It's not just the Apple Silicon Macs, either; I have a 2017-model Intel Mac which runs any number of distros just fine except that sleep just doesn't work right. No amount of keystrokes or mouse-clicks will wake it up if it sleeps.
Is there anything stopping this from being thrown some investment plus LLM tokens? I wonder what a KVM connected to the machine plus a few thousand in Astra/Fable tokens could do here. It seems funny to think of software feature defects in OSS software now if people are building full recombinations of closed source software daily now!
Add a tool to the harness you use that can ping you on Telegram/whatever when it gets stuck and need you to do stuff physically, tell it to use it in the workflow with you. Used this approach a bunch with Codex to work on and debug hardware stuff. Once every 5-15 minutes I receive my command, and as a good r̶o̶b̶o̶t̶ human I moved the resistor/patch cable in the way the agent instructed me, eventually it got things working in the way I wanted it to.
My only blocker for installing Asahi on my Mac Studio (M1 ultra) is that llama.cpp performance is very bad when compared to using the Metal backend on the same hardware.
I have similar issues with my ultra. Have put it on a laptop, but my desk Setup with my multiple desktop computers is usb-c video based ( kind of a poor man’s kvm) , and asahi doesn’t do usb-c video yet
The Asahi installer does this automatically, it guides you through sizing. You run it in a macOS terminal. By default, Asahi will be the default boot option, and to get to macOS you hold the power button on boot until it says "Loading startup options..."
I have two M1 pro asahi macbooks, and I only use macOS for VirtualDJ or AirPlay.
I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You have to work through provided code samples and then eventually get the vendor’s engineers to look into problems that couldn’t be resolved through the documentation, where they would go look into the other teams and their sources to discover the answer.
The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. The honest answer is that it’s not worth the huge effort investment needed to document an entire platform for public consumption.
I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
You describe an exhaustive documention, but some documentation would already be better than none. Perfect is enemy of good, as your comment illustrates.
If you’ve ever tried to lock down a mac and dealt with the 100s of system services, you’d know why. I like the hardware and base os, but I have no idea what those services are doing.
Many are undocumented. A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. And, they’re chatty and persistent in trying to communicate out. You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.
I only use my mac for development. I’m a simple man and don’t need all the bloat and hidden behavior. Plus, I always feel like I’m one automatic update away from it becoming unusable.
So many daemons. And while a lot can be disabled, some of them cause important stuff to break if you disable them, or even cause the OS to crash in a Heisenbugian fashion. And there's no documentation. So debugging this crap is anything but simple.
Not to mention coming from something like Niri, or even default Gnome to MacOS Tahoe is just gimping productivity tenfold. It is so incredibly unintuitive in every way for window management and keyboard shortcuts and everything in between.
My Mac Mini M4 is for building the Mac/iOS apps, other than that it's useless as a daily driver. I will patiently wait for Asahi while I use my other computers that can run serious operating systems.
> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.
I suspect there would be an element of induced demand here. IMO the MacBook range are the only laptops on the market worth buying - but not having support for gaming (or at least, hilariously bad support for a limited range of games) is compelling enough reason to install Linux for a large portion of users (filling the void left behind by the widely adopted Bootcamp).
> but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF.
Yeah, GPU ISA, controllers, power management, NPU, and who knows what else. I still believe that companies should be compelled by regulators to offer documentation and support necessary to write drivers as I believe it is part of the "right to repair" (M1 will lose support in 2 years, it's still a great platform).
> They chose to leave it open.
I _really_ wonder on this point. It's so uncharacteristic of Apple. Were they concerned about potential anti-competitive lawsuits and maliciously did the bare minimum to avoid them? "It's technically open hardware, but good luck figuring out how it works"
This is nonsense. Chinese vendors like Rockchip and Allwinner provide fairly halfassed docs at times, but they try. It's housnads of pages, total, sure. But even this along with public code samples allows to create almost perfectly FOSS supported implementations for their HW. And it's a complex HW similar to what Apple has. I've worked with all kinds of just annoyingly incomplete and badly written datasheets, and if you put some work into it having at least something helps tremendously, even if the manufacturer ignores you completely and you have no field engineer access, and just throws incomplete crap over the public fence.
No docs is clear statement Apple hates FOSS. "how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop" argument is very weak considering that only consumer platforms that engage in a complete lockdown are maybe some gaming consoles, and those are basically appliances and not a general computing machines.
Sure but that's not really their point. They're not saying that Linux is a joke nor that it's useless; they're saying that the amount of people installing Linux on their Macs is so small that it wouldn't make financial sense for Apple to support them. Knowing how much an engineer gets paid, even staffing a small team to supporting Linux would cost Apple a couple million each year. That's not even taking support into account.
