this site) don't have needs that are any more demanding than mine.
People who edit video or make music and other such tasks are totally normal too, and there are hundreds of millions of them
Congrats, but I think you may be in a small minority when it comes to developers shopping for laptops.
Personally, I had to upgrade from a late-model i9 MacBook Pro to this M2 MacBook Pro, because the npm + docker setup at work was taking upwards of 20 minutes for a production build...
I think maybe you don't understand what the needs are of normal people. It's only partially about what software they run.
I recommend Mac's to the people in my life because when they have a problem they can take the machine to the Apple Store in the mall. Or if they want to understand iPhoto or Pages better, they can go to the Apple Store and take a class. They like Apple laptops because they look nice, they feel great, sound amazing (for a laptop) and have excellent battery life.
Like you, I have a ThinkPad (a P-something) and, frankly, it kind of sucks. It's all plasticy, it flexes, battery life is a joke, the trackpad is meh, and the fans are almost always running. I do like the keyboard though (I'm a fan of backspace).
The problem is that now one else is currently making hardware that is competitive with apple silicone. Apple is the only one offering both performance and battery time.
I love my Thinkpads, I really do but they are bulky, loud and the battery doesn't last very long. They are not an option for many people.
1. Asahi Linux's battery life is like 2/3 as long as on macOS
2. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon is just about as thin and nice as a Mac but it also costs just as much.
3. Apple is still leading in single core CPU speeds but x86 has caught up or surpassed M devices in both multicore and graphics. And even last gen x86 can beat the 3-generations-old M2 that is the latest one supported by Asahi Linux.
Re:3- only because they've only released the base M3 so far- once they release Pro/Max configs they'll easily regain the lead, as seen by the single core dominance.
Intel lunar lake gen 1 and 3 are competitive with the M series both in battery life and performance. Qualcomm makes arm chips that are somewhat competitive too, but you run into similar problems as M. x86 chips can most definitely reach the efficiency of M.
If I have learned one thing it's is that current corporate strategy is no guarantee for the future. If you want to purchase a laptop now and want a great linux experience, then the M2 Is a great option. But don't assume that M(n+1) will ever get support.
This reasoning is essentially just as true for any other laptop maker Dell, Lenovo, Asus, Framework, HP etc might also decide to bomb linux support at any time.
> Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon Macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices. That means that, unlike iOS devices, Apple does not intend to lock down what OS you can use on Macs (though they probably won’t help with the development).
IIRC Marcan mentioned something he found that had been deliberately put into the Mac boot loader that made booting alternative operating systems easier and perhaps making it possible altogether.
That's apparent enough from the fact that you don't need a jailbreak exploit to boot non-Apple-signed kernels on a Mac, unlike iPads with exactly the same silicon. They are intentionally configured differently.
iPads are cheaper than MacBooks and more popular. They'd rather prefer if you bought another one instead of using it indefinitely. The same with smartphones. The answer always has been: I like money!
Yes, because if they didn't, the fact that macOS doesn't lock you down in a sandbox means that is more like the entire boot chain would've been jailbroken. The boot chain shared for the most part with iOS devices, where Apple 100% does not want "jailbreaks" because it means App Stores that they don't get to take 15-30% from.
The happy path on the Mac was provided so the talent capable of booting Linux on it could take the happy path that hides all of the stuff Apple would rather not have a bunch of reverse engineers sniffing around.
The main thing that held me back from using Asahi on my M2 MacBook air - was missing external display. If I read TFA correctly - that should now work with a custom kernel.
If that's true - I'd say MacBook air M2 is probably the new sweetspot - depending on how cheap you could get an M1.
My impression is that until now, MacBook air M1 was the sweetspot.
I don't own Apple hardware, but just reading through it made me appreciate how gifted these souls are, doing the god's work. I hope they succeed with upstreaming their contributions and have a first-class Linux on ARM support.
I was watching Bladerunner last night, specifically the part where Ford is zooming in on the photograph using voice commands.
Above the display is an amber horizontal bar that changes in sync with the activity on the display and my first thought was, "Finally they found a use for the Mac Touch Bar!"
The Touch Bar has so many uses in Linux I can't wait for it to work.
My favorite feature of the Touch Bar was that, if memory serves well, force push was right next to cancel in one of the IDEs, can't recall if Xcode or Intellij.
If your design language is “flat as we can make it” how can you visualise a third dimension? You have to already know which things are 3D touch ready.
I blame the software refresh of Apple after the 5-series UI language was removed. Minimal mechanical design with rich complex software is a beautiful contrast that strengthens how both feel.
Yeah it could have been useful but I feel like they nerfed it from the start. Still wasn’t a big fan.
I was hoping it was a tease for a fully software defined haptic feedback based keyboard. There’s the obvious usefulness and coolness of that, and then the fact that you could make a laptop closer to the sealed clean-ability of a phone. Probably not quite submersible/waterproof due to ports and fans but able to survive a spill and be cleaned well.
It would be nice if projects like this were more willing to take on paid devs, and accept regular payment. have some sort of a subscription? I don't say that because my money is burning a whole in my pocket, but because I want to see more hardware support and stability. more testing, QA, but hunting.
With the attention this project is getting, I'd be surprised if they can't get the equivalent of a small startup's seed round, just by crowdfunding. Do they have all the funding and resources they need or not? that's really my ultimate question. I know you can't just throw money at these things and make them happen faster sometimes.
This is amazing work, and I certainly respect the talent of those involved.
That said, my question to those interested is why? I've been a daily user of both Ubuntu since 2005 and Mac since 2012. There are some edge case differences but for the most part they are so similar that I nearly always run the same code on both without modification. Clearly I'm missing something important but I'm curious what it is. Thanks in advance.
One reason is for continued software support after Apple drops macOS compatibility for your machine. Intel Macs could be patched to run newer, unsupported OS versions (essentially hackintoshing your real Mac) but from my understanding that's basically impossible for Apple Silicon Macs.
