[HN Gopher] OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux
___________________________________________________________________
OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux
Author : simjue
Score : 387 points
Date : 2023-06-06 13:46 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (asahilinux.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (asahilinux.org)
| DCKing wrote:
| I wonder if the new Mac Pro's full PCI Express support resolves
| any limitations that prevents people from using GPUs over
| Thunderbolt on existing Apple Silicon hardware (this is
| apparently a hardware limitation).
|
| Although the Mac Pro's PCIe extensibility makes it a pretty
| mystifying niche product from Apple without providing memory and
| GPU expandability, once Asahi Linux gets running on there you
| should be able to not get the full abilities of the latest Vulkan
| and full OpenGL 4.6 by putting in a recent AMD card. The open
| source Radeon drivers should "just work" on ARM as they do in the
| Talos II POWER-based workstation, if they can be stably
| initialized that is. Heck, Nvidia publishes a binary Linux
| aarch64 driver and they sound petty enough with Apple to try to
| make that work.
|
| You could have Asahi Linux running and delegate any not-yet-
| supported hardware to the 7 PCIe devices it supports. Would be
| quite a mighty ARM Linux workstation. Again though - only if
| Apple has the PCI Express support for it.
| stirlo wrote:
| @Marcan shared some technical details around their PCI Express
| implementation recently here:
| https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110494017883893557
|
| It seems they didn't make any massive changes and instead just
| put switches on the existing PCI-E Lanes. That probably doesn't
| bode well for full GPU support :(
| endorphine wrote:
| Kinda irrelevant but Asahi is the topic on HN that gets me
| excited the most. Can't wait to have such a great hardware for my
| daily driver.
|
| -- a happy ThinkPad Debian user
| fsiefken wrote:
| When Vulkan drivers are ready maybe the Asahi Linux perhaps also
| be ready to run some SteamVR apps
| https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamVR-for-Linux/blob/mast...
| pkulak wrote:
| I'm surprised that Vulkan wasn't the target, which could then
| have something like Zink layered on top for OpenGL.
| lonjil wrote:
| Zink requires a fairly advanced Vulkan driver, with many
| complex optional extensions. A basic Vulkan driver wouldn't
| cut it. So getting basic OpenGL working is much less work,
| especially since they can share a lot of work with Mesa's
| existing OpenGL drivers.
| kirbyfan64sos wrote:
| This gets mentioned basically every time. The gist is that:
|
| - OpenGL is a much easier target to support, in terms of
| having a functional desktop. Remember, hardware-accelerated
| apps have been runnable on Asahi for _months_ now, while
| Vulkan support is still a while away. - Most of the work
| being done is common to OpenGL _and_ Vulkan, so it 's not
| exactly a ton of wasted effort.
| tormeh wrote:
| Sorry, but what's the point? Why not just buy a Linux laptop and
| have everything work out of the box? Why are Linux enthusiasts
| putting so much effort into supporting hardware from companies
| that - at best - ignore Linux? This question is also valid for
| other manufacturers, btw, not just Apple. So much time wasted
| doing free labor for hardware companies that will just break your
| stuff with the next hardware iteration.
| sliken wrote:
| Apple makes good hardware and makes good engineering decisions.
| Sure other laptop makers have low end and high end options. But
| frustratingly often match apple on 50-75% of the features. Sure
| some have nice still aluminum bodies. Some have screens that
| match or beat apple's. Some have nice centered quality
| touchpads and keyboards. Some have great battery life. Some
| have great performance.
|
| Very few match on all aspects. I'd tried a few and always had
| one terrible issue. Terrible battery life, lousy screen, and/or
| terrible touchpad. Apple does seem willing to make improvements
| without as much worry about backward compatibility. There are a
| few that match on everything I care about, but often cost more
| than the Apple.
|
| People like to complain and mention byzantine purchase methods.
| Wait for a lenovo sale, buy the bare bones model, apply the
| discount code, then buy dimms and SSDs from random bargain
| basement sellers. Oh and buy the linux compatible wifi card and
| do surgery on your laptop to get wifi working after suspend.
|
| MBA is pretty compelling mix of performance, size, cost, and
| battery life. Unlike any x86-64 laptop, you can pay $500 more
| or so and get double the memory bandwidth. Or another $500+ and
| double it again. Definitely makes the macs better any PC at
| some workloads. Sure some x86-64 with a nice discrete GPU is
| way faster ... when plugged in to wall power.
| paddim8 wrote:
| The point? There are no other ARM laptops that are even close
| to being competitive right now. I want a good fanless laptop.
| My only choice is Apple. Asahi made it possible and I now have
| a great experience. What's the problem?
| [deleted]
| solarkraft wrote:
| What Linux laptop has comparable hardware?
| sbuk wrote:
| With that attitude, Linux and its ecosystem wouldn't exist. But
| to answer your question; because they can and are having fun
| doing so.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Why not just buy a Linux laptop and have everything work out
| of the box?
|
| Because these things are rare as gold in the first place as
| being Linux ready isn't a focus for most OEMs, sometimes
| _severely_ lag behind the competition in feature support (e.g.
| limited to UVC webcams with crap quality), have serious
| availability issues (Framework), you have a tough time getting
| service or spare parts, or barely any resale value, or limited
| choices in screens (which is the one and only thing keeping me
| from a Framework - who the fuck wants a 3:2 screen?). Also,
| tough luck getting firmware updates for embedded components.
|
| Apple devices, spare parts and repair centers, in contrast, are
| widely available across the world (okay, maybe not in places
| sanctioned by the US), firmware updates come around when needed
| and hold their resale value for _years_.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| For me, the Macbook Pro 14 with a 10-core M1 Pro I am typing on
| has my favorite keyboard and trackpad I've ever used on a
| laptop (2nd place was the 2013 MBP and this feels the same). It
| has the best display I've ever set eyes on.
|
| The battery life is the best of any laptop I have ever used by
| far.
|
| And the performance for number crunching is as high as any x86
| machine I had previously and per watt it blows everything out
| of the water. And it is dead silent while doing so, whereas
| every x86 'work' powered laptop I ever used would wind up
| sounding like a jet engine with my workloads.
|
| So for someone who runs linux.. if they want to run it on
| hardware that is this nice (to me at least)... this is it. This
| is worth it. It's worth developing for.
|
| Also, Apple is going to stick with the M-series SOC's for a
| long time now that they have switched. And they tend to keep
| hardware interfaces for a long time too. So the development of
| Asahi now will bear fruit for... at least the next decade I'd
| say.
|
| I still use OSX for daily activities, but the kernel Asahi is
| developing may be my plan to stretch this 2021 M1 MBP 14 out
| hopefully to the year 2030, as MacOS moves on. My 2013 intel i7
| Macbook Pro made it to 2021... 8 years of daily use and world
| travel. I was beyond the moon with that product performance and
| I'm expecting similar from these new macbooks based on my
| current 1.5 years of use.
| lonjil wrote:
| > Why not just buy a Linux laptop and have everything work out
| of the box? Why are Linux enthusiasts putting so much effort
| into supporting hardware from companies that - at best - ignore
| Linux?
|
| Almost all laptops sold with Linux pre-installed or with
| support advertized only work well with Linux due to volunteer
| work similar to what is being done with Apple's stuff right
| now. Almost everything is proprietary with close to zero
| upstream support, you just don't notice it because the work has
| already been done.
| biomcgary wrote:
| In an OSS ecosystem, manufacturers inherently have to use
| work that has been done by volunteers! The real question is
| whether they invest their own resources too. For example,
| System76 has created their own distro, Pop OS. My team and I
| were happy with the laptops purchased from them and the OS
| integration provided a smooth experience.
| nsonha wrote:
| Are there commercially available arm-based linux laptops? I'm
| not after horsepower just decent battery life and enough
| computing power to do non-AI programming.
| neonsunset wrote:
| Far superior hardware.
| kaba0 wrote:
| > Why not just buy a Linux laptop
|
| Please tell me where is it because I will buy it instantly, and
| I'm only half kidding.
|
| I don't see how making linux available on possibly the
| currently available best laptop hardware any different to the
| previous decades of hacking a working wifi driver into the
| kernel. It was always an uphill battle, and we should be
| thankful for those who take up the hard work!
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| system 76 makes linux ready hardware. personally I'm waiting
| for a framework which does have some linux support
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Please tell me where is it because I will buy it instantly,
| and I'm only half kidding.
|
| System76? Star Labs? Purism? HP Dev One?
| sliken wrote:
| HP Dev one works well, kudos to System76 for the desktop
| env.
|
| It has the worst LCD panel I've seen in many years. It's
| not the resolution just poor contrast and poor color
| accuracy. It pains me to see it.
|
| They went on sale recently, I bought one, and shortly
| afterwards (a few months ago) they stopped selling them.
| hedora wrote:
| System76 doesn't ship reasonable screens (they are all
| 144Hz 1080p):
|
| https://system76.com/laptops-ultraportables
| https://system76.com/laptops-powerful
|
| The only exception is the Bonobo, but it comes with a
| discrete GPU, so its battery life + weight are going to
| suck. Also, its keyboard is off center.
|
| Most of the star labs machines have low resolution
| displays, but I can find nothing wrong with this one. If
| you choose AMD, a reasonable config is $2600, which is
| comparable to Apple. However, they are only building 10,000
| units, and taking preorders, so it might be unobtainable:
|
| https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starfighter
|
| The purism offering seems OK except that it is a 10th
| generation intel, and those were extremely bad, even by
| recent intel standards. Maybe they'll get an AMD refresh
| out the door with the same ergonomics.
|
| The HP has an off-centered keyboard and trackpad and a
| 1080p display.
|
| So, of those four vendors, there's one model that's vaguely
| competitive, but it's a limited production run pre-order.
| ac29 wrote:
| System76? Framework? Even Dell has a number of Linux laptops.
|
| If your requirements are "must run an Apple designed ARM
| processor", then yes, your choices are pretty limited.
| nsonha wrote:
| ANY arm processor, do tell
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Any? https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Lenovo_IdeaPad_Fl
| ex_3_Chr... is dirt cheap and runs PMOS quite well.
| Actually Chromebooks in general are a good bet when
| combined with PMOS - or even _not_ combined with PMOS, if
| you can work with a normal Linux VM on top of ChromeOS.
| zamadatix wrote:
| From a follow up post on Mastadon
| https://social.treehouse.systems/@AsahiLinux/110497512340479...:
|
| "Also in this update:
|
| We now have a cpuidle driver, which significantly lowers idle
| power consumption by enabling deep CPU sleep. You should also get
| better battery runtime both idle and during sleep, especially on
| M1 Pro/Max machines.
|
| Thanks to the cpuidle driver, s2idle now works properly, which
| should fix timekeeping issues causing journald to crash.
|
| Also thanks to the cpuidle driver, CPU boost states are now
| enabled for single- and low-threaded workloads, noticeably
| increasing single-core performance.
|
| Thermal throttling is now enabled, which should keep thermals in
| check on fanless (Air) models. There was never a risk of
| overheating (as there are hard cutoffs), but the behavior should
| now more closely match how macOS works, and avoid things getting
| too toasty on your lap.