If Apple doubled their Mac revenue, the financial benefit of Linux would remain the same. That means it would then be effectively half as important for their business, but the operational challenges and risks remain the same.
At some point the ongoing maintenance and support as well as coordination and organizational distraction mean it wouldn't get approved if internal engineers offered to start it off for free.
They're avoiding it because installing Linux (or Windows, even), would actually decrease their income. I doubt people running Windows on Intel Macs were avid Apple Music subscribers.
No, they're not loss leaders, but in 2015 services were about 9% of Apple revenue. Now they're about 28%.
It's fairly clear which direction the wind is blowing.
Also, hardware - software integration pushes more hardware sales. People with iPhones are a lot more likely to buy Macs than people with Android phones. Same story for Airpods & co. I've also basically never seen an Apple keyboard used with non-Apple computers.
Also Apple stops supporting the hardware and the software at the same time. The case that Linux support lets hardware be used longer is a harder sell when the company stops manufacturing/stocking parts for servicing at the point where someone would consider Linux.
> I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
Oh please - Apple provided a full suite of Bootcamp drivers for their hardware just a couple of years ago, not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.
It allowed a machine running Intel's EFI firmware (as Intel Macs have always done) to boot an OS that only understood the older BIOS standard.
Once Microsoft and the various PC vendors started supporting UEFI directly, Bootcamp was just a bundle of existing Windows drivers from the component vendors.
If you put a specific Broadcom Wi-Fi chip in the Mac, Bootcamp included Broadcom's Windows driver that was best suited for that chip.
And Linux support on M Macs would also have a "real job", what is your point exactly?
I find it so bizarre that some of you here are defending a megacorporation that could have easily afforded to provide drivers for Linux Kernel like their competitors do.
You're clapping for free volunteers to spend hundreds of hours reverse engineering Thunderbolt controllers when companies like Intel outright contribute them.
I'm pretty sure Intel is providing Xenon CPUs for free when they are used in Linux servers, so they have no financial interest in providing first party Linux drivers.
Sure, they relied on community Linux drivers in the past, but that didn't have anything to do with money.
There is no "applause" in my post - please learn to read before you take up your bigcorp defender shield and think for a second why you're fighting against your own benefit.
Regardless, saying it would be too much effort for Apple is laughable at best. Even more so when Apple used to release such docs in the past when it was much less financially capable.
Bootcamp on Intel Macs was a different story because Apple's hardware was mostly an assortment of other vendors' hardware (with some custom components and set up). That means they could bundle drivers for Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, Realtek, Marvell, Synaptics, etc plus a couple of their own (the camera, the touchpad, the mouse, etc) and call it a day. Since the hardware was x86-64 it mostly just worked. That's an immensely different world from their custom hardware. They would need to write Linux drivers for all of their networking chips, each of their processors, their GPUs, work around Linux/Windows' 16KB memory page issues, their neural engines, the SEP, their DCP, the interrupt controller, IOMMU, their custom storage drivers, etc. You're vastly underselling or misunderstanding the size of the situation.
They were also in a different place back when they made Bootcamp. They were fighting a "Mac vs PC" battle head on and trying to convert other OS users to macOS. Now they don't really seem to care about that because their strategy is converting iPhone users into ecosystem members.
The implication of saying it's a "huge effort" is that the effort is too much. You're nitpicking at this point and the flat refusal is just as much a problem as tossing out "laughable" in a sentence focused on calling Apple bad.
There's a lot of documentation required to write drivers for hardware; for the GPU, they'd need to share the instruction set of the GPU along with the specifications of the controller. Lots of weird things like power management too.
If shared, that's probably enough to create copycat hardware or at least an emulator.
Personally, I just want to run Linux on my latest MacBook Pro on day 1 with full hardware acceleration. If it was supported, MacOS would be on the device for as long as it took to install Linux.
I think the only way that would happen is if the EU extended "the right to repair" to include software, compelling companies to release documentation sufficient to produce drivers with. I'm sure Apple would maliciously comply, like provide the ISA but not power management specs - but that would still cut the work required by the Asahi team by 80%.
Apple's hypervisor.framework lets other OS instances run very very fast with the UTM app (open source on github, but i use the prebuilt version from the App Store). In my case i've used arm native linuxes (arch with various compositors, kde, gnome, fedora) all on M2, M2 Max, M5 and the experience is indistinguishable from native. MacOS is running too. I think hardcore graphics folks might want direct accelerator access, or there'd be curiously little reason for Asahi (other than that it's awesome work).