Apple makes some of (if not) the best hardware around. It makes sense that some people would want to buy a Macbook Pro for its hardware and run their favorite OS on it.
For me lack of thunderbolt is a showstopper, when it’s supported a lot of needed peripherals will be supported automatically. They have apparently been working on tb support since the m1 was released 4 years ago.
To be frank, TB support on Linux in general is kinda crap. I'm not surprised this might take them a while, and I'm sure it's lower priority compared to other things on the road map
I wonder how this will be impacted by the Steam Frame et. al.
Apple is probably the most mainstream supplier of ARM computers at the moment, but Valve is likely to soon have the most mindshare amongst ARM-shippers who actively support Linux. I expect that will improve ARM support in the ecosystem, which should be good for Asahi also.
This is incredibly impressive and also quite sad. Six years later, we have a very-nearly-right kernel for the M1.
Apple is launching the M5. It seems like the future is going to be a world of closed systems and custom silicon, with any free software lagging far behind.
M1 and M2 hardware isn't going anywhere. They're still great machines. And progress will be faster once the project finishes getting their code merged into the existing Linux kernel and distros. They have a first alpha of M3 ready, they're just refraining from releasing it in that state because they're so busy with everything else they're doing - a key difference compared to when they first came out with alpha support for the M1.
I’m sad because the WiFi on my M1 MBA is dying/dead and there’s no way to replace it without swapping the whole “logic board.” Apple also doesn’t support any USB WiFi adapters in recent versions of MacOS, so it’s now tethered to a wired network connection. I’m just waiting for the M5 refresh to hit at this point. Anyway, all that’s to say that at least some M1 hardware is going to to the trash heap soon :(
To add to that, they'll continue to be great machines running Linux even after Apple has bloated MacOS to death. Tahoe has made my M1 MBP feel significantly less snappy for no good reason.
Most of my software development career was spent working at a small company that sold a product that emulated the operating system developed and sold by a much, much larger company. The work was interesting and when you had a breakthrough or a small victory, it sure felt good. The challenge of keeping up was exhilarating and kept folks motivated to keep pressing forward.
But eventually it wears you down. It's nearly impossible to keep up in the long-term. Normal product evolution, the sheer size of the behemoth and sometimes even malice on their part to thwart the little guy make it really tough to stay current.
Think of Wine vis-a-vis Windows. They will never catch up.
Except they did with Wine, in a way. They got to the point where sufficient number of third party software developers target the common base between Wine and Windows (Steam/Proton), electing to have broader compatibility rather than catching all the newest Windows-only APIs.
I wonder how much similar behavior influence other buying choices. I’ve been eyeing an upgrade from M1 for a while - so far punting on it, mostly because of Asahi.
I guess I wasn't aware that Wine pivoted from trying to be a general purpose, drop-in replacement for Windows to being a platform for games that only supports a subset of Windows functionality.
It's much more difficult to keep current and support the full functionality of a much larger competitor's offering when you have to support everything. In my experience it was an all or nothing proposition. Either you emulated it 100% or you had nothing. I think Asahi is more in this realm maybe than Wine. It really needs to support all the hardware, 100%, or it's value is greatly diminished.
> I guess I wasn't aware that Wine pivoted from trying to be a general purpose, drop-in replacement for Windows to being a platform for games that only supports a subset of Windows functionality.
Or „just enough” for the subset of users that is „enough” to ensure product viability. The absolutism of „all or nothing” is rooted in the strictly-better mentality for replacing something.
For Wine/Proton, the core demographic is essentially gamers, who tend to overlap heavily with engineering population later on, and thus core population for Microsoft to capture and retain. Once Steam removed that vendor lock-in, the corporate discussion became more flexible.
For Asahi (proud Asahi user for 4y now), the added value of „most powerful Linux/Arm64 laptop on the market” outweighs the few things that don’t work on Asahi (HDMI out is probably the only one that occasionally matters for me, but screencasting works well enough). Yes, there are gaps, but they are smaller than things from Linux that are missing on OSX or Windows for me.
First you have to convince consumers to give up on systems that work with support to development kits that are build it yourself with (lots of) caveats, which is why the year of the Linux desktop still hasn’t arrived.
At least Apple usually supports their hardware for ~7 years so that's plenty of time to get Asahi working on newer Ms. I don't care too much about getting instant support but I definitely care about having the option to use my hardware more than 7 years
And that's with Apple deliberately leaving the bootloader open on Macs. If they had locked it down like they do on every other product then it would be even more of a struggle, and there's always the looming possibility that they'll just change their mind with future models.
This is my main concern. I applaud the effort that the Asahi team is doing, but there's no way that I would rely on a small team of inarguably passionate and talented hackers to maintain a system that uses reverse engineered software running on hardware manufactured by a company historically opposed to everything they're doing, even if they left this small door open for that.
It would be like going back to the days of early Linux and all the Windows-specific hardware we had to deal with, but extrapolated to the entire system. As impressive as all of their work is, it's not worth the IMO minor UX benefits of Apple's hardware.
Mainline Linux on ARM is solid these days; new x86 chips from Intel perform very well and are reasonably power efficient; and battery life of most professional laptops in Linux is quite good. For example, I get a good ~12 hours of work done on an X1 Carbon Gen 13 from a single charge. This may not be as impressive as Macbooks, and the packaging certainly isn't as sleek, but it's good enough for me. The tradeoff for a solid software experience, modulo the usual Linux shenanigans, is worth it to me.
Thankfully, hardware progress is relatively slow in a way that makes the m1 still a perfectly capable machine. Maybe we’ll have a future of “flagship community devices” where only one of every X is chosen as the supported option.
Will the gap remain just as big once earlier architectures are fully covered? I would expect some inertia bringing positive feedback in the development loop.
The problem is, many "nerds" have little other options in hardware. Which ARM laptop would be the alternative? Even if you allow x86, which ones are as nice as the Macbooks? Then, there is the problem, that not everyone wants to be Linux-only in their setup. I definitely prefer macOS to W11.
