[HN Gopher] Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux
___________________________________________________________________
Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 750 points
Date : 2022-12-07 06:12 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (asahilinux.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (asahilinux.org)
| drooopy wrote:
| It has been fascinating to watch the progress being made on this
| in the past few months. Makes me wish I had continued studying
| Computer Science at uni...
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| As someone who adores Apple hardware, I'm really looking forward
| to having the option of running Linux on my MacBook.
|
| I'm also really looking forward to the changes in Asahi getting
| upstreamed. The Rust in Linux work has me really excited for the
| future of Linux.
|
| I might even start contributing once Rust is more common!
| INeedMoreRam wrote:
| I've been running Linux Mint on my MacBook Pro (2011 model) for
| the last year relatively issue-free.
|
| For a couple weeks, I had DNS issues with the /etc/resolv.conf
| file, but I added a rule to the Network Manager to not touch
| that file upon reboot so everything works correctly now (except
| pinch to zoom on the touchpad).
| midoridensha wrote:
| Apple hardware is terrible.
|
| I wish someone could somehow make a laptop with the internals
| of an MacBook (mainly the CPU), but with the externals of a
| Thinkpad, including the far-superior Thinkpad keyboard and far
| better aesthetics. And while they're at it, make it easy to pop
| the back cover off and replace components (esp. the HD) as
| needed.
| signa11 wrote:
| hmm, it seems you are talking about the framework laptop ?
| brozaman wrote:
| I have a mac m1 pro at work and it's hands down the best
| laptop in terms of hardware I've ever had if you forget
| extensability. By a far margin.
|
| It makes no noise at all, to the extent that I even checked a
| dissasembly video to check if they had fans or just passive
| refrigeration. The display is the best I've ever seen in any
| laptop. The trackpad is excellent, the keyboard think is very
| good, the speakers, microphone and webcam are also very good.
|
| I've owned before a lenovo T530, T460s and T580 and quite
| frankly if we're talking about just hardware this is even
| better and my last experience with the T580 was just bad. My
| perception of the lenovo brand was that they made the best
| laptops until then. In fact I asked to get a macbook because
| the T580 was so so problematic and not just for me.
|
| I have to say I personally dislike macOS. In fact because now
| I'm working on 100% FOSS software I'm only using the laptop
| for corporate calls or situations where I have to deal with
| customer data, but the rest I do on my personal computer with
| ubuntu.
| vachina wrote:
| The latest m1 MacBooks frankly felt like iPads with
| permanently attached keyboard. It offers none of the
| convenience of a typical Wintel laptop, namely getting
| software running out of the box, and the mouse and touchpad
| lag is atrocious. I don't know how mac users put up with
| it.
|
| Though the only experience I've had with macs are at apple
| stores.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| None of this comment makes any sense at all. MacBooks can
| be bought with tons of software preinstalled (or did you
| mean it's missing apt-get? Try brew). And the
| mouse/touchpad are as good as it gets.
| dontbesquare wrote:
| Parallels runs Windows 11 & Debian wonderfully in my
| experience for running anything I can't in MacOS. If
| someone could just get a good port of Android running
| well on an M1 it would be the ideal solution for me.
| vachina wrote:
| > Android running
|
| sounds like you're consumer type of user.
|
| i dabble in embedded development and more often than not
| oem release drivers and tool chain for Linux and Windows,
| and those drivers are too low level to be emulated
| properly if at all.
| PeterisP wrote:
| It depends on the domain. Most scientific software, on
| the other hand, works out of the box on Linux and Mac,
| and if you want to get it to build and run on Windows,
| well, you're most likely going to be the first one so
| good luck if there are any issues as the authors won't
| bother with non-unixy compatibility.
| thiht wrote:
| This would be great arguments against Macbooks, if any of
| these were slightly true. Like "touchpad lag is
| atrocious" wtf? This is utterly false. And "getting
| software running out of the box", what are you even
| talking about?
| [deleted]
| sbuk wrote:
| > namely getting software running out of the box
|
| Why do you mean? The lack of a package manager?
|
| > and the mouse and touchpad lag is atrocious.
|
| I don't know which timeline you're commenting from, but
| as someone that works with both Lenovo and Apple laptops,
| there is simply no comparison. The Lenovo's trackpad
| borders on unusable. In fact it _is_ unusable when
| booting /waking from 'sleep'. It literally has to warm
| up! I use an MX Master 3S with both, and it works
| fantastically well connected via Bluetooth on both
| platforms - surprising so for the Lenovo.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| > best display.
|
| Well, 6th place
|
| https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Best-Notebooks-with-the-
| Be...
|
| But yeah it is pretty good.
| brozaman wrote:
| I said it's the best *I've* ever seen. I never claimed it
| was the best in the market or that I had seen every other
| laptop in the market.
|
| I don't know the criteria for rating the display quality,
| but scoring less than 2% from the best one is still
| arguably a very good rating.
| jack_pp wrote:
| I can never understand how other people stand glossy
| displays but to each his own
| filchermcurr wrote:
| I'm the complete opposite. I hate how hazy and dull
| "anti-reflective" displays look. I understand being
| opposed to reflection, but I'd much rather have a display
| that's as sharp as humanly possible.
|
| To me it's kind of like washing your windows. Sure, it's
| fine if you don't do it. You can still see outside. The
| window works. You may even prefer that less light comes
| in if you're opposed to light for some reason. But once
| it's clean, you're really getting the full effect.
| rob74 wrote:
| Matte or glossy, the sharpness of the display (all other
| things being equal) will be exactly the same. Glossy
| displays just look "nicer" because we associate glossy
| surfaces with higher value: glossy magazines, brochures,
| photos etc.
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| this isn't quite right, because the coding used on matte
| displays definitely makes them a little bit less sharp as
| you can see comparing the close up:
| https://youtu.be/jFdtJzAgPtA?t=228
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Matte surfaces prevent reflections by diffusing the light
| rays that hit them. They have the same effect on light
| rays that pass through them.
|
| There is a reason your house and car windows are polished
| to a reflective surface. It provides more acuity.
| ideamotor wrote:
| Sharpness is but glossy screens provide wider color range
| aka gamut, just like glossy photo paper.
| Milner08 wrote:
| Matte ends up with lower contrast because it defuses
| light and washes things out, especially in bright light.
| I think LTT did a video a while ago showing that it was
| actually worse in bright light than a glossy screen.
| vinay427 wrote:
| It's worth mentioning that MacBook glossy displays are
| noticeably better than many (not all, presumably) glossy
| displays out there, probably because of a decent anti-
| reflective coating. Some of them on the market look about
| as reflective as a pane of glass placed over the panel
| even when on, while in contrast I rarely if ever notice
| any reflections on my MBP and still have the advantages
| in image quality.
|
| I far prefer this anti-reflective glossy setup to my
| previous ThinkPad which of course had a matte display.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Yeah the Apple displays are almost like a black hole. I
| stuck a glass protector over my ipad and noticed the
| screen became massively more reflective.
| sofixa wrote:
| > while in contrast I rarely if ever notice any
| reflections on my MBP
|
| Really? I see my own reflection even in indirect sunlight
| and it's causing significant eye strain.
| vinay427 wrote:
| It might also depend on the model. The one in question is
| a 2021 14" MBP with the Mini LED display, and the only
| other MBP I owned had a matte display.
| coldtea wrote:
| Perhaps they've mastered the skill of not pointing the
| display at a light source...
|
| I'd take a glossy display anytime of day, and have so,
| since 2005 or so, including external displays. Better
| color saturation, no artificial fuzziness (which is
| exactly what the "matte" is in the matte displays, they
| literally reduce glare through a mesh that also kills
| contrast and clarity).
| snowwrestler wrote:
| For me the secret has been in managing the level of the
| backlight. If the screen is at least as bright as the
| ambient light level, reflections will not be noticeable.
| Kind of like how house windows seem so much more
| reflective at night.
|
| In very bright conditions (like bright sunlight), the
| backlight can't be bright enough. But in those
| conditions, matte screens suck too: they look super
| washed out, like there is a thick fog n front of the
| screen. (Optically it is the same phenomenon: diffused
| light rays start to overpower direct light rays.)
| perceptronas wrote:
| I bought two monitors which are matte: 4K 27", IPS, sRGB.
| Biggest complaint is how hazy/non-clear they look. I
| personally started to think glossy displays are superior,
| but I understand others have their own preferences.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I typically work on a 30" Ultrasharp 2560x1600. It's
| pretty great for media at a distance and physical screen
| space, but it's so refreshing when I sit down with any of
| my MacBooks and use theirs for a smaller task. I'd really
| like a good 5k 30"+ IPS (not 27) but that's just a dream
| brailsafe wrote:
| Are you exclusively working with the sun to your back?
| jack_pp wrote:
| It depends but I'd really hate to be limited by using my
| laptop depending on the lighting of the room I'm in
| coldtea wrote:
| Why, do you often work at random unfamiliar rooms, or
| cafes that impose a specific seat to the patrons?
| culopatin wrote:
| Let's not act like most of the other matte displays on
| the market get bright enough to be useful with the sun
| hitting your screen anyway. Most aren't enough to even be
| sitting out at noon.
| jlokier wrote:
| My Fujitsu-Siemens laptop from 2005 was great in the sun.
|
| The backlight obviously couldn't compete with sunlight,
| but the LCD behaved transflectively under enough light,
| so my Emacs session out in a meadow on a bright, sunny
| day was perfectly readable. That was unexpected. It
| wasn't an advertised feature. I don't even know if it was
| deliberate, but it worked great.
| speed_spread wrote:
| You are being downvoted into oblivion for that first line but
| I support you. Apple hardware look and feel is optimized for
| perception, not for practicality. I'll always prefer a laptop
| that's field maintainable even if it is a few mm thicker.
| StreamBright wrote:
| As an ex-IBM guy who spent a decade on Thinkpads I disagree.
|
| > Thinkpad keyboard and far better aesthetics
|
| Thinkpads are great for other reasons, partially that almost
| everything was replaceable as you pointed out.
|
| In the case of aesthetics, Apple is the clear winner.
| urthor wrote:
| The words you are using are not true about modern Thinkpads
| sadly.
|
| Apple's screen, lower power management, chassis, touchpad,
| are all dramatically superior.
|
| The stereo on the Macbook Pro 16 inch is absolutely absurd.
| It's the stereo for my HOUSE.
|
| Apple's killed supply chain that delivers more for less.
|
| Modern Thinkpads have been ruined by the pivot to the
| ultrabook-esque approach.
|
| Thinkpad's are like models.
|
| There's simply no reason for them to be that skinny.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| Yeah the speakers in the newer macbook pro models (even the
| late intel ones) are really impressive. I almost never use
| them and when I happen to play audio through them I nearly
| always catch myself thinking "wow, those are really good".
| notpushkin wrote:
| Yeah, and that's kinda sad. However, old Thinkpads are
| still totally usable. I was using T420 until a year ago and
| the only thing that I hate about it was the absolutely
| awful screen. It was 1600x900 with absolutely horrible
| colors. There's a few ways to install a better display but
| it might be tricky [1].
|
| Otherwise it was a decent "daily driver" laptop, in many
| aspects superior even to current gen MacBooks, particularly
| repairability, ports, keyboard quality. I'm using a 2020
| MacBook Air now which I bought to try out the M1, and some
| aspects where it excels are screen (obviously!) and
| speakers, but I think those are comparable to a little more
| modern ThinkPads (xx40 maybe?).