|
| Random touchpad instability woes should now finally be gone,
| thanks to bugfixes in both the M1 (SPI) and M2 (MTP) touchpad
| drivers.
|
| A bugfix to the audio subsystem that fixes stability issues with
| the headphone jack codec.
|
| New firmware-based battery charge control, which offers fixed a
| 75%/80% threshold setting. To use this, you need to update your
| system firmware to at least version 13.0, which you can do by
| simply updating your macOS partition to at least that version or
| newer. This new charge control method also works in sleep mode.
|
| U-Boot now supports the Type A USB ports (and non-TB ports on the
| iMac), so you can use a keyboard connected to any port to control
| your bootloader.
|
| And last but not least, this kernel release includes base support
| for the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra SoCs! We are not enabling installs on
| these machines yet as we still have some loose ends to tie, but
| you can expect to see support for this year's new hardware soon."
| gigatexal wrote:
| Such an amazing set of engineers jacking away at this. What
| awesome work they're doing.
| gigatexal wrote:
| ugh ruined by autocorrect
|
| s/jacking/cracking
| londons_explore wrote:
| > e includes base support for the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra SoC
|
| Does this mean Apple gave them prerelease hardware early? Might
| apple start helping these guys more - like for example donating
| a 5 person dev team for a few months maybe?
| sounds wrote:
| M2 Pro/Max were available in January. I think they needed to
| wait until now to be sure the M2 Ultra announcement didn't
| have too huge of changes from the way the M1 Ultra was done.
| In other words, the Asahi Linux team don't have an M2 Ultra
| to test on, they are getting ready for when they can get some
| test results, possibly from users.
|
| Please consider donating if you have the means.
| https://asahilinux.org/support/
| GeekyBear wrote:
| It means that Apple isn't radically changing the internals of
| the SOC every year.
|
| >Apple's first iPhones ran on Samsung SoCs, and even as Apple
| famously announced that they were switching to their own
| designs, the underlying reality is that there was a slower
| transition away from Samsung over multiple chip generations.
| "Apple Silicon" chips, like any other SoC, contain IP cores
| licensed from many other companies; for example, the USB
| controller in the M1 is by Synopsys, and the same exact
| hardware is also in chips by Rockchip, TI, and NXP. Even as
| Apple switched their manufacturing from Samsung to TSMC, some
| Samsung-isms stayed in their chips... and the UART design
| remains to this day.
|
| https://asahilinux.org/2021/03/progress-report-january-
| febru...
| pbasista wrote:
| I also appreciate the detail in which the Asahi team presents
| the progress they have made.
|
| I do not follow Apple's release notes so I cannot compare.
| vanburen wrote:
| "New firmware-based battery charge control, which offers fixed
| a 75%/80% threshold setting. To use this, you need to update
| your system firmware to at least version 13.0, which you can do
| by simply updating your macOS partition to at least that
| version or newer. This new charge control method also works in
| sleep mode."
|
| This is interesting, am I correct in thinking this a feature
| implemented by Apple and now supported by the Asahi team? Does
| that mean that macOS supports this charge control feature?
|
| I really hope Apple brings the same charge limiting to iPhone
| as well.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > I really hope Apple brings the same charge limiting to
| iPhone as well.
|
| This was added to iPhones in 2019.
|
| > If your iPhone stops charging at 80%, it's most likely due
| to a feature Apple introduced in iOS 13 called Optimized
| Battery Charging. It aims to prevent over-stressing the
| battery and hence extend the battery life of your iPhone by
| limiting the charge to 80%.
|
| Your iPhone learns your usage patterns and delays 100%
| charging until moments before you wake up in the morning.
|
| https://www.makeuseof.com/why-your-iphone-stops-charging-
| at-...
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| It's a bit different, though. I don't often need my iphone
| to last multiple days on end. Yet, if I keep it plugged in
| as often as I'm sitting at a desk, it'll never go below
| 80%. If I get it below 80%, sooner or later, it will figure
| "i want to use it" and will charge it all the way to 100%.
| The lowest my battery ever got on this phone was 40
| something when I was away for a weekend without a charger.
| It's very rare I use it a lot, so the "intelligence"
| clearly doesn't care how long the battery needs to last.
|
| The way it's implemented on my mom's android, it always
| shows 80 or 85% (can't recall which one it is), even if she
| leaves it plugged in for the whole weekend.
|
| On my HP laptop, if I activate the "battery saver mode" (as
| opposed to "AI"), it reports the maximum capacity as
| somewhere around 80% of the design capacity. I don't know
| whether Linux cooperates with this, but probably not. HP
| only talks about OS compatibility for the "AI" mode, which
| not only requires Windows but a specific HP app.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > It's a bit different, though.
|
| Yes.
|
| It learns your normal waking time (if you have one) and
| gives you a full charge before you wake up.
|
| Which is what I want. A full charge for the working day,
| without needlessly shortening the batteries functional
| lifetime.
| lonjil wrote:
| My Sony Xperia 10 IV lets you set it to never charge
| above 90 or 80 %, as an alternative to it learning your
| habits. I have it set to 80%, and I've been unable to use
| it up in under 2 days. I've heard that iPhones have
| similarly good battery life as the 10 IV, so it seems, to
| me, that get quite far on 80%.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > I've been unable to use it up in under 2 days.
|
| Take up playing a resource intensive game like Genshin
| Impact and you can very easily drain the battery in a
| day.
|
| > 60fps highest settings 100% brightness Low sound Home
| WiFi 3:20 total
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/SonyXperia/comments/onb3dw/gensh
| in_...
| pezezin wrote:
| I bought the same phone recently, and for my light usage
| pattern (some texting, the browser, Google Translate,
| Google Maps, a calculator app, and the camera), the
| battery lasts almost 5 days!
|
| I had completely forgotten how it is to own a phone that
| doesn't need to charge everyday...
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Sure, but if I know I won't drain my battery more than
| 10% that day, I can't tell it not to top it up more than
| 80%. That's the case for me 99.9% of days.
|
| This also seems to work only if you've drained the
| battery below 80%. If it says 90% and I plug it in? It'll
| charge it fully right away.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| That's not how Apple's implementation works.
|
| It doesn't charge the battery over 80% at all, unless it
| detects that you have a normal waking time, in which case
| it charges fully right before you normally wake up.
|
| Unfortunately, other companies copied the 80% charge bit
| without copying the part about figuring out if you have a
| normal waking time and giving you a full charge right
| before that.
|
| For instance, Samsung's S23:
|
| >Once you turn off the battery protection function,
| you'll be able to charge your battery up to 100%
|
| https://www.samsung.com/ae/support/mobile-
| devices/battery-pr...
| brynet wrote:
| > This is interesting, am I correct in thinking this a
| feature implemented by Apple
|
| Yes, battery charge control is a hardware(/firmware) feature
| supported on other modern laptops as well, such as the Lenovo
| ThinkPads, but it's not a standard so it requires explicit
| driver and OS support.
|
| OpenBSD recently added support for this as well for both of
| these implementations (Apple silicon and ThinkPads).
|
| https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=168436150408382&w=2
|
| https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=168458409622780&w=2
|
| https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=168521616605492&w=2
|
| I know certain Android/Samsung phones support this as well,
| not sure about iOS/macOS.
| londons_explore wrote:
| If your laptop firmware doesn't support it, here is one
| trick if you have a removable battery:
|
| Put a piece of paper over one of the batteries middle
| contacts. That will make the firmware think the battery is
| overheating. It will then refuse to charge, but will still
| happily discharge.
|
| You can do that to keep your battery at 80% while still on
| AC power. Handy if you operate from AC power 99% of the
| time, yet don't want your battery to die from being stored
| at 100% charge and hot for many years.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Put a piece of paper over one of the batteries middle
| contacts.
|
| Bad, very bad idea if you don't know what you are doing -
| depending on where the "smarts" in the BMS are, you may
| damage your battery or make your BMS think the pack is
| broken or prevent your BMS from recognizing a charge
| state mismatch (and in the worst case, a cell going
| undervoltage or reverse polarity) as you have a good
| chance that you cut off one of the cell balancer
| contacts. This trick only works with removable phone
| batteries.
| Thews wrote:
| I am on macos 13.3.1 and have noticed this feature for at
| least a couple of months, maybe longer. It says Charging On
| Hold (Rarely Used On Battery)
| windowsrookie wrote:
| Optimized Battery charging has been available since Mac
| OS 11. Works on intel MacBooks too.
|
| https://www.macworld.com/article/235001/macos-big-surs-
| batte...
| eisa01 wrote:
| I can never get that to activate, even though I use my
| MBP 14" 100% at home...
| cyberax wrote:
| > This is interesting, am I correct in thinking this a
| feature implemented by Apple and now supported by the Asahi
| team? Does that mean that macOS supports this charge control
| feature?
|
| It does, but in a weird way. You can turn on "adaptive
| charging" and it will randomly decide to charge to 80%.
|
| If you want to properly control it, just install the
| wonderful AlDente utility ( https://apphousekitchen.com/ ).
| Then you can manually control the max charge percentage. Mine
| is permanently set to 80% because I never really use even 40%
| of the battery on my M2-based laptop.
| imbnwa wrote:
| >And last but not least, this kernel release includes base
| support for the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra SoCs! We are not enabling
| installs on these machines yet as we still have some loose ends
| to tie, but you can expect to see support for this year's new
| hardware soon."
|
| Amazing
| hejcloud wrote:
| Recently, I've been thinking about using Asahi as the host system
| running on my M1 MBA and run everything macOS in a vm. Does
| anyone have experience with that? How stupid would that be?
| zamadatix wrote:
| People have gotten QEMU with KVM running VMs and other people
| have gotten macOS ARM64 running under QEMU... so I think
| technically possible, though I haven't actually tried going
| that far with it. I don't think you'd get virtual GPU
| acceleration support working in the current state, so
| performance would be pretty god awful.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Donate.
|
| Please don't forget to donate if you get value from Asahi.
|
| This is tremendously detailed and laborious work that people are
| doing in their free time.
|
| https://asahilinux.org/support/
| [deleted]
| baq wrote:
| Related: does anyone do development on a Mac in a Linux VM? If my
| dockers are already running in a VM, why not go to the next
| logical step?
| _ph_ wrote:
| I do all of my development work on my x86-Mac in a VMWare VM.
| Works very well. I am using Fedora.
| hedora wrote:
| I'm using a multipass docker setup. It is faster than my
| previous setup, but when running make -j from inside the
| container top says that only 1 of 8 CPUs is getting scheduled
| to userspace at a time.
|
| Also, the bind mount of the external MacOS directory is
| extremely slow. I do out of tree builds so that the builds land
| in ext4.
|
| I haven't gone the next logical step because (1) it is plenty
| fast for rust development, and battery life is fine, and (2)
| I'd like webcam and speaker support.
|
| Also, I just checked, and I have a 2023 model, and the
| installer status is "WIP", so I guess I'll be waiting a bit
| longer.
| umanwizard wrote:
| I used to do this before switching to a Linux laptop. It worked
| mostly fine.
| e12e wrote:
| Filesystem/disk performance? Although that's probably an
| argument against running Docker on arm64 Macs too...