I use UTM in emulation mode, NOT Qemu simulation mode, which is wasteful.
What is the purpose here? You are still stuck with a full blown MacOS running the system no? That is what Asahi tries to replace, not the other way around.
I'd recommend reading up on it, and perhaps trying it, because it's very useful.
For folks lamenting that the (awesome) Asahi efforts are challenged by reverse engineering of changes from M2 to M3, and so on, those changes vanish into the abstraction, but their benefits do not. That's why i switched from Asahi a couple years ago to UTM in apple silicon hypervisor mode.
The purpose is to be able to run a decent Linux setup while also having MacOS for things. Not everyone is stuck on the anti-Apple train; some of us put software on all the platforms and thus using the hypervisor for this use case is quite comfortable. Disclaimer: personal experience - I too use UTM for highly productive things..
Wanting to run a single OS at a time is anti Apple now? Run MacOS or run Linux, why run both and create more problems than it solves and waste resources?
i have no idea how you think apple silicon will discontinue support for itself.
the hypervisor framework documentation, that i linked above, is pretty clear; the linux builds for arm run extremely fast on apple silicon because hypervisor framework gives them hardware access, in some subsystems directly (memory mapping for example), in other systems through a shim (graphics hardware).
Aside from the "they have no incentive" answer, I imagine it's not so easy even if they wanted to. I suspect most of it won't be solely Apple's IP to share in the first place.
So that you have to keep buying Macs every few years of course. If they gave you a way to install linux easily then you could use it far past their intended lifespan and wouldnt keep you locked into the apple ecosystem. They have proved time and time again that Apple hardware running anything but MacOS or iOS is something they will work very hard to stop you doing.
2 more years and your mac will not install the latest MacOS version, which then means you will no longer be able to update any software on your own computer or install any new software either. If you could install linux or any other OS on it you would be able to use it for decades to come, but instead you will be forced to buy another new shiny Apple box.
You will probably argue thats ok because you would have wanted one anyway by that time or some such point, but the fact remains that Apple will force you to upgrade your hardware not very long away by not allowing you to install anything on it.
That's not how macs work. You don't suddenly lose the ability to run new binaries just because they're not on the latest MacOS version.
Using your own conservative estimate, 8 years seems like a fine lifespan for a laptop, far longer than the "few years" you initially said. And in practice, there are plenty of macbooks that have been running even longer.
The parent commenter described exactly how Macs work. I have a beautiful 10-core iMac 27” with 72 GB of RAM from 2020 that Apple has now decided to turn into a lemon. macOS Tahoe runs as slow as molasses and no more macOS upgrades will be forthcoming. I downgraded to Sonoma (which cost me hours) and the machine runs well again for now but the App Store has already started refusing to update apps like Pages because macOS is old. Soon I won’t be able to install a single app through the App Store and Linux (T2 Linux in my case, not Asahi) will be the only option to keep using this terrific hardware.
Intel macs suddenly will lose the ability to run programs because Apple has dropped the requirement to ship an intel build. And from experience, as soon as Apple stops requiring devs support old hardware, nothing works anymore.
It's a bit awkward where newer Intel models with T2 chips don't support OpenCore, so e.g. the 2019 MBA is going to run out of security updates with macOS 14, sooner than a 2008 MBA that OpenCore will update up to macOS 15.
Depends on your expectations. Throwing a perfectly working laptop out after 7 years because apple cut off software support is wasteful to me. It might not be for you.
It wouldn’t even be a problem for Apple to support Linux. Linux’s desktop market share has never been a threat to Apple at all. I hope Ternus, being the engineer he is, opens this up.
Hmm, odd listing. Looks like an embedded linux job working on a BSP, but they don't have any hardware I know of which ships with Linux. Even their constrained environments use things like their own L4 variant or RTKit.
They want control on the walled garden. When was the last time apple did anything for public unless forced by FCC. Now there is no hope since they can simply donate to trump.
Would you happen to have a link to this? I would like to learn about this but unfortunately treehouse.systems doesn't seem to be very well indexed by search engines, and Mastodon's search is failing me.
Absent that, it'd take some kind of sustained right-to-repair, EU morality, many sternly worded letters pressure campaign.
Plus, once they did (officially), they're kinda committed to keep doing it. That's explains why they remain okay with emoloyees helping on their own time; all the upside, none of the down.
The FCC? I guess you mean their wifi chips or cellular modems or something? I can’t see the FCC having jurisdiction over anything else that Apple does. Maybe you meant the FTC?
I expect they don't actually care whether or not people run Linux on macs. I mean they used to let you run Windows!
