As an old-time Linux user I wish Asahi all the best, and I get why they want to have the apple silicon working. But it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth to support a company that has historically been somewhat hostile towards Linux/FOSS compat and the power users while in the same breath trying to proclaim their platform as developer friendly, nevermind the "apple tax" that has to be paid on commodity hardware. The hacker spirit isn't aligned on this one.

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skywhopper a day ago | parent | next [-]

Uhh, this ethos of “can I make Linux work on this hardware” has been a huge driving force of Linux’s success. This sort of effort is deeply embedded in the culture and always has been.

Apple makes very high-quality hardware, and unlocking the full capability of that hardware via strong Linux support is absolutely a noble cause. Rather than giving in to corporate lockdown, the Asahi folks are gifting the world a way to take advantage of this new lineage of Apple Silicon based personal computers.

In 10 years when Apple has long abandoned support for the M1, M2, etc, that hardware will still be able to run strong thanks to the efforts of this team. I salute them.

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dead_hn_theory 15 hours ago | parent [-]

> Apple makes very high-quality hardware, and unlocking the full capability of that hardware via strong Linux support is absolutely a noble cause.

That is highly unlikely to happen. See proprietary GPU drivers.

	▲	vallerie 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		fyi you should check out the Honeykrisp driver

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wmf a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Unfortunately this has been going on for 20 years and people refuse to learn.

"My [GPU/whatever] doesn't work right"

"Why don't you buy hardware that officially supports Linux?"

"I couldn't possibly"

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PennRobotics an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I bought multiple ThinkPads with "official Linux support" that had diverse, show-stopping bugs. Because Lenovo is a difficult partner (for one, their service centers don't test against Linux) I don't hesitate anymore to instantly return a new computer if it has even minor bugs while running Fedora or Ubuntu. If ANY feasible alternative to Lenovo existed, I would've switched five years ago.

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oefrha a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because sometimes people don’t go out of their way to buy Linux but want to repurpose old stuff they already own to experiment a bit and/or extend its life? For instance, I recently installed Ubuntu on my 10yo Intel MBP from 2015, and had to tweak lots of things to get it to a somewhat usable state that doesn’t flicker/tear/freeze. Had to use X11 instead of Wayland for anything Chromium-based. One of the most amusing ones (for some definition of amusing) is Bluetooth audio not working, turns out Ubuntu uses hot garbage codec that can’t fit into the available bandwidth due to AAC licensing (?), possibly among other problems, and switching to an AAC-enabled build made it reasonably stable.

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skywhopper a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Wild to limit yourself to what the manufacturers “officially support”. May as well just run macOS with that attitude.

	▲	renehsz a day ago \| parent [-]
		I agree that you shouldn't rule out devices that don't have official support for Linux. And it's amazing that the community brings it to some many devices. But if you already know at purchase that you'll install Linux on the device, you might as well prefer those with official support rather than just a community port, simply to show support for companies that agree with your priorities. Also you should inform yourself beforehand. Don't just buy random hardware and then make the surprised pikachu face when it happens not to support Linux.

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rossy a day ago | parent | prev [-]

If you think Apple has historically been somewhat hostile to FOSS, you'd hate to hear about the company whose logo is on every other laptop

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dead_hn_theory 15 hours ago | parent [-]

No need for snide remarks. That "every other laptop" company runs stock x86 which has been documented and supported by Linux since day zero. Dealing with custom Apple hardware is a major fuck-you from too many angles.

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rossy 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Which angles specifically? It really isn't that clear cut. For example, the "every other laptop" company engages in "DRM as vendor lock-in" practices that Apple does not: a PC laptop with Secure Boot disabled can't watch 4K Netflix in the Windows partition, but an Apple laptop with Asahi can in the macOS partition.

Also, if you've bought a high-end PC laptop in the past decade, you'd know that you still can't get one without prior research to see if everything actually works with Linux.

	▲	306bobby 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> a PC laptop with secure boot disabled can't watch 4K Netflix... It can't? Not a laptop, but my desktop still has L1 without secure boot enabled. Don't have Netflix subscription to actually test your claim but idk what they'd be detecting / requiring outside of that