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| Docker desktop has arm64 builds.
| jzombie wrote:
| I use Parallels w/ an Xubuntu VM running some Docker projects
| and am pleased with the results.
|
| Filesystem performance used to be better than Docker Desktop,
| but they seem about on par w/ one another now.
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| > Filesystem performance used to be better than Docker
| Desktop, but they seem about on par w/ one another now.
|
| They made an update that claims performance is comparable.
|
| I tested realistic workloads last week and docker desktop was
| still meaningfully worse.
|
| If your work computer has antivirus, the performance of
| docker desktop will be even worse if exceptions aren't or
| can't be added.
| l72 wrote:
| My work issued laptop is a Macbook Pro M1.
|
| I typically work on my work issued linux workstation (pretty
| old now and less powerful than my Macbook Pro), but often need
| to do development from my laptop too. I run a Fedora arm VM in
| UTM full screen. It generally works well, although I'd much
| prefer to have native linux on my laptop. It would be nice of
| mac os didn't interrupt full screen mode randomly and allowed
| UTM to capture all keys and touchpad gestures.
|
| I personally am incredibly unproductive on a mac, and have no
| idea how anyone does anything with how terrible the window
| management and virtual desktops are. Plus, I find all my linux
| based tools that I am accustomed to just work so much better
| under linux. So for me, even a VM is still a huge leap in
| productivity.
| viraptor wrote:
| Utm is there if you want reasonable size desktop without
| fighting with qemu settings / setup. https://mac.getutm.app/
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| I tried utm early on with an m1 but had many graphics issues
| that parallels made work out of the box.
|
| I need to try it again, bet it works out of box now.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| How much do you need macos around to use it?
|
| Sounds like the original install and then for firmware updates?
| I'd like to keep telemetry to a minimum and not use macos if
| possible.
| vulcan01 wrote:
| Yes, that's right; I generally pop back in to macOS every so
| often to check for OS updates (which update the firmware as
| well - no way to just update the firmware).
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I seem to remember there being a tiny recovery partition or
| cut-down version of macos or something maybe from boot CD (we
| have an old iMac).
|
| Also found this:
|
| https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/311947/how-to-
| upda...
|
| Still I'd rather have no MacOS.
| brundolf wrote:
| Is the desktop GPU-rendered by this point? What's battery life
| like (for those using Asahi daily)?
|
| Thinking about taking the dive...
| Aeolos wrote:
| It is GPU accelerated and very smooth since late last year.
| Battery life is about 6-8 hours on an M1 air for me, and should
| improve significantly with this latest upgrade (haven't
| measured yet).
|
| The installation experience is very smooth, so it's very easy
| to try it out. You can nuke it afterwards if it doesn't work
| for you.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| It appears so.
|
| From last December:
|
| > "This release features work-in-progress OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL
| ES 2.0 support for all current Apple M-series systems. That's
| enough for _hardware acceleration with desktop environments_ ,
| like GNOME and KDE."
|
| https://asahilinux.org/2022/12/gpu-drivers-now-in-asahi-linu...
| Jasper_ wrote:
| Sample-rate shading is exceptionally rare (MSAA is rare-ish these
| days, but I only know of exactly one title that has shipped
| sample-rate shading), so requiring a basic compiler transform to
| handle it, especially when they can do so easily because of their
| tiler architecture, is pretty sane.
| samwillis wrote:
| The work of the Asahi team is incredible, and so much fun to
| watch unfold.
|
| I wander if now that you can get a _rack mount_ Mac Pro with
| Apple Silicon (launched yesterday, the second coming of XServe),
| running server workloads on them with Asahi Linux becomes a
| viable route for some people?
| umanwizard wrote:
| FYI it's silicon, not silicone. Silicone is a type of rubber.
| samwillis wrote:
| The curse of Dyslexia and crap Apple spell check.
| thx-2718 wrote:
| This is what they have support for at the moment:
|
| https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support#m2-d...
|
| Maybe not quite possible to do today but if Asahi keeps up the
| pace they've made so far I bet it will be soon.
|
| It helps that Apple has popular hardware so there's a good bit
| of people out there interested in developing support for Apple
| processors.
| smoldesu wrote:
| If you're doing on-the-road visuals and you want a chunky
| realtime rackmount to render with, $7k for an M2 Ultra might
| look like a steal. For hosting purposes and parallel
| workloads though, there are _many_ other options at much
| better price /performance points in the same market. If
| you're not leveraging Apple software and you pay for an Apple
| Silicon server, you're kinda wasting money that could have
| gone towards an Ampere or Grace instance instead.
| kytazo wrote:
| Its been more than a year I'm running asahi on my macbook air and
| I can't stress how grateful I feel for enjoying such wonderful
| freedom.
|
| I don't feel like ever going back to x86 to be honest, at this
| point there is nothing lacking or unable to run and when the
| neural engine drivers come online now that the GPU is starting to
| mature people will be able to juice out every last bit of
| computation this machine is capable of.
|
| For the record, I've switched to the edge branch a couple of
| months ago and honestly I noticed no actual difference in my day-
| to-day tasks which is really telling about how powerful even the
| M1 is when it can handle software rendering in such an effortless
| manner coupled with anything else running.
|
| Really thank god for asahi being a thing.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > when the neural engine drivers come online now
|
| Has there been any ongoing work on this? It's been marked as
| "WIP" in GitHub for a while now, and I'd imagine it's one of
| the more complicated things to reverse-engineer.
| dougall wrote:
| Some: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35301630
| kytazo wrote:
| You can check here for some insight
|
| https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi/search?q=ane
| https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi/search?q=neural
| https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi-dev/search?q=ane
| est31 wrote:
| The features support page lists the webcam as TBA. How do you
| do video conferencing? USB webcam? No video?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| People who demand others show their faces in a video call
| generally aren't fun to be around anyway, and if it's family
| or friends just use your phone.
| imiric wrote:
| > at this point there is nothing lacking or unable to run
|
| Sure there is. You just haven't run into it yourself.
|
| Faster, cooler and more power efficient hardware is great. I
| just don't think that it makes up for depending on a small team
| of volunteers to resolve all hardware issues in an ecosystem
| hostile to OSS, which might break at any point Apple decides to
| do so.
|
| And the incompatibilities with ARM are not negligible. If all
| your software runs on it, great. If not, good luck depending on
| yet another translation layer.
|
| I'm sticking with my slow, hot and power-hungry x86 machines
| with worse build quality for the foreseeable future. The new
| AMD mobile chips are certainly in the ballpark of what Apple
| silicon can do, so I won't be missing much.
| psanford wrote:
| > depending on a small team of volunteers to resolve all
| hardware issues in an ecosystem hostile to OSS, which might
| break at any point Apple decides to do so
|
| You are describing how most OSS software has been developed.
| I don't see how this is any different than early linux when
| no hardware manufacturers had any interest in supporting it.
|
| A lot of the work that the asahi team is doing is just fixing
| Arm issues in the linux kernel (and sadly user space). That
| work will benefit everyone using Arm systems, not just folks
| running asahi on Apple hardware.
|
| Its good for there to be more hardware architecture
| competition! I'm glad I can run my server workloads on the
| Arm servers in AWS that are 20% cheaper than the equivalent
| x86 machines. I'm glad that I can run the software I like
| (linux) on legitimately nice hardware (m2 air). You can make
| different decisions on what architectures are best suited for
| your needs, but the competition in the market improves the
| options and prices for everyone.
|
| I've been using Asahi since the fall of 2022. When I first
| started using it a lot of software was broken because of bugs
| in that software that had never been exposed before
| (specifically around page sizes larger than 4k). All of that
| software has now been fixed. Support for linux/arm will only
| continue to improve as more people use it.
| imiric wrote:
| > I don't see how this is any different than early linux
| when no hardware manufacturers had any interest in
| supporting it.
|
| It's very different. Hardware manufacturers in the 90s were
| incentivized to support Linux to expand their customer
| base. A trillion-dollar corporation has no incentive to
| sell their hardware to a niche of a niche of technical
| users who are not part of their software ecosystem.
|
| Another major difference is that Asahi is a small team of
| dedicated volunteers who want to run Linux on their Macs.
| They're a niche intersection of Linux hackers and Apple
| fans. Unsupported hardware in the 90s typically had a much
| larger customer base and group of hackers willing to spend
| time adding supporting for it.
|
| Even worse: Apple can decide at any point to make their
| hardware much more difficult to support. Newer models or
| firmware updates might break things. Being at the whims of
| a corporation that is the antithesis of F/LOSS to run Linux
| on their hardware doesn't inspire confidence.
|
| > Its good for there to be more hardware architecture
| competition!
|
| > Support for linux/arm will only continue to improve as
| more people use it.
|
| Agreed. I'm glad that Asahi exists. But we've had ARM Linux
| distros for decades now. What Asahi is doing is
| specifically to support Apple hardware. Some improvements
| will trickle out to improve general ARM support, but this
| points out the gargantuan task they're actually up against.
| Not only do they need to reverse engineer the hardware,
| they have to resolve all software issues with Linux and
| ARM. My hat's off to them. The willpower, patience and
| skills required to wade through the absolute mountain of
| issues must be astronomical. Yet this is also part of my
| concern; how long can a developer keep the motivation and
| sanity to swim against the current?
|
| It's great that Asahi works for you and everyone else. I'm
| just pointing out why it will likely never be my choice for
| any serious work.
| psanford wrote:
| > Hardware manufacturers in the 90s were incentivized to
| support Linux to expand their customer base.
|
| That is not an accurate description of linux support by
| hardware manufactures from that time period.
|
| > Unsupported hardware in the 90s typically had a much
| larger customer base and group of hackers willing to
| spend time adding supporting for it.
|
| I also don't think this is generally correct. Have you
| looked at all the random drivers in the linux kernel for
| niche hardware. A ton of that is from one or two
| hobbyists taking the time to add support.
|
| > Apple can decide at any point to make their hardware
| much more difficult to support. Newer models or firmware
| updates might break things. Being at the whims of a
| corporation that is the antithesis of F/LOSS to run Linux
| on their hardware doesn't inspire confidence.
|
| I guess, but so what? Apple can't break the hardware they
| are already shipping if you are just running linux on it.
| Its true, I might not buy a theoretical future laptop
| from Apple if I can't run linux on it, but I don't see
| how that would affect my purchasing decision for hardware
| that is currently available.
|
| > The willpower, patience and skills required to wade
| through the absolute mountain of issues must be
| astronomical. Yet this is also part of my concern; how
| long can a developer keep the motivation and sanity to
| swim against the current?
|
| Hmm, maybe you've not worked on projects like this, or
| are motivated by different things. To me, reverse
| engineering a thing to figure out how it works and then
| writing software to get it to do things the original
| designers hadn't planned for is one of the more
| satisfying and fun activities of being a software
| engineer. I suspect the asahi team is having fun doing a
| lot of this work. (That's not to say its all fun. It
| sounds like getting things upstreamed has been trying. I
| also think having to read giant comment threads where
| people are needlessly negative about their work might be
| a bit demoralizing.)