Probably the real reason is just that it's extra work - both in terms of producing the docs, and in dealing with complaints when they change things. From their point of view it's extra work with no benefit to them.
Yep, I suspect the goal is to reduce support footprint/burden to the absolute minimum possible, which is also why they don't maintain their legacy virtualization/translation layers indefinitely (Classic mode, Rosetta 1 (PPC → x86), Rosetta 2 (x86 → ARM)). The benefit is being able to make major changes, refactors, etc with relatively little delay and encumbrance.
This applies on both the software and hardware layers. In the past, CPU suppliers dragging their feet and/or being unable to deliver on promises were the chief motivation for switching architectures, and now that they're their own supplier they can banish that issue entirely so long as they're not beholden to any kind of external behavioral contracts or expectations.
If the OS teams need some new capability or discover substantial benefit from redesigning some part of the SoC, the SoC/hardware team can just implement it and not have to care about breaking anything. That's a major competitive advantage that practically nobody else in the computer or mobile device industries has.
They let you run Windows when they were losing in the market and needed a path to migration for users of the winning platform. Once they started winning, they stopped.
Conversely, Microsoft refused to interoperate with Linux. Until Linux became the clear winner in the datacenter space. Now they have WSL and actually work pretty well as a cross-platform development environment.
Microsoft is being all kumbaya right now for those exact same reasons - they are hemorrhaging users to Linux and macOS. WSL only exists because of this.
In the 90s and 2000s, they considered Linux a cancer, and only kept macOS alive for antitrust reasons.
Community... is what you have with family, neighbors and such. Being a user of a mass produced thing is not a community.
But to answer your question: Why would they? Apple hasn't asked anybody to put Linux on their machines. They deliver them with a fully functional OS already and there are thousands of other computer models you can purchase instead of a Mac.
> Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community?
Because then they'll have to compete with Linux, which opens them up to someone else making a cheaper computer that does the same stuff.
I mean, I'm typing this on a junky Raptor Lake laptop I found on eBay for $220. Would I buy a Neo or MBP to replace it just to run the same software stack? Probably not.
If you believe OS X is the best environment and Apple Silicon will remain the best hardware in perpetuity, it seems silly for Apple not to allow some experimentation. Apple executives, to be blunt, know better. Lean times are always ahead.
Apple silicon is winning in performance and power consumption. It's not quite the same as the old Intel based generation, where they were more like premium/well built machines with good screens and hardware.
Now some people would like to use that top of the line Apple silicon but without MacOS that comes with it. I doubt this is a huge threat to apple but it's also not a huge market for them. From what I understand they are not actively impeding it but not actively helping it either.
I actually won a M2 laptop a while ago. I resold it, new in box still shrink wrapped because I did not care for MacOS, just a personal preference. People like me are a minority though.
> It's not quite the same as the old Intel based generation, where they were more like premium/well built machines with good screens and hardware.
Not sure what generation you're talking about? Intel c. 18-25 years ago was wildly ahead on everything, much more so than Apple is now, in fact.[1] Apple Computer, quite famously, straight up abandoned their previous CPU architecture and started shipping Intel chips just to have something competitive in the market.
Again, everything goes in cycles in this industry and Apple's executive decisionmaking is 100% not placing bets on being the best forever just to make a bunch of Linux nerds happy.
[1] Process innovation mattered more at the time, where now we're hitting the scaling limit and chips are much more comparable.
Reverse-engineering Apple's custom silicon is basically the modern equivalent of repairing a spaceship while it's actively launching. Incredible work by the Asahi team!
Makes you wonder who's choice it was to launch a half-finished rocket. AMD and Intel's rockets sit on the launch pad with GPU/CPU drivers shipped for Linux before T-10.
If selling Linux servers (or parts used in Linux servers) is a major chunk of your revenue, your company is likely to start providing first party Linux drivers?
>Their Silicon was written to be OS agnostic, Apple's was not.
i don't think that's accurate. the M series chips and memory architecture enable capabilities for the OS software to take advantage of, and the software and hardware teams get to collaborate to be ready for a simultaneously launch, but nothing about that is macos specific, just that they're on the same side of a walled garden.
Apple silicon has features specifically designed for macOS or software running on macOS. e.g.: Rosetta 2.
From Wikipedia:
One of the key reasons why Rosetta 2 provides such a high level of translation efficiency is the support of x86-64 memory ordering in the M1 SoC.[12] The SoC also has dedicated instructions for computing x86 flags.
So, Apple always adds one more thing to their hardware to enable their magic.
