Amazing progress as usual. It’s been fun watching just how much a few people can accomplish over the last few years despite working on sometimes unstable sand.
Yeah, you'll find out that va-api is not a good match for v4l2-requests. It does not pass decoded bitstream to the drivers as is, but pre-computes some things for some codecs, while v4l2-requests mostly expects original information parsed from the bitstream.
Fantastic to see the progress and a fascinating detailed write-up.
You have to appreciate the effort Apple puts into security - goes some way to understanding why they won't endorse/support installing an alternative operating system.
Most of those accommodations are for macOS, and make very few (if any) concessions for alternative operating systems. We're talking Qualcomm-tier effort.
Intel and AMD set the standard for "tremendous effort" bringing up support for alternative OSes. Nvidia follows behind, and Apple isn't even on the graph.
They already have the ability to prevent alternative operating systems. They use the same or similar SoCs in their other product lines and those do not let you do this.
Yes, Apple put effort into making it possible to install alternative operating systems on Macs, but that is an exception to the design because the chips are designed to be locked down. I expect Apple to remove the option at some point because nobody is using it on any of the recent hardware.
I see a lot of dual-purpose here. Maybe you don't, or maybe you figure it's just a coincidence that Linux can also benefit from this. Apple definitely had it in mind, and designed for it, even if they don't release documentation.
> Rumours circulating that Apple are actively hostile towards efforts such as Asahi, or that their security must be bypassed or jailbroken to run untrusted code are unfounded and false. In fact, Apple have expended effort and time on improving their security tooling in ways that only improve the execution of non-macOS binaries. An example of this is giving their Boot Policy configuration tool the ability to wrap raw AArch64 code in a proper Mach-O format starting with macOS 12.1. This is only ever required for enrolling a boot object that is not already a macOS kernelcache.
I will admit I am a bit confused by them locking out features like that, especially since they didn't at first. I wouldn't jump to assuming it's hostile, though.
> Thanks to the combined efforts of mildsunrise and chaos_princess, we discovered that ACE3 has pretty much the same register set as CD3217, only wrapped in a SPMI interface instead of addressed over I2C. Both the SPMI interface and ACE3 itself are now working in Asahi Linux, bringing USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt support to all M3 series devices.
When I got my M3 Pro MBP, I got it with the intention of eventually installing Linux on it. In hindsight I seriously underestimated the amount of effort needed for even partial Linux compatibility, which makes me all the more grateful for the work Asahi contributors have put in! I'll still be keeping macOS installed for iOS dev work(which I plan on doing soonish), but other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life.
"I paid thousands of dollars to apple who doesn't document their hardware or pay developers to contribute drivers Linux. Then I just waited for some unpaid volunteer to do it for me."
Unfortunately, the state of non-Apple hardware makes your parent’s comment a defensible position. Btw, using Linux in general means having “some unpaid volunteer do it for you”
I'm using Intel Thinkpad. And I'm pretty sure that Intel does a good amount of work upstreaming Intel support in Linux. So I'm not sure that using Linux in general means having some unpaid volunteer do it for you. In fact I believe that most Linux development nowadays is pretty far from unpaid volunteer work.
Regarding state of non-Apple hardware. Well, my laptop just works. Literally zero hardware or compatibility issues. Maybe Macbook is faster in artificial benchmarks, but in my day to day usage, Thinkpad is more than fast enough.
My steelman read of that would be that there is a difference between paying Apple a premium to make installing Linux hard vs. paying, say, Framework a premium to make installing Linux easy.
Except the Asahi Linux team are pretty insistent that Apple isn't making it particularly hard. Yes the hardware is novel, but hardly any hardware vendors share low level details on the Intel side either, all that has to be reverse engineered anyway.
Yeah, they insist on that and then write long blog posts on how they have to reverse engineer basic things which have been contributed by other manufacturers to linux kernel directly.
A lot of hardware gets Linux support because the hardware manufacturer itself (Intel, AMD, Mediatek, NXP, Marvell, etc) takes responsibility for writing and upstreaming Linux drivers. This is how companies like Lenovo or Dell can offer systems with Linux preinstalled.
When you make a big chunk of your revenue selling Enterprise Servers, you can no longer rely on drivers written by volunteer labor, as they did in the past.