|
| [1]: https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Replacing_T430_screen_w
| ith_a_... (ThinkWiki got some terrible ads since I last
| checked it, get your ad blocker ready)
| nortonham wrote:
| I have T420 (and T430s) as well, but I think at this
| point it no longer qualifies as a daily driver. Even with
| 16GB of RAM there are times when the machine is just
| slow. Even with a replacement battery I only really get a
| couple of hours. Performance is just not there for
| anything serious. I've used linux and BSD's on it for
| about 5 years. It's true you can repair it fairly easily,
| but after getting my hands on a refurbished M1 MBA, there
| is a huge difference in quality, performance, battery
| life, etc.
| mort96 wrote:
| Are you thinking about the 2016-2020 Mac hardware? The loud
| and hot machines with broken keyboards and a useless TouchBar
| and no IO can be described as terrible. But their recent
| machines? Powerful, always cold, never makes a noise, pretty
| good keyboard, industry-leading touch pad, decent IO? I don't
| think you can defend calling those machines terrible, even if
| you prefer ThinkPads.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Actually my 2019 13" is still pretty good, but the new 16"
| M1 pro, though huge, puts it to shame in all of those
| dimensions.
| midoridensha wrote:
| Yes, I can defend calling them terrible: they're terrible
| because they're ugly and the keyboards suck. The internals
| seem fantastic, but the outsides are awful (except the
| touchpads, and also the screens are reportedly excellent
| but I'm not sure if that qualifies as "internals" or
| "external").
|
| What we need is a computer with the internals of a modern
| M1 Macbook, but the aesthetics and keyboard of a Thinkpad
| of yesteryear, plus a magnesium chassis.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I guess ThinkPads are pretty in the same way an old
| Quattro or Golf are, generously, but to me it's a real
| reach to call them prettier.
| pprotas wrote:
| You are entitled to your opinion, but many people like
| how the macbooks look like. They also like the keyboard.
|
| Many people also dislike how ThinkPads look like, and
| dislike how the keyboard works.
| sbuk wrote:
| I _hate_ Lenovo keyboards. Too spongy, and key presses
| often don 't register.
| davidy123 wrote:
| Was that a Thinkpad keyboard, though? It's a different
| category. Though they have declined over the years as
| they went to shallower keys.
| sbuk wrote:
| P14s and X1, sorry, should have included that.
| antihero wrote:
| What do you mean "reportedly"?
| mort96 wrote:
| I personally think they're good-looking, they diverge
| from Apple's traditional "ultra-sleek form over function"
| design style and enter the area of a somewhat industrial
| look IMO. They can be described as boring, but they're
| not exactly eye-sores. But this is clearly subjective.
| Personally, I don't buy computers based on looks, as long
| as they don't look like those gnarly "gaming"-branded
| products.
|
| The keyboards though? I've had a range of laptops, some
| Dells, some HPs, a 2021 MacBook Pro and a 2011 MacBook
| Pro, I would simply describe the keyboard as "meh". Most
| of the laptops O've had have been slightly less
| comfortable to type on, but they've all essentially done
| the job (with the exception of one Dell which had a truly
| terrible keyboard).
|
| No offence, but it looks like you feel the need to
| describe everything as either "terrible" or "amazing",
| the keyboards can't just be "not as good as they should",
| they have to "suck", the externals can't just be
| "boring", they have to be "awful". I think there's a
| version of what you're saying which people would agree
| with (or at least find unobjectionable), but as it is,
| nobody will agree with you that an objectively average
| laptop keyboard "sucks" or that an aesthetic lots of
| (most?) people like is "ugly".
| rowanG077 wrote:
| With the exception of the notch I think they are in top
| end of good looking laptops. The ThinkPad Z13 beats it in
| terms if aesthetics. But still. The new style is miles
| and miles superior to the all to common wedge shape.
| jitix wrote:
| "Ugly" and "suck" are highly subjective and depend on
| people's personal tastes. You could say that MacBooks are
| terrible for upgradeability but "keyboards suck" is
| pretty generic.
|
| Older MacBooks did have issues but Apple generally
| delivered on what most mac users wanted.
| fnord123 wrote:
| Do they still ground through the user like the intel
| models?
| mre wrote:
| Apparently they still do [1], even though I have an M1
| and never experienced any of the "micro vibrations" that
| I had on the old Intel Macs.
|
| [1]: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macbook-
| pro-m1-max-almo...
| trarmp wrote:
| Oh, I finally have something of value to add to a HN
| thread!
|
| I was always bothered by this and managed to fix it a few
| months ago. I had grounded my power-plug-box to the
| central heating system with some copper (don't ask), but
| was wondering why I still got those vibrations whenever I
| was charging the MacBook.
|
| Turns out, charging through just the monitor (via
| Thunderbolt) solved this: the monitor was grounded. The
| default MacBook charger (EU) plug just has just two
| prongs; a third one for grounding exists, but has to be
| attached separately.
|
| Edit: indeed, this was on a 14" 2021 MBP. They definitely
| still get the vibrations when connected to a power source
| without grounding.
| tpush wrote:
| Yup, and you feel static charge when it's plugged in,
| too.
| adamparsons wrote:
| This is fixed with using a power cable on the charger
| block instead of the bunny-ears adapter. Apple removing
| the power cord in favour of only including the bunny-ears
| adapter was such a mistake
| wpm wrote:
| It doesn't help that the power cord extension they used
| to ship (and can still buy for $20) flat out refused to
| be coiled in any sort of way. Even a large loop would
| spring back straight immediately. Absolutely awful
| experience. I kept my old power cord extension from my
| MagSafe 1 charger from 2009 for this very reason.
| DrBazza wrote:
| 10 year cycle perhaps?
|
| I had a 2012 MacBook and at the time it was the best laptop
| I'd ever used in terms of screen, keyboard, even performance.
|
| I upgraded last year to an M1 Pro, and once again, it's the
| best laptop I've used, and I've had a lot of company laptops
| (Surface, Lenovo, Dell, HP) in that time.
|
| I completely missed the keyboard debacle, the Touch Bar, and
| all the other drama of the late 10s.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| Current mac is leagues beyond any mobile devices on the
| market and it's not even remotely close. I am force to use
| mac because of it.
| culopatin wrote:
| Im sorry but you're letting your Thinkpad snobby side show. I
| understand where you come from because I thought the same
| thing. I used thinkpads for long time (as a choice) but the
| build is shit compared to what Apple is putting out. Maybe
| they were better in the past, but they need to keep up.
|
| I moved from thinkpads to the 14 MBP and I can't think of a
| reason I'd want to go back to Thinkpad other than being able
| to run Linux.
|
| I'll leave the "far superior" keyboard aspect aside because
| it's personal preference. I got used to the Apple one and I
| type much faster than on my x220.
|
| But the screen? Come on. Mini Led, high brightness, just
| looks absolutely great. Thinkpads usually have shit
| brightness and basic coatings. I've even gotten panels from
| China to make custom replacements for some of mine because of
| the garbage panels they came with.
|
| Speakers are vibrating turds on thinkpads. One day my gf
| brought her laptop to bed to watch a movie and i thought
| "there is no way this is going to be enjoyable". Then i heard
| it and I was blown away. I then ripped off the speakers off
| mine and I made custom housing for some speakers out of a
| MacBook Air for mine. They couldn't live sounded better if
| the whole chassis didn't rattle with the added bass and if
| the speakers fired up.
|
| The soft touch coating on the shell that peels off leaving
| half shiny half matte, classic no?
|
| They are tied on the hinges, both are solid. Thinkpads may
| have more ports, but honestly I don't go around plugging my
| laptop to too many things.
| kleiba wrote:
| Aesthetics lie in the eye of the beholder.
|
| But it is my understanding that the mouse pad on MacBooks are
| far superior to most other mouse pads. I don't know about the
| keyboard, though.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| MacBook's touchpads are quite famous at being better than
| most of the competition.
|
| Thinkpad keyboards are indeed much better, but only if you
| don't care about small water spills rendering your keyboard
| unusable.
| dathinab wrote:
| > Thinkpad keyboards are indeed much better, but only if
| you don't care about small water spills rendering your
| keyboard unusable.
|
| This kind of generalization is as far I can tell the
| source of a lot of pointless discussions around
| thinkpads.
|
| The truth is the quality varies, a lot. Sure wrt. most
| aspects the quality is at least good, but weather it's
| better or worse then a mac especially wrt. the keyboard
| is quite device dependent.
|
| For example the one I have has a better keyboard then any
| mac keyboard I tried and the keyboard is quite nice to
| type on and quite robust, much more then then any mac
| keyboard. There are some models where you can
| continuously pure water on it and they will be just fine.
| But then there are some thinkpads keyboards which aren't,
| but then apple had also keyboards for a while which died
| from a bit of dust.
|
| So in the end general statements like ThinkPads have the
| best keyboards or the most reobust ones or apple products
| have that are all kinda pointless. From both companies
| you can pick modules to get whatever result you want
| especially if you include some "fake ThinkPads"
| (published under the ThinkPad brand but not really
| thinkpads wrt. robustness, repair-ability etc.).
|
| My main point for favoring ThinkPads is that you can
| easily remove the keyboard and use an external keyboard
| until an replacement part arrives.
|
| (Just to be clear: I'm not speaking about the very old
| thinkpads; Only mean thinkpadish thinkpads e.g. mainly
| the T and P series but not e.g. the Yoga Thinkpad; Mean
| water and not liquids with a higher acidity)
| happymellon wrote:
| How does a water spill render your Thinkpad unusable?
| Mine has drain holes to handle this situation, my work
| Mac can't handle crumbs. I don't want to think about how
| it would cope with liquid.
| dathinab wrote:
| There are some models where the keyboard itself isn't
| fully water safe, so there is a chance your keyboard dies
| but the rest of your system is fine. This is especially
| true if we don't spill water but some other harder to
| handle liquids.
|
| There are also some products published as ThinkPads which
| aren't really ThinkPads (like some(many?,all?) of the
| Yoga ThinkPads don't have any of the properties normally
| associated with ThinkPads, they are much less robust
| pretty much in every category and much harder to repair
| even if it's just the keyboard.
| happymellon wrote:
| Wouldn't that be true of Macbooks as well?
| frereubu wrote:
| "Better aesthetics" is an entirely subjective judgement.
|
| Agree about being able to swap components though.
| coldtea wrote:
| So, your "Apple hardware is terrible" wants the Thinkpad
| "keyboard and far better aesthetics", but stil prefers Apple
| internals especially "the CPU".
|
| In other words, you claim "the hardware is terrible", but
| your actual case is "I prefer the external design of the
| Thinkpad".
|
| I guess, I'll give you the keyboard. Which is more than
| compensated with the far greater touchpad, incredible speed,
| battery life, and coolness while all of the previous (of the
| M1).
| jeltz wrote:
| I vastly prefer the Thinkpad touchpad over the Mac one and
| do not get what people see in the Mac's touchpad. For me
| Macs have better cooling, better battery life, better CPU
| but worse input devices (keyboard and touchpad). Macs have
| better glossy screens but since I prefer matte screens I
| prefer the screen of the Thinkpad.
| sosborn wrote:
| IMO, the Apple touchpad really shines when you
| incorporate gestures and turn on "tap to click".
| tstrimple wrote:
| I'm still annoyed they moved three finger drag into the
| accessibility options. It's one of the defining features
| of the trackpad in my opinion.
| r00fus wrote:
| Wow. I had no idea this was possible. Clicking and
| dragging (ie holding the click) on my Mac trackpad always
| felt cumbersome - this is a lot better.