The dubious metaphor is what tipped me off in the first place, but then I looked at the account activity. Dormant for over a year, submits vibecoded AI project to Show HN (which gets immediately downvoted and flagged due to being slop), then leaves two LLM-style comments.
Processors, not just Apple’s, change constantly between generations. The core instruction set doesn’t change, but they get new capabilities, not just with new instruction sets.
Remember the SoC isn’t just the CPU. It’s display engines, GPUs, storage controllers, video decoders and more.
Even outside of Apple, you’ll see hardware vendors provide Linux patches for their latest CPUs to keep working well. There’s some baseline functionality that works out of the box but it’s never a free ride.
Me too. I've got an M3 Mac Mini running as a linux server with parallels, but it has a weird NIC bug that crashes the mini every few weeks, keen to get of macOS and it's buggy NIC driver. (really don't want to send it into an Apple repair shop, there are non local here, it's a whole thing)
Because it's a lazy response. OP might not be a software developer. Should they learn complex software engineering to try and contribute or should they call out a missing feature that's important to them so the actual developers have some data on what to prioritise?
Feedback in a forum stating something the developers are probably well aware people want in a location the developers might not even be reading is not particularly useful feedback. As for the comment thread utility, sure, I guess if you think that not reading the article is valuable for the HN community, but I could just as easily argue that pushing back against comments like that could be seen as valuable for a community that values more thoughtful feedback.
You're entitled to your opinion that scrolling to the last comment on the page is preferable to reading the article. I'm also entitled to mine that it's a net loss to the quality of conversation.
I don't understand this. Buy something else to run Linux, as in anything other than Apple M series laptops. And if you want to do AI stuff, suffer with OSX using too much RAM, or again, buy something appropriate.
I don't think it makes much sense to expect such a cohesive/specific philosophy from an open source project like this.
The goal is "Linux on Mac". In a commercial product, specific details of what gets built usually stem from a more detailed vision that can be articulated as one. In open source projects those details are determined by what individual contributors are motivated to work on.
That doesn't means a cohesive vision can't emerge, there might be one for Asahi actually. But I think the default position is that it's kinda just a mob of people doing what they each feel like doing.
I don't think it matters that Asashi is a generation or three behind, because the moment you really need it is when Apple stops updating the OS for your hardware.
When M1 drops out of support I bet Asashi for the M1 machines will be pretty polished.
It‘s going to be a godsend for people with M1 macs when Apple or App vendors decide to drop support for them.
The hardware is super capable and will make a great fileserver, TV box or HomeAssistant instance once I‘m done using it as daily driver.
Similarly, because of distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, I can keep using a 15y old Samsung notebook with a modern firefox, whereas Windows 8 already broke Samsung‘s display brightness driver and thermal management, and 10&11 are entirely unusable.
Oh, so an M2 will support GPU usage? Can you run CoreML and unsloth models in the same way you would use them on regular MacOS? Are there benefits to using Linux/Asahi for running models on Apple hardware?
You wouldnt be using coreml since thats apples software, but likely vulkan versions of llama.cpp or pytorch or what have you. How well that works at the moment i dont know
I have an M2 Macbook Air that i sometimes boot into Asahi to play Steam games that doesn't work natively on mac. It works unreasonably well given that there is something like five different translation layers to make it work!
Huh, I thought Asahi would still be too unpolished on M2 to play games reliably. Could you elaborate on your setup a little? What kind of games do you play? What is performance like? Is it really better than Crossover for example?
Are you talking about using a thunderbolt dock and GPU? I doubt that's a use case high in the developers minds. I'm curious though, I wonder if the open source NVIDIA driver can be built for it.
I bought a Mac mini M4 simply because it was very cheap and the M4 chip offers great performance. It is currently mounted on the back of my TV and serves as a media station.
It runs macOS, but I have no particular interest in the operating system, nor do I own any other Apple hardware. (So no synergies.) It is alright (and better than Win11) but the preinstalled software does not even properly update without an Apple account. As soon as I can switch over to Linux, I will. ... I would just wait for all the ports to work.
Me too, M4 and keen to run Linux, partly because every damn system update bloats the system by 20GB but no memorably useful novel feature actually emerges and partly because it's long term stable. That said, at this stage in my career I appreciate a working system that doesn't require umpteen kernel recompiles!
My bet: Apple is going to close it down. It is too much of a legal risk. What if some Linux enthusiast finds patent infringements in Apple's undocumented APIs?
Why would they even care? 99% of people aren't going to be installing Linux on their Macbook. If Apple did care, they'd have stopped allowing dual booting a long time ago.