"... so that I can never switch to anything ever due to vendor lock-in, which includes hard-to-transfer data, muscle memory and habit forming not applicable to other OSes, accounts bound to iCloud, voluntary surrender of privacy, acceptance of planned obsolescence and non-repairability, lack of support beyond 'try turning it off-on' or 'replace your device for half its price', etc., etc. But hey, the hw is great!"
I've got one - I bought a macbook from apple so I don't have to replace it for a decade. My 2014 one still works fine, aside from a distorted right speaker. And you know what? I'd do it again!
Switching isn’t nearly as bad as some make it out to be. Much of iCloud is built with well-supported standards like IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV. Getting out of Google’s or Microsoft’s ecosystem, with how much both of those love their proprietary protocols and data formats, I would say is overall more messy.
As far as muscle memory and habits go, that almost makes it sound like it’s objectively wrong to build a desktop OS that doesn’t follow Windows-esque conventions, which I staunchly disagree with. Desktops are insanely personal and I cannot support the idea that things like keybindings and window chrome should only ever come in one shape.
Mindblowing to me that people continue to try and pin "planned obsolescence" on Apple, the manufacturer that makes infamously long lived products. You anti-Apple zealots get your talking points from 1996 Usenet posts.
>.. so that I can never switch to anything ever due to vendor lock-in,
What exactly prevents you? I use macOS, but have used Windows and still also use Linux, and can jump at a moment's notice if I wish. While keeping iPhone, or ditching that too for Android.
I'd lose the App Store bought apps, but I don't use that many of those, and the non-cross-platform apps would be an issue if I jumped away from any other OS too. The most expensive apps I use (Lightroom, Resolve, Photoshop), are available for Windows too, and some even for Linux.
Music and Movies are streaming, and I use Music, Spotify, Apple TV, Netflix and Prime (and increasingly less anyway). But if jumped, I'd hardly miss anything except Apple-exclusive TV shows and my playlists (which I'm sure are portable in some way, either some existing tool, or if I need some LLM to hack sqlite3 dbs).
There might be no reason while the hardware is latest and greatest, but installing a different OS can keep old hardware going for longer. My 2014 Macbook Pro is uncomfortably slow on the last supported MacOS but works perfectly fine when running the latest Fedora.
This exactly sums up my long term feelings. Even now I’m annoyed by all the background bloat/tasks that are running on it, and I’d prefer being able to have more control over what runs on it for battery/performance reasons. Additionally, even though I’ve had it for years at this point, I think I’d still be more comfortable if I could use i3 with it.
Background processes almost never really use expensive resources on macOS or Linux. Certainly they can cause symptoms sometimes, but it's typically no worse than extra fan noise.
All the wasted resources on most people's machines are going to a) pixel buffers b) browser tabs c) both.
Also computers should run and not run what you choose. Apple should not be able to for e you to run "services" (for themselves) and apps you cant delete
Why does MacOS "require" AppleTV (even monopolizing the folder name TV in your official Movies folder, or Stocks, or News, or FindMy, or any of the other stock apps that are protected by SIP?
And mine is as fast as I need, with Sway as my main DE. (With Arch Linux, but I bet Fedora wouldn’t be any worse.) The only reason to switch to M{1,2,3} is battery life. So, as soon as the external Thunderbolt display is going to work, I think I’m making the switch.
I actually didn’t buy it! It was a gift from a friend who really likes splurging at Micro Center. If it were my money, I probably would’ve gotten an Air.
you overlooked the UTM.app (also buildable from open source) on the App Store, which allows installation from an ISO of arm-native linux builds, directly run via the Apple hypervisor.framework, _not_ using Qemu emulation.
it's fast as greased lightning and fantastic. I've used it two or so years on M1, M2, M2 Max, and M5 and it's what I think you too will love.
The only reason is because M2 to M3 was a dramatic shift in how everything works, M1 and M2 were both compatible with one another, I'm not sure if after M3 its been stable, but I sure hope so, there's value in my opinion in being backwards compatible with older CPUs.
This project has been so impressive and exciting. I hope power management is a serious concern once they nail all the reverse engineering and functionality. Battery life would be a huge differentiator for the day to day macbook usage and traditionally Linux has been terrible at that due to lack of proprietary & highly tuned drivers
How likely is such tuning to happen within the practical lifetime of these devices? It's already been years and Linux isn't even feature complete on newer models.