I've never bought any Mac, but I've been issued several at jobs. At one company, I scandalized the Apple fans by wiping OSX and installing Linux on a 10th gen Macbook Pro.
So all of the nerds that care about open platforms stop buying their systems. Everyone else is going to keep doing it and they number us massively.
And then there's the fact that it's still a dark ending if the best hardware out there — even if we all refuse to buy it because we're on a moral high ground — is a closed platform that we have to refuse to buy.
Anyone know if the M4 GPU support has improved? I might not use Asahi "today" but I'm sure the day will come when my M4 laptop will be deemed "vintage" despite being perfectly fine hardware, and on that day I am most likely to flip over. Hopefully by then the GPU support is much richer.
For me, it has been ready as a daily driver for more than a year. Battery life is shorter than macos but still long enough that I don't have to think about it (which I can't say about any x86 laptops, even when they use iGPUs).
The notable missing features are external displays (an experimental kernel branch is publicly available though) and the fingerprint sensor. That's about it, though. Given the amount of polish combined with the hardware, it's arguably the most polished Linux laptop experience you'll get.
Couldn't Apple make a change that renders all this work a waste of time? i.e. lock out other OSe's from booting for example. I applaud the effort but given MacOs is already a capable unix I don't see the rewards being worth it.
macOS is a capable UNIX, but it's not Linux - which has since become the standard platform for most cloud/web/ML development.
As a developer myself who uses Fedora Asahi Remix as my daily driver, I can also tell you that Linux runs 2x faster (often much more) for everything compared to macOS - on the same hardware! And that performance gain is also important for my work :-)
Totally, I have a mini forums pc that runs void linux that I ssh into from my MB air. My worry is hitching your wagon to a project that could stop working one day through no fault of the devs.
They could which is ultimately why we need regulators in the EU to premeptively ban those kinds of anti-repair anti-ownership kinds of business decisions.
Consumers should be allowed to install whatever software they want on decides they own.
Just came to praise the seven heroic souls who are working on this wonderful project that my M1 is just waiting to install once battery life meets my needs. And may I ask why, with all the crypto and tech money floating around, does Asahi not have a fully funded staff of fifty people?
Well, wish I could contribute something which could help, but I am homeless living with Schzioaffective disorder and the inflation and wealth inequity caused by the tech industry has left my life on a razors edge when it comes to money.
But I would gladly match my 1% of my monthly income to anyone here who can pledge the same 1% who makes over $500k a year. So that would be my $20/month vs their $416/month.
If “long running agents” have any use, this feels like the kind of project where they should be put to work. You have an oracle implementation (macOS) and a well defined problem with lots of grueling trial and error.
That is a tremendous update. Thank you for providing a great read about the diligent efforts of an increasing number of talented contributors: Oliver and Janne and Alyssa M and Shiz and Robert and Sven and James and Neal and chaos_princess and Davide and Lina and Michael and Sasha and Alyssa R have been killing.
Great work. I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years, like the Thinkpad T420 used to be. For different reasons, of course.
Do the M4 and M5 GPUs also change a lot from the M3? I hope it's not too much work to get those going once M3 is usable.
> I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years
I doubt it. For one, the SSDs have limited lifespans, and are soldered on the mainboard. They'll be fine enough for the planned life of the laptop, but eventually secondary market laptops will start seeing waves of failures, at which point people learn that purchasing one is a gamble.
The entire Apple silicon lineup is designed for limited lifespan.
The keyboard has a much shorter lifespan than the SSD, and it's incredibly difficult/expensive to replace.
A single bad key or trace and any Apple laptop is basically toast. $800+ to have Apple replace the top cover.
Maybe an independent shop can do it cheaper, I don't know.
Absolutely not.
SSD can be resoldered and that service is actually becoming popular and inexpensive. It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered. This will become a totally normal thing in a few years from now.
Soldered storage is extremely uncommon for laptops not from Apple. You pretty much only find it in very low-end Chromebook type hardware that's using eMMC for cost reasons, and a small fraction of more expensive Qualcomm-based laptops that use UFS for no good reason. All mainstream PC laptops use M.2 NVMe storage.
> It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered
That's simply a lie. No other laptop have soldered SSD. An increasing number do have soldered RAM.
> > It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered
> That's simply a lie. No other laptop have soldered SSD. An increasing number do have soldered RAM.
That's simply a lie. Pretty much all laptops using eMMC or eUFS for storage are soldered directly to the mainboard. These are often budget devices and many are things like x86-based tablets or chromebooks but there are models that are very much laptops. I do concede I am unaware of any non-apple laptops with directly soldered NVMe storage, but your claim that no other laptop have soldered SSD is patently false.
SSDs can be resoldered, but it's a PITA and I haven't seen it becoming popular or inexpensive.
It's on chip for the m series and not soldered to the motherboard.
The RAM yes but not the SSD modules
The ram is on chip, the ssd is soldered to the motherboard. There are tons of YT vids showing people upgrading them.
Neither the ram nor the ssd is on chip. The ram is on package, the ssd is on board.
On chip means literally on top of the silicon, like how AMD X3D cpus mount the SRAM chip. On modern Apple devices the ram is mounted on the organic package substrate. The difference is significant, and it's shitty that Apple outright lied about it.
I think that particular definition of "on chip" is entirely your invention. I've usually seen it broadly used for anything on-package, whether it's on-die or on a separate die within the same package.
"On chip" definitely does not have much if any history of referring specifically to stacked dies with TSVs, because that has been a very niche packaging technique until recently, and "on chip" is a much more broadly used term.
I've yet to see a desktop SSD wear out from writes. The only dead desktop SSDs I've seen have been due to buggy firmware (early drives or that recent batch of Samsungs) or well before their wear level is down (cheap noname drives off amazon).
