i run linux on both in arch and fedora versions with zero problems, by using the hypervisor framework of macos and wsl2 (wrapper for hyperv). do you need a more direct than hypervisor access to some hardware?
Pretty much all ARM platforms are. Even ARM devices designed from the ground up to be Linux devices are full of issues, like the MNT Pocket Reform's lack of HW suspend. The tight interop between vendor and implementation is a huge anti-pattern for software freedom, and the standardization initiatives like ARM SR are nowhere to be seen. It's probably the most problematic part of ARM being the future of personal computing, yet another impending manifestation of enshittification.
A consumer shouldn't be restricted from installing their own OS on a device that they bought, be it a smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, or server.
A company the size of Apple should also be required to release proper documentation that enables the porting of operating systems to these kinds of devices.
The reverse engineering work that the Asahi team did is remarkable but so much of it is ultimately busy work that didn't need to be done if we regulated the consumer electronics market appropriately.
The EU is not some kind of god that will make others do your bidding if you pray enough to them. You've been misguided into following a false religion.
For every niche thing you wish that Apple or other third parties do only for your own enjoyment, there are hundreds of millions of other people who want different niche things. Buy the products that suit your needs and wants, and companies have incentive to make them. And if no company wants to provide a feature or function that you know a huge portion of people will want, then you have a golden opportunity to start a business providing this.
> For every niche thing you wish that Apple or other third parties do only for your own enjoyment, there are hundreds of millions of other people who want different niche things.
We're talking Apple publishing specs for their hardware. That's not some "niche, particular, random" feature each persons asks for. We're all asking the same thing. Same thing that IBM did and what made the PC and IT industry as we know it.
> You've been misguided into following a false religion.
You're being misguided by your patronizing attitude.
If you believe this, the fight should be against PlayStation and Xbox.
They’re 100% commodity hardware and fully locked down from any user freedom. Weirdly everyone focuses on Apple with all their might instead of gaming consoles.
I can see the argument when it comes to locked-down mobile devices, but macOS is a general-purpose operating system with no restrictions on software sources that can't be easily disabled. Nearly every program available for Linux (excepting OS-specific stuff like desktop environments) is available for macOS, commercial and free, and there's plenty more that's macOS-only. Asahi is cool, but it's mostly used by enthusiasts - there's very little practical use for it as a macOS alternative. I think that you'd have a hard time convincing regulators that this cause really matters.
In any case, though, Apple agrees with you, and they explicitly built support for non-macOS OSes into the bootloader. This is a bug in the first developer beta of a new release.
Honestly this shouldn't be limited to traditional computing devices. Why do I need some hacker to reverse engineer my robot vacuum and then fully disassemble it just to install custom firmware to it? Should be a basic requirement of right to repair so all this smart crap doesn't wind up in a landfill when a company goes out of business or decides to arbitrarily drop support for it.
No one said otherwise. Apple tightly coupling macOS is not mutually exclusive with Apple publishing specs for allowing to support other OS on that hardware.
There was a brief period of time where you could buy your car like this. You'd purchase a rolling chassis from one manufacturer, and commission a coachbuilder to put a body on top. Many premium brands such as Bugatti, Rolls-Royce and Jaguar (Swallow) started in this fashion.
Today, outside of a few niche areas such as motorsport and commercial uses such as buses and coaches, nobody buys a vehicle this way. If you walked into your local Ford or Toyota and asked for a rolling chassis they would look at you as if you were insane, and rightly so. Integrating the development of the chassis and body into a single unit (both philosophically and literally [0]) has given us cars which are lighter, faster, more efficient, more featureful and safer by every measure.
We had our coachbuilding period in personal computing and it's all but over[1]. Nobody asks for the hardware and operating system to be sold separately for their washing machine, their TV, their microwave oven, PlayStation or Tesla EV. And yet for some reason some still cling to the idea that tablets and smartphones are personal computers rather than recognising them for the appliances they are.
As Steve Jobs allegedly said, design is not how something looks, design is how something works. How a feature works on a highly evolved device like an iPhone is a function of tightly coupled and carefully designed hardware and software.
Having this design process take place in different teams inside different companies, selling in different commercial models would not lead to a better outcome, it would be worse, much worse. The staggering commercial success of both iPhone and iPad is all the proof you need.
If hobbyists want to hobby, more power to them! But it's not something any government needs to regulate into existence.
On the other hand I doubt that's intentional.
Even as an avid Apple critic I want to mention that people I trust and are more involved with Asahi, always pointed out that Asahi received the occasional little help from Apple devs where possible (surely, not with official documentation, or confidential infos).
So, I would wait until things had time to calm down and not get too invested with Apple bashing.
It seems like this is a bug, apple went through the trouble to allow something like asahi to be possible in the first place. I doubt they're purposely trying to break it.
Apple designed a bootloader for Apple Silicon Macs that allows you to run an unsigned OS without degrading security when you boot into MacOS. This wasn't an accident.
Reminds me of when the Xbox 360 came out, Microsoft had to buy a bunch of Macs because Macs had PowerPC processors, so it was kind of a no-brainer to get the darn thing going quickly enough. Ultimately Windows was the standard way to build Xbox games but it is kind of funny to think, one day someone at Apple saw an order for easily several dozens of Macs from Microsoft, and wondered if hell froze over.
Such bugs have happened and been reported before. Asahi exercises "raw boot" facilities that just don't get all that much attention in any other context.
The boot flag was undocumented, like most features of Apple devices that are required knowledge for being able to port another operating system to them.
Because of this lack of documentation, every release of a new version of Apple hardware or software may require the restarting of the reverse engineering work, like in this case, just to keep working the alternative operating system.