Apple's indifference to OSS does not give me much hope.
I would assume that once you have fully functional support for entire historical SoCs, the effort stops being "get most things working on most chips" and starts becoming "adapt already-working things to the newest chips". Yes, it's been years, but there's still so much hardware that Asahi doesn't have good support for yet, and that's dividing the efforts to support the newest chips. I'm sure that once all the existing chips are well-supported, new chips will be fairly quick to bring up.
I've daily driven Linux for years, even on laptops. Yet they're always plugged in because I've yet to see Linux out perform battery life of native OS's. Well, except for very niche and pared down Linux's.
Rather it seems that as time goes on Linux just outgrows old devices entirely, again excluding very niche distros. Not that it makes them increasingly efficient.
Have you seen Linux getting more efficient over time? What's your use case?
Given the enormous lifetime of these devices, I’d say chances are pretty good! The only thing that’s going to make an M series Mac obsolete is when Apple stops releasing updates. If you can run Linux on it, that thing is going to last forever.
My concern is for the devices I have, which are usually newer, and for battery life. Linux doesn't even have full hardware support, much less efficient battery life on these now several year old devices.
Maybe things will unlock soon and stay that way long enough for it to be viable for me. I'm just not holding my breath.
Of course it's great to have a supported OS for retired hardware--regardless of battery performance. That's a different use case. And I salute all those who work to keep old devices out of landfills.
The new project leadership team prioritized upstreaming the existing work first.
Once the upstreaming was largely done, they first mentioned beginning the work of adding M3 support in the February progress report.
Now we have this:
> With all of this progress coming on top of milestones already reached on M3, we are pleased to announce that we are almost ready to cut an official release! We will have more to say about this in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!
To downvoters: historically, a decent number of Windows and Linux users would run the operating systems on Apple hardware. I myself ran a triple-boot between macOS, Windows and Linux for years. Apple Silicon demolished that market, and Asahi Linux is like a light at the end of the tunnel for those users who were entirely left behind by the ARM architecture transition.
I was seriously worried the various incompatibilities the M3 bootloader had with Asahi's debugging setup would mean way slower bring-up than M1 and M2 had. Seems like that wasn't the case - or, at least, won't be the case anymore.
I have immense respect for the incredible work that the Asahi team does, but at the rate that Intel and AMD have been catching up on power efficiency I wonder whether anyone will really _have_ to run Linux on M series laptops. There was a clear case for it back when Apple silicon absolutely dominated anything else you could buy but with Panther Lake I'm not so sure that Apple's lead will continue to be big enough to justify needing to wait several years for full Linux hardware compatibility to be reverse engineered.
This is exactly why I run asahi. There really is not a laptop that comes close the hardware quality of an apple laptop. I have even sacrificed x86 at the alter which is a much bigger step that battery life imo.
I’ve been a big Lenovo fan, settled on the X1 carbon. I’ve had three of them, G5, G6 and G9. The USB-C port broke on both G6 and G9 models. Apparently it’s a common problem. Unfortunately the ports are soldered directly on the motherboard making it difficult to fix(should be a small separate board for easy replacement). I was going to desolder and replace the ports, but haven’t gotten around to it.
Apple saves itself a lot of the trouble with superior build quality. With Samsung devices (so no cheap crap), USB ports last me about three years of heavy use.
With my old iPhone 12, 2019 16-inch MBP or my 2022 MBA? Not a single issue. The housing is simply constructed so tight and, being made of solid metal, rigid that the housing bears the torsion load and not the tiny PCB solder pads.
The only problem I have with my new USB-C iPhone 15 is that it is hard to clean pocket lint out of the socket, compared to the old Lightning connector.
> With Samsung devices (so no cheap crap), USB ports last me about three years of heavy use.
What are you doing to these machines?! I work in the safety and security biz, including in the field, and my trusty HP EliteBook 2730p is still rocking along on its first USB ports. That machine is over 15 bloody years old!
That is a convertible laptop that meets MIL-STD-810F standards on vibration resistance, it’s not really a fair comparison. Also, the change from dedicated charge ports to USB-C charging increased USB port usage considerably.
> Also, the change from dedicated charge ports to USB-C charging increased USB port usage considerably.