My macbook air 2013 ssd died after 10 years, it is not soldered luckily
Exactly, the entire appeal of Thinkpads is their ability to be repaired and upgraded by the end user. MacBooks are designed to be disposable.
It’s really a shame. May last “favorite” MacBook was from 2013 where everything was upgradable. I bought the fastest Core processor with the lowest everything else and upgraded to 16GB of RAM, SSD (granted at SATA speeds) and a second data drive in the optical drive bay. What luxury!
I have a 120GB SSD from 2013 that saw typical gaming/workstation usage since it was bought, and it still works fine.
I think repairability is important, but I don't think it will stop those laptops from being popular.
And how easy is it to replace an aging battery?
I still haven’t felt much urge to upgrade my 64gb MacBook Pro M1 Max.
The biggest issue I have with it is macOS Tahoe. Guess I really should be checking out Asahi on it!
S**, I haven't felt much urge to upgrade from my 16GB M1 Air and I even use it to play some Windows games under Crossover. Quite possibly the best laptop I've ever owned.
It's really nice springing for 64G RAM and being increasingly glad you did for every year that passes. (And this year more than most)
Before you do, note that battery time on Asahi is abysmal at best, so if you're on battery often I'd really reconsider.
Abysmal? I am getting 8 hours on my M1 air with 80% battery life on it. What are you talking about?
Abysmal by macOS on m series standards, pretty decent by everything else standards.
So not abysmal! Abysmal would be if it was 3h, not 8-10.
Public information seems to describe the M4 GPU as mostly a performance-oriented refresh of the one from M3. M5 has brought bigger changes, not least neural/tensor accelerators on chip.
I just like the build quality and they are reaching the 200€ threshold on the used market. I bought one with 16GB RAM and a small black strip one the side of the screen (don’t bother me) for 230€ last week
>they are reaching the 200€ threshold on the used market.
Where?! I just cheeked the used market in Austria and 2020 M1s go for at least 350 for the 8GB RAM models and 450 for the 16GB model. Your 230 for the 16gb one fells more like a rare exception but not them norm everywhere.
I’m in Hungary and usually check Facebook Marketplace, Vinted, and another two local sites
Here is another one from today, just messeged them. 230€ rose gold one, and that's without any bargaining offer https://files.catbox.moe/exbrfc.jpg
Damn that's lucky. I checked facebook marketplace in Austria and prices are double that of what you're showing, even on Intel macbooks, there's no M1 macs for 200 Euros, only 400 Euros and up. Same on Vinted. No 200 Euro M1s, only at 2x the price.
The ones that I saw similarly low to yours are obvious scams from scam profiles all repeating the same message in the ad.
So maybe the ones you saw are scams as well. Otherwise hungary seems to be a lucky exception for some odd reason. Maybe because people have less disposable income, IDK?
Anyway, I wouldn't spend 400 Euros on a used mac with no warranty. The point of buying an old ThinkPad for cheap was that if something broke on it you could easily swap that part yourself for cheap because it was easily repairable and the used market was flooded with spare parts. But if your used macbook dies out of warranty, then you're shit out of luck, you can't fix anything, it's 400 Euros wasted.
>So maybe the ones you saw are scams as well
I bought one already so I know it's not a scam. Scams usually communicate badly and they don't want to meet you in a public space (like a McDonald's with free wifi)
Obviously ymmv
>Anyway, I wouldn't spend 400 Euros on a used mac with no warranty.
This I agree with. I still prefer Thinkpads too but these M1s are also pretty good in almost every sense except for repairability
isn't this is just exchange rate? 1AUD is 0.6 Eur
Austria, not Australia.
If HNers could read, they'd be very upset.
Apparently there's changes to boot that are more or less understood, but require some heavy work to handle.
Basically starting with M4 you have a choice between starting with Apple's page table monitor already running in their guarded mode extension, or all apple extensions disabled on the CPU cores.
the money quote (at least for some)
I often wonder whether the folks at Apple have the Asahi team on their radar. Are they in awe of the reverse engineering marvels coming out of the Asahi project, or are they indifferent to it?
I think the dev that was responsible for the bootloader or some security chip having the option to be opened posted on twitter a while ago. Pretty sure he implied or mentioned that this was what he was hoping for.
Edit: this was what I was remembering: https://x.com/XenoKovah/status/1339914714055368704
In fairness; that decision predates the existence of Asahi. Unless Apple was working with the community before Apple Silicon dropped, this isn't much acknowledgement of their existence.
They are aware. They are also aware of the designs sitting in the cabinet right next to them in Cupertino that would make all the reverse engineering instantly unnecessary.
Such a monumentally Sisyphean waste of effort in behalf of the Asahi devs in my opinion.
If you care about personal computing or Linux, don’t buy a Mac.
I'm sure Apple has data showing that their extremely lockdown strategy is good for their business but I feel like I'm one of the potential customers Apple could gain if they didn't have that.
They're a fantastic hardware company. But my admittedly very limited experience with Apple software, from iPad to their streaming service website, has been miserable. The UX doesn't work for me, the software just doesn't do what I want. Understandable, Apple very much designs their software to work for a particular workflow they come up with, if you like that workflow it's great, for someone like me it's miserable. But I would gladly buy their hardware if I could freely run an OS of my own choosing.
I doubt that any company actually cares about what any of the myriad of metrics they collect mean at the C-suite level. I mean, "maybe" I just think it is unlikely. I bet 9/10 times someone just makes a decision about how things "ought" to be and then that's the way it is going forward.
The assumption that this is a triangulated and well researched strategy doesn't match my experience in "real-job" world. I mean, maybe Apple is different because of their history, but I am not convinced anyone listens to anyone that articulates any math ideas beyond Algebra outside of some niche specialties because they don't understand it. And it's not that I'm some math god - I mean, that's what I studied, but there are people SO much more knowledgeable and capable, and they seem to get ignored too.