|
| > It's great that Asahi works for you and everyone else.
| I'm just pointing out why it will likely never be my
| choice for any serious work.
|
| You should obviously run whatever works for you.
| imiric wrote:
| > Have you looked at all the random drivers in the linux
| kernel for niche hardware. A ton of that is from one or
| two hobbyists taking the time to add support.
|
| Sure, for _niche_ hardware. When was the last time a GPU
| driver was added by reverse engineering it? The single
| Nouveau maintainer was burnt out, last I heard, and the
| project was never a serious alternative to NVIDIA's
| closed driver. Kudos to whoever found the energy to
| contribute to it, but these projects usually don't have a
| bright future.
|
| Now expand that to include maintaining all Apple devices,
| and it's an insane amount of effort realistically
| unsustainable for any group of volunteers. But good luck
| to the Asahi team.
| mfuzzey wrote:
| >When was the last time a GPU driver was added by reverse
| engineering it
|
| Freedreno (for the Adreno family) Etnaviv (for the
| Vivante family) Panfrost / Bifrost (for Mali)
|
| All these RE efforts built on each other, although the
| GPUs are different the tools built to do the RE were
| shared (and I think ashai is benefiting too).
|
| AFAIK Google has now hired Rob Clark the Freedreno
| maintainer who started all this to work on Freedreno for
| Android / ChromeOS
|
| Upstream Linux now has pretty good GPU support for all
| the major mobile GPUs these days. The hold out has been
| PowerVR but they are now working on an official (not
| reverse engineered) driver.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Nouveau maintainer was burnt out, last I heard, and
| the project was never a serious alternative to NVIDIA 's
| closed driver_
|
| Simply not true. I recall in the mid '10s using it
| because the proprietary driver was crashy garbage. No, I
| didn't get the same performance possible with the
| proprietary driver, and I didn't have a bleeding-edge
| video card, but it was more than usable as a daily
| driver.
| psanford wrote:
| Nvidia/Nouveau is a good example. I've had a number of
| laptops with nvidia graphics. For most of that time
| Nouveau was _more stable_ than the official nvidia
| drivers. Linux clearly was a second class citizen for
| nvidia for most of the last 20 years. Maybe go back and
| rewatch linus' rant about nvidia if you need a reminder
| about how terrible they have been historically.
|
| Nvidia now only sort of cares about linux because of
| gpgpu applications. They still clearly don't care about
| gaming on linux; or desktop stability.
|
| Yes, I will take Nouveau over the official drivers
| whenever I can.
| imiric wrote:
| See, now I just think you're gaslighting me.
|
| Nouveau has never been more stable, or nearly as
| performant as official NVIDIA drivers. I've had the exact
| opposite experience from you on every laptop I've had
| since Nouveau was released, so we must live in different
| universes.
|
| > Linux clearly was a second class citizen for nvidia
|
| And Linux is not even on the radar for Apple. :)
|
| Anyway, I think we've exhausted our arguments here, and
| are just talking past each other now. Have a good day.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's not gaslighting:
| https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/PowerManagement.html
|
| Nouveau is an awesome project, but for later cards it's
| basically a dead project. You _can_ get some features to
| work, but without proper power management there 's no
| justifiable reason to daily-drive it. The proprietary
| driver is by no means perfect (particularly for Wayland)
| but it's the only real option if you own a modern card.
|
| > And Linux is not even on the radar for Apple. :)
|
| They must be awfully curious about why Xserve failed,
| then.
| psanford wrote:
| If you've had good experiences with the nvidia drivers,
| thats great. My experiences with them have been bad and I
| will use Nouveau for general desktop environments unless
| I'm also doing gpgpu.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Point me to the Apple contributed drivers in the kernel
| please.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| The parent already addressed the point that you're trying
| to make when he said:
|
| > I don't see how this is any different than early linux
| when no hardware manufacturers had any interest in
| supporting it.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| This is not early Linux anymore.
| psanford wrote:
| Why does Apple need to contribute to this work to make it
| somehow legitimate or good? I own some nice hardware (an
| m2-air), I want to run Linux on it. Asahi allows me to do
| that! Why can we not celebrate that the asahi team is
| bringing oss to new hardware?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| They don't need to. I keep seeing that Apple does no less
| than other companies w/ regard to Linux. Well- where are
| their kernel contributions then? Lenovo and Dell (my two
| laptop manufacturers) contribute.
|
| https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rafael/li
| nux...
| imiric wrote:
| They also don't need to contribute to the Linux kernel.
| Why would they? They don't support Linux on their
| hardware in any official capacity, otherwise projects
| like Asahi wouldn't need to exist.
|
| And playing devil's advocate, Apple has open sourced
| their macOS and iOS kernels, and has some open source
| presence[1]. None of their contributions are crucial
| parts of their business, of course.
|
| [1]: https://opensource.apple.com/
| psanford wrote:
| > I keep seeing that Apple does no less than other
| companies w/ regard to Linux.
|
| Where did I make that claim in this thread?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > in an ecosystem hostile to OSS
|
| > You are describing how most OSS software has been
| developed.
|
| Nope. Disagree here
| psanford wrote:
| Cool, thats a different claim than what you said above
| but at least one I can actually engage with.
|
| I've run linux on many Dell and Lenovo systems over the
| last 25 years. Most of those systems were fully
| unsupported by the manufactures for anything but windows.
| And yet, random people on the internet contributed to
| make that hardware (mostly) work. I've not seen any
| particular improvement in the driver situation since Dell
| started selling linux certified systems.
|
| Its not really surprising though, Dell is just an
| integrator. All they do for their systems with linux pre-
| installed is to pick hardware that already has drivers.
| They took a little bit of work out of needing to research
| if a given configuration is likely to work or not with
| linux (which is good). They don't really deserve much
| credit beyond that.
|
| Its also a little funny because most drivers from
| hardware manufacturers suck. I don't know why, but most
| hardware companies are terrible at writing software. Its
| easy to list off hardware companies that have a long
| history of shipping mediocre, buggy linux drivers:
| nvidia, amd, broadcom, realtek, (maybe i should just list
| every nic and wireless chipset manufacturer). Some of
| these companies have gotten better and have learned how
| to be good kernel contributors, but they were mostly bad
| for years and years. Thankfully in some of those cases
| random people on the internet reverse engineered the
| hardware and contributed from scratch drivers to the
| kernel. Most of the time I've been happier with the
| experience of running those from scratch drivers than
| what hardware manufactures ship.
| mfuzzey wrote:
| Absolutely. A large part of the reason is that in the OSS
| world the architecture is optimised to make as much as
| possible common between drivers for different hardware.
|
| For example for GPU drivers Mesa has tons of common code
| (NIR, GLSL parser etc) that is shared by all drivers with
| just the hardware specific parts being per driver whereas
| closed source vendor drivers reinvent the wheel each
| time.
|
| Similarly for kernel wifi drivers there is a single
| MAC802.11 stack shared by all drivers.
|
| Vendor drivers have an initial head start since those
| writing them have access to internal documents describing
| the hardware interface and don't have to do reverse
| engineering. But, over time, OSS drivers can be better as
| improvements to common code help _all_ drivers.
|
| In fact I think the best way hardware vendors could help
| OSS is not to provide drivers but documentation.
| mfuzzey wrote:
| >A lot of the work that the asahi team is doing is just
| fixing Arm issues in the linux kernel (and sadly user
| space)
|
| While I don't have Apple hardware so haven't been closely
| following Asahi I dont't think that is true. Linux has
| supported Arm for years (more like decades) now. They've
| been doing excellent work on support for Apple specific
| hardware sure, generic Arm not so much since it was mostly
| done.
| stirlo wrote:
| If you follow Hector Martin the lead Asahi dev he's
| encountered a number of bugs and race conditions in ARM
| linux systems which were never previously exposed because
| there weren't blazing fast ARM chips out there that could
| trigger them.
| psanford wrote:
| Let me be more specific. There were a lot of bugs
| specifically related to non-4k page size architectures.
| Arm doesn't dictate the page size so most of the Arm
| systems out there have defaulted to 4k pages. The Asahi
| wiki has a partial list of userspace programs that were
| (or still are) buggy and broken because they made
| simplifying assumptions about how different architectures
| work[0].
|
| Maintainers of other non-x86 architecture have said that
| this is improving things for them[1].
|
| [0]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Broken-
| Software [1]: https://www.talospace.com/2022/03/asahi-
| linux-gives-hope-for...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Aren't lots of things in Linux dependent on a small team of
| volunteers? I know the Linux foundation owns the whole
| kernel, but in practice how many full time people work on the
| ext4 driver or whathaveyou?
| fallat wrote:
| > I just don't think that it makes up for depending on a
| small team of volunteers to resolve all hardware issues in an
| ecosystem hostile to OSS
|
| This. The volunteer pool is too small. And you're supporting
| a shitty company.
| simonh wrote:
| I hope you're being good. Every time a Samsung Galaxy owner
| says this, a fairy dies.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I would like to see the volunteer pool grow, but I suspect
| a lot of things in the Linux kernel are maintained by a
| small pool of volunteers--it's not like all volunteers (or
| paid developers) work across the whole kernel, after all.
|
| Also, which are the virtuous hardware companies and what's
| stopping them from making compelling products? And since
| I'm already a Mac user, I've already supported this evil
| company, so what does it matter if I change out the
| operating system?
| fallat wrote:
| Not sure why you're fixated on the whole Linux kernel -
| we're talking about a small pool of volunteers supporting
| complex modules.
|
| There are good laptops out there other than Macs...
| Lenovo, HP, Dell, etc all have offerings which are
| supported _out of the box_ by Linux because they aren 't
| using their own hardware or do contribute the necessary
| code to run FOSS OSs.
|
| I'm not asking you to now dump your Mac. That'd be silly.
| Continue to use your Mac with Asahi, just don't complain
| if Apple decides to break anything at any time, and
| expect it. Know that what you type on now is already
| planned for obsolescence and most likely has intentional
| design flaws as shown again and again by people like
| Louis Rossmann.
|
| When your Mac dies, I _am_ asking you to not buy Apple
| for your next laptop. That 's all that can be reasonably
| asked.
| hedora wrote:
| > _There are good laptops out there other than Macs...
| Lenovo, HP, Dell, etc all have offerings which are
| supported out of the box by Linux because they aren 't
| using their own hardware or do contribute the necessary
| code to run FOSS OSs._
|
| For the love of all that is holy, name one model that has
| the following properties:
|
| - 6 hours real life battery doing C++ development work.
|
| - 7+ days suspend battery life
|
| - 99.99% success rate resuming from suspend under linux
| (~ 1 kernel panic per year is OK)
|
| - Centered keyboard and trackpad
|
| - >> 1080p screen
|
| - bluetooth, wifi, webcam, etc, etc, all work reliably (~
| 1 device "need to reboot" failure across all categories,
| per year)
|
| - un-noticable fan
|
| - less than 10% permanent hardware failure rate per year
|
| None of the last ~ $10K worth of intel machines I've used
| (including high end macs, linux and windows machines) met
| the above criteria.
|
| My M2 macbook actually ticks all the boxes.
|
| However, I really, really, dislike MacOS.
| fallat wrote:
| My thinkpad does all those things... I expected really
| something crazier as a rebuttal. It sounds like you may
| have bought bad products and then bought a Mac when they
| had those specs and were happy then...