I never needed one, but a good USB-C adapter (or maybe even small dock) with power passthrough should solve this. Burning through whole machines because a single USB-C port cakes out after just three years is an awful lot of waste.
Mostly, keeping them in my pocket with a USB cable attached to a power bank. Places an awful lot of torsion force on the connector. I tend to go through 2-3 charges a day.
Another issue is that I have cats that like to play with everything being too close to a table corner.
I try to buy good hardware for practical reasons. I insist on repairability for emotional reasons around ownership and independence. You do not have to value the same things as me, of course.
The only thing that’s egregious is the batteries.
They tape the batteries to the case, and to remove them you have to do this complex twirling motion with tweezers to pull the tape out from under the battery. If the tape snaps during this then the documentation basically says get a new case.
Find me another laptop that has everything, even if it's more expensive ! You can't, some have keyboard as good, some it's the display. In best case you got 2 or 3 things but then it goes downhill on the other, like the trackpad.
1. Trackpads. I hate 'em. Keyboard-integrated trackpoints and/or trackballs is what I need. Detachables with a trackpad are acceptable as one can bring a Bluetooth substitute (that's how I do it on my HP x2 G4); on a non-detachable only a trackpoint, in addition to the trackpad, is acceptable (on my HP 2730p or my workplace ThinkPads I only use the trackpoint, the trackpad is turned off).
2. Form factor. Not counting their "castrated" tablets, Apple doesn't build 2-in-1 or 3-in-1 detachables (the best general-purpose mobile computing form factor) or convertibles (T-hinge models represent the second best form factor). The last orthodox-chassis laptop purchase I made took place in 1999. Outside of a vintage or retro machine I might entertain (which itself loses out to wedge-style keyboard computer cases), that form factor is dead to me.
3. Apple is not the only outfit that ships with good displays. Et cetera.
Exactly. As a lifelong linux user, I bought a Neo on release for my SO and was blown away by the quality at that price point.
I've had high-end laptops from all the big vendors, and even at the highest price tier, other vendors don't deliver such build quality. I hate how all non-Apple laptops feel. The case, the hinge, the materials, everything. If I coud reliably use linux on Apple hardware, I'd never buy another laptop brand again.
It’s more about not having to drag a cable + brick around everywhere and not needing to care about the location of the nearest power outlet, potentially for multiple days depending on usage patterns. You can instead leave the charging bits at home or the hotel and charge overnight.
This also means that battery cycles accumulate more slowly and the battery’s lifetime is stretched further.
Also, generally more efficient chips don’t get hot as easily which makes the laptop more comfortable to use and prevents fans from becoming audible unless you’re really pushing the system.
I have a M1 Pro from work and it surely won't last that while working. Throw some video calls at it and working outside (so, screen at the brightest level) and at the end of the work day I have to plug it in
With load on it and a bright room (= display reasonably bright as well) my M3 also doesn't always last 8h. But it gets very close. Intel machines are more like 3h in that case.
I don't see how? it is a 50Wh battery. Even at 6W that is about 8h of usage? On what OS + workload on x86 are you seeing just 6W usage? Or is it that each day your usage is only 2-3 hours?
The main power advantage of the apple chips is when the system is mostly idle - under mid to high load power to watt has been comparable for a few years already (at least AMD and Apple, intel was way behind - but I guess they caught up recently). The main reason behind my M3 MBP back then wasn't so much power efficiency - but that I can get it with 96GB of RAM.
It's nice that I can go a full office day without charging - the previous x86 notebook couldn't, but a decent one from the M3 generation probably could as well. But also if I put proper load an that thing the Macbook battery is done in less than 2 hours.
> And I bet you can soon get a ThinkPad with the same intel chip, that should have similar battery life.
Yes you can, speaking from experience. I have the T14 gen 7 with the 75 wh battery, and the 356H CPU, it only uses 4-6w/hour when coding with a lot of browser tabs open, a headless VM running, docker containers and so on, online meetings is about 6-8w/hour, this is under Linux, with default power setting from Opensuse.
It can easily last more than 10 working hours, I limit mine to 80% charge as it's more than enough for when I'm on the go.
> wait several years for full Linux hardware compatibility
I'm not convinced it's only "several years".
Asahi was launched in January 2021. So 5 and a half years ago. Asahi, as far as I can tell, supports most of M1 and M2 features, so generations launched in November 2020 (6 years ago) and June 2022 (4 years ago).