I recently read somewhere that someone wrote a letter/email to Apple's legal team, explaining the risks. Sorry if I cannot be more specific, I already went through my browser history and cannot find it back right now. PS: Browsers really need to improve here, it is crazy that I cannot search through my history in a meaningful way.
On the topic of browsers, I feel your pain. There were a good few years where they were shipping new and useful features, but they plateaued and started removing features. I can't remember the last time I was excited about browser features.
I wish the team every success.
My only blocker for installing Asahi on my Mac Studio (M1 ultra) is that llama.cpp performance is very bad when compared to using the Metal backend on the same hardware.
When running inference, I would love to use all of my hardware please Apple.
I have two M1 pro asahi macbooks, and I only use macOS for VirtualDJ or AirPlay.
the devs strongly discourage single-booting
I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You have to work through provided code samples and then eventually get the vendor’s engineers to look into problems that couldn’t be resolved through the documentation, where they would go look into the other teams and their sources to discover the answer.
The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. The honest answer is that it’s not worth the huge effort investment needed to document an entire platform for public consumption.
I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
Many are undocumented. A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. And, they’re chatty and persistent in trying to communicate out. You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.
I only use my mac for development. I’m a simple man and don’t need all the bloat and hidden behavior. Plus, I always feel like I’m one automatic update away from it becoming unusable.
Sure you can
> You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.
No
My Mac Mini M4 is for building the Mac/iOS apps, other than that it's useless as a daily driver. I will patiently wait for Asahi while I use my other computers that can run serious operating systems.
I suspect there would be an element of induced demand here. IMO the MacBook range are the only laptops on the market worth buying - but not having support for gaming (or at least, hilariously bad support for a limited range of games) is compelling enough reason to install Linux for a large portion of users (filling the void left behind by the widely adopted Bootcamp).
> but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF.
Yeah, GPU ISA, controllers, power management, NPU, and who knows what else. I still believe that companies should be compelled by regulators to offer documentation and support necessary to write drivers as I believe it is part of the "right to repair" (M1 will lose support in 2 years, it's still a great platform).
> They chose to leave it open.
I _really_ wonder on this point. It's so uncharacteristic of Apple. Were they concerned about potential anti-competitive lawsuits and maliciously did the bare minimum to avoid them? "It's technically open hardware, but good luck figuring out how it works"
No docs is clear statement Apple hates FOSS. "how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop" argument is very weak considering that only consumer platforms that engage in a complete lockdown are maybe some gaming consoles, and those are basically appliances and not a general computing machines.
Right now, yes. But Linux support is like freedom of speech in a dictatorship.
Everyone makes fun of it and says it's useless but fundamentally the powers that be are deathly afraid of it ever turning the tide.
That would be like you buying something at the dollar store.
At some point the ongoing maintenance and support as well as coordination and organizational distraction mean it wouldn't get approved if internal engineers offered to start it off for free.
They're avoiding it because installing Linux (or Windows, even), would actually decrease their income. I doubt people running Windows on Intel Macs were avid Apple Music subscribers.
or are you saying apple devices are loss-leader prior the app store revenue ?
that's the model taken to the extreme
It's fairly clear which direction the wind is blowing.
Also, hardware - software integration pushes more hardware sales. People with iPhones are a lot more likely to buy Macs than people with Android phones. Same story for Airpods & co. I've also basically never seen an Apple keyboard used with non-Apple computers.
Oh please - Apple provided a full suite of Bootcamp drivers for their hardware just a couple of years ago, not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.
It allowed a machine running Intel's EFI firmware (as Intel Macs have always done) to boot an OS that only understood the older BIOS standard.
Once Microsoft and the various PC vendors started supporting UEFI directly, Bootcamp was just a bundle of existing Windows drivers from the component vendors.
If you put a specific Broadcom Wi-Fi chip in the Mac, Bootcamp included Broadcom's Windows driver that was best suited for that chip.
I find it so bizarre that some of you here are defending a megacorporation that could have easily afforded to provide drivers for Linux Kernel like their competitors do.
You're clapping for free volunteers to spend hundreds of hours reverse engineering Thunderbolt controllers when companies like Intel outright contribute them.
Sure, they relied on community Linux drivers in the past, but that didn't have anything to do with money.
The person you're replying to didn't say that. Please don't misrepresent and please keep it respectful
They just don't care.
They were also in a different place back when they made Bootcamp. They were fighting a "Mac vs PC" battle head on and trying to convert other OS users to macOS. Now they don't really seem to care about that because their strategy is converting iPhone users into ecosystem members.
The challenge isn't finding an engineer. It is picking what project doesn't get done in its place.