| dathinab wrote:
| IMHO general design of ThinkPad touchpads with the
| additional buttons at the top (if it's a thinkpad which
| has it) is much much better even if you don't use the
| trackpad.
|
| But if you don't use that buttons apple touchpads tends
| to be better in my opinion.
| crypt0x wrote:
| IMHO Keyboard quality in thinkpads dropped like a stone after
| the 230s. It's like Lenovo lost the plans for how to build
| those.
|
| The keys in the recent ones are incredibly mushy.
| ekianjo wrote:
| not if you have a model with a Chicony keyboard.
| highwaylights wrote:
| "Apple hardware is terrible"
|
| Interesting take. As an example I have an Apple laptop with a
| trackpad that is quite useable, something pretty much unheard
| of on anything else.
|
| The keyboard feels much better than my old Thinkpad, but this
| might be subjective. I've not been impressed with the recent
| models (although admittedly haven't spent long with them).
|
| I'm with you on the
| upgradeability/repairability/maintainability, but maybe a
| Framework is a better fit in that case.
|
| My Air outperforms my desktop, has close to 20 hour battery
| life in my normal use, and is completely fanless. It's not
| perfect, but I don't see anything else that comes close (if I
| did I'd probably switch.. macOS is driving me more crazy with
| every release).
| nortonham wrote:
| >My Air outperforms my desktop, has close to 20 hour
| battery life in my normal use, and is completely fanless.
| It's not perfect, but I don't see anything else that comes
| close (if I did I'd probably switch.. macOS is driving me
| more crazy with every release).
|
| I'm on my first macbook--a M1 air--and now I finally see
| what the hype wrt apple hardware is. I love thinkpads, but
| between the battery life, the speakers, display, just how
| light it is, never runs hot no matter what I do to it....I
| can't believe I went this long without trying one out.
|
| The hardware plus improving linux compatibility means I
| know this machine is worth it
| perth wrote:
| The issue with thinkpads has always been the externals! I've
| only enjoyed them for their budget internals and their
| openness via extensive reverse-engineering. The lack of a
| metal body of any sort more or less sentences them to an
| eventual crumbling, and iFixit rates most Thinkpad T420 body
| maintenance as "Moderate" to "Hard", so good luck repairing
| it when something on that plastic case cracks since it will
| happen eventually, and there's no Apple Store for thinkpad
| repairs.
| ekianjo wrote:
| You dont need an Apple Store when the parts are sold
| everywhere by everyone, not only in a hipster store.
| goosedragons wrote:
| Metal dents. Metal scratches. And if you get any of the
| colors other than boring bright grey then it's really easy
| to scratch. And at least things like keyboard replacement,
| SSD replacement are easy to replace on ThinkPads.
|
| Nothing's cracked on my W520 yet, and I don't have to worry
| about plugging in the power adapter damaging the finish
| like I did with my Space Grey MBP.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| I dropped my aluminum body Dell XPS 13 on a tile floor
| (it was in my messenger bag, but I don't think that
| helped much). It hit the rear corner and mushroomed the
| metal quite a bit, but nothing broke. I'm reasonably sure
| that if it was a plastic body it would have broke.
| boomskats wrote:
| Most Thinkpads are not normal plastic. The W520 is carbon
| fiber and glass reinforced plastic over an alloy frame.
| nuodag wrote:
| You can just order body parts from Lenovo (true, probably
| not for t420 anymore) or third party resellers, or just
| take them from another one.
|
| And there are a lot of Thinkpad service partners stores,
| mainly for business customers, I bring around 1-3 Thinkpads
| a month there for repair (we have ours close by).
| boomskats wrote:
| > there's no Apple Store for thinkpad repairs
|
| I pay around 50USD/year for an enterprise grade Thinkpad
| support plan with Lenovo, where they send an engineer to
| either my home or office the _next day_, complete with any
| spare parts needed to fix whatever might have gone wrong,
| whether it's accidental damage or a hardware defect. I've
| only needed that support maybe four or five times over the
| last decade, but each time it's been stellar: new screens,
| mainboards, keyboards, broken case parts, etc. No caveats
| or gotchas or 'ooh that voids your warranty' to worry
| about, ever. It gave me full confidence to run my company
| and equip all of my devs with Thinkpads that run on Fedora
| - so much so, that when we were acquired a couple of years
| ago, my only negotiating condition that caused a stir was
| the requirement that me and my team get to keep our
| Linux+ThinkPad stack.
|
| What I just described is the polar opposite to every
| experience I've ever had with anything to do with Apple,
| ranging from the genius bar arguments to the six week waits
| to fix our designer's spacebar that stopped working because
| someone dropped a a breadcrumb in there. It just doesn't
| compare.
|
| Side notes relevant to your comment:
|
| - the T420 that you mention is now an 11 year-old piece of
| hardware, I don't understand why you're referencing it
|
| - even so, plastic gets brittle over time. I don't know
| anyone with a 10+ year old MacBook that still runs
|
| - iFixit are heavily biased, or at least they were when the
| T420 came out (it's in the iName)
|
| - with all that said I still can't wait to be able to use a
| fanless desktop M2 as my daily driver (@LinaAsahi you're
| awesome)
| filchermcurr wrote:
| Barely relevant anecdotes:
|
| My mom daily drives my old 2012 retina Macbook Pro.
| Neither of us have ever had any problems with it. So it's
| possible for macs to hit the 10+ year mark!
|
| I also still use my X200 tablet (not as a primary machine
| anymore, but it decoratively runs Creatures Docking
| Station 24/7). No crumbling or even any signs of aging
| plastic. That thing is still a tank.
| boomskats wrote:
| I owned a 2012 rMBP (the 15 with the proper quad core)
| and it was an absolutely excellent laptop. I had it as a
| secondary machine for design/music work but used it quite
| a lot, and sold it to a mate of mine who used it every
| day until it died around 2019 I think.
|
| Is your tablet the one with the 400nit outdoor screen?
| detaro wrote:
| > _and there 's no Apple Store for thinkpad repairs._
|
| But a widespread network of service companies that will
| happily fix your devices, in most places way denser then
| the network of apple stores. (Not to mention providing on-
| site warranty services)
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Frame.work? I rather have an ARM processor for the battery
| life but outside that it's a decent. Just the Linux support
| is lagging. Wish people would focus on support that type of
| far more open and repairable hardware instead of closed. That
| said, my macbook air m1 is the best laptop I ever had because
| of the battery life and solid hardware (and price... for the
| E999 I paid, there is nothing close even 2 years later).
| Frame.work with AMD + discrete Nvidia GPU I would buy,
| Frame.work with ARM I would buy, but the better part of the
| dream is that _someone_ can make these boards and I can shove
| them in my existing frame.work. That 's where we should be
| going.
| abrouwers wrote:
| I love my framework, and would buy it again. But man, I'm
| not sold the 12th gen intel chip is ideal. My battery life
| is pretty awful, and it doesn't take much to start the fan
| / generate heat. Even doing something simple like watching
| youtube :/
| teerak wrote:
| As a Linux user I've had many Thinkpads. X1 Carbon does have
| a great keyboard. But there's to my knowledge no other laptop
| with a display as good as a Macbook's retina. Look at any
| Thinkpad next to a retina display, it's night and day. That's
| why keep using a 2015 MBP with Linux as my daily driver.
| Looks like I might be able to upgrade soon thanks to Asahi.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| The Dell XPS has a fantastic OLED screen that is better
| than anything I've ever used before. I think the Apple
| laptops have slightly higher pixel densities, but it's all
| the same when they're as dense as they are.
| teerak wrote:
| Thanks, I'll take a look at the XPS.
| aulin wrote:
| > I might even start contributing once Rust is more common!
|
| as someone who's recently experimenting with Rust, why is that
| so? I mean if you have something in the kernel where you could
| give valuable contribution, why letting the language stop you?
| guess any dev who can write Rust today is also a good C dev,
| ain't it?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| >guess any dev who can write Rust today is also a good C dev,
|
| I'm sure they have the potential, but they might not want to
| learn/use C.
|
| I'd certainly be much more likely to look at kernel dev if I
| can use rust than if I have to use C.
| aulin wrote:
| my point was more that given rust is so young people
| proficient in it have probably also experience in more
| classic low level languages
| thfuran wrote:
| But that doesn't mean they want to deal with C code in
| their free time.
| fulafel wrote:
| Not really. C is a simple but dangerous language where the
| compiler doesn't do much for you, Rust is the opposite. It's
| like chainsaw juggling vs bridge.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Life is too short to desire writing in C and/C++.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| No, it's just not true. Just look at Google's recent Android
| statistics as a validation.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Not OP but I'm waiting for Rust support to be finished before
| I look at kernel development. Don't have any interest in
| writing C.
| ploxiln wrote:
| Honestly this is a bit of a fantasy. If you love Rust and
| hate C, and haven't looked into kernel development before
| ... it's a whole different ball-game than user-space Rust.
| With a variety of real-world hardware, and the complexity
| of modern CPUs, and demands of a variety of complex user-
| space software, you just don't have the "guarantees" and
| conveniences you want, at this layer. The hardware does
| what it does and you just have to deal with it. User-space
| C code can be way easier to reason about. For a small taste
| see https://lkml.org/lkml/2022/9/19/1105
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| Yes, but dealing with low-level stuff in Rust is going to
| be easier than doing that in C. See for example the blog
| post by Asahi Lina talking about how it was easier to
| program the M1 GPU driver in Rust than it would have been
| in C.
| caskstrength wrote:
| Even in best case scenario Rust code will be confined to
| individual subsystems and drivers for a very long time. And
| even in these subsystems you will probably still have to
| interact with a lot of C code from shared data-structures
| in other subsystems.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Most of Linux kernel is drivers, so if new drivers can be
| written in Rust, it's a huge win in safety for the whole
| world.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _guess any dev who can write Rust today is also a good C
| dev, ain 't it?_
|
| Quite a number of Rust devs I've read about, have never been
| C devs. They came from dynamic languages or Java or similar,
| and stuck with Rust and learned it, as a more modern
| features-wise and less error-prone systems language than C.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| I'm one such person.
|
| I learned in C, it's the abstraction that exists in my mind
| for computers, but I'd never use it to actually write
| something, because of memory safety. I'd even been using
| Ada.
|
| So, Rust was appealing in the ways C wasn't.
| rjsw wrote:
| I would not want someone writing kernel code who can't
| understand what the rest of it is doing.
| coldtea wrote:
| Who said those people will be writing kernel code?
|
| Rust for the Linux kernel is like 0.000001% of real life
| Rust use (which is not that big to begin with).
|
| And it wouldn't be used the main kernel for the most part
| anyways, mostly (if not exclusively) kernel drivers.
| rjsw wrote:
| This thread is about a kernel DRM driver written in Rust,
| writing any DRM driver requires a lot of knowledge about
| how the rest of the DRM subsystem and the kernel works.
| coldtea wrote:
| The subthread though is about whether "any dev who can
| write Rust today is also a good C dev, ain't it?", not
| about kernel drivers...
| dhruvdh wrote:
| There is a difference between not understanding and not
| wanting to write C.
| tbalsam wrote:
| I'd be curious how C (and C++ for that matter) stacks up
| on some arbitrary "freshness" metric that measures some
| kind of statistic/statistics that indicate the
| average/median time it takes for the population of
| engineers to reach some particular level of "done"ness
| with a language.