Like, I'm sure the guy who runs an insurance company listens to the actuaries about relative risk, but mostly, what I've just seen is someone makes a decision, and then finds post hoc ergo proctor hoc rationales for why this was a good decision down the line when they have to account for their choices.
For instance, it took my like a year at my old job, but I finally got most of the KPIs we were using to set strategy cancelled. The data we were using to generate those KPIs? Well in a few cases, after you seasonally differenced the data was no different than white noise. No autocorrelation whatsoever. In ALL the cases the autocorrelation was weak and it was all evaporated after a month or 2. You could MAYBE fit an MA model to it, but that seemed dodgy to me. And like, I'm not a major expert - I took 1 time series class in gradschool, and frankly, time series is kind of hard. But management had ZERO idea of what I was talking about when I was like, "hey, I don't think these numbers actually mean anything at all? Did anyone run an ACF?"
Then each month someone higher up the chain would say, "why is this number low?" And then they go out and search through the reams of data they had to come up with an answer that plausibly explained things. Was the number particularly "low?" No, it was within expected statistical noise thresholds, you are probably going to have at least have 1 number out of whack every 20 cycles or so... You still had to spend an hour in a meeting coming up with reasons for why it was low that went beyond "ummm, well, this is kind of random, and we'd expect to see this sort of thing ever couple years once or twice, we won't know if it's a trend for a few more months."
Anyway, this is a long anecdote to explain why I have no confidence that most companies do any sort of actual introspection. CEO creates targets and underlings build models that show how they're meeting or not meeting those targets. Now, hilariously, with Apple in particular I might be wrong, because in Tim Cook's defense, I'm pretty sure his education is in Industrial Engineering? So if any CEO is thinking about that stuff, it's him. Still, I am totally and completely unimpressed with the C-Suite sort of thinkers.
They're not dumb - like I've never really had a straight up dumbass manager outside of shitty lower jobs or small-mom-and-pop businesses? But I have seldom met any company that actually cared about the numbers - most say they do, but most just use those numbers to justify decisions they've already made.
Am I just unlucky? I'm I the witch in church here?
> don’t buy a Mac.
As opposed to what hardware, then? Because this is pretty much how most other drivers became a thing in the first place. Linux has come a long way and due to it "winning the cloud" many hardware vendors started properly supporting it, but this was absolutely not the case for the longest times.
So we make excuses for apple because that’s how it used to be back in the bad old days? This is flawed logic.
As for alternatives, there are many.
Like which, especially with an ARM processor?
You don't need an arm processor, many modern x86 chips match or outcompete m series on power efficiency and performance. Mainly lunar lake gen 1 and the new gen 3 (arrow lake not really).
The efficiency of arm chips was never arm, really, it was the manufacturing node and SOC design. Well, Intel and AMD can make SOCs, and they do.
Your pick of the litter, if you intend to run Linux. Snapdragon laptops, Ampere desktops, or even a Raspberry Pi with an RTX 5090 if you wanted.
I'm still surprised how much drive this project has, a platform that doesn't want to support it and could introduce breaking changes any day.
Just why?
There are millions of Macbooks out there that will be out of MacOS support one day. If this project diverts just a fraction of them from becoming e-waste for a little, it will be a win.
And then beyond that, there is simply no laptop manufacturer that meets the quality of Apple's hardware design. I like Macs for their hardware, the software is a compromise. A linux macbook would be my ideal laptop.
dont most ppl just throw these laptops in the trash, or does someone give you money to turn an out of support mac in somewhere
> does someone give you money to turn an out of support mac in somewhere
Yes, marketplace
Because they want to. Their time, their choice.
This horse has been beat to death on HN. Because the apple laptop ecosystem is the highest quality laptop you can purchase.
Maybe so, but nothing beats the 2008-2013 Thinkpad keyboards. The key travel and tactility are unmatched even by later Thinkpads. Also no trackpoint.
> nothing beats the 2008-2013 Thinkpad keyboards
Maybe so, but 15-20 year old laptops are definitely starting to show their age.
An M2 MacBook Pro, on the other hand, is only 4 years old, has a fairly OK keyboard, and is still in striking distance of current high-end ultrabooks when it comes to performance.
The only thing my X230 struggles to do is run LLMs locally. My needs are simple, and I think normal people (i.e. probably not most people on this site) don't have needs that are any more demanding than mine.
Granted, this is running GNU/Linux rather than Windows. If you're running Windows then yeah, they show their age.
I think an X230 would be performant enough for 95% of the things I do, but a 14 year old CPU is going to have pretty terrible battery life for anything more than very light usage. And things that would be light usage on a recent PC, like watching video encoded with a modern codec, would be fairly taxing on an old CPU with no hardware decode.
True. By the time I upgraded from my X200 (fantastic machine, noticeably outdated), the lack of software support for hardware decoding H264 was noticeable. Also being stuck with OpenGL 2.1 isn't the best either.
I don't know what I'll do if and when my X230 stops being sufficient. If I could buy an Apple motherboard in an X200 chassis I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Asahi Linux is certainly not targeted at "normal people". Normal people would just run macOS
There's this saying, all progress is done by unreasonable people, because reasonable people just accept things are the way they are
>The only thing my X230 struggles to do is run LLMs locally. My needs are simple, and I think normal people (i.e. probably not most people on this site) don't have needs that are any more demanding than mine.
People who edit video or make music and other such tasks are totally normal too, and there are hundreds of millions of them
> My needs are simple
Congrats, but I think you may be in a small minority when it comes to developers shopping for laptops.
Personally, I had to upgrade from a late-model i9 MacBook Pro to this M2 MacBook Pro, because the npm + docker setup at work was taking upwards of 20 minutes for a production build...
I think maybe you don't understand what the needs are of normal people. It's only partially about what software they run.
I recommend Mac's to the people in my life because when they have a problem they can take the machine to the Apple Store in the mall. Or if they want to understand iPhoto or Pages better, they can go to the Apple Store and take a class. They like Apple laptops because they look nice, they feel great, sound amazing (for a laptop) and have excellent battery life.