I’m sorry but some of the comments are out of touch. Apple devices do not have any intent of supporting separate OSes . Asahi supports M1 to M2. I can see this as a PSA to not install a beta but I am confused who would install both Akashi and macOS 27 beta at the same time when you could run the beta in a VM for development ? Others have said that this has been a fix that will happen soon.
The comments there are absolutely insane lol, especially now that we know it's a bug.
I did not realize that some people were still so anti-Apple. I'm of course not saying that there's not a small element of truth in many of the comments, but talk about some straw man arguments.
It was not a bug, it was just another undocumented Apple feature.
However, when a company sells a device, as opposed to providing it for lease, I do not believe that it has the right to not document any feature of the device that is relevant for its usage, like it should also not have the right to impose any constraints on how the owner should use what has been bought.
Obviously, the owner of any kind of things may not use them to perform illegal acts, but that is a constraint imposed by the valid laws, not by the seller of the things.
Today, far too many companies claim to sell things, but they also attempt to control what the owner may do with them. I avoid to buy such things, but my choices are limited by those who buy them, allowing these policies to be beneficial for the sellers.
Apple transformed handheld computing into walled garden, brainwashed installation into "sideloading". Apple software update made Apple laptops to fail booting Linux.
"Concerned people are insane anti-Apple without any solid arguments, lol"
40 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 60.5 ms ] threadWhen folks say Intel and AMD are done, and we should all be on ARM, or RISC-V, beware of what to wish for.
Yes there are device trees now, however someone has to keep them up to date, and that is only part of what makes a motherboard.
A consumer shouldn't be restricted from installing their own OS on a device that they bought, be it a smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, or server.
A company the size of Apple should also be required to release proper documentation that enables the porting of operating systems to these kinds of devices.
The reverse engineering work that the Asahi team did is remarkable but so much of it is ultimately busy work that didn't need to be done if we regulated the consumer electronics market appropriately.
That is not what the industry, that pays lobby money, wants. They want to be able to control what the user runs and extract profits.
For every niche thing you wish that Apple or other third parties do only for your own enjoyment, there are hundreds of millions of other people who want different niche things. Buy the products that suit your needs and wants, and companies have incentive to make them. And if no company wants to provide a feature or function that you know a huge portion of people will want, then you have a golden opportunity to start a business providing this.
We're talking Apple publishing specs for their hardware. That's not some "niche, particular, random" feature each persons asks for. We're all asking the same thing. Same thing that IBM did and what made the PC and IT industry as we know it.
> You've been misguided into following a false religion.
You're being misguided by your patronizing attitude.
They’re 100% commodity hardware and fully locked down from any user freedom. Weirdly everyone focuses on Apple with all their might instead of gaming consoles.
In any case, though, Apple agrees with you, and they explicitly built support for non-macOS OSes into the bootloader. This is a bug in the first developer beta of a new release.
Regulate what exactly? Bugs? That's what this was...
Today, outside of a few niche areas such as motorsport and commercial uses such as buses and coaches, nobody buys a vehicle this way. If you walked into your local Ford or Toyota and asked for a rolling chassis they would look at you as if you were insane, and rightly so. Integrating the development of the chassis and body into a single unit (both philosophically and literally [0]) has given us cars which are lighter, faster, more efficient, more featureful and safer by every measure.
We had our coachbuilding period in personal computing and it's all but over[1]. Nobody asks for the hardware and operating system to be sold separately for their washing machine, their TV, their microwave oven, PlayStation or Tesla EV. And yet for some reason some still cling to the idea that tablets and smartphones are personal computers rather than recognising them for the appliances they are.
As Steve Jobs allegedly said, design is not how something looks, design is how something works. How a feature works on a highly evolved device like an iPhone is a function of tightly coupled and carefully designed hardware and software.
Having this design process take place in different teams inside different companies, selling in different commercial models would not lead to a better outcome, it would be worse, much worse. The staggering commercial success of both iPhone and iPad is all the proof you need.
If hobbyists want to hobby, more power to them! But it's not something any government needs to regulate into existence.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_frame#Unibody
[1] Servers/Linux are the commercial vehicles in this analogy
On the other hand I doubt that's intentional. Even as an avid Apple critic I want to mention that people I trust and are more involved with Asahi, always pointed out that Asahi received the occasional little help from Apple devs where possible (surely, not with official documentation, or confidential infos).
So, I would wait until things had time to calm down and not get too invested with Apple bashing.
Macs have always allowed you to run another OS.
iDevices have always had a locked bootloader.
People shouldn't confuse the two.
Because of this lack of documentation, every release of a new version of Apple hardware or software may require the restarting of the reverse engineering work, like in this case, just to keep working the alternative operating system.
if going through trouble means "doing less shit to lock their systems down", then yes.
Apple ultimately dgaf about linux.
I did not realize that some people were still so anti-Apple. I'm of course not saying that there's not a small element of truth in many of the comments, but talk about some straw man arguments.
However, when a company sells a device, as opposed to providing it for lease, I do not believe that it has the right to not document any feature of the device that is relevant for its usage, like it should also not have the right to impose any constraints on how the owner should use what has been bought.
Obviously, the owner of any kind of things may not use them to perform illegal acts, but that is a constraint imposed by the valid laws, not by the seller of the things.
Today, far too many companies claim to sell things, but they also attempt to control what the owner may do with them. I avoid to buy such things, but my choices are limited by those who buy them, allowing these policies to be beneficial for the sellers.
"Concerned people are insane anti-Apple without any solid arguments, lol"