|
| I have no idea how you would measure it, but I'm assuming
| that C, VBScript, Perl, sed, AWK, bash, and Haskell
| (please don't hurt me I'm thinking about the code
| maintenance, time draining nightmare that is a real-world
| use case of mega-scaled purely functional codebases as
| opposed to a mixed dynamic with a purely functional
| core).
|
| Curious what other languages would top the list. I'm
| going to assume also that some low-barrier entry
| scripting languages that are well designed, similar to
| Python, and languages that save the hypothetical,
| proverbial broken backs of their ancestors, like Rust, to
| be near the bottom of the list. I'm curious what that
| bottom part of the list would look like too, oddly
| enough. :D :))))
| pitched wrote:
| I would also really love to read a statistics-based
| approach to all of modern software engineering. Like,
| does SOLID actually increase bugs? Is Agile more likely
| to slow things down? Etc.
|
| This is the closest I've ever found:
| http://www.knosof.co.uk/ESEUR/
| hedora wrote:
| It strongly depends on the type of software being
| developed.
|
| As the abstract of that book suggests (when referring to
| ego and bluster), 100% of the agile proponents I have
| encountered are incompetent. (This especially includes
| organizations that claim they are "agile").
| halpmeh wrote:
| C is an amazing language. If you want to integrate into
| another language via FFI you basically have 0 other
| options.
|
| That being said, it's too easy to do something wrong in
| C. The desire to use Rust isn't because C is stale,
| rather it's too hard to write C correctly.
| hedora wrote:
| Rust and C++ both have C FFI boundaries that the compiler
| can inline across. What more do you want?
| halpmeh wrote:
| Well for one, I don't want to add another language to my
| tool chain. Many languages can compile C directly. For
| instance in Swift or Go you can add C source files
| directly to your project and have them compile as part of
| your Swift or Go build. You can't do that with Rust or
| C++.
|
| C is the lingua franca of the software development world.
| [deleted]
| tester756 wrote:
| "amazing language"
|
| ye ye, sure it is
|
| uses physical pathes instead of logical namespaces for
| includes
|
| average code base could be summed in such a way:
| everything is fucking "int" or its cousin - such a great
| tool for system modeling!
|
| basic concepts as for $current_year are still non-trivial
| in C - like strings
|
| when opening non-trivial codebase my VS Code goes crazy.
|
| Maybe I do have high standards after using C# for years,
| but holy shit, writing Rust is 10 times better experience
| for me than using C.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| My desire to write Rust is for both reasons. C tooling is
| awful, the language offers insufficient abstraction
| capabilities, and, finally, is unsafe.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| Modern C++ now has nearly all of Rust and other modern
| language features built in, some as flags. At the same
| time it has 30 years of ecosystem, cruft, and bad habits.
| It's entirely possible to write performant, memory safe
| C++, even in a functional style. It's a bazooka, and
| won't stop you from firing at your feet, but it is also
| the right tool for big jobs.
| hedora wrote:
| The last time I checked, there were only nascent efforts
| to add the borrow checker to C++.
|
| That's the main reason to implement in Rust (the others
| being syntactic sugar like match, ?, and, of course, the
| library ecosystem that learned from ~ C++17's mistakes).
| snotrockets wrote:
| It still lacks memory safety.
| __jem wrote:
| Except... you know... the most important feature of
| Rust... the borrow checker.
| aulin wrote:
| The main problem with C++ is that it's too vast, it does
| everything and everyone has its very own choice of a
| subset of the language he should use.
|
| The result is codebases hard to navigate, code hard to
| undestand with lots of clever code and unintuitive
| syntax.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| That's a pretty naive statement. No kernel dev knows what
| the rest of it is doing. Because the rest is a tens of
| millions of lines code base.
| potatochup wrote:
| I used to write bare-metal C for my day job. It's pretty hard
| to get everything right when the language has so many sharp
| edges. I wouldn't want to use C for a bigger project (e.g.
| the kernel, drivers, a gui app) but I'd quite happily use
| Rust because the compiler will yell at me if I do something
| stupid
| reacharavindh wrote:
| Silly question.. is there a way to run Asahi Linux on a M1Pro
| MacBook in a live mode without installing it?
|
| I'd love to try it for fun on a computer that is not mine...
| dottedmag wrote:
| M1 boot sequence requires some code to be installed on the
| system. Once the execution jumps to the bootloader the rest can
| be run from anywhere, such as USB stick.
|
| It still requires adding a new partition with bootloader and
| some other files required by Apple for successfully verifying
| the signatures on everything, so it's not a "live mode".
| blackMysticCat wrote:
| Not as far as I know, but the installation process is the
| easiest time I've ever had installing any linux
| zinekeller wrote:
| Sadly no, and it's unlikely for _any_ OS to be livebooted on
| Apple ARM systems (effortlessly, like on x86 BIOS /UEFI). macOS
| does this cheat of "copying bootfiles it needs in internal
| storage", and it'll be likely that Asahi (and any other OS)
| would need to set up a permanent partition just so they can
| pretend to boot up external drives.
| gavinsyancey wrote:
| Can I install to an external/USB disk?
|
| Apple Silicon machines cannot boot from external storage. While
| it may look like they do when you choose an external macOS
| volume, behind the scenes parts of its boot components are
| being copied to the internal drive to make this work. It's
| unclear whether this mechanism will ever be usable by third
| party OSes, for technical reasons.
|
| Instead, we recommend using the UEFI environment only installer
| option to install only a UEFI bootstrap to your internal drive.
| This only requires around 3GB of disk space, and it will then
| automatically boot from any connected USB drive with a UEFI
| bootloader. Note: installing the Asahi Linux desktop images to
| a USB drive automatically isn't supported right now, though if
| you're adventurous enough it's not terribly hard to do manually
| :-)
|
| > https://asahilinux.org/2022/03/asahi-linux-alpha-release/
| tw1984 wrote:
| truly incredible, for less than two years, a group of talented
| engineers managed to release the world's first GPU driver in Rust
| by reverse engineering apple hardware known for its opacity. oh,
| they also happened to have the free time to port Linux to Apple
| hardware.
|
| now I just have one question - when this wonderful work will be
| merged into the mainline kernel.
|
| (PLEASE - no one cares who is Lina, we've been there many times,
| let's don't do it again here in this thread. thanks!)
| aulin wrote:
| > no one cares who is Lina
|
| I couldn't care less who she is, but I'm pleased they're giving
| more status updates in written form.
| oblio wrote:
| Who is Lina? :-)
|
| Edit: honest question...
| 16 wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is an elephant-in-the-room sort of thing
| of if people legitimately haven't picked up on it, but if you
| listen to the speech patterns and accent that Lina presents,
| (s)he speaks _exactly_ like marcan. You can listen for
| yourself and form your own opinions, but I am _firmly_ in the
| camp of "Lina is marcan".
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Lina also lives in Tokyo, Japan; curiously just like
| Marcan.
|
| What are the odds of two of the brightest kernel developers
| living in the exact same city? ;)
| risho wrote:
| ???? what are the odds that a tech metropolis with a
| population of more than 10 million people has 2 people
| that are proficient enough to contribute to the linux
| kernel at a high level? i would say very high. i don't
| have an opinion on whether they are the same person or
| not, but your logic is hilarious.
| thfuran wrote:
| Well, it is the most populous city in the world.
| jron wrote:
| There are only a handful of people in the world that can do
| this type of work and the odds of both of them being into
| live streaming and Anime is exactly 0. I have no idea why
| marcan decided to make his reversing magic unwatchable but
| I hope it stops soon. That said, he doesn't try to keep it
| a secret: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effHrj0qmwk
| https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1509926572488556546
| aulin wrote:
| look at the date
| jron wrote:
| So you actually think marcan gave Lina his streaming API
| key to pull off this April fools prank? Do you also think
| they conspired to use the same DE, editor, and tooling
| from the start to fool us all?
| aulin wrote:
| Honestly? I don't care, you're probably right but if he
| wants to keep this double personality that's cool, who
| cares
| jron wrote:
| I only care because I enjoyed watching him reverse
| engineer in his easy to understand normal unmodified
| voice.
| anakaine wrote:
| bartvk wrote:
| > when this wonderful work will be merged into the mainline
| kernel
|
| Last year, they already merged part of their work:
| https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/09/asahi_linux_merged/
|
| But I haven't seen anything since. It's the stated goal,
| though.
| OJFord wrote:
| Presumably GP means the GPU driver specifically.
|
| There's a table here that shows not only what's supported vs.
| not, but also which minimum kernel version or linux-
| asahi/asahi-edge release it's in:
| https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
| pygy_ wrote:
| Provided Linus Torvalds has been test driving it, I'd expect
| Asahi to be merged in sooner than later...
| tiahura wrote:
| If Lina is an Apple employee or otherwise has access to Apple
| trade secrets, it would be a huge issue.
|
| Merging code from an unverified source that is purportedly
| submitting a clean room implementation would be quite
| irresponsible.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Marcan has been explicit in that he knows who Lina is and has
| indicated that they have been in the same room together. This
| scenario is not a risk.
|
| Others have discussed in here the speculation around Lina's
| identity if you care about the specifics for whatever reason.
| Personally, I don't think it's particularly important.
| tiahura wrote:
| See if "Marcan said it's fine" flies with legal.
| cthalupa wrote:
| The Linux kernel doesn't allow for anonymous or
| pseudonymous contributions. It does allow for
| organizations to contribute on behalf of people working
| for or through them.
|
| If Asahi wants to submit this upstream, then they and
| Marcan can put their name to it. Hector Martin or another
| person at Asahi would be the name on the git commit, and
| they would almost certainly be taken at their word that
| there is no concern with the merge around Lina's
| identity.
|
| It's not like other commits which are done from clean
| room re-implementations are requiring a background check
| on the person submitting it.
| shmerl wrote:
| Congrats!
|
| On a side note, I wish more DEs and Wayland compositors would
| move to Vulkan.
| bla3 wrote:
| > fast enough to run all of the above at 60 frames per second at
| 4K.
|
| Does anyone know if it supports variable refresh rate? Apple's
| marketing term for it is "ProMotion", which is hard to search
| for.
| joshlk wrote:
| What's the game demonstrated in the screenshots?
| iamevn wrote:
| Looks like Quake 3 and Super Tux Kart
| tgtweak wrote:
| If there's a way to get support up to opengl 4.6 then almost all
| android and iOS apps can run natively (arm) on that setup! Very
| cool.
| Tepix wrote:
| Isn't it a shame (and waste of human life really) that everything
| has to be reverse engineered?
| StreamBright wrote:
| Yeah it is. In the 90s everything had a manual. Does anybody
| remember how good the documentation was for new hardware? I was
| looking for an example but google became garbage and I can't
| find any good example.
| jorvi wrote:
| A sheet containing all the specs, wiring, resistances etc was
| tacked to the inside of my 80s speaker set. Fun discovery
| when I revamped them!
| StreamBright wrote:
| Yep, that is exactly what I am talking about. Maybe it was
| more of a 80s thing.
| rodgerd wrote:
| I feel like this is overstating how good things were.
|
| Yes, my ZX Spectrum and Amiga both came with some very nice
| documentation to at least the block level on how everything
| worked - but at the same time, every programming manual for
| the Amiga was an expensive Addison-Wesley tome. Every
| programming language beyond BASIC was an expensive
| proprietary product. It wasn't the paradise people seem to
| (mis-)remember.