Like you, I have a ThinkPad (a P-something) and, frankly, it kind of sucks. It's all plasticy, it flexes, battery life is a joke, the trackpad is meh, and the fans are almost always running. I do like the keyboard though (I'm a fan of backspace).
The problem is that now one else is currently making hardware that is competitive with apple silicone. Apple is the only one offering both performance and battery time.
I love my Thinkpads, I really do but they are bulky, loud and the battery doesn't last very long. They are not an option for many people.
Technically:
1. Asahi Linux's battery life is like 2/3 as long as on macOS
2. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon is just about as thin and nice as a Mac but it also costs just as much.
3. Apple is still leading in single core CPU speeds but x86 has caught up or surpassed M devices in both multicore and graphics. And even last gen x86 can beat the 3-generations-old M2 that is the latest one supported by Asahi Linux.
Re:3- only because they've only released the base M3 so far- once they release Pro/Max configs they'll easily regain the lead, as seen by the single core dominance.
Intel lunar lake gen 1 and 3 are competitive with the M series both in battery life and performance. Qualcomm makes arm chips that are somewhat competitive too, but you run into similar problems as M. x86 chips can most definitely reach the efficiency of M.
If I have learned one thing it's is that current corporate strategy is no guarantee for the future. If you want to purchase a laptop now and want a great linux experience, then the M2 Is a great option. But don't assume that M(n+1) will ever get support.
This reasoning is essentially just as true for any other laptop maker Dell, Lenovo, Asus, Framework, HP etc might also decide to bomb linux support at any time.
> If you care about personal computing or Linux, don’t buy a Mac.
^ This
Also, the security teams at Apple must be watching Asahi closely from an exploit-perspective. They are basically holes that must be patched.
From https://asahilinux.org/about/
> Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon Macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices. That means that, unlike iOS devices, Apple does not intend to lock down what OS you can use on Macs (though they probably won’t help with the development).
Then why did they go out of their way and made the bootloader able to load another OS?
To get a better idea where their security holes are.
So the opposite of a Trojan Horse? A Greek Gateway?
More like a Honeypot.
I don't think they care. It brings more customers to Apple.
Sure they do. They even explicitly made some changes back 2-3 years ago to make it easier for Asahi (or such projects)
IIRC Marcan mentioned something he found that had been deliberately put into the Mac boot loader that made booting alternative operating systems easier and perhaps making it possible altogether.
That's apparent enough from the fact that you don't need a jailbreak exploit to boot non-Apple-signed kernels on a Mac, unlike iPads with exactly the same silicon. They are intentionally configured differently.
Why the locking difference on platforms?
I so want to run my os on ipad and save it from the ewaste bin.
iPads are cheaper than MacBooks and more popular. They'd rather prefer if you bought another one instead of using it indefinitely. The same with smartphones. The answer always has been: I like money!
Yes, because if they didn't, the fact that macOS doesn't lock you down in a sandbox means that is more like the entire boot chain would've been jailbroken. The boot chain shared for the most part with iOS devices, where Apple 100% does not want "jailbreaks" because it means App Stores that they don't get to take 15-30% from.
The happy path on the Mac was provided so the talent capable of booting Linux on it could take the happy path that hides all of the stuff Apple would rather not have a bunch of reverse engineers sniffing around.
xeno-kovah is responsible for that one. see the most excellent 39c3 video "asahi linux porting linux to apple silicon" for more information.
Certainly they know about it. There is no way they don't.
If one were to grab a second hand (is there much of an ex-lease market?) mac. What is the sweet spot for performance,battery life, and Asahi support?
The main thing that held me back from using Asahi on my M2 MacBook air - was missing external display. If I read TFA correctly - that should now work with a custom kernel.
If that's true - I'd say MacBook air M2 is probably the new sweetspot - depending on how cheap you could get an M1.
My impression is that until now, MacBook air M1 was the sweetspot.
yep it should work on M2 Macbook Air.
I don't own Apple hardware, but just reading through it made me appreciate how gifted these souls are, doing the god's work. I hope they succeed with upstreaming their contributions and have a first-class Linux on ARM support.
I was watching Bladerunner last night, specifically the part where Ford is zooming in on the photograph using voice commands.
Above the display is an amber horizontal bar that changes in sync with the activity on the display and my first thought was, "Finally they found a use for the Mac Touch Bar!"
The Touch Bar has so many uses in Linux I can't wait for it to work.
My favorite feature of the Touch Bar was that, if memory serves well, force push was right next to cancel in one of the IDEs, can't recall if Xcode or Intellij.
It's a shame that Apple discontinued 3D touch. That thing was so cool and working so well, but not enough developers used it apparently.
I think they are talking about git force push, not 3D push, but yeah, I liked the concept of 3D Touch too
The issue was discoverability.
If your design language is “flat as we can make it” how can you visualise a third dimension? You have to already know which things are 3D touch ready.
I blame the software refresh of Apple after the 5-series UI language was removed. Minimal mechanical design with rich complex software is a beautiful contrast that strengthens how both feel.
Yeah it could have been useful but I feel like they nerfed it from the start. Still wasn’t a big fan.
I was hoping it was a tease for a fully software defined haptic feedback based keyboard. There’s the obvious usefulness and coolness of that, and then the fact that you could make a laptop closer to the sealed clean-ability of a phone. Probably not quite submersible/waterproof due to ports and fans but able to survive a spill and be cleaned well.
100% agree. They nerfed it hard and so we just politely ignored it until we no longer even knew it was there.
Man, I know it’s probably going to be a while longer, but I’m really looking forward to the day I can run Asahi on my M4 Air.
It would be nice if projects like this were more willing to take on paid devs, and accept regular payment. have some sort of a subscription? I don't say that because my money is burning a whole in my pocket, but because I want to see more hardware support and stability. more testing, QA, but hunting.
