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!
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.
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?
>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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
You describe an exhaustive documention, but some documentation would already be better than none. Perfect is enemy of good, as your comment illustrates.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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..
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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!
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?
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.
Here's the blog post from the Asahi devs announcing this: https://asahilinux.org/2026/09/m2-episode-1/
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!
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.
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.
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.
Their Silicon was written to be OS agnostic, Apple's was not.
>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.
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.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)#Rosetta_2
i wonder if this is not something that asahi could eventually make use of
edit: https://lwn.net/Articles/970907/
macOS ships with full working drivers for everything. They're unfortunately not under AGPLv3.
You're replying to an LLM-written comment.
Why do you believe that comment was LLM-generated?
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.
Lack of sleep and HDMI support is real roadblock for adoption. Hope they gets past soon.
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.
I am wondering how much the spec changes per M-chip iteration? I think that after some iterations, the spec stays the same, no?
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.
Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community? So much wasted effort when they can just share a pdf.
> 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.
You describe an exhaustive documention, but some documentation would already be better than none. Perfect is enemy of good, as your comment illustrates.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Wft?
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor https://apps.apple.com/us/app/utm-virtual-machines
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.
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..
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?
Run both when you need to build for both. Why not run both when you need to?
This misses the point entirely. What happens when apple inevitably discontinues support for this hardware.
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.
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).
Apple discontinues support for this HW, not Apple discontinues support for running Linux in a hypervisor.
I don't think you understand what Asahi Linux is.
This isn't about running VMs.
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.
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.
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.
The sad part is that it's known that Apple internally maintains Linux ports to their SoCs
> https://talents.vaia.com/companies/apple-inc/software-engine...
I don't think Linus Torvalds has any sway on what Apple does. Or do you mean John Ternus, the new CEO?
My phone autocorrected Ternus to Torvalds, what a catch!
> My phone autocorrected Termus to Torvalds, what a catch!
Kinda funny and definitely a word suggestion that will be locked in future code.
Also it's "Ternus" with an "n"
Fixed. Thanks!
This message would be so badass if you were Ternus himself!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> past their intended lifespan
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
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.
> past their intended lifespan
This bullshit needs to die. The products are designed to last.
The hardware is designed to last, the software is designed to force you to buy a new device after 7 years at most.
Is it a "a few years" or 7 years?
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.
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 here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578
Discussed there, but shame the original linked tweet is deleted
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.
Source? It's a welcome thing but very much not like Apple.
Apple has a long long history of supporting open source.
can you please tell us what have they done for open source except LLVM.
Probably took me less time to search “Apple open source” and click the first link than it did to type your question:
https://opensource.apple.com/
LLVM / Swift / Webkit & XNU (I don’t really know of anything using Xnu up stream but the others are large open source projects?)
Swift, WebKit, Darwin/XNU, MLX, FoundationDB, Container, Pkl, libdispatch (GCD), CUPS, CareKit, ResearchKit, Kubernetes, Cassandra, Spark, Netty, Solr…
Sure, but other then language tools, databases, printing, container orchestration, what have the Roman’s ever done for us?
and CUPS
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?
> 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.
> 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?
Legal reasons. Lawyers say "no".
Competition could use it as well. Why make it easy.
Why would they?
When Intel-based Macs debuted they touted their support for dual-booting Windows (Bootcamp).
Apple makes money selling hardware.
Yeah, they abandoned that, though.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"Developers developers developers!"
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
How does providing the specs to run Linux on a MacBook open them them up to competition from junky used eBay laptops?
This is really incredible work but so frustrating that its necessary
Some big caveats but still amazing progress!
Does USB work already or is that a 2027 item?
This is great news.
Hoping for M4 to the latest chip.
We need Ashai to support more chips.
Let me know when we get M4 support.
Still no thunderbolt support.
You can contribute support for it
Indeed, not sure why you are being downvoted. Contribute to open source with the energy you have to call out missing features.
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?
It's no lazier than saying "Still no <feature> support"
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
The platform already supports it.
https://social.treehouse.systems/@sven/117186314116319619
Not quite there yet though. No PCI or DisplayPort (latter is working but unstable). But at least they seem to be on it.
To be fair this is the thing that is likely to be the most difficult due to it being closed proprietary apple/intel tech.
Intel and AMD both support Thunderbolt on Linux, it's not impossible per-se.
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.
I thought development officially ended?
Some contributors left, but others were able to take over. The project is still ongoing.
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?
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.
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.
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)
More info: https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html
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?
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
To my understanding the M1 and M2 have very functional GPU drivers. I don't know about the other specifics you asked
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.
I think it is more the technical challenge of doing it that drives development than any target users.
> 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.
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!
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?
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?
It’s cooler to run Linux on bare metal
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)
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.
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