| gigatexal wrote:
| That's a super cynical way of looking at it. What I see is a
| triumph in the very hacker ethos of being able to reverse
| engineer these drivers. The team is even fixing bugs and will
| likely get better performance out of the hardware than can be
| found on MacOS when it's all said and done. And all of this is
| done without specs.
| Tepix wrote:
| What's cynical about it?
|
| Apple is benefitting from the availability of Linux on these
| devices. That they do nothing to help this effort is
| disappointing.
|
| Yes, it is a triumph in reverse engineering. I am very
| impressed. But why reward Apple despite not helping in this
| effort?
| pharmakom wrote:
| > Apple is benefitting from the availability of Linux on
| these devices.
|
| How do we know this? I think there are downsides too.
| viraptor wrote:
| Someone working on the re effort mentioned how Apple runs
| their own testing on those machines on Linux while macos
| support is being developed. I don't know where they got
| the information from. (It was posted on Twitter, but
| can't dig out the link now)
| oblio wrote:
| And those would be...? Keep in mind absolutely everything
| in life has downsides, so listing only minor things is
| for all intents and purposes, worthless.
| wanderingmind wrote:
| I would absolutely run a cloud Linux VM on M1 compared to
| any other hardware. Apple can create a PaaS that can
| rival AWS
| gigatexal wrote:
| they could ... but doing so would likely cost far too
| many billions even for Apple. Maybe they could justify it
| by saying instead of paying AWS and GCP and Azure for
| services they could just do it all in house on Apple
| hardware -- and boy howdy that'd be really cool -- I
| don't think they REALLY think that is a useful use of
| their time and resources and would rather instead focus
| on devices and services.
| sofixa wrote:
| Have you checked AWS' Graviton?
| amelius wrote:
| What's more cynical is that these hackers are helping Apple
| to eliminate the competition, and when that happens they'll
| put another layer of crypto on everything and the hackers
| and other developers have no platform left to work on
| without paying 90% Apple taxes.
| gigatexal wrote:
| What are you on about?
|
| Apple locking down their platform is their prerogative.
| If it comes to that and the Asahi team cannot continue
| their reverse-engineering efforts then they'll stop.
|
| Consider why they began in the first place. The M1 and
| their subsequent M2 and future chips are amazing. The M1
| was such a huge leap in performance per watt that it
| wow'd everyone. In fact it's a huge testament to the
| hardware team at Apple for creating such an amazing bit
| of kit that a team of Linux hackers wanted to work on
| porting Linux to it. This rebellious striving for freedom
| is refreshing and amazing. They're going to get Linux
| working on the M1/2... hardware working under Linux and
| it'll be even more performant than under MacOS. That's
| huge.
|
| But now folks are saying why Apple? Because nobody has a
| chip that rivals the M1. Why would you settle for worse
| performance? Why would you settle for build quality from
| a lesser hardware manufacturer? Qualcomm and others don't
| have chips that are as performant. They might in the
| future but by then the M3 or M4 will likely be out.
|
| Why are we punishing hackers -- in teh purest sense of
| the word -- for opening up a platform that is superior
| (hardware wise) to any of the other offerings from all
| the other deep pocketed ARM laptop/desktop manufacturers?
| Oh, right, because of tribal hate of Apple. Smh.
|
| If the other manufacturers get off their butts and pour
| billions into chip design and process and can get laptops
| out with similar or better performance characteristics
| then perhaps other teams will attempt what Asahi is
| doing, and if these same manufacturers wanted to release
| the specs or work with the upstream Linux community and
| release drivers themselves that'd be even better. Until
| then I will continue to support the Asahi team and
| champion their efforts in every ear that will hear me
| because I am just so astounded by what they've
| accomplished so far.
|
| I say all of this as a former Apple-stan. I had macbooks
| every year since college until now. That's some 15 years.
| I've since gone full time on Fedora and Thinkpads
| (currently a P14s but maybe an X1 Carbon in the future).
|
| Edit: I don't think there will be a huge wave of sales
| because of this for Apple but it will mean that i can get
| a used M1 and run my favorite distro of Linux because the
| Asahi team is working with upstream to get their changes
| up-streamed -- they're amazing like that. It really is
| how open source work thrives.
| amelius wrote:
| Apple produces consumer hardware. You can't build
| anything hardware-wise using the M1 or M2 processors.
| There are hackers and startups who love to build new
| hardware. They now see Apple buying entire supply chains
| and dominating the market. If this continues, then after
| a while these hackers will not be able to fully depend on
| technological progress because it will all be locked up.
| gigatexal wrote:
| What? None of that makes any sense.
|
| There's been no chatter about Apple buying up or hogging
| wafers. Nobody is preventing others from building ARM
| based machines. The M1 and M2 chips are proprietary to
| Apple and so be it; the Asahi folks are allowing us to
| run Linux on them at full acceleration. What's not to
| love?
| smoldesu wrote:
| > There's been no chatter about Apple buying up or
| hogging wafers.
|
| https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-
| tsm...
|
| It already happened for TSMC's first-gen 5nm node.
|
| > Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based
| machines.
|
| There is _somebody_ , namely the ARM corporation that
| Apple owns a controlling stake in. So yes, Apple does
| prevent people from doing what they please with the ISA.
|
| > What's not to love?
|
| You sound like the people preaching the Nouveau drivers
| right now. "we reverse-engineered this proprietary GPU
| and got it working at 50% speed and 3x power consumption,
| what's not to love?"
|
| Nvidia's first-party drivers are far-and-away the more
| popular (and faster, more power-efficent, more well-
| supported, etc.) option. What's "not to love" is the fact
| that we're cheering for someone doing thankless and
| redundant work that wouldn't exist if the multi-billion
| dollar corporation dedicated a couple engineers to Linux
| support. You can't even consistently control the
| brightness on these machines more than a year after
| they've launched, it's obvious that there are significant
| problems WRT reverse-engineering the hardware.
| gigatexal wrote:
| " > There's been no chatter about Apple buying up or
| hogging wafers.
| https://www.extremetech.com/computing/315186-apple-books-
| tsm... It already happened for TSMC's first-gen 5nm node.
| > Nobody is preventing others from building ARM based
| machines. There is somebody, namely the ARM corporation
| that Apple owns a controlling stake in. So yes, Apple
| does prevent people from doing what they please with the
| ISA."
|
| AMD and Nvidia and Apple are going to be buying from the
| new plant.
|
| Again show me where ARM is preventing folks from
| licensing it? It's antithetical to the whole of the
| company.
|
| Given what is possible and what's possible is what you
| can control and what you can control is what you do, so
| in that light they the Asahi devs took it upon themselves
| to reverse engineer hardware that they knew would not be
| opened. What's easier? Getting apple to make like Intel
| and have a Linux division? Haha. So they took it upon
| themselves and that effort is laudable nay it's worthy of
| lots of praise. Heaps of it.
|
| The Noveau argument is a false flag. Think where they
| could get if they could get proper firmware. And you can
| get that on the Apple side.
|
| I just don't understand what people want? Awesome smart
| folks are working to open a platform that would be
| closed. And yet they get shit on. Instead people would
| rather whine and moan or write apology pieces about
| hardware that sucks in comparison.
|
| Nobody is porting Linux to arm surface hardware because
| it sucks in comparison. Give me a 14 inch MacBook Pro
| with 32GB or ram and Asahi Linux any day of the week.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > Again show me where ARM is preventing folks from
| licensing it? It's antithetical to the whole of the
| company.
|
| ARM is a proprietary ISA. To use it, you have to pay ARM
| money. It's literally their entire business model, I'm
| not sure how you could miss it.
|
| > so in that light they the Asahi devs took it upon
| themselves to reverse engineer hardware that they knew
| would not be opened
|
| Yep. It's a damn shame too, that's what everyone is
| saying in this thread. Apple has billions of dollars and
| they're letting volunteers do their work for them. It's a
| depressing waste of human effort, considering how Apple
| has the proper implementation specs available internally.
| It's undeniable that Asahi's development pace would be
| faster if they had rudimentary help from Apple engineers.
|
| > Think where they could get if they could get proper
| firmware. And you can get that on the Apple side.
|
| That's also a false-flag since Apple's firmware interface
| is undocumented. Plus it's also fairly outdated because
| Nvidia's GPUs have been shipping with firmware interfaces
| for years (since RTX 20-series). Think where they could
| get if they had open source kernel modules. And you can
| have that, on any recent Nvidia card.
|
| > Awesome smart folks are working to open a platform that
| would be closed. And yet they get shit on.
|
| They get shit on because they're wasting their time. It's
| been 2 years and you still can't adjust the brightness on
| these machines, not because they're incapable of it but
| because Apple never documented the control interface for
| each model. Apple has this info, they just withhold it
| from the community because of how horribly sensitive it
| is. Real security issue, yunno.
|
| It's really tragic to consider all the engineering hours
| lost trying to figure out how Apple's hardware works.
| It's been 2 years since the M1 was released and it still
| doesn't have the same level of Linux support as a HP or
| Lenovo machine would have on Day-1.
|
| > I just don't understand what people want
|
| A Macbook with Linux on it? Preferably one that doesn't
| suck.
|
| > Nobody is porting Linux to arm surface hardware because
| it sucks in comparison.
|
| And nobody ported Linux to the previous Macbooks because
| they also sucked. It's entirely besides the point,
| though.
| gigatexal wrote:
| "> Again show me where ARM is preventing folks from
| licensing it? It's antithetical to the whole of the
| company. ARM is a proprietary ISA. To use it, you have to
| pay ARM money. It's literally their entire business
| model, I'm not sure how you could miss it."
|
| What did I miss? Show up, pay the license, build chips.
| That's the business model. Are you upset about how
| business models work? Are you advocating all hardware
| ISAs be open a la RISCV? That's insane. ARM's whole model
| is to make money and to do so they'd welcome licensees.
|
| "> so in that light they the Asahi devs took it upon
| themselves to reverse engineer hardware that they knew
| would not be opened
|
| Yep. It's a damn shame too, that's what everyone is
| saying in this thread. Apple has billions of dollars and
| they're letting volunteers do their work for them. It's a
| depressing waste of human effort, considering how Apple
| has the proper implementation specs available internally.
| It's undeniable that Asahi's development pace would be
| faster if they had rudimentary help from Apple
| engineers."
|
| Do you have this same take on the Homebrew project and
| its many competitors? One could make the same argument
| that Apple should run their own package manager. Why
| allow some third party project to add value to the system
| by allowing end users to be able to run open source
| software easily on Apple hardware and software? I find
| this line of reasoning nonsensical.
|
| "> Think where they could get if they could get proper
| firmware. And you can get that on the Apple side.
|
| That's also a false-flag since Apple's firmware interface
| is undocumented. Plus it's also fairly outdated because
| Nvidia's GPUs have been shipping with firmware interfaces
| for years (since RTX 20-series). Think where they could
| get if they had open source kernel modules. And you can
| have that, on any recent Nvidia card."
|
| Nvidia is finally working on first party open source-ish
| drivers. So that's a win I guess. But that's only because
| the IP owner -- Nvidia -- deemed it necessary to do so. I
| am not sure what army of Stallman-stans you command but I
| am not sure Nvidia or Apple or any other enterprise is
| going to bend to some FOSS ideal. So given that very real
| reality intrepid hackers like the Asahi folks took it
| upon themselves to reverse engineer the hardware and it
| has been a win for Linux/BSD enthusiasts the world over,
| how is this bad?
|
| "> Awesome smart folks are working to open a platform
| that would be closed. And yet they get shit on.