With the attention this project is getting, I'd be surprised if they can't get the equivalent of a small startup's seed round, just by crowdfunding. Do they have all the funding and resources they need or not? that's really my ultimate question. I know you can't just throw money at these things and make them happen faster sometimes.
They accept financial help on OpenCollective: https://opencollective.com/asahilinux
This is amazing work, and I certainly respect the talent of those involved.
That said, my question to those interested is why? I've been a daily user of both Ubuntu since 2005 and Mac since 2012. There are some edge case differences but for the most part they are so similar that I nearly always run the same code on both without modification. Clearly I'm missing something important but I'm curious what it is. Thanks in advance.
One reason is for continued software support after Apple drops macOS compatibility for your machine. Intel Macs could be patched to run newer, unsupported OS versions (essentially hackintoshing your real Mac) but from my understanding that's basically impossible for Apple Silicon Macs.
Apple makes some of (if not) the best hardware around. It makes sense that some people would want to buy a Macbook Pro for its hardware and run their favorite OS on it.
120Hz is awesome! That was the last feature I personally felt was missing from my M1 Pro MBP.
For me lack of thunderbolt is a showstopper, when it’s supported a lot of needed peripherals will be supported automatically. They have apparently been working on tb support since the m1 was released 4 years ago.
To be frank, TB support on Linux in general is kinda crap. I'm not surprised this might take them a while, and I'm sure it's lower priority compared to other things on the road map
I wonder how this will be impacted by the Steam Frame et. al.
Apple is probably the most mainstream supplier of ARM computers at the moment, but Valve is likely to soon have the most mindshare amongst ARM-shippers who actively support Linux. I expect that will improve ARM support in the ecosystem, which should be good for Asahi also.
This is incredibly impressive and also quite sad. Six years later, we have a very-nearly-right kernel for the M1.
Apple is launching the M5. It seems like the future is going to be a world of closed systems and custom silicon, with any free software lagging far behind.
M1 and M2 hardware isn't going anywhere. They're still great machines. And progress will be faster once the project finishes getting their code merged into the existing Linux kernel and distros. They have a first alpha of M3 ready, they're just refraining from releasing it in that state because they're so busy with everything else they're doing - a key difference compared to when they first came out with alpha support for the M1.
I’m sad because the WiFi on my M1 MBA is dying/dead and there’s no way to replace it without swapping the whole “logic board.” Apple also doesn’t support any USB WiFi adapters in recent versions of MacOS, so it’s now tethered to a wired network connection. I’m just waiting for the M5 refresh to hit at this point. Anyway, all that’s to say that at least some M1 hardware is going to to the trash heap soon :(
USB is a standard protocol, so Asahi should support USB WiFi adapters just fine. Is Bluetooth also impacted?
How many USB ports does a MBA M1 have?
Now you have to walk around with a USB hub, for a subpar battery life.
To add to that, they'll continue to be great machines running Linux even after Apple has bloated MacOS to death. Tahoe has made my M1 MBP feel significantly less snappy for no good reason.
Most of my software development career was spent working at a small company that sold a product that emulated the operating system developed and sold by a much, much larger company. The work was interesting and when you had a breakthrough or a small victory, it sure felt good. The challenge of keeping up was exhilarating and kept folks motivated to keep pressing forward.
But eventually it wears you down. It's nearly impossible to keep up in the long-term. Normal product evolution, the sheer size of the behemoth and sometimes even malice on their part to thwart the little guy make it really tough to stay current.
Think of Wine vis-a-vis Windows. They will never catch up.
In my experience half the things I ran in Wine ran better in it than Windows.
So depending on what you want to run, not only did Wine catch up bit also surpassed.
Except they did with Wine, in a way. They got to the point where sufficient number of third party software developers target the common base between Wine and Windows (Steam/Proton), electing to have broader compatibility rather than catching all the newest Windows-only APIs.
I wonder how much similar behavior influence other buying choices. I’ve been eyeing an upgrade from M1 for a while - so far punting on it, mostly because of Asahi.
I guess I wasn't aware that Wine pivoted from trying to be a general purpose, drop-in replacement for Windows to being a platform for games that only supports a subset of Windows functionality.
It's much more difficult to keep current and support the full functionality of a much larger competitor's offering when you have to support everything. In my experience it was an all or nothing proposition. Either you emulated it 100% or you had nothing. I think Asahi is more in this realm maybe than Wine. It really needs to support all the hardware, 100%, or it's value is greatly diminished.
> I guess I wasn't aware that Wine pivoted from trying to be a general purpose, drop-in replacement for Windows to being a platform for games that only supports a subset of Windows functionality.
It didn't.
Or „just enough” for the subset of users that is „enough” to ensure product viability. The absolutism of „all or nothing” is rooted in the strictly-better mentality for replacing something.
For Wine/Proton, the core demographic is essentially gamers, who tend to overlap heavily with engineering population later on, and thus core population for Microsoft to capture and retain. Once Steam removed that vendor lock-in, the corporate discussion became more flexible.
For Asahi (proud Asahi user for 4y now), the added value of „most powerful Linux/Arm64 laptop on the market” outweighs the few things that don’t work on Asahi (HDMI out is probably the only one that occasionally matters for me, but screencasting works well enough). Yes, there are gaps, but they are smaller than things from Linux that are missing on OSX or Windows for me.
They never got Office or any Adobe (or similar) apps working, which is a huge miss.
But we have still the power of choice: moving consumers away from such closed platforms would affect their business.
First you have to convince consumers to give up on systems that work with support to development kits that are build it yourself with (lots of) caveats, which is why the year of the Linux desktop still hasn’t arrived.
Not really true. There are platforms and systems that are stable and open.
Apple launched the M5 in October, they sell 2 devices already with it:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-...
At least Apple usually supports their hardware for ~7 years so that's plenty of time to get Asahi working on newer Ms. I don't care too much about getting instant support but I definitely care about having the option to use my hardware more than 7 years
Pretty much this.