I would be very surprised if a decade from now the story won't still be the same thing: 90% of features for systems half a decade old with software package gaps in important areas and everything slightly less optimized than MacOS.
Asahi is doing incredible work but it's still 5 people in a garage vs the huge corporation.
This can be a good tradeoff. An M1 Ultra still runs circles around 90% of consumer hardware sold today, and with Linux it has easily another 10+ years. Now support for M3 is coming.
> Asahi is doing incredible work but it's still 5 people in a garage vs the huge corporation.
Not sure why the "vs" scenario, this is a project that makes no promises. And I think they do have some support from Fedora / Red Hat fwiw.
That's a good tradeoff for durable hardware with available spare parts. That's not a good tradeoff for hardware that was designed so it cannot be repaired, such as newer Macs.
Yeah, but there was a time when running Linux on a laptop was one of the most complex ways of running Linux. Now I just expect everything to work, especially if I buy from Lenovo, Dell, or HP.
There was a time when Wi-Fi, or Wayland, or XComposite, or Linux gaming, or just accelerated graphics at all or, or, or... People get excited, they work on it, other people get excited and mess about, and eventually it just works.
I would love to one day pick up a decommissioned M1 Ultra and use my OS of choice on it, and I'm grateful for the people who are doing the hard thing now.
i snatched a lenovo yoga slim aura with a core 5 226 for 650 euro. Its build quality is on par if not better than the colleague's macbook, it's pretty good for working, runs fedora natively, battery last at least 12 hours unless i'm playing games.
On the battery life front, both Intel and AMD have caught up. Apple greatly inflates their battery numbers; to get 18 hours, you need the lowest spec model and you need to basically not use it. Chromium or Firefox open? Bluetooth active? Yeah, you’re looking at 12 hours, not 20.
12 is still good, but intel as of lunar lake (2 generations ago!) matched that. Now, the performance is still behind, particularly single core. But the efficiency is there, and these are standard x86 chips.
The efficiency doesn’t come from ARM, it comes from the process node and chip design. Apple uses the latest process nodes with an SOC design. When intel does the same, as they have done, they match the efficiency easily on x86.
The real gain is the SOC. When you shove the ram and chipset into the CPU you save massive battery.
> On the battery life front, both Intel and AMD have caught up.
Intel and AMD's cpus don't have batteries ;)
Their chips are approximately as efficient as Apple's chips from ~2 years ago, but that's not their fault, it's Apple getting the entire allocation of new chips for about 1.5 years.
> to get 18 hours, you need the lowest spec model and you need to basically not use it. Chromium or Firefox open? Bluetooth active? Yeah, you’re looking at 12 hours, not 20.
I work on compilers, often maxing out all the CPU cores, and have stopped carrying the power adapter altogether. I plug it in maybe once in three days.
> The efficiency doesn’t come from ARM, it comes from the process node and chip design. Apple uses the latest process nodes with an SOC design. When intel does the same, as they have done, they match the efficiency easily on x86. The real gain is the SOC. When you shove the ram and chipset into the CPU you save massive battery.
Yes, I agree. IDGAF about whether the battery lasts longer because of ARM or magic pixie dust.
correct! it's better on lenovos. All metal, trackpad has a proper click, keyboard doesn't shit itself. Screen is not retina, but then again i don't need that ridiculous resolution as the OS i'm using doesn't employ a toy UI with bubbles and rounded everything. Before this i had macbooks for 15 years, colleagues have this generation's macbooks at work, i like this one a lot more.
I'm a bit opponent of Apple's walled garden, but the build quality of this laptop is quite far away from a MacBook... Except the display, this OLED WXHQwhatever is stunning.
Source: I bought the same (with core i7, so it's performant, etc.).
I'm still hoping one of these mega AI LLMs will figure out how to install Linux on the many old iPads that become nearly useless after Apple stops updating them and you can't install new apps.
Oh definitely, there's great value in it for those who already own Macbooks for one reason or another. I just personally have found myself shying away from buying a Macbook multiple times over the years because the Asahi Linux experience was really really rough at the time & probably still is for the generations I would be interested in buying.