That's not what they said. Please don't misrepresent
> is laughabe
And this disparaging language about commenters is not OK. Please stop.
Nothing about that statement is disparaging - just because you don't want to hear it, doesn't make it insulting.
Calling out nonsense is important, especially on this website.
There's a lot of documentation required to write drivers for hardware; for the GPU, they'd need to share the instruction set of the GPU along with the specifications of the controller. Lots of weird things like power management too.
If shared, that's probably enough to create copycat hardware or at least an emulator.
Personally, I just want to run Linux on my latest MacBook Pro on day 1 with full hardware acceleration. If it was supported, MacOS would be on the device for as long as it took to install Linux.
I think the only way that would happen is if the EU extended "the right to repair" to include software, compelling companies to release documentation sufficient to produce drivers with. I'm sure Apple would maliciously comply, like provide the ISA but not power management specs - but that would still cut the work required by the Asahi team by 80%.
I use UTM in emulation mode, NOT Qemu simulation mode, which is wasteful.
just my $0.02.
For folks lamenting that the (awesome) Asahi efforts are challenged by reverse engineering of changes from M2 to M3, and so on, those changes vanish into the abstraction, but their benefits do not. That's why i switched from Asahi a couple years ago to UTM in apple silicon hypervisor mode.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor https://apps.apple.com/us/app/utm-virtual-machines
You can run any flavor of Linux you like in a virtual machine, while booted into the native OS.
You can still boot Linux natively on it.
the hypervisor framework documentation, that i linked above, is pretty clear; the linux builds for arm run extremely fast on apple silicon because hypervisor framework gives them hardware access, in some subsystems directly (memory mapping for example), in other systems through a shim (graphics hardware).
This isn't about running VMs.
YMMV
That sounds like a you thing; I've kept my macs for at least 5 years. My M1 is still going strong and I haven't felt any pressure to upgrade.
You will probably argue thats ok because you would have wanted one anyway by that time or some such point, but the fact remains that Apple will force you to upgrade your hardware not very long away by not allowing you to install anything on it.
Using your own conservative estimate, 8 years seems like a fine lifespan for a laptop, far longer than the "few years" you initially said. And in practice, there are plenty of macbooks that have been running even longer.
Thanks to the community, you can install macOS 15 (or older) on unsupported macs (as old as 18 years)
https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht...
https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher
This bullshit needs to die. The products are designed to last.
> https://talents.vaia.com/companies/apple-inc/software-engine...
Kinda funny and definitely a word suggestion that will be locked in future code.
I believe it was Hector Martin who discussed it on Mastodon a while ago.
https://opensource.apple.com/
Absent that, it'd take some kind of sustained right-to-repair, EU morality, many sternly worded letters pressure campaign.
Plus, once they did (officially), they're kinda committed to keep doing it. That's explains why they remain okay with emoloyees helping on their own time; all the upside, none of the down.
It would have been trivial for them to lock out other operating systems entirely.
Even the Asahi team has been much more appreciative of Apple leaving this open.
It is trivial for them to lock out other operating systems entirely.
Probably the real reason is just that it's extra work - both in terms of producing the docs, and in dealing with complaints when they change things. From their point of view it's extra work with no benefit to them.
This applies on both the software and hardware layers. In the past, CPU suppliers dragging their feet and/or being unable to deliver on promises were the chief motivation for switching architectures, and now that they're their own supplier they can banish that issue entirely so long as they're not beholden to any kind of external behavioral contracts or expectations.
If the OS teams need some new capability or discover substantial benefit from redesigning some part of the SoC, the SoC/hardware team can just implement it and not have to care about breaking anything. That's a major competitive advantage that practically nobody else in the computer or mobile device industries has.
They let you run Windows when they were losing in the market and needed a path to migration for users of the winning platform. Once they started winning, they stopped.
Conversely, Microsoft refused to interoperate with Linux. Until Linux became the clear winner in the datacenter space. Now they have WSL and actually work pretty well as a cross-platform development environment.
In the 90s and 2000s, they considered Linux a cancer, and only kept macOS alive for antitrust reasons.
Apple makes money selling hardware.
But to answer your question: Why would they? Apple hasn't asked anybody to put Linux on their machines. They deliver them with a fully functional OS already and there are thousands of other computer models you can purchase instead of a Mac.
Because then they'll have to compete with Linux, which opens them up to someone else making a cheaper computer that does the same stuff.
I mean, I'm typing this on a junky Raptor Lake laptop I found on eBay for $220. Would I buy a Neo or MBP to replace it just to run the same software stack? Probably not.