|
| They get shit on because they're wasting their time. It's
| been 2 years and you still can't adjust the brightness on
| these machines, not because they're incapable of it but
| because Apple never documented the control interface for
| each model. Apple has this info, they just withhold it
| from the community because of how horribly sensitive it
| is. Real security issue, yunno."
|
| Smart hackers -- again, in the truest sense of the word
| -- chose to spend their time doing this. In fact Hector
| Martin when he embarked on this asked for donations and
| plenty of folks are donating with their cash to fund this
| effort. There's clearly a market for this. It's not the
| fault of Martin or his friends in the Asahi world that
| Apple doesn't see this. And Apple may never see it. So
| what? The Asahi team will have brought the ability to run
| Linux to the M1 and increased the choice amongst Linux
| enthusiasts, it's a huge win.
|
| "> I just don't understand what people want
|
| A Macbook with Linux on it? Preferably one that doesn't
| suck."
|
| If Apple isn't going to give that to you as we just
| settled above (unless you want to buy a few board seats,
| or march on Cupterino with some sort of army...) then how
| else is that going to get accomplished if not by the
| Asahi team?
|
| "> Nobody is porting Linux to arm surface hardware
| because it sucks in comparison.
|
| And nobody ported Linux to the previous Macbooks because
| they also sucked. It's entirely besides the point,
| though."
|
| While not 100% easy people have been running Linux on x86
| Macbooks for a long time. Not sure what you're getting at
| here.
| amelius wrote:
| Come on, you have to admit that competition is lacking in
| the CPU space, and Apple being closed about everything
| isn't helping. If you want to see open, have a look at
| Microsoft Research. Apple is nowhere near that. FOSS
| people have no reason to like Apple, let alone to support
| them.
| gigatexal wrote:
| " Come on, you have to admit that competition is lacking
| in the CPU space,"
|
| Competition is lacking because Intel fucked up. Apple bet
| big on power sipping performance and it's paid off. Why
| should they "help" the industry out when they're so far
| ahead?
|
| They also have no incentive to spend billions on R&D only
| to open it up to competition. That makes no sense.
| They're not a platform like Microsoft is. MS wants an
| open platform hardware wise so they can sell more
| licenses of Windows. They're different business models.
| Surely you see that?
|
| " FOSS people have no reason to like Apple, let alone to
| support them."
|
| Of course. And nowhere was I saying "FOSS" folks to
| support them just celebrate the work of your fellow
| hackers doing the equivalent of reverse engineering some
| Empire tech for the Rebellion. Does that metaphor work
| for you?
| smoldesu wrote:
| > Competition is lacking because Intel fucked up.
|
| And now it's Apple's turn to fuck up. The M2 isn't even
| 20% faster than the M1, it's like a Skylake situation all
| over again.
|
| > Apple bet big on power sipping performance and it's
| paid off.
|
| Apple bet big on the 5nm node (bought the exclusive
| rights to use it) and it paid off. Your marketing
| copywriting doesn't mean anything if you don't back it up
| with evidence.
|
| > They're different business models. Surely you see that?
|
| They both make hardware. Shouldn't they both get held to
| the same standards, to encourage healthy competition?
| They certainly have the financial means to do it.
|
| I think your technical perspective on this situation is
| horribly maligned, you should spend more time researching
| the technologies Apple used rather than repeating the
| words from their announcement event.
| tpush wrote:
| > What's more cynical is that these hackers are helping
| Apple to eliminate the competition [...]
|
| Nonsense premise.
|
| > [...] they'll put another layer of crypto on everything
| [...]
|
| That's just unsubstantiated FUD.
| Steltek wrote:
| > > What's more cynical is that these hackers are helping
| Apple to eliminate the competition [...]
|
| > Nonsense premise.
|
| Take Brew and any container runtime away from all
| developer's laptops. See how useful they are for
| development when compared to the more open competition.
| dihrbtk wrote:
| This is completely nonsensical. Take away your linux
| package manager and compiler and you'll get no work done
| either!
| smoldesu wrote:
| My package manager and compiler are part of my OS. Brew
| and container runtimes are not part of MacOS.
| Steltek wrote:
| Err, the premise is that Linux tech and effort is
| improving the appeal of Apple products, which hurts the
| more open, Linux-friendly competition. Look at the rest
| of this thread comparing MacBooks to other options. My
| point is that a MacBook without the free work by these
| hackers/tech would be a paperweight for development and
| the Linux-friendly options would get more business. Your
| retort of "take Linux tech away from Linux" doesn't make
| any sense.
|
| Apple is entirely comfortable with using crypto to lock
| down its platforms when the competition is dead and users
| are left with no other choice.
| amelius wrote:
| > That's just unsubstantiated FUD.
|
| It's hypothetical. The problem is that the reverse
| argument is also unsubstantiated.
| ekianjo wrote:
| They could spend their valuable time somewhere else instead
| or reinventing the wheel
| kelnos wrote:
| I don't think the grandparent is saying that people are
| wasting their time; they're saying that it's a shame that
| they even _have_ to do this, and that public hardware
| documentation isn 't the norm.
| vaughan wrote:
| Reverse engineering can be a fun adventure.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| I'm guessing the number of people who just want to use the
| hardware massively outweighs the number of people who want to
| reverse engineer it
|
| Even if the software were completely open source from day 0,
| a reverse engineer could still not look at the source and RE
| the hardware.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| Not really. Wouldn't it be a shame if nothing could be released
| without thorough documentation, to avoid the need for someone,
| sometime, to maybe have to reverse engineer it?
| ChrisRR wrote:
| Welcome to medical software and ISO 62304 compliance
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| That is not really how opposites work.
|
| The opposite of "none" is "some" not "thorough".
| arjvik wrote:
| I don't think OP is saying that all hardware must have
| thorough documentation before it can legally be released.
| Instead, they're claiming Apple already has _some_
| documentation internally, and it costs them nothing to
| release it.
| chippiewill wrote:
| They should do it, but I doubt it would cost them nothing.
| That internal documentation is almost certainly not fit for
| external consumption and would need to be reviewed and
| rewritten in places.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Apple is a company with ~$200 billion in liquid cash. If
| they can't spend $20,000 reworking some spec sheets for
| the community, what the hell are we paying them for?
| thfuran wrote:
| FOSS is like the exact opposite of apple. Anyone who has
| been paying Apple with the expectation that they're
| suddenly going to play well with others instead of
| locking everything down as much as they can is
| delusional.
| oblio wrote:
| > They should do it, but I doubt it would cost them
| nothing.
|
| Let's be real here, they just don't want to do it.
|
| The cost of the documentation review would be peanuts.
|
| Apple has just broken capitalism, they're probably 5
| years away from rivaling Saudi Aramco in profits:
|
| https://companiesmarketcap.com/most-profitable-companies/
|
| Financial excuses for Apple strategy decisions don't
| really hold up to scrutiny ;-)
| alfonsodev wrote:
| You have to consider the opportunity cost, probably those
| people engineering time is better placed on M3 gpu
| drivers. It takes really excepcional and kind people to
| achieve what they did AND prepare public documentation
| along the way for the profit of open source community. It
| sometimes happens, and we have to celebrate that more,
| but it's not the normal.
| oblio wrote:
| Or, you know, they could hire good technical writers for
| a fraction of the cost and have them work together with
| developers, just like other companies do?
|
| Devs would have to write just the hairiest parts.
| alfonsodev wrote:
| yep that sounds reasonable, no idea why Apple doesn't do
| that, my wild guess is that there aren't enough technical
| writers that can understand low level code, or just a
| company/team culture that doesn't value it.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| You speak so blithely, I can see you've never gone
| through an Apple documentation review...
| djaychela wrote:
| Perhaps, but releasing it even in an unfinished state
| would massively reduce the duplication-of-effort which is
| needed for reverse engineering. There are often clues
| which would take a long time to find when working blind
| which you can glean even from a few sentences of concrete
| inside knowledge.
| kilburn wrote:
| Honest question because I'm totally ignorant here: can
| anyone shed some light on the typical roadblocks for
| large corporations to release documentation like this
| one, other than "it's just easier not to do it"?
| xenadu02 wrote:
| Once documented anything becomes public API that
| customers will expect to work forever with no regressions
| no matter how many caveats and warnings you put on it.
| rodgerd wrote:
| This is always going to be the biggest barrier, even if
| there were no concerns around e.g. third-party IP,
| sanitisation, etc. Apple don't want to end up implicitly
| committing to supporting every element of the current M1
| hardware forever.
| johncoltrane wrote:
| Not being required to do it sounds like a good enough
| reason for not doing something. Large corporation or not.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| a) commercial in confidence, and b) non-disclosure
| agreements with partners.
|
| Internateral documentation may also need business /
| developer processes sanitised.
| happymellon wrote:
| Its one thing to write for your team
|
| > This is a huge clusterfuck that requires A to be set
| before you can use B because of no good reason. :poo:
|
| And another to publicly publish that an API is a turd
| because you outsourced it for time to market reasons.
| iamgopal wrote:
| Lot of surface for security and legal attack.
| smallnix wrote:
| References to internal concepts (acronyms), Hyperlinks to
| internal knowledge bases, insight into individual
| contributers & team / org composition and mention of
| undisclosed efforts / strategy. And undisclosed failures
| on whatever level that stakeholders maybe should not see.
| pixiemagic wrote:
| I think a big part of it would broadly fall under "legal
| and privacy concerns", especially since Apple Silicon is
| proprietary hardware. They need to work out which details
| about the hardware they might want to keep secret, and
| make sure the public documentation only contains things
| they're happy to share to the public. They then need to
| make sure it's up to their standards for externally
| published documents, it probably has to go through a
| review process, be published under a certain license
| which needs to be written or selected, and so on and so
| on.
| mvonballmo wrote:
| Documentation for internal consumption often makes
| assumptions that no longer hold outside of the company.
| It might reference internal machines or drives that will
| not be available. It might take shortcuts that will be
| confusing enough that it will be worse than having no
| documentation at all. It might just be a few bullet
| points that refer to asking the right person internally.
|
| If you've ever taken over a department at a company, and
| inherited the documentation, you've experienced this.
| It's sometimes better to just reverse-engineer the
| current state of things than to try to use outdated or
| misleading or very sparse documentation. Documenting the
| current state cleanly takes time, effort, and capability.
| It's an ongoing effort that requires budget and capacity.
|
| And, most of all, it requires that the company see the
| need of having a good knowledge base, despite such a
| thing being a short-term cost that only pays out in the
| long term, and then, in ways that you won't be able to
| ascribe to one department's budget or another. Corporate
| structures can get in the way of cross-cutting/long-term
| benefits.
| darthrupert wrote:
| A pretty big guess that it wouldn't cost them anything. The
| process of it all plus the secrets their competition could
| easily learn must both be quite valuable.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| ...No, that sounds wonderful. I want to move to that reality.
| christophilus wrote:
| Or you could just open source it.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| I don't want to put down their achievements but I somewhat
| agree with you. And doing free work for a corporation the size
| of apple that could've just supported Linux from the start. I
| don't think it's a waste of life necessarily, but it is a
| shame.
| sounds wrote:
| How would Apple corporate priorities shift from their current
| strategy of removing all GPL code?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990
| smoldesu wrote:
| I dunno, put their money where their mouth is and license
| it as BSD instead? They seem awfully fond of the license,
| what with how much BSD code appears in MacOS...