Yea, this project doesn't just benefit someone who goes out and buys a new Apple laptop. It's going to be most beneficial years from now, after Apple deliberately obsoletes today's hardware, stops updating them with software, and tries to turn them into e-waste.
As someone who does a lot of work with local LLM's, today's systems feel woefully under-powered. I'm looking forward to a future where my laptop has 10x the memory, 100x the memory bandwidth, and optimized cores to make inference workflows that currently take minutes or hours go down to seconds or milliseconds.
While we're at the point where traditional software is pretty much fast enough for all but extreme use-cases, with LLM's it feels like we're back to the days where you press compile and go have a coffee or chat to your colleague.
That's what I mean though. The comment I was responding to was talking about "forever laptops" - my point is there's plenty of room for new capabilities which will make current hardware obsolete. Just like how GPU's didn't exist at all, and became a standard part of computing.
And given how fast the hardware and software is evolving, I can easily imagine a future where we all have very capable models running on our own devices for an embedded intelligence layer that's doing most of the day-to-day tasks, and only have to outsource to a super-smart cloud model for specific things.
> What do I need any higher specs for, other than battery life?
To run poorly made software. Despite Apple having the best hardware around, they still manage to slow down M1 devices on Sequoia. Somehow.
I think it’s a double-edged sword. Powerful hardware means powerful hardware. But it also means developers get lazy, and start writing poor quality software because it still runs OK on the latest and greatest.
Luckily Linux doesn’t have that problem, which is why you can easily add 10 years to a laptops lifespan just by using Linux.
I do family tech support. Hardware refresh is driven by facebook adware js knobbery. Proof-of-work bot countermeasures, too, although i don't really resent that.
If you run noscript then yeah, why not keep rocking your pentium.
You can't run an egpu (amd or nvidia) on macos so that's one thing I could see switching for. I did just discover tinygrad though due to a hackernews comment, but not sure its performance.
Also Tahoes absolutely horrendous performance for the last year..
> Meanwhile, donations and pledges kept slowly decreasing, and have done so since the project launched. Not enough to spell immediate doom for my dream of working on Asahi full time in the short term, but enough to make me wonder if any of this was really appreciated. The all-time peak monthly donation volume was the very first month or two. It seemed the more things we accomplished, the less support we had.
I think the issue is funding is so low the developers don’t even have access to newer Apple Siicon, let alone funding for token costs, etc.
> It is the opinion of the Board that Large Language Models (LLMs), herein referred to as Slop Generators, are unsuitable for use as software engineering tools, particularly in the Free and Open Source Software movement.
Using LLMs in a project like this is also somewhat illegal, because LLMs may have inside information about apple devices and it's not allowed to use it.
That's not going to save them, the model could leak GPL licensed code on output as well, and it's an order of magnitude more likely than leaking internal documents.
These large tech companies can't have their cake and eat it too.
It's not new Anthropic/OpenAI/whatever trained on copyrighted code and leaks (anna's archive). Companies just don't give a shit because you can't prove it.
In Asahi Linux specifically, there was not long ago a PR for M3 or similar for removing a big roadblock that existed (and I think still exists). Turns out this whole PR was implemented by an LLM (using copyrighted materials, probably most of it is Apple's) and it was immediately closed. Yes, it's a problem and illegal.
Can you please edit out swipes like "That's nonsense" from your posts here? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Your comment would be just fine without that bit.
(I realize these little things may seem insignificant, but (1) it's customary for people to underestimate the provocations in their own posts and overestimate those in others, and (2) they add up like mercury in the bloodstream.)
AFAWK, M6 CPU is a die shrink of M5, so unless something M7 present that will significantly improve CPU performance. The ARM C1 CPU core that is available to everyone has pretty much matched up to Apple. And that is all things included from performance, power, die size etc.
Or just not use acronyms for standard sentence structure and non-specialised terms?
For example: "AFAIK the TLA is NFG for well written prose."
It is awkward to parse them and is infuriating when the author can clearly write well otherwise, because they don't use three- or four-letter-acronyms to replace standard sentence structures for the rest of their prose.
You said > "Considering how much better m-series CPUs are, "
And I give some thoughts into may be they are not "much better". And in that case may be sticking to spec and not Thinking Different on certain things matters more.
>only the latest intel cpu are beginning to get "comparable" with previous m-series cpu.