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I wish more manufacturers worked harder to keep fan noise
| down to between none and barely audible without severely
| throttling the CPU and GPU or toasting your lap. My
| laptop shouldn't be spinning up its fan just because I
| plugged in something as pedestrian as a 2560x1440 60hz
| monitor (as my ThinkPad X1 Nano likes to).
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Installing "uBar" fixed a lot of my beef with MacOS. (I
| get no referral bonus, just a happy user)
| ced wrote:
| To be clear, is this a description of your experience
| with Asahi Linux?
| endorphine wrote:
| > _I 'm sticking with my slow, hot and power-hungry x86
| machines with worse build quality for the foreseeable
| future._
|
| Nothing wrong with being a late adopter. Nothing wrong with
| being an early adopter either.
| acomjean wrote:
| I have an AMD Linux laptop I've been using for work.
|
| It's great. The battery life is great, it's quite fast with a
| lot of cores, when I need to do my genetics runs (plugged
| in). Build quality isn't bad, plus affordable and lots of
| ports. After my initial transition away, not missing my 2015
| Mac book pro.
|
| Linux is the way to go. I don't blame people with apple
| hardware for wanting it. I just don't feel the x86 side is as
| bad as the everyone makes it out to be. We've come along way
| since my first Linux laptop and it's not so great battery
| life.
| danieldk wrote:
| Two years ago or so I bought a ThinkPad with an AMD Ryzen
| CPU, there was a lot of hype about them. How Linux laptops
| were finally competitive, speed, driver, and battery-wise.
|
| The machine was quite a bit slower than an M1 Air, would
| have loud fans during video meetings, and on Linux the
| battery would typically last 3 hours (6-7 on Windows, yes I
| did all the usual power optimizations). In S3 sleep it
| would discharge overnight and the next day it would refuse
| to charge with Lenovo's included USB-C adapter. When waking
| up the machine from sleep the track point or trackpad
| wouldn't come up 1/3rd of the time on Linux.
|
| I used the laptop for work and the question 'does the
| laptop work' when having a meeting or having to teach
| became so stressful, that one day after another Linux
| hardware episode I immediately went to a store after work
| and picked up an M1 Air and never looked back (well, got an
| M1 Max after that).
|
| There is no way I am going to touch Linux on laptops within
| 5 years.
|
| (I use a headless Linux GPU machine daily, first used Linux
| in 1994, and was paid to work on a Linux distribution in
| the past.)
| imiric wrote:
| > Two years ago or so I bought a ThinkPad with an AMD
| Ryzen CPU
|
| Things have changed a bit since then[1]. The new Phoenix
| chips are quite competitive with the M2 as far as
| performance and TDP goes. Your other complaints are with
| Lenovo, not AMD.
|
| I doubt anyone will argue that Apple laptops don't have
| the best build quality. Apple has the advantage of full
| vertical integration, so it's very difficult for any
| other manufacturer to compete on things like battery life
| and power efficiency.
|
| The Linux glitches you describe is the usual Linux jank.
| I don't disagree that even the most well-supported Linux
| laptop will have these. As a Linux user, you choose to
| deal with these issues because the alternative of relying
| on a corporation to decide how you're going to use your
| computer is not an option. I've also heard and
| experienced my share of issues with macOS and Windows. In
| the eternal words of a modern philosopher: every OS
| sucks[2].
|
| [1]: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m2-max-
| vs-amd-ry...
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPRvc2UMeMI
| kelnos wrote:
| Was the laptop advertised as supporting Linux, or, if
| not, did you at least do your research ahead of time to
| ensure that everything worked properly? Because clearly
| it didn't, so I expect Linux support was already known to
| not be in a great place before you bought it.
|
| And yes, that sucks. We should have first-class support.
| It's no wonder macOS gained popularity among developers.
| But I've been running Linux on laptops for 15+ years now
| (even on Macs), and I've seen how it's changed from
| barely-working and having to futz with things at every
| kernel upgrade, to pretty much seamless (and these days I
| really have little patience for futzing around with
| things; I want something that works so I can do useful
| things on it). But, again: you need to choose your
| hardware carefully.
|
| For reference, I had a 2016-model Razer Blade Stealth,
| which had no issues with Linux. Then in early 2019 I
| bought a 2018-model Dell XPS 13 that worked flawlessly
| (except for the fingerprint reader, which I knew ahead of
| time and accepted as ok). For the past yearish I've been
| using a Framework Laptop, which has had some problems
| (unrelated to Linux; Windows users have the same
| problems), but the hardware support on Linux has been
| solid.
|
| Meanwhile, I'd constantly hear problems from my friends
| with Macs about how it could never stay connected to a
| wireless network after a couple hours (requiring a reboot
| to fix), or would frequently "beachball" under not that
| much load, or how the yearly major OS update would
| usually break their development setup. I used macOS on
| and off between 2005 and 2017 or so, and ran into plenty
| of issues as well.
|
| While I certainly agree there's some laptop hardware that
| you just shouldn't run Linux on, the still-kicking Steve
| Jobs Reality Distortion Field somehow causes people to
| ignore or explain away all the issues macOS has.
| acomjean wrote:
| Sorry it didn't work for you. I would recommend anyone
| buying at notebook to get one with linux pre-installed. I
| did that because I want to use this thing, not futz with
| it.
|
| I'm assuming you're using Asahi Linux on your Macs
| (though you said you wouldn't touch it..). The lack of
| hardware diversity should make comparability easier, even
| if everything need to be reversed engineered.
|
| I get 6 hours or so on my machine. Its pretty much
| silent, unless I push it. Its a Ryzen 7 5700u. We do a
| lot of parallel compute and genetics code tends massively
| parallel and x86 optimized. Mostly run on cluster though.
| I haven't done any maintenance and have had not hardware
| issues.
|
| I don't link I could ever go back to macos, or windows.
| hedora wrote:
| What ryzen laptop is this that you keep referencing?
|
| The negative experiences with the thinkpad are typical of
| all the intel laptops I have recently used, preloaded OS
| (including Windows, and to a lesser extent, Linux and
| MacOS), or not.
|
| Whenever I look for an AMD laptop, it has a low
| resolution (1080p) display, and/or an off-center
| keyboard/trackpad (or has some other obvious fatal flaw).
|
| I'm typing this on an M2 macbook. I do 100% of my work in
| an "8 core" arm Linux VM that can only use one core for
| userspace stuff (according to top), but that still kicks
| the pants off my previous laptop.
|
| I'm strongly considering dual booting into asahi.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| The off-center keyboard thing is super irritating. I know
| some live and die by numpads but for my usage, 99% of the
| time they're just collecting dust and making typing less
| comfortable.
|
| Laptop displays are also a common frustration, though
| this has been improving lately. Still too many models
| stuck on 16:9 aspect ratio though, which is suboptimal
| for anything but watching movies due to lack of vertical
| real estate. By the time you've factored in all the
| taskbars, titlebars, toolbars, menubars, tab bars, and
| status bars you've got a keyhole left to peer through.
| This is less of a problem for those using something like
| i3 or Sway where half of those bars are hidden but tiling
| WMs just aren't my thing.
| acomjean wrote:
| Its a system76 pangolin (2022)
|
| >Whenever I look for an AMD laptop, it has a low
| resolution (1080p) display, and/or an off-center
| keyboard/trackpad (or has some other obvious fatal flaw).
|
| yup it has both of those. But the screen is only15", and
| I'm old so it doesn't matter. It not glossy which I
| really like though.
|
| If you love the mac hardware, give Asahi a try. My
| understanding its the best linux for the M-series
| macbooks. Linux is great for developing on and they seem
| to be making great progress.
| kytazo wrote:
| > And the incompatibilities with ARM are not negligible.
|
| Namely?
| mo_42 wrote:
| I'm running it on my M1 MBP. Also super happy. How do you use
| suspend?
|
| That's the only thing I'm really missing currently.
| lucabs wrote:
| [dead]
| JCWasmx86 wrote:
| Would you say buying e.g. a Mac mini for 2.3kEUR just to run
| Asahi Linux is worth it?
| jb1991 wrote:
| I've owned both windows and Apple computers, quite many of
| them, over the last 20 years. On average, the Apple machines
| last at least twice as long as the windows machines while
| still being fully usable. One could argue just based on that
| basic math that they are worth twice the price.
| 12345hn6789 wrote:
| If you take care of your devices they will last. - typed
| out on a gen 1 i7 desktop
| jabbany wrote:
| Unfortunately, Apple machines are usually 4 - 10 times more
| expensive, making this choice still quite difficult.
| mattkevan wrote:
| You mean it's possible to buy the exact equivalent of a
| M1 MacBook Air for PS99-PS249?
|
| Send me the link, that sounds amazing.
| Apfel wrote:
| Yeah, the M1 MBA was really so out of the norm in terms
| of value that it's pretty much impossible to find
| anything like it at the price point. It literally turned
| me into an Apple person, essentially overnight. I no
| longer even switch on my windows machines.
| jabbany wrote:
| Not sure where you got the impression of that?
|
| There do not exist "equivalent"s to any Apple devices (I
| don't see them licensing the M1/2 chips to anyone else
| anytime soon). But depending on what you care about, a
| "comparable" Apple device could be 10x more expensive. Of
| course, for other tasks a "comparable" Apple device can
| also be _cheaper_ than any non-Apple device available!
|
| Only looking at aiming for similar "longevity" (since the
| parent is using that as a benchmark), there are plenty of
| devices that have a useful life comparable to Apple
| devices at 1/4 - 1/10 the price.
| tverbeure wrote:
| I'd love to see your 10x example.
| jabbany wrote:
| There is one above in the server/homelab space. Items
| like memory and storage are charged huge markups* so if
| you need a lot of capacity of those you are going to
| quickly get into the 10x range!
|
| As for longevity, if you consider software support ending
| as EoL, software/OS support for a huge swath of Intel
| iMacs (especially those with DGPUs) was dropped by Apple
| quite a few OS releases ago and you have to run community
| patches to keep them working. Whereas similar decade old
| hardware still run Win 10 and Linux out of the box.
|
| *: Don't get me wrong though, the markups are for good
| reason. x86 platforms don't offer anything close to
| Apple's ARM chip memory bandwidth (which are closer to
| DGPU levels). Similarly, for flash/SSDs.
| jb1991 wrote:
| They are expensive but 10X certainly seems like a
| stretch. Show me comparably specd hardware only 10% the
| price of an Apple machine?
| jabbany wrote:
| See, here's where the undefined nature of things comes
| in. "Comparably spec'd" needs to be conditioned on what
| task you're aiming for.
|
| A "pure gold hammer" is a terrible idea and would also be
| terribly expensive. But asking for a "comparably spec'd"
| hammer presumes the absurd premise that the material of
| the hammer must be kept consistent regardless of its
| intended use just for the purpose of being comparable.
