You can't install a different OS on these? Are they different from the M series? Because those have Asahi Linux.

TheDong 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Asahi linux effectively only supports the M1 and M2 chips, so even a modern macbook air won't work, and even on "supported devices" you can't use thunderbolt or a usb-c display yet.

These use the A series chip, and even supporting new M chip revisions has been enough of an undertaking that I wouldn't really expect this to get Asahi linux anytime soon....

And apple can lock down the bootloader to be closer to the iPad/iPhone at any time with no notice, and based on their past actions, it would be quite in-line with their character to do so.

	▲	zozbot234 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The Asahi folks have also demonstrated M3 support, though without GPU-accelerated graphics (the M3 GPU is very different from the M1 or M2). Much of the effort is currently on getting the existing components upstream.
	▲	brookst 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		By “past actions”, do you mean doing extra work to make the bootloader support other operating systems? https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/introduction/

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artimaeis 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Asahi only supports M1 and M2 series Macs currently. The Neo uses an A18 Pro, which was only ever in an iPhone before. I wouldn’t count on Asahi coming to these soon.

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MBCook 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I see no reason they couldn’t.

But we know there’s lots of other models that they’re already working on. We don’t know how similar or different it is from an OS perspective.

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adrian_b 8 hours ago | parent [-]

The reason is the lack of documentation from Apple.

Reverse engineering needs a lot of time and hard work, which may not be worthwhile.

Sometimes someone does this work, and everyone may benefit from it, but you should never count on this happening, unless you do the work yourself.

	▲	zozbot234 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Reverse engineered documentation is very often preferable to the internal kind, which is not necessarily accurate. So either way, the Asahi folks are doing valuable work.

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gedy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe some of these agentic AI superstars can point their 100x engineering chops at this. This would impress me but not going to hold my breath for that.

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raw_anon_1111 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Surprisingly enough you don’t need Linux to learn about computers. You know that Macs have terminal?

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bigyabai 10 hours ago | parent [-]

The default Mac terminal environment is the Weetabix of UNIX-likes. You need GNU coreutils to do pretty much anything.

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rz2k 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm confused. Isn't coreutils a just small subset of even macOS's current zsh's builtins? What do you prefer about systemd to launchd? defaults seems like a convenient way to manage settings. Is it confusing for people from other operating systems?

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hollerith 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Name one thing lacking in the utilities included with MacOS (which come from BSD).

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Paracompact 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

`grep -P` kinda annoying. GNU has Perl-compatible regex, and BSD does not. You're reaching for `perl` or installing `ggrep` the moment you need a lookbehind.

	▲	kybernetyk 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		BSD grep is the pure grep version though. Perl regex is unnecessary bloat.

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realusername 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is it still shipping with that ancient bash, the awful Iterm and without a package manager? I haven't used OSX for a while.

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wolvoleo 7 hours ago | parent [-]

No. Zsh is now standard, though it still included an old optional version of bash. Apple hates GPLv3 that's why they moved away from bash.

The terminal app is not iterm. But Apple's own Terminal.app

And no there's no package manager but there's brew and macports.

	▲	realusername 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I didn't know it was an homemade terminal, it's just that it looked old and abandoned compared to your average Linux distribution.

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bigyabai 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The overwhelming majority of UNIX-like software isn't designed for BSD runtimes, to name one.

	▲	raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		So exactly eves “Unix like software” will kids be missing that prevents them from learning about computers?
	▲	veltas 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The overwhelming majority of UNIX-like software is available in the package managers right now for major BSDs.
	▲	hollerith 10 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I ask for a specific example, and you respond with more generalities.
	▲	freeone3000 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Aside from the BSD software, the Mac software, and all the software that’s actually POSIX-compliant (on purpose or by accident).