I am comparing ARM CPU against ARM CPU Core. Which is why it needs to there to the ARM Spec specific to ARM ISA. And those are standard ARM CPU design tested across industry benchmarks. Not sure what is baseless about it.
As Apple themselves proved with M1-M3, you can make really good cpus without violating the ARM architecture spec in dumb ways. Why they decided to do that in M4+ is anyone's guess.
>The ARM specification mandates that cores in WFI loops should preserve all state. This is not the default mode on Apple Silicon.
I sometimes do wonder at what point do ARM find and test these stuff and ask Apple to follow. Obviously this is not the first time we see such thing happens.
My understanding is that Apple has an extremely special license with ARM partially because they helped fund ARM when it was spun out of Acorn and they are not required to conform to the specifications like other licensees.
See also when Microsoft introduced DocX, Apple products corrupted documents because Apple followed the standard that Microsoft had specified but turns out they didn't follow it themselves.
This is allowed as long as you hold the architectural license (which Apple does), and the register is not exposed to userspace (this register is accessible only from kernel)
I agree with this sentiment. If someone wants to do a bunch of reverse engineering, maybe they could try to get full mainline support for older Qualcomm mobile phone/tablet SoCs and minimize/get rid of BLOBs?
All the fun of reverse engineering and we know the processors already run Linux...
I hope they will support M4 soon, I cant stand macos and its desire to be different
than everything else by custom keyboard shortcuts etc.
After 2 years of usage, I still have issues with basic actions like copy paste.
edit: omg, writing this post, i checked if there is some way to use linux shortcuts and there is (Kanesh/KMonad or Karabiner-Elements). Maybe my suffering will finally stop.
What I did was to simply remap Command to Control in the built-in keyboard settings. I don't know if that would solve your problems with shortcuts, but it solved mine. Muscle memory remains intact. The physical key combos on the Mac are now largely the same as on Windows or Linux.
(to replies, yes, i understand that macos keyboard shortcuts might objectively be better, but if you are using multiple computers and macos is the only one of OSs, those shortcuts become pain in the neck)
Dunno, my experience has been different. I cycle between macOS, Linux and Windows all day every day and it’s just automatic muscle memory for me now as I switch between each. Thanks for the link though, keeping that stashed.
Aren’t the shortcuts with the command key older than the PC ones (which started out as Shift+Insert etc. actually)? I wouldn’t call that desire to be different (also as mentioned below it has a lot of advantages in a terminal)
Or the more usual argument: Macos is broken in many ways and you're not allowed to fix it. But you can install some kind of add-on that will sit between you and the broken-as-designed UI and makes it look non-broken.
I truly understand the frustration of people asking when will it be done, and that DP Alt Mode got past that point. However it was in an official progress report, but then the last three don't mention it at all. (I have been running it without issue that whole time). A single line on the current scale of outstanding bugs would really help.
It’s a shame that Macs have leading processors and hardwares but Apple can’t make Linux first-class. I know they have full builds internally so it’s not a matter of resources.
It’s simply a business decision for Apple. And quite a dumb one at that. Here’s hoping that Ternus reverses that shortsighted decision.
Realistically, what would the business case for Apple be where it would make sense to make Linux a first-class citizen on their hardware? Their product is a combination of hardware and software that works together to form the final product.
You mean other than the fact that MacOS continues its slow decline? And the fact that giving your customers different options to use their hardwares would attract more even more customers?
I've pretty much given up on Asahi because of the years-long delays, and because there's no performant way to share disk space for data with MacOS.
By running Linux in a VM on MacOS on Apple silicon, you sacrifice some raw speed but in return you still get to run MacOS apps occasionally and have access to the same data from either MacOS or Linux without having to duplicate everything. And battery life is reasonable, which is not true yet with Asahi.
Not saying your VM approach isn't right for you, but:
>and because there's no performant way to share disk space for data with MacOS
Have you tried a ZFS partition? If it's a desktop system use iSCSI to network storage (I'm not running Linux directly on my Studio or M4 mini but I still put my Home folder on the network)?
It's worth a spin. Before moving to iSCSI I had my home folder as well as lots of projects and data on ZFS for macOS for almost a decade, and it was extremely reliable and performant within reason [0]. ZoL of course is also quite solid at this point too. Life gets a lot more complex if you want to boot off of it, but a shared data partition for two separate OS boots could be a good match.