If you believe OS X is the best environment and Apple Silicon will remain the best hardware in perpetuity, it seems silly for Apple not to allow some experimentation. Apple executives, to be blunt, know better. Lean times are always ahead.
Now some people would like to use that top of the line Apple silicon but without MacOS that comes with it. I doubt this is a huge threat to apple but it's also not a huge market for them. From what I understand they are not actively impeding it but not actively helping it either.
I actually won a M2 laptop a while ago. I resold it, new in box still shrink wrapped because I did not care for MacOS, just a personal preference. People like me are a minority though.
Hell, I was given a bunch of old iphones recently, all of which are newer and better hardware than my phone. I wiped them and donated them to charity.
Not sure what generation you're talking about? Intel c. 18-25 years ago was wildly ahead on everything, much more so than Apple is now, in fact.[1] Apple Computer, quite famously, straight up abandoned their previous CPU architecture and started shipping Intel chips just to have something competitive in the market.
Again, everything goes in cycles in this industry and Apple's executive decisionmaking is 100% not placing bets on being the best forever just to make a bunch of Linux nerds happy.
[1] Process innovation mattered more at the time, where now we're hitting the scaling limit and chips are much more comparable.
Apple doesn’t. Apple consumes it, so Apple always has a customer.
This is a shocking development.
i don't think that's accurate. the M series chips and memory architecture enable capabilities for the OS software to take advantage of, and the software and hardware teams get to collaborate to be ready for a simultaneously launch, but nothing about that is macos specific, just that they're on the same side of a walled garden.
From Wikipedia:
One of the key reasons why Rosetta 2 provides such a high level of translation efficiency is the support of x86-64 memory ordering in the M1 SoC.[12] The SoC also has dedicated instructions for computing x86 flags.
So, Apple always adds one more thing to their hardware to enable their magic.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_(software)#Rosetta_2
you can find more apple-specific stuff by digging around in these docs: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/subsystems/
edit: https://lwn.net/Articles/970907/
Processors, not just Apple’s, change constantly between generations. The core instruction set doesn’t change, but they get new capabilities, not just with new instruction sets.
Remember the SoC isn’t just the CPU. It’s display engines, GPUs, storage controllers, video decoders and more.
Even outside of Apple, you’ll see hardware vendors provide Linux patches for their latest CPUs to keep working well. There’s some baseline functionality that works out of the box but it’s never a free ride.
Hoping for M4 to the latest chip.
We need Ashai to support more chips.
Can't wait to get Linux running on it native.
Why are you demanding a user does that for free instead of the big corp that made the platform?
b) it's useful in a comment thread like this so people can quickly see what the 'caveats' mentioned in the title of the post are
Not quite there yet though. No PCI or DisplayPort (latter is working but unstable). But at least they seem to be on it.
But Intel and AMD post documents to explain how to use their hardware. Apple doesn’t. So it’s not an equivalent effort by any stretch.
Is this someone that only wants to run Linux and wants to use their GPU on Linux? Seems like this is not the case, yet.
Or, is this for someone that wants to dual boot and use Linux sometimes, and then reboot into MacOS when they want to use the GPU?
The goal is "Linux on Mac". In a commercial product, specific details of what gets built usually stem from a more detailed vision that can be articulated as one. In open source projects those details are determined by what individual contributors are motivated to work on.
That doesn't means a cohesive vision can't emerge, there might be one for Asahi actually. But I think the default position is that it's kinda just a mob of people doing what they each feel like doing.
When M1 drops out of support I bet Asashi for the M1 machines will be pretty polished.
The hardware is super capable and will make a great fileserver, TV box or HomeAssistant instance once I‘m done using it as daily driver.
Similarly, because of distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, I can keep using a 15y old Samsung notebook with a modern firefox, whereas Windows 8 already broke Samsung‘s display brightness driver and thermal management, and 10&11 are entirely unusable.
More info: https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html
So, if there are five translation layers, why not run a Linux VM using UTM and play there? Is there a technical reason that does not work?
If you want to run bare metal Linux on Apple's hardware (instead of running it in a virtual machine) you are the target audience.
(Though I’m sure people outside the project get value from it as well, like OpenBSD using Asahi bootloader)
It runs macOS, but I have no particular interest in the operating system, nor do I own any other Apple hardware. (So no synergies.) It is alright (and better than Win11) but the preinstalled software does not even properly update without an Apple account. As soon as I can switch over to Linux, I will. ... I would just wait for all the ports to work.
As much as I like Linux this kind of tinkering is only for people with more time and less expectations about the experience
If I need Linux I can always go for UTM or something similar