|
| To preface, I totally understand the value proposition of
| Apple devices for some use cases, but it is important to
| recognize that they are aiming for certain workloads.
|
| As examples:
|
| I have one friend that runs virtualization workloads that
| require a lot of memory, a lot of storage, a lot of
| cores, but they don't really care about memory bandwidth,
| "having a display", or even the noise of the device. An
| older server with 192G of RAM, 24 cores and >8TB of
| storage can easily be had and upgraded within $1k,
| whereas a "comparable" Mac Pro costs upwards of $10k! (Of
| course nobody would use a Mac Pro for this workload, so
| the comparison is moot)
|
| I also have friends that are digital artists. They care
| about having a high brightness and color accuracy display
| but otherwise don't do anything that taxes the computer.
| They also appreciate having high quality speakers and
| long battery life. Some of them run M1 Macbook Airs at
| the lowest 8G memory configuration for ~$800 (discounted
| new from other retailers) + a digitizer for ~$100, while
| the closest comparable non-Apple laptops are all premium
| devices upwards of $1.5k and even then they are still
| worse in the battery department!
|
| As for myself, I do light dev work, virtualization,
| gaming, but also travel a lot and present at conferences.
| I use a GPD Win Max 2 for a little over $1k (early
| Indiegogo pricing). The closest Apple offering would be a
| 14" MBP, and configured as needed (32GB/2T) would be
| about $3800 and still be short a 4G modem and a couple of
| extra devices like a digitizer, game controller, and
| dongle for USB-A. -\\_(tsu)_/- Can't win 'em all.
| wtallis wrote:
| > An older server with 192G of RAM, 24 cores and >8TB of
| storage can easily be had and upgraded within $1k,
|
| Are you referring to a _used_ server, or just buying a
| minimally-equipped new server and upgrading it with
| aftermarket RAM and (low-quality) SSDs?
| jabbany wrote:
| Used (decommissioned from equipment retirement from
| companies) server, upgraded by maxing out the RAM slots
| and using the cheapest available SSDs.
|
| This is a pretty common practice for homelab enthusiasts,
| or so I hear.
| Thews wrote:
| A micro ryzen 5600U build with really bad quality
| components can be half the price of a mac mini with equal
| CPU performance. If you upgrade all of the mac specs you
| can probably get a larger divide, but IMO maxed out macs
| don't make much sense for most people.
| jb1991 wrote:
| A 2X price difference is certainly believable, but I was
| responding to the suggestion of a 10X price difference.
| wtallis wrote:
| It's that focusing on one specific aspect of the system
| and compromising on everything else that produces the
| really big discrepancies. I tried to use PCPartPicker to
| spec out a rough equivalent of a maxed-out Mac Pro in
| terms of CPU cores, GPU performance, and RAM and SSD
| capacity, but still ended up at with at most a 3.5x
| disparity, and that's ignoring the GPU VRAM capacity
| limitation and features like Thunderbolt and 10GbE and
| assembly and warranty and support. If you want to assign
| $0 value to a large portion of a Mac's features then you
| can make it look wildly overpriced, but that's mostly an
| admission that it's the wrong product for your needs.
| Thews wrote:
| The years of the keyboard issues left a bad taste in my
| mouth, but I switched to a non mac laptop for my previous
| laptop and now I'm back again. The coupling of the OS and
| hardware really do make for a great user experience. I
| don't want to play games on my laptop, which is the only
| real use case where I hear valid complaints. I just need
| my dev environment and snappy research and communication.
|
| A valid complaint from me is linux based container
| resource utilization. The only really good fix for that
| IMO is if apple did something like WSL2 or FreeBSD's
| linux ABI and had an efficient compatibility layer. For
| now I just run dev containers on my (linux) desktop.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Compared to what? Junk? My w541 is 10 years old and I just
| ordered parts from Lenovo to perform cosmetic repairs on
| it.
| stirlo wrote:
| For EUR2300 I assume you're looking at an M2 Pro model? Note
| that neither the M2 or M2 Pro Mac Mini currently have working
| display outputs[1] so no you should not. Apple changed the
| way the display outputs work in M2 so they're now dependant
| on Thunderbolt/DP alt mode support which is not implemented
| for any Apple silicon machine yet.
|
| On the other hand a cheap M1 Mac Mini would make a great
| machine to try it out. The M1 Mac Mini is the best supported
| machine currently.
|
| [1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-
| Support#m2-d...
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| New M2 mac minis start at $600 (8 core CPU; 8GB ram; 256GB
| SSD). You can probably find similarly specced x86 PCs for a
| comparable price, but this doesn't seem unreasonable.
| https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini
| kytazo wrote:
| You can get a used M1 mini for more or less 400EUR. Get a
| glimpse of whats going on in your local facebook marketplace,
| most likely you'll come up with nice offers.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| You must be kidding right? Who on earth would sell for 400?
| ac29 wrote:
| Literally the first result on (US) eBay is for 419 euros
| with "more than 10 available"
| windowsrookie wrote:
| The Mac mini M1 was on sale new for $400 at Costco a
| couple weeks ago. The M2 Mac mini is $499 on the Apple
| education store.
| jabbany wrote:
| I'm guessing that's for a model with 8G memory?
|
| In my experience the experience for those is quite bad, as
| you're sharing that 8G across both the CPU and GPU...
|
| Judging from the OP's post of 2.3kEUR, they're probably
| considering a maxed out version, which has a completely
| different experience since you can fully take advantage of
| the high memory bandwidth for hybrid tasks unlike the low-
| memory models where you're sharing the limited capacity.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Not the OP but I got a 13" and a larger model Mac of the x86
| variety when they were still reasonably young and even though
| I eventually got all of the bits and pieces to work it
| usually pays off to wait until a somewhat larger distro
| supports the hardware as well. That way you benefit from a
| much larger crowd of testers and once they have no more
| issues you should be good to go.
|
| Moneywise it was definitely worth it, both machines are still
| working many years later and have been pretty much trouble
| free after the initial bugs were ironed out.
|
| If I was in the market for a new laptop right now I'd wait
| for a bit and then pull the trigger on the latest model with
| broad support.
| macNchz wrote:
| I don't run Asahi on anything currently, but I do have two
| desktop Linux machines, an M1 Macbook, and have previously
| run Linux on an Intel Mac... I can see the argument for
| laptops based on battery life/heat/build quality, but for a
| desktop machine I'd need a lot of convincing to justify the
| price premium and risk of compatibility issues in choosing a
| Mac Mini over a SFF/USFF/Tiny desktop with fully supported
| hardware.
| slowmotiony wrote:
| I'd say getting a macbook or a macbook air would be worth it,
| but rather than spending that much on a mac mini I'd probably
| get one of those new ryzen mini-PCs like from Beelink or
| Minisforum. You could get something with a 7735HS 8-core
| chip, terabytes of diskspace and a shitload of LPDDR5 RAM for
| 500EUR and it's as small as the mac mini.
| aseipp wrote:
| The compute accelerator story on mainstream, non-patched Linux,
| with upstream software isn't that good at the moment. You're
| going to be waiting a while before you can do fun stuff like
| organize layers across the Neural Engine and GPU for ML models,
| something CoreML can do today. Compute using graphics APIs
| exists, but it isn't really the same and loses out on many
| features people practically want and are used to, and it moves
| forward much more quickly than graphics APIs e.g. Nvidia just
| released Heterogeneous Memory Management as stable in the open
| source GPU driver for x86. The Linux accelerator ecosystem in
| practice is just held together by Nvidia's effort, honestly.
|
| We really need something like Mesa, but for compute accelerator
| APIs. I'm really hoping that IREE helps smooth out parts of the
| software stack and can fill in part of this, but the pieces
| aren't all put in place yet. You'll need the GPU for a
| substantial amount of accelerator work regardless of Neural
| Engine support.
|
| I disagree that there is nothing lacking on these machines with
| Asahi, I still run into small nits all the time (from 16k page
| sizes biting back to software missing features). But my M2 Air
| is 100%, no-questions-asked usable as a daily driver and on-
| the-go hacking machine, it is fast as hell and quiet, it has
| nested virtualization and is the only modern ARM machine on the
| market, and I love it for that.
| themulticaster wrote:
| Is the Neural Engine/CoreML used in "normal" desktop apps on
| macOS, or is it limited to specialized ML centered apps? In
| other words, where should I expect performance improvements
| if there was a hypothetical Mesa for compute accelerators?
| Spontaneously, I can only think of image editors like
| Photoshop offering AI-based tools.
| endorphine wrote:
| Curious, what do you use it for?
| Topfi wrote:
| Thanks to the entire Asahi team, your work is truly incredible
| and so far beyond my pay grade that words fail me. I honestly
| recently tried and very much struggled to communicate why I was
| so amazed by your project when talking with friends.
|
| For anyone interested into the GPU side, I can't recommend Linas
| streams[1] enough.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/@AsahiLina/streams
| POiNTx wrote:
| How's proton support nowadays? The new M2 15-inch macbook Air
| looks really appealing
| kcb wrote:
| No Vulkan drivers. Will need that before anyone tries to do
| much with proton.
| sliken wrote:
| Proton is a wrapper/tweaks to wine, right? Thus x86-64 windows
| games can run on x86-64 linux. Thus the steam deck and many
| happy linux gamers. Apparently it's good enough to run a large
| majority of steam games, I believe I remember something like
| 90+% of the top 50 games on steam.
|
| I don't think it helps at all with running x86-64 code on arm.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| For running x86-64 on arm you have FEX. You can combine FEX
| with wine to run standard steam games on Asahi linux.
| sliken wrote:
| Wow, excellent. I'm trying to justify replacing a 2015
| desktop with either a mac studio or a ryzen/zen4 desktop.
| I'm not a gamer, but do occasionally fire up steam to play
| something old like Xcom 2 or Majesty.
|
| Knowing that at least some x86-64 steam games could work is
| promising, thanks.
|
| For me it all comes down to the extra memory bandwidth.
|
| A recent metal port of llama is pretty tempting and being
| able to run GPU accelerated LLMs with greater than 16GB
| (mid range GPUs) or 24GB (highend/RTX 4090) on the mac
| studio is interesting. $3,600 (for 96GB ram) interesting,
| not so sure.
| circuit10 wrote:
| It can run under FEX or box64 though
| nightski wrote:
| This is great work and I commend it. But in other threads people
| are acting like Asahi Linux hardware support is 100% complete. My
| fear is that if I were to go this route and purchase the hardware
| I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability I would
| in Mac OS. To be honest this blog post seems like the project has
| a long ways to go, not that it is nearly completion.
|
| I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so
| hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| You don't create a new bootloader that allows users the freedom
| to run an unsigned third party OS without having it degrade the
| system's security if and when they boot the native OS because
| you are "hostile to developers and hackers".
| fsflover wrote:
| My laptop can use TPM and a hardware key with my keys and
| free software. Where is the degraded security?
| rodgerd wrote:
| You seem unfamiliar with the Alder Lake compromise.
| hedora wrote:
| I could trick you into adding a hardware key, then install
| a tampered version of Windows with it.