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Their work is phenomenal but I also kind of wish we would all
| stop supporting such a company.
| _visgean wrote:
| the people working on asahi seems to have a lot of fun, i am
| really envious of the work they are doing!
| uluyol wrote:
| > Through Mesa and Gallium3D, we benefit from thirty years of
| OpenGL driver development, with common code translating OpenGL
| into the much simpler Gallium3D. Thanks to the incredible
| engineering of NIR, Mesa, and Gallium3D, our ragtag team of
| reverse-engineers can focus on what's left: the Apple hardware.
|
| The Linux graphics folks have really achieved something.
| pxc wrote:
| In the case of AMD, the Gallium-based open-source OpenGL
| drivers also manage to compete very well with AMD's proprietary
| OpenGL drivers, both in terms of performance and features,
| despite the fact that the proprietary drivers are much more
| mature. See: https://www.phoronix.com/review/radeon-
| spvp2020-linux
|
| There's even a working Direct3D 9 driver based on Gallium3D.
| With an appropriately patched WINE, you can use it to run old
| Windows games quite nicely even on integrated graphics or with
| low core count CPUs. Here's some reporting:
| https://www.phoronix.com/news/Gallium-Nine-Better-2021
|
| I hope that with NVIDIA's new open-source kernel drivers, now
| Nouveau can push forward and get good performance like the
| Mesa's open-source drivers for AMD. That'd be awesome, and it
| could pave the way for mainlining NVIDIA's new kernel driver.
| oblio wrote:
| I remember reading about David Miller, I think, porting Linux
| to SPARC.
|
| That was an amazing feat, this is also very impressive.
|
| I think at some point Linux was as good as Solaris, if not
| better, on SPARC systems.
|
| I really wish this were true at some point for Apple hardware.
| wolf550e wrote:
| You're not telling the most important part of that story:
| https://archive.is/KgAYd
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_S._Miller
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Cantrill
| oblio wrote:
| I didn't want to be a jerk to Dave.
|
| These days I think even Cantrill regrets being a jerk back
| then.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| > I think at some point Linux was as good as Solaris, if not
| better, on SPARC systems.
|
| That's a bit of a stretch. In fact, the last time I was in an
| air traffic control tower, it was Solaris, not Linux, in
| active use by the controllers themselves.
| hedora wrote:
| Ignoring the air traffic thing, I agree it's a stretch.
|
| Back when Sun was still in business, Linux's SMP support
| was still in its infancy, futexes were not a thing, and the
| pthreads documentation was nonexistent.
|
| On top of that, fsync was actually broken on ext2/3. Also,
| there was a single kernel level lock per file, so you
| couldn't have two CPUs seeking in the same file at the same
| time (oracle recommended using a block device instead of a
| filesystem, and provided a list of changes to the kernel
| source you needed to make manually if you wanted Oracle on
| Linux to be supported.)
|
| None of this mattered of course, but the Linux kernel
| certainly wasn't "better" than Solaris back then.
| Steltek wrote:
| Anything touched by the FAA wasn't considered on technical
| merit, it was pure inertia and being terrified of any
| change, no matter how warranted. C.f. leaded gas for
| general aviation.
| coldtea wrote:
| That would 100% be based on how those systems were acquired
| and where they were tested and delivered originally (e.g.
| through a tender and some Sun or Oracle support deal), not
| whether Linux is better than Solaris on that hardware on
| some particular metric, and even less so if 2022 Linux is
| better than Solaris on that hardware.
|
| It would also have to go through many series of bureucracy,
| compliance requirements, and such to be installed in the
| first place. Even a point update to the next Solaris
| version could be a year long process, complete with several
| staging systems and so on.
|
| Last but not least, it would 100% be tied to the ATC
| software run there, and under what OS it was developed and
| tested (which, if it was pre-2000, would more likely be
| some commercial UNIX like Solaris, considered - and being -
| more mature and supported for such use then).
|
| An airport management wont just go and reinstall some
| mission critical software they got through a specific
| contract deal. And ATC software wont be just some GitHub
| repo you recompile and build for Linux.
|
| But that's almost totally unrelated to how well Solaris vs
| Linux runs on the machine.
| RustyRussell wrote:
| At USENIX in 1997 I went to a talk by a young David S
| Miller and Miguel de Icaza on porting Linux to the
| Ultrasparc. That talk (regretfully unrecorded) more than
| anything else convinced me that I had to work on Linux.
|
| Throughout the talk they showed Linux vs Solaris
| performance, and talked about their optimizations. It was
| lmbench (Larry McVoy the author was ex-Sun, which adds
| something) that, and by the end they beat Solaris on every
| result.
|
| Obviously this was impressive, but it's hard for me to
| clearly express how much this shook my assumptions about
| how to build good software. A bunch of students shouldn't
| have been able to beat Sun _on their own hardware_ in
| _anything_!
| prirun wrote:
| Even if it was running on Linux, it would probably be some
| ancient version of Linux that past gobs of certifications
| at some point. There likely wouldn't be any OS upgrade
| until another lengthy certification was done, ie, never.
| zaarn wrote:
| I don't think someone being stuck with Solaris for unknown
| reasons is sufficient to declare that Solaris is better or
| equal to Linux. For the ATC, it could simply be a matter of
| "The application we run only support Solaris"
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| It's aviation. Even if there was a superior solution and
| it was readily available, it would take decades to get
| through certifications and before it became widely
| accepted or even the new default. See GPS vs radio
| navigation or just analog radio communications.
| zaarn wrote:
| Yeah that would be on top of it all. For the ATC to use
| Linux on something, there would have to be a competing
| application that runs on Linux, which has to be certified
| and then migrated towards. That could take a decade or
| two.
| wongarsu wrote:
| See also this whole radio-altimeters vs 5G debacle that
| wouldn't have happened if radio altimeters used a
| reasonably modern design.
| windexh8er wrote:
| You're probably right. I worked for Lockheed in a facility
| that was ATC and MS2. I was on the MS2 side, but our
| program was ATC for NATO countries (war and peacetime
| operations).
|
| All of the ATC applications were built on Solaris running
| SPARC. Most of the developers were familiar with Linux at
| the time, this was back in the early 2000s. But even then
| many of the devs wanted to migrate the platform to Linux
| for a number of reasons. The cost and time, however, for
| acceptance testing on Linux would have eaten the budget
| alive.
|
| So instead pieces and parts that were readily accessible in
| Linux were ported to SPARC. I remember getting a new
| requirement for GPS time (previously the system had only
| used Rubidium oscillators) and working with one of the devs
| on getting OTS hardware working with the ported code. The
| further along the program went and newer features were
| added to the scope the more this happened. But everything
| in the UI was based on CDE and some SPARC specific
| libraries for the UI. The HMI was written in ADA.
|
| Since these systems have so many requirements just swapping
| out the OS would be a major overhaul and I'm not actually
| sure that Linux would even be the right choice.
| olakease wrote:
| Is anyone using this as a daily driver? If this is your case,
| what is your experience? I'm a linux user looking for a new
| laptop. My preference would be a thinkpad but the Apple machine
| looks way superior. Migrating to Apple OS is a no go for me. My
| mainly use will be internet browsing, js development with vim +
| running docker containers.
| trustingtrust wrote:
| In another year or two you'll be able to buy an M1 Air refurb
| on eBay for maybe 400$ and once this thing is stable, that
| would probably the best bang for your buck Linux laptop you can
| buy.
| culopatin wrote:
| You can already find some people selling 2020MBAs on fb
| marketplace for 400-500
| zamadatix wrote:
| I work at a network VAR and use it regularly though not
| exclusively. The big remaining limitation at the moment is the
| speakers are still disabled while the Asahi team works on
| volume safety. Other than that it's reasonably stable for non
| critical use but not something to be relied upon to work right
| by any means. I'd say give it another year unless "I want to
| get it to tinker" is higher on the list of reasons for getting
| a laptop than "I want to do work". If you need a laptop sooner
| than that one of the commonly recommended x86 laptops
| recommended by HN'ers would probably be the way to go.
| pwpw wrote:
| I vastly prefer my Thinkpad X1 Nano to my work MacBook Pro. I
| pair it with a desktop, so keep that in mind...
|
| The nano is very, very lightweight, which makes it an amazing
| portable device for packing up and carrying around. The display
| is matte, which reduces glare when working outside. The
| keyboard feels significantly better to type on. This is the
| biggest pro for me. The camera has a privacy shutter, which
| gives me a greater peace of mind. And of course, it works well
| with Fedora Linux. I also optioned mine to have a 5G modem,
| which is convenient, although I rarely use it due to costly
| data plans. I have only managed to get the modem to work on the
| Windows side, but I'm optimistic it will have better Linux
| support one day.
|
| The MacBook Pro is an impressive piece of hardware. The M1 chip
| is powerful, the battery life is amazing, and the build quality
| is high. However, I find it to be a much better experience
| exclusively using it at home docked in my setup due to its
| weight and glossy screen. At home, I can use my own mechanical
| keyboard when it's docked to get around its mediocre keyboard.
| At that point, I'd rather just use my desktop. But if you're
| only getting one device and are fine with MacOS, it is a good
| option. I prefer the more flexible desktop + lightweight laptop
| setup personally.
|
| A minor thing I'll note in favor of Apple is that the MacBook
| Pro is capable of driving my nicer Sennheiser headphones with
| ease. It's something most people wouldn't care about, but Apple
| excels in the audio department and deserves praise.
| olakease wrote:
| How many hours of battery you can get from the X1?
| pwpw wrote:
| I've honestly never measured it, but it lasts me most of
| the day (e.g. ~8 hours) with the i5 chip I optioned it with
| last year. I wouldn't classify battery life as a strength,
| but I wouldn't classify it as a weakness either. On a
| normal day, I'm never worried about the battery dying. If
| you want more battery, the bigger sized X1 offers more than
| the Nano.
|
| My normal workflow consists of Firefox playing music on
| YouTube, VS Code, and the terminal.
| capableweb wrote:
| About 20 days ago I asked the same question ("How ready for
| daily driving is Asahi Linux?") as a Ask HN, resulting in ~100
| comments about it.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33607994
|
| Conclusion seems: depends on how ready you are to live with the
| various drawbacks. Personally, I wasn't, but I'm hopeful the
| day will come soon as I like Apple hardware in general, but
| can't stand Apple software.
| loeg wrote:
| Functional GPU drivers were a big missing piece! Even if they
| just do 2d bit-blitting for the desktop (and they seem much
| more functional than that), it saves the CPU a ton of work.
| [deleted]
| sva_ wrote:
| Apple Hardware is starting to look attractive to me, as a diehard
| Linux user. But not sure if I'd want to do this to myself at this
| stage of development.
| javchz wrote:
| I will say do it if your confortable with something like arch
| or Gentoo but with less documentation on what to do when
| something goes wrong. Right now it's a little bit raw, don't
| take me wrong the progress so far it's amazing, but the task
| itself it's gigantic too
| sva_ wrote:
| Yeah I use arch (btw), I'd just be worried that I would run
| into stability issues more frequently while having to be
| productive on stuff. Being a tester can be frustrating at
| times.
| nightski wrote:
| It's really sad you have to resort to reverse engineered drivers
| which will always be behind because Apple won't support Linux
| officially. You'd think the most profitable company in the world
| could do better. Really sad.
|
| Not to dismiss these efforts, incredible engineering. But I won't
| buy Apple hardware unless Apple officially supports Linux. I
| honestly don't know why they wouldn't. More developers using
| their hardware is a good thing imho.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| It's sad you think this work is "half-baked."
