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saghm 6 hours ago

It seems like there are a decent number of people finding Asahi stable enough for regular use: https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1quko4w/how_via...

I imagine there are still some rough edges (and it seems like distro choices are probably a bit lacking at the moment if you prefer something outside of a few specific mainstream options) but given how niche ARM support was before the first M1 machines, the progress that's happened so far is honestly pretty astounding. Given that the iterations from M[n] to M[n + 1] seem less large than the initial leap from Intel to M1, it doesn't seem that crazy to imagine they'll end up closing the gap even further to the point where you could probably assume a similar level of hardware support from Asahi for a year-old Macbook as you would for a year-old non-Apple laptop.

As for Apple "supporting" Linux, my perception is that if they wanted to make it harder than it was for the people working on Asahi to even get this far, they almost certainly could have. It seems like they're probably doing the same thing that most laptop vendors do, which is not explicitly support it but also not go out of their way to block it either. For a company with the reputation and history Apple has, I think that's a pretty huge win for the community, and even as someone who overall has a somewhat negative inclination to purchase from them, I have to admit that they seem way less hostile to Linux on their ARM machines than I would have predicted.

TingPing 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Asahi is great on earlier models but it will certainly not support the M5 before its already multiple models behind.

wpm 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's only because they are focusing on upstreaming all of their work into the kernel first. A handful of them spent a small amount of time building some device trees for M3 and it didn't take them long to get to the point M1's were at at the first release of Asahi.

I imagine once a lot of the cleanup and maintenance is done on what they have, they'll be in a better spot to accelerate support for other SoCs, and it probably won't be half a decade before the M6 or whatever is supported.

All said, Apple could just spend a tiny tiny amount of their warchest and just ship some goddamn drivers for Linux a la Boot Camp and save the Asahi team the time divining it from the tea leaves.

philistine 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

Unfortunately, Apple is not one to revisit their previous decisions very often. With the move to Apple Silicon, the capabilities of the bootloader were locked in (chain-of-trust, ability to load other OS and keep chain-of-trust on macOS) and that was it. Apple is telling you what they support; there's never any damning secret with them. You want to run Linux? Run it in a VM on macOS. That's what marketing has been saying since day one of the M1.

Them's the breaks.

sysworld 5 minutes ago | parent [-]

I don't mind using Apple's native Hypervisor framework, it's better then QEMU (speed/overhead), but Apple has no support to passthrough USB ports. https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/3778

saghm 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure, I don't disagree. I feel like I was pretty explicit about what I was claiming though:

> it doesn't seem that crazy to imagine they'll end up closing the gap even further to the point where you could probably assume a similar level of hardware support from Asahi for a year-old Macbook as you would for a year-old non-Apple laptop

allthetime 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Is it? I have my old M1 Air and I am very curious but don't want to go through the trouble of fiddling about with linux for a few days just to leave it rotting after. I would be inclined to maintain a dual boot situation as well and SSD space is at a premium.

0xffff2 3 hours ago | parent [-]

As far as I can tell, Asahi actually requires dual boot. There doesn't seem to be an option to install it standalone. (But I have an M4 Air, so I'm not able to install it yet)

allthetime 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Just looked into it - MacOS is required for installation - and they firmly recommend leaving a minimal installation on the drive for things like firmware updates and disaster recovery.