|
| (Also, the last time I looked, TPM keys could be grabbed
| with ~ $100 of hardware, but I think that's fixed by some
| newer standard.)
|
| But, yeah, it's not a big tradeoff in practice. I think
| their point was that Apple had to expend effort to enable
| the use case, which isn't "hostile" toward the use case.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > I could trick you into adding a hardware key, then
| install a tampered version of Windows with it.
|
| There are other issues as well.
|
| For instance, on a PC the security settings are applied
| per machine and not per partition, so you can't mix an
| unsigned OS on one partition with full security on
| another partition.
|
| Also:
|
| > On Wednesday, researchers at security firm ESET
| presented a deep-dive analysis of the world's first in-
| the-wild UEFI bootkit that bypasses Secure Boot on fully
| updated UEFI systems running fully updated versions of
| Windows 10 and 11.
|
| Despite Microsoft releasing new patched software, the
| vulnerable signed binaries have yet to be added to the
| UEFI revocation list that flags boot files that should no
| longer be trusted.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2023/03/unkil...
| kaba0 wrote:
| > I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is
| so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be.
|
| As opposed to what company besides those tiny ones? Almost all
| of them are closed-source only and drivers have been
| painstakingly reversed engineered over decades.
| rollcat wrote:
| > I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is
| so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be.
|
| I don't think it's hostile, I think they're just hands-off;
| they throw the hardware over the fence and say, "if you wanna
| make use of it, here's our software; if you don't like our
| software, sorry no docs but you're free to write your own".
| Which is exactly what's happening.
|
| I mean it _would_ be nice if Apple had released more
| documentation, but I totally understand if they don 't want the
| burden of supporting it.
| thx-2718 wrote:
| First, personally I don't care what hardware or software
| people use, if they are happy with the tools that they using
| then that's good.
|
| That said, Apple has been very hostile to hackers over the
| years imo. Hardware being hard to repair, access, upgrade,
| etc. I think at one point they were making it virtually
| impossible to replace components because they were serial
| locked.
|
| As far as I am aware, progress Apple as made has been in
| response to public image issues or changes in consumer laws
| within the EU.
|
| Plus Apple software is heavily indebted to Open Source
| software so they very easily could be releasing drivers for
| their hardware instead of relying on community to do
| backwards engineering.
| circuit10 wrote:
| "I think at one point they were making it virtually
| impossible to replace components because they were serial
| locked."
|
| They are very much still doing that
| hedora wrote:
| In fairness, most instances of them doing that actually
| significantly increase the cost of evil maid hardware
| tampering attacks.
|
| If I could, I'd configure grub or whatever to serial-lock
| my Linux install to my desktop hardware (and keep a
| recovery key that would unlock it at another location).
| circuit10 wrote:
| The issue is that Apple isn't giving anyone access to the
| tools to pair the parts, unless you give them all the
| information in advance, buy them at possibly inflated
| prices through their self repair program if they're even
| available, and then have Apple remotely approve it
| afterwards (and this process only really works for
| individuals, 3rd party repair is more important as most
| people don't have the skill)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > That said, Apple has been very hostile to hackers over
| the years imo. Hardware being hard to repair, access,
| upgrade, etc. I think at one point they were making it
| virtually impossible to replace components because they
| were serial locked.
|
| That came partially out of the desire to reduce the lure
| for thieves and robbers. It was really bad during the first
| generations that regularly had jailbreaks and ways to
| bypass "Find My..." or whatever, then the first tightening
| reduced resale values of stolen iPhones by a good amount
| (as they were only good enough to slaughter for parts once
| reported stolen), and the latest round made it even worse
| for criminals.
|
| _Personally_ though, I 'd preferred they simply provided
| "unlock codes" with a phone that could be used to remove
| the association between a part's SN and the IMEI/SN of the
| phone. That way, buyers of iPhone have something similar to
| a certificate of authenticity.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| That's not true for Macs. Apple allowed and worked with MS
| to allow windows to work on Intel macs. That's pretty
| insane from allowing people to do what they want with their
| hardware.
| thx-2718 wrote:
| No offense but that's not even contextually the same
| thing so I'm not really sure what you're trying to say.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| You claim Apples Mac line of products is adversarial to
| hackers. Which I dispute with the example they help
| alternative OS to run on the Mac. First with Windows and
| now Asahi.
| kaba0 wrote:
| > Hardware being hard to repair, access, upgrade, etc. I
| think at one point they were making it virtually impossible
| to replace components because they were serial locked
|
| You can only have so many flexibility in design with modern
| hardware -- they are not fitting things into 5 cm "thin"
| chassics anymore. How exactly are such a thin device be
| repairable? Similarly to how old car motors could be
| tweaked with, you need special tools to touch anything in a
| modern engine. This is not against the customers, these are
| trade offs.
|
| But even this way, apple devices have by far the longest
| lifetimes, macs, iphones will have 2-3 owners easily - so
| is it really fair to call them out, or is it just baseless
| emotional reaction?
|
| Also, what you heard about locked down components resulted
| in better security, a much lower risk of theft, and a much
| more clean second-hand market (where you won't be sold a
| phone with a cheap chinese shittier screen for example).
| thx-2718 wrote:
| "But even this way, apple devices have by far the longest
| lifetimes, macs, iphones will have 2-3 owners easily - so
| is it really fair to call them out, or is it just
| baseless emotional reaction?"
|
| Why reply that criticism of Apple must be purely an
| emotional one? Kind of diminishes your argument here.
|
| Immediate search result for repairable phones:
|
| https://www.androidcentral.com/best-sustainable-
| repairable-p...
|
| https://shop.fairphone.com/en/buy-fairphone-4
|
| Here's a laptop that you can upgrade:
|
| https://frame.work/
|
| Lifetime for Apple isn't as long as you make it out to be
| when batteries need replaced and software support for
| hardware ends:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/macos-sonoma-
| drops-s...
|
| "Also, what you heard about locked down components
| resulted in better security, a much lower risk of theft,
| and a much more clean second-hand market (where you won't
| be sold a phone with a cheap chinese shittier screen for
| example)."
|
| Apple could just release stuff that didn't break so
| easily too so no need to risk changing out a screen if it
| ain't broke. There are plenty of ways to increase
| security of the device without making it less consumer
| friendly.
|
| Additionally since the context here is whether Apple has
| been hacker friendly or not, why shouldn't you be allowed
| to upgrade and change the hardware of YOUR device? As in,
| you want to put in more storage or change the screen to
| one that's better in some manner (maybe it's just cost)
| then you ought to be able to.
|
| That is it should be the device owners choice whether or
| not to replace their screen with one from Apple or a
| cheaper one.
| kaba0 wrote:
| So the only option has 1/10th the hardware of an older
| iphone with shittier camera than that.. for me that's not
| a good deal. Framework laptops are insanely expensive for
| again, worse hardware. Isn't the point of linux to run on
| anything?
|
| Also, every device needs battery replacements, like this
| is just the physics/chemistry of batteries and it has an
| absolutely doable price for any apple device.
|
| What breaks easily on an iphone? They are quite sturdy
| phones with metal casing. They wouldn't get sold after
| 5-7 years of active use if they weren't sturdy. And glass
| will still be breaking when it meets with big enough
| force - I again don't see your point.
|
| > re hacker friendliness
|
| The RAM has different architecture on the M series, so it
| can't be replaced even theoretically. Also, every moving
| part is one more point of potential breaking, plus it
| takes up space. This is not a rasppi, different design
| goals/constraints.
|
| You can put in a worse screen but one will be able to see
| that in the settings so they can't be scammed.
| m45t3r wrote:
| > Framework laptops are insanely expensive for again,
| worse hardware.
|
| 1199 EUR is not insanely expensive, specially considering
| that I can put up-to 64GB of RAM in a Framework laptop
| with a reasonable amount of money, while I would need to
| pay almost the price of a full Framework laptop to do the
| same in a Macbook Pro [1]. This is IMO, insanely
| expensive.
|
| And yes, I can definitely use those amount of memory
| during mass rebuilds that I sometime like to do in NixOS.
| I don't even try to do those same workloads in my macOS
| because they start to become hugely slow once you hit the
| swap.
|
| [1]: by the way, this get even worse considering that I
| also need to upgrade from an M2 Pro to M2 Max to have the
| option to do so. I just did a quote for the cheapest
| Macbook Pro with 64GB of RAM, and I got a 4000EUR quote
| for 512GB of storage that is laughable low for something
| that expensive. At that price, I can get 2 of the most
| expensive Framework AMD and I would still have sufficient
| money to get another one of the older Intel ones as a
| spare.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Mind you, the two kinds of RAM are not directly
| comparable.
| m45t3r wrote:
| Sure, I never said so. It doesn't mean that there isn't
| workloads that benefit from more RAM (even if it is
| slower) or that the Apple's RAM prices are insane.
| thx-2718 wrote:
| Not to mention I can't find anything on them having ECC
| capabilities but I could be wrong.
| thx-2718 wrote:
| If you like the hardware or software that you use then I
| am happy for you.
|
| "This is not a rasppi, different design
| goals/constraints."
|
| That we can agree on.
|
| Apple is a business with specific goals and so far as a
| business in terms of profits they have been successful.
|
| All I wanted to point out was that Apple is not hacker
| friendly in my opinion, and I have listed good reasons
| that you don't want to accept. There's no amount of going
| in circles here that will change either point of view I
| fear.
|
| Have a blessed day!
| hedora wrote:
| Going with the first link. The "best" phone is not
| globally available. The second "best" comes with three
| years of OS updates. I stopped reading there; three years
| is a much, much shorter lifespan than you get with iOS or
| MacOS.
|
| Also, say you have one of these phones, and are in a
| major city, then break it. How will you get the parts you
| need to repair it? How many hours will you be without a
| phone?
|
| With Apple phones, it's typically same day service to get
| it repaired. Worst case, you can get a new phone with
| your data mostly transferred, again, same day.
|
| The Ars article you link is pointing out that Apple is
| dropping software support for laptops that are 6 years
| old. That's better than pretty much any other vendor.
|
| As far as laptop repairs go, frame.work is probably the
| best non-apple option, but they don't have a fixed policy
| for how long replacement parts will be available. The
| story is similar for Apple:
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624
|
| says they provide parts for up to 7 years, and battery
| swaps for up to 10 (subject to part availability). I hope
| frame.work will be able to do better, but I challenge you
| to find any laptop company significantly better than
| this.
|
| (Other than soldered ram and disk, I honestly don't care
| about third party parts. It's not like Apple replacement
| part markups are insane or there are significantly better
| parts available. I've definitely never used third party
| parts for other brands of laptops, even when they were
| available. However, I've been repeatedly screwed over
| getting other brands of laptops repaired, especially
| under warranty.)
|
| Anyway, I get why Apple has a bad reputation for support
| and repairability. There objectively bad. However, that
| doesn't mean they're not simultaneously also the best
| option (or close to being the best).
| thx-2718 wrote:
| I am sorry but you're missing the point here.
|
| I'm not arguing over better hardware (performance) or
| price. I am arguing over hack-ability; that's it. I hope
| you can understand that.