And that's with Apple deliberately leaving the bootloader open on Macs. If they had locked it down like they do on every other product then it would be even more of a struggle, and there's always the looming possibility that they'll just change their mind with future models.
This is my main concern. I applaud the effort that the Asahi team is doing, but there's no way that I would rely on a small team of inarguably passionate and talented hackers to maintain a system that uses reverse engineered software running on hardware manufactured by a company historically opposed to everything they're doing, even if they left this small door open for that.
It would be like going back to the days of early Linux and all the Windows-specific hardware we had to deal with, but extrapolated to the entire system. As impressive as all of their work is, it's not worth the IMO minor UX benefits of Apple's hardware.
Mainline Linux on ARM is solid these days; new x86 chips from Intel perform very well and are reasonably power efficient; and battery life of most professional laptops in Linux is quite good. For example, I get a good ~12 hours of work done on an X1 Carbon Gen 13 from a single charge. This may not be as impressive as Macbooks, and the packaging certainly isn't as sleek, but it's good enough for me. The tradeoff for a solid software experience, modulo the usual Linux shenanigans, is worth it to me.
Thankfully, hardware progress is relatively slow in a way that makes the m1 still a perfectly capable machine. Maybe we’ll have a future of “flagship community devices” where only one of every X is chosen as the supported option.
Will the gap remain just as big once earlier architectures are fully covered? I would expect some inertia bringing positive feedback in the development loop.
What do you expect when you nerds keep buying their closed systems?
The problem is, many "nerds" have little other options in hardware. Which ARM laptop would be the alternative? Even if you allow x86, which ones are as nice as the Macbooks? Then, there is the problem, that not everyone wants to be Linux-only in their setup. I definitely prefer macOS to W11.
I've never bought any Mac, but I've been issued several at jobs. At one company, I scandalized the Apple fans by wiping OSX and installing Linux on a 10th gen Macbook Pro.
So all of the nerds that care about open platforms stop buying their systems. Everyone else is going to keep doing it and they number us massively.
And then there's the fact that it's still a dark ending if the best hardware out there — even if we all refuse to buy it because we're on a moral high ground — is a closed platform that we have to refuse to buy.
Well that's the thing, if you're buying an Apple, you are supporting these closed hardware and software systems.
At least PCs are open to a greater degree, despite Microsoft's attempts otherwise.
Anyone know if the M4 GPU support has improved? I might not use Asahi "today" but I'm sure the day will come when my M4 laptop will be deemed "vintage" despite being perfectly fine hardware, and on that day I am most likely to flip over. Hopefully by then the GPU support is much richer.
There is no support for M3/M4/M5 GPUs, period. Asahi Linux is only installable on M1 and M2 Macs.
Would anyone knows if asahi is ready to be a daily driver on the m1 sir tet? How is the battery life against stock macos?
For me, it has been ready as a daily driver for more than a year. Battery life is shorter than macos but still long enough that I don't have to think about it (which I can't say about any x86 laptops, even when they use iGPUs).
The notable missing features are external displays (an experimental kernel branch is publicly available though) and the fingerprint sensor. That's about it, though. Given the amount of polish combined with the hardware, it's arguably the most polished Linux laptop experience you'll get.
`sudo cpupower frequency-set -g conservative` might help a bit with battery life.
Sorry, typo. Meant macbook air m1.
Depends A LOT on what exactly you need for day to day usage. E.g. some have higher requirements than others.
Couldn't Apple make a change that renders all this work a waste of time? i.e. lock out other OSe's from booting for example. I applaud the effort but given MacOs is already a capable unix I don't see the rewards being worth it.
They could have done that day 1 of Apple Silicon.
It’s clear Apple went out of their way to make Asahi possible in a secure way. I believe people on the Asahi project have said as much.
Out of their way?
They have been watching talented folks waste their lives away reverse engineering hardware/software that they possess all the schematics of.
If they really wanted to help, all they had to do is send a single e-mail with a zip file.
The distortion field is unbelievable.
macOS is a capable UNIX, but it's not Linux - which has since become the standard platform for most cloud/web/ML development.
As a developer myself who uses Fedora Asahi Remix as my daily driver, I can also tell you that Linux runs 2x faster (often much more) for everything compared to macOS - on the same hardware! And that performance gain is also important for my work :-)
Totally, I have a mini forums pc that runs void linux that I ssh into from my MB air. My worry is hitching your wagon to a project that could stop working one day through no fault of the devs.
They could which is ultimately why we need regulators in the EU to premeptively ban those kinds of anti-repair anti-ownership kinds of business decisions.
Consumers should be allowed to install whatever software they want on decides they own.
I agree, can't see Apple doing it so should be fine. The hope is once M1/M2 is done its less work to get M3-M5 working
I’m asking out of pure curiosity, no ill intent: what makes hdmi/usb-c support hard to implement?
I read a great article that explained that. It's called "The one we're commenting on"
Just came to praise the seven heroic souls who are working on this wonderful project that my M1 is just waiting to install once battery life meets my needs. And may I ask why, with all the crypto and tech money floating around, does Asahi not have a fully funded staff of fifty people?
> why, with all the crypto and tech money floating around, does Asahi not have a fully funded staff of fifty people?
Because all that crypto and tech money is trying to turn money into much more money, and Asahi isn't a great candidate for doing that
Perhaps you should make the first step towards funding?
Well, wish I could contribute something which could help, but I am homeless living with Schzioaffective disorder and the inflation and wealth inequity caused by the tech industry has left my life on a razors edge when it comes to money.
But I would gladly match my 1% of my monthly income to anyone here who can pledge the same 1% who makes over $500k a year. So that would be my $20/month vs their $416/month.
Wasted effort. Apple will just lock down their hardware more in their coming releases.
If “long running agents” have any use, this feels like the kind of project where they should be put to work. You have an oracle implementation (macOS) and a well defined problem with lots of grueling trial and error.