|
| The reality is Apple will probably never release drivers for
| Linux or Windows (the latter of which ever again).
|
| This work is the premier effort in its space and the reverse
| engineering skills required to accomplish it are exceptionally
| uncommon.
|
| I doubt you could hire for this type of position remotely
| easily if you wanted to find the skillset for a corporate
| environment.
| nightski wrote:
| I wasn't trying to down play the engineering. It's going to
| be half baked because the developers don't have access to
| hardware documentation. When the next Apple chip comes out,
| it's back to square one. It's entirely Apple's fault.
|
| Plus while they may be able to achieve good results, we'll
| never know if they took full advantage of the hardware or
| realized it to the full potential. Because it's proprietary.
| povik wrote:
| > When the next Apple chip comes out, it's back to square
| one. It's entirely Apple's fault.
|
| That's simply not true.
|
| Source: wrote a couple of drivers for M1 (now upstreamed in
| mainline Linux) that work _without a single change_ on M1
| Pro and M2
| SpaghettiX wrote:
| Could this pave the way to being able to use Mac GPUs in Docker
| (Linux VM), running on macOS?
| jolexxa wrote:
| Wow, that's really exciting. I'm looking forward to having the
| option to run linux. I've been eyeing elementaryOS for years, but
| it will be hard to leave some macOS-only apps behind.
| aliqot wrote:
| Congrats! There's not a whole lot left, is there? Audio via the
| speakers I think was the last one I was concerned about. Maybe
| brightness?
| dottedmag wrote:
| USB4, Thunderbolt, audio over Thunderbolt, DisplayPort,
| TouchID. I'm not sure mike and camera work.
|
| Also various accelerators: video decoder, video encoder, neural
| engine.
|
| Unless I'm mistaken all of it is in progress, but not yet
| ready.
| wtallis wrote:
| > audio over Thunderbolt
|
| I'm not sure why this rates a separate mention, or even what
| exactly you're referring to with this one. Did you mean audio
| over DisplayPort or HDMI? I don't think there's any standard
| for audio over Thunderbolt like there is for audio over USB,
| and if there was then it would automatically start working
| when Thunderbolt itself is supported.
| dottedmag wrote:
| Yes, I mixed it up, sorry.
| [deleted]
| OJFord wrote:
| https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
| urthor wrote:
| A very, very, very, long list of features.
|
| There's actually a humongous list of peripherals, power states,
| and the speakers which don't work at all, to support.
| worldsavior wrote:
| The important parts are working.
| bipson wrote:
| There might be different definitions of "important stuff"
| between you and others...
| worldsavior wrote:
| The base components are working, thats what I meant.
| toomim wrote:
| That definition still varies between you and others. I
| personally consider sleep to be a "base component."
| worldsavior wrote:
| Base is a component that's needed to the other
| components, such as the GPU, or a driver for the screen,
| and similar. A sleep function isn't a base component,
| since it's rather a feature.
| blackMysticCat wrote:
| Brightness is working already, as well as suspend. But there is
| a _lot_ of stuff to work out
| OJFord wrote:
| Only on M1 devices, excluding the Mini & Studio:
| https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
| fulafel wrote:
| Deep sleep, currently they have a s2idle state that eats a bit
| too much battery.
| toomim wrote:
| This is a big one -- when you close the lid on your laptop,
| the laptop stays on. When you open the lid again, the battery
| will be drained, because it stayed on the entire time.
| dottedmag wrote:
| Display controller stays on. It's battery-hungry. This
| should change, now that DCP driver is available.
|
| s2idle will be pretty resource-light once all peripherals
| can be put into sleep. CPU by itself is not consuming that
| much power when idle.
| weberer wrote:
| Unfortunately, that's also a problem with like 90% of new
| computers out there.
| jdwithit wrote:
| This has been a problem as long as laptops have existed.
| I had a Dell in like 2006 that I would close and throw in
| my backpack at the end of the day. When I got home there
| was a 50:50 chance it would be about 5000 degrees with
| the fans blasting because it never actually went to
| sleep.
|
| The fact that this still routinely happens 15 years later
| despite the insane progress of technology is kind of
| hilarious.
| Kuinox wrote:
| This is a widespread recent problem due to Intel pushing
| for S2 sleep.
| m_eiman wrote:
| The remaining 10% are the mac, I suppose? It's one of the
| better things about macs, and has been working mostly
| flawlessly for at least 15 years, strange that the other
| platforms still struggle with it.
| weberer wrote:
| There are a few non-Mac vendors that still support S3
| sleep mode. I think Thinkpads still work. The problem is
| that it requires vendors to support it in the BIOS.
| Windows no longer supports S3 sleep mode, so vendors
| aren't willing to add that feature just for Linux users.
|
| Previous discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33846437
| sofixa wrote:
| For what it's worth, my MBP is also a coin toss if it
| manages to get to sleep or not. Oftentimes even if i
| explicitly click Apple -> Sleep it just flashes and stays
| awake.
| happymellon wrote:
| My 2019 Intel Mac Pro is really flakey about actually
| going to sleep when I close the lid. It seems to require
| me to reset the PRAM occationally to get it to work
| again.
|
| I'm glad they moved to their own chips because these
| Intel Macs are the worst hardware I have ever owned.
|
| My Thinkpad works fine under Linux, I didnt need to do
| anything to get great battery life and perfect sleep.
| fulafel wrote:
| Depends on how low your battery was. Here's a quote from
| their november update:
|
| "CPU frequency scaling, device runtime PM (for select
| devices), hardware auto-PM... even prior to this release,
| users could already get 10+ hours of idle runtime. With DCP
| and proper display DPMS, that now goes as high as 30+ hours
| (powered on, screen off)!"
|
| [...]
|
| "While s2idle does work, it's in its infancy and we haven't
| debugged all driver issues yet. Here's what works:
| NVMe is shutdown WiFi goes into S3 mode
| Display (DCP) goes into DPMS (backlight & screen fully off)
| DARTs power gate & restore state on resume CPUs
| stay in shallow idle Some misc devices
| (i2c/spi/etc) power off Wakeup via power button or
| lid open
|
| "
|
| So they report 30 hours of battery life with display off
| (not sure if it was in s2idle or just normal screen off
| operation). So if you close the lid overnight, it should
| eat <30% of the battery.
| phkahler wrote:
| I wonder if it can run Solvespace (CAD). It's fairly simple but
| IIRC requires ES 3 or similar. I'm kind of embarrassed not
| knowing our GL requirement myself ;-)
| dancemethis wrote:
| It should be ready to be Fandaniel Linux now.
| koeng wrote:
| Does this enable Mac mini dual screen on Linux? Really been
| looking for that before switching!
| dottedmag wrote:
| GPU and display controller are two different pieces of hardware
| on M1 (and on most of computers out there except PCs), so GPU
| driver won't change anything.
| Grazester wrote:
| Most "computers" out there are PC's!
| ask_b123 wrote:
| Aren't M1s PCs too? I wonder why Macs are often not counted
| as Personal Computers.
| bobmaxup wrote:
| > The designation "PC", as used in much of personal
| computer history, has not meant "personal computer"
| generally, but rather an x86 computer capable of running
| the same software that a contemporary IBM PC could. The
| term was initially in contrast to the variety of home
| computer systems available in the early 1980s, such as
| the Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore 64. Later, the term
| was primarily used in contrast to Apple's Macintosh
| computers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible
| dottedmag wrote:
| There are more mobile phones alone than PCs, and phones are
| computers with screens.
| [deleted]
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| jasoneckert wrote:
| Asahi has been my daily driver since April
| (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/asahi-linux/).
|
| I watched the hardware support evolve with each major update and
| remember when the first builds of specific software (e.g.,
| Chromium and VSCode) that supported the 16K page size were first
| available.
|
| The last few months were incredibly interesting to watch -
| especially the live coding sessions. And throughout the whole
| time, Asahi was rock solid as a daily driver. I find it a stellar
| example of the power of open source and the people in the
| community that drive it.
| humanistbot wrote:
| > And throughout the whole time, Asahi was rock solid as a
| daily driver.
|
| I'm also in awe and respect for the Asahi team, but please
| don't overstate things just to celebrate their work. Even
| according to your own posts, there are huge dealbreakers like
| sound or external HDMI.
|
| I bought an M1 based on HN posts like this, because I need
| linux and not OS X. I soon returned it when I realized how it
| could not come close to being my daily driver.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Lol, the limitations of Asahi are described very clearly on
| their site. It's your own fault if you spent $2000 on a
| computer based on random HN comments about an open source
| driver that's still in it's alpha release.
| sophacles wrote:
| > there are huge dealbreakers like sound or external HDMI
|
| I wouldn't need those, nor know they were broken if I had an
| M1. Sounds like the functionality I would need for a daily
| driver is there and solid though. Of course I'm capable of
| looking at lists of working features and roadmaps and
| deciding if something fits my use case independently of vague
| "pro" and "con" reviews on random discussion sites.
| eulers_secret wrote:
| HN is crazy bullish about some things and it can be easy to
| get hyped (I'm hyped for M1, but only use FOSS).
|
| I came to this thread looking for exactly what you posted.
| Sure, I could check the site but I expect limitations to be
| discussed as well.
| pxc wrote:
| To be fair, 'rock solid' just means stable, not necessarily
| complete.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Donate.
|
| As a reminder, especially during this holiday season - to donate
| to your favorite OSS project.
|
| https://asahilinux.org/support/
| neonsunset wrote:
| nickip wrote:
| What do have they done thats toxic? Total outsider to Asahi
| btw.
| [deleted]
| nortonham wrote:
| what echo chamber, and what toxicity are you referring too
| rodgerd wrote:
| From the code of conduct:
|
| [...] Be kind to others. Do not insult or put down other
| participants [do not make] Personal insults, especially
| those using racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory
| terms [do not] Deliberately referring to others by names or
| pronouns counter to their identity.
|
| The "echo chamber" of "not being shitheads to people".
| Seems like a pretty neat echo chamber to me. I guess the
| parent poster finds it impossible to interact with others
| unless they can use slurs, threats, or what have you.
| neonsunset wrote:
| Surely the actual conduct of community always is the same
| as stated code of conduct, especially outside of one :^)
|
| Also a nice jump to conclusion (and an ad hominem
| attack), you already know which ideological line you are
| pushing, regardless if it runs contrary to what takes
| place in actuality.
| yewenjie wrote:
| Whenever there is an Asahi thread on HN, I like to ask people who
| are daily driving it - how is your experience?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| i've been daily driving Asahi on M2 for months and it's
| awesome, but not all drivers are done, sound in particular and
| sleep modes seem not complete. neither matter to me personally
| for daily driving.
| yewenjie wrote:
| How is the battery-life? Is it comparable to MacOS? What kind
| of issues about sound and in general are the most annoying
| from the end-user perspective?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| it's long, but not as long as if the drivers were further
| along for the screen brightness and processor/os sleep
| states, I think.
|
| I can work many many hours not plugged in. I'd not measured
| how long.
| _joel wrote:
| How's M2 looking? Noticed this in release notes from a few months
| back
|
| > Only the M2 MacBook Pro 13" is tested. We've added completely
| untested M2 MacBook Air support (because we can), but none of us
| have one yet! If you do, only try it if you're feeling very
| adventurous (and don't blame us if things go wrong).
|
| I think it's time to give it a go on my M2 air :)
| abujazar wrote:
| Given this feat, it's quite incredible that Nvidia is incapable
| of shipping stable Linux drivers for the RTX 30xx series.
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