| Kratacoa wrote:
| > But even this way, apple devices have by far the
| longest lifetimes, macs, iphones will have 2-3 owners
| easily - so is it really fair to call them out, or is it
| just baseless emotional reaction?
|
| I would dispute this claim, e.g. Apple settles iPhone
| slowdown case for $500m[1], just the first link I found
| looking for "planned obsolescence apple" on DuckDuckGo.
| This is not exclusive to their iPhones as one can find
| with a quick search.
|
| [1][https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51706635]
| kaba0 wrote:
| Which was about a very stupidly communicated, but
| genuinely good intentioned misshap. Iphones older devices
| with old batteries had cases where they no longer could
| provide sufficient voltage to the phone and thus it would
| reboot randomly for people. To fix the issue, they
| decreased CPU frequency so that it would no longer drain
| so high peak power.
|
| But they should have made it an option (it is one now on
| these devices) instead, they might have even come out
| good from it (as an android manufacturer wouldn't even
| care about such an old device at the time).
| smoldesu wrote:
| There's a line somewhere, and I think it's different for
| every person. For a lot of people, the pricing itself is just
| outright hostile. 8gb of RAM in a base model Mac is not
| future-proofed in an age of local AI models, and paying to
| upgrade it gets expensive, fast. For others the OS is hostile
| when it unceremoniously drops support for $THING they use, or
| because it has the gall to show them ads. For others yet, the
| hardware is hostile because it's basically a black box that
| Apple withholds documenting to maintain a monopoly on fixing
| them.
|
| Apple is one of the few companies smart enough to
| deliberately do this. It is both a testament to ability to do
| brilliant things, and akin to being trapped in a room with a
| lion that has twice your SAT score. The "golden handcuffs",
| as they say.
| kytazo wrote:
| Well overall if you sum up what even a basic m1 mb air
| packs, be it the panel, quality peripherals and soc itself
| its rather reasonable and within reach for almost anyone
| contemplating of buying a new computer. When you factor in
| that they were the first ones with an actual capable
| desktop arm offer I'd even say its cheap.
|
| At least this is how I felt 2 years ago back when I bought
| it and more or less even to this day. I'm wondering how is
| the market as of now, two years later, and how the $1k arm
| laptops coming out today compare.
| kaba0 wrote:
| There is literally no other laptop on the market that would
| be anywhere close to an M1 air in terms of performance-
| battery life combo. And it is definitely not even on the
| upper end in price for that, tiny windows laptops are
| ridiculously expensive!
|
| So, are they really expensive?
| viraptor wrote:
| > I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability
|
| You'd temporarily lose some hardware support (documented) while
| it's being worked on. But I'm not sure why you expect losing
| performance? This is running native code. Same binary will run
| the same on both systems (+/- the llvm version differences).
| nightski wrote:
| Specifically GPU drivers, which can dramatically impact
| performance. Especially if I am attempting to run any kind of
| ML workload from Linux. I'm assuming it's basically a non-
| starter at this point and one is forced to use Mac OS.
| viraptor wrote:
| Yes. I put that in the capability rather than performance
| basket though. As in, you can't access the compute shaders
| yet, rather than: you can and they're slower.
| zamadatix wrote:
| E.g. the performance you can get out of the GPU at the moment
| is a subset of what you can get out of the hardware. Or as
| another more generic example, until this latest release CPU
| boost states weren't enabled due to lack of proper cpuidle
| driver which resulted in regressed single thread performance.
|
| There is nothing inherent about running Linux that will
| require it be slower, in some cases it will/is even faster,
| but the lack of everything being fully supported does
| actually impact performance right now. It has been getting
| better with time.
| kytazo wrote:
| CPU wise at least its been on par if not better from its
| first days. At least this is what the various benchmarks at
| the time showed.
|
| Makes you wonder about how the rest of the system
| components will compare when they're finished.
| hedora wrote:
| Has anyone tried Steam under Linux? It's quite bad under
| MacOS (2016 casual games stutter, and there is no 32 bit
| support).
|
| I know rosetta doesn't exist under Linux, but I don't see
| any options to run steam / proton under rosetta either.
| viraptor wrote:
| > Has anyone tried Steam under Linux?
|
| Through FEX, yes
| https://vt.social/@lina/110068264684987710
|
| > I know rosetta doesn't exist under Linux
|
| It does these days! https://developer.apple.com/documenta
| tion/virtualization/run...
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Even with the regressed performance it beat osx in a ton of
| workloads.
| Timon3 wrote:
| Does the CPU run at similar frequencies between Mac OS and
| Linux (since they're writing their own drivers this isn't
| guaranteed)? Is the scheduling done similarly? Are there any
| special hardware modes you have to activate with e.g. binary
| blobs?
|
| There are a bunch of factors that could affect performance
| even under the same OS (try underclocking your CPU or play
| around with schedulers). Given the mostly non-existent
| documentation from Apple I'd strongly suspect that average-
| case performance will stay worse on the Linux side for a long
| time.
| hedora wrote:
| The currently top-rated top-level HN comment goes into
| those details. This release significantly improves CPU
| power management, to the point where it should be similar
| to MacOS.
|
| Some of this stuff is handled by binary blobs that get
| installed/upgraded by MacOS, and are running by the time
| Linux boots.
|
| With the previous release, power per watt and absolute
| performance were already better than high-end x86 laptops,
| so if your question is "is this faster and more power
| efficient than my other Linux laptop?", the answer is
| probably yes.
|
| If you're asking if it will beat MacOS's perf/watt in all
| scenarios, the answer will be no for a long time. However,
| it is probably already beating MacOS in many practical
| scenarios.
| jb1991 wrote:
| There have been multiple reports of the last couple years that
| Apple has been informally internally helping the Asahi Linux
| team to make it run well on their hardware. Apple cannot come
| out and officially support another operating system of course,
| but they are aware of the interest and are helping make it
| happen, in an unofficial capacity.
| hollerith wrote:
| >Apple cannot come out and officially support another
| operating system of course
|
| Apple officially supported running Windows on Macs for many
| years.
| jb1991 wrote:
| You can still do so with VMs, officially endorsed. But
| Bootcamp is RIP. Asahi Linux is not a VM, so not a fair
| comparison.
| hollerith wrote:
| I wasn't comparing. I was refuting your assertion.
|
| What has changed that prevents Apple from officially
| endorsing another OS nowadays when it clearly was able to
| do so in the past?
| freedomben wrote:
| > _Apple cannot come out and officially support another
| operating system of course_
|
| Why?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah that's nonsense. They already have bootcamp.
| zamadatix wrote:
| A car with one seat seems 100% complete if your use cases only
| involve you driving it alone. Asahi Linux is absolutely in that
| kind of spot right now. For some people there is 0 reason to
| wait, for others it's not even worth booting. If you have fear
| it's not fully complete enough, I'd say trust those feelings.
| At least right now.
| pkulak wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not gonna run out and buy a new Macbook just to wipe
| it. But these M1 machines are going to be things you just have
| lying around sometime soon. If my wife upgrades, for example, I
| know exactly what I'm doing with her M1 Air. :D
| brundolf wrote:
| Asahi is designed to be dual-booted right now (in fact you
| have to go off the beaten path to not do that), and it even
| uses the native Apple boot UI to let you pick your OS
| coldtea wrote:
| > _My fear is that if I were to go this route and purchase the
| hardware I 'd be seeing fraction of the performance and
| capability I would in Mac OS._
|
| The performance is there, it has been running stuff much faster
| than the vast majority of Intel/AMD laptops for over a year.
|
| Regarding the capabilities not sure which one you miss. Do you
| plan to use it for development, or you want some kind of
| gaming/multimedia setup?
|
| > _To be honest this blog post seems like the project has a
| long ways to go, not that it is nearly completion._
|
| It's the other way around. It has been usable as a daily driver
| for ages.
|
| > _I just can 't justify buying hardware from a company that is
| so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be._
|
| Then don't?
| caskstrength wrote:
| > Regarding the capabilities not sure which one you miss. Do
| you plan to use it for development, or you want some kind of
| gaming/multimedia setup?
|
| > It's the other way around. It has been usable as a daily
| driver for ages.
|
| Honest questions since I haven't been paying attention to
| Asahi for some time now:
|
| - Does hardware accelerated video decoding work? Including in
| Firefox?
|
| - Does sleep work properly or do I get significant battery
| drain after leaving it sleeping during the night time? Also,
| does it wake up from sleep reliably? Like if you open/close
| the lid 100 times in a row would it crash?
|
| - How is wifi? Does it work as fast and reliably on Linux as
| the Intel cards? Supports latest WiFi standard and 6ghz?
|
| This would be my most basic questions to buy MacBook as a
| daily-driver Linux laptop.
| nightski wrote:
| I don't see why it is unreasonable to desire Apple to provide
| documentation and open up their hardware. Honestly I'd ask
| the same as any other hardware vendor. Intel for example
| provides very detailed technical documents on their new GPUs
| (A770).
| coldtea wrote:
| It's not unreasonable, it's just not gonna happen any time
| soon.
| roboben wrote:
| I can't wait for M2 (pro) support for my MacBook Pro. I was long
| term Thinkpad/Arch Linux user and really want to go back to such
| setup. Sadly I didn't find anything better hardware-wise than the
| MacBook but I love Linux.
|
| I know they are focused on getting it to a good quality on M1
| first but eagerly consuming all project updates! Good job team!
| speed_spread wrote:
| I'm still waiting for Apple Silicon that's fast enough to run
| Gentoo Portage at Arch Pacman speed.
| yewenjie wrote:
| Is anybody daily-driving any M2 macbook pro on Asahi Linux? What
| is your experience like?
| zamadatix wrote:
| It wasn't until this morning installing Asahi on an M2 Pro was
| supported in expert only install. Prior to that it hasn't been
| supported at all. There is still some work to go on the
| Pro/Max/Ultra SoC family.
| deelawn wrote:
| I heard the Asahi Linux code is super dry.
| htk wrote:
| "And yes, the team is already working on Vulkan."
|
| This can do more for gaming on the Mac than Apple's efforts
| combined.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Does anyone know how efforts are going to to get Asahi's kernel
| changes merged back upstream? Has anything been merged upstream
| already? Is there a roadmap for getting things upstreamed? Are
| they pursuing an incremental approach to upstreaming individual
| components or do they have to prove that everything is flawless
| on Apple silicon before anything can be merged?
| yobert wrote:
| This information is on their website wiki. See
| https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
| zamadatix wrote:
| The feature table here
| https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support also
| tells you where along the path something is in terms of being
| stable and making it into the kernel. If it just has a release
| number like "5.19" then that means it was successfully
| upstreamed as part of that kernel version. Generally, the Asahi
| team tries to upstream as they go, but if they are uncertain
| about the overall architecture of a driver they'll hold off to
| prevent ossifying certain design decisions too early. An
| example of this is the GPU driver.
| Ruq wrote:
| Their work tempts me to get a Mac some day just because I know I
| can run Linux on it.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Awesome work. Now if we could just get those parts in a modern,
| modular laptop with replaceable components. Frame.work has raised
| the table-stakes for laptops.
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