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0: By which I mean, for equivalent features. It's possible to go really far out of the normal with ZFS in terms of silly compression and multiple copies of data even within a single OS and checksumming and so on in ways that add computational overhead, but I don't hold that against it vs APFS.
Or good old FAT+symlinks from the MacOS partition might be sufficient, if you don’t need large files. NTFS, ironically, is pretty stable via FUSE on Mac if you need more than FAT allows.
Someone out there can go and build a cancer vaccine for their dog, and I can't even find a door into projects like this — that's on me.
Forget a PR, even making a comment feels devastating - human communication -.
I have everything it takes to help this project, and I can do nothing.
Lovely.
We seriously need an open hardware law or something. Like it doesn't have to be regulation necessarily (as by law) but we really need to start very strongly pressuring/forcing companies to open up their hardware and provide all documentation to get any operating system to run on it, and to hell with what the manufacturer wants (to prevent things like attestation requirements). This entire "just let random volunteers figure it out" isn't sustainable and locks out competition.
I think you’ll also find that the best way to strongly pressure companies to do something is by law. The work that Right to Repair advocates have been doing across the industry is fantastic.
I like this idea, but a prerequisite would likely be removing or substantially revamping patent and related IP law. That is probably also a good thing; I’d love if the bar to which process specificity in a patent was held was one that was sufficient for behavior reverse-engineering, but it seems very difficult to enact that change.
> If you think about it, m1n1 is almost like our own firmware for Apple Silicon.
If you really think about it, it's kinda amusing how far we came from https://wiibrew.org/wiki/MINI being used to bootstrap homebrew on the Nintendo Wii on PPC to being used to fire up our Macs daily running Asahi on ARM.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 6.0 ms ] threadhttps://xff.cz/git/libva-v4l2_request/
You have to appreciate the effort Apple puts into security - goes some way to understanding why they won't endorse/support installing an alternative operating system.
Intel and AMD set the standard for "tremendous effort" bringing up support for alternative OSes. Nvidia follows behind, and Apple isn't even on the graph.
Yes, Apple put effort into making it possible to install alternative operating systems on Macs, but that is an exception to the design because the chips are designed to be locked down. I expect Apple to remove the option at some point because nobody is using it on any of the recent hardware.
> Rumours circulating that Apple are actively hostile towards efforts such as Asahi, or that their security must be bypassed or jailbroken to run untrusted code are unfounded and false. In fact, Apple have expended effort and time on improving their security tooling in ways that only improve the execution of non-macOS binaries. An example of this is giving their Boot Policy configuration tool the ability to wrap raw AArch64 code in a proper Mach-O format starting with macOS 12.1. This is only ever required for enrolling a boot object that is not already a macOS kernelcache.
You get a jmp to some arm64 instructions of your choosing, with a bunch of CPU features locked out.
Tremendous efforts would be to publish reference manuals for all their hardware components.
Apple is doing the bare minimum, which is to not build 10km tall walls around its walled garden.
But in the modern day of walled gardens, that's viewed as generosity.
When I got my M3 Pro MBP, I got it with the intention of eventually installing Linux on it. In hindsight I seriously underestimated the amount of effort needed for even partial Linux compatibility, which makes me all the more grateful for the work Asahi contributors have put in! I'll still be keeping macOS installed for iOS dev work(which I plan on doing soonish), but other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life.
Regarding state of non-Apple hardware. Well, my laptop just works. Literally zero hardware or compatibility issues. Maybe Macbook is faster in artificial benchmarks, but in my day to day usage, Thinkpad is more than fast enough.
Maybe using Linux on a desktop, but using Linux in general is >80% paid developers [1]
[1]: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/hubfs/Reports/LinuxKernelRep...
Plenty of components for quivalents of which Avahi struggles with on MacBooks.
When you make a big chunk of your revenue selling Enterprise Servers, you can no longer rely on drivers written by volunteer labor, as they did in the past.
As far as muscle memory and habits go, that almost makes it sound like it’s objectively wrong to build a desktop OS that doesn’t follow Windows-esque conventions, which I staunchly disagree with. Desktops are insanely personal and I cannot support the idea that things like keybindings and window chrome should only ever come in one shape.
What exactly prevents you? I use macOS, but have used Windows and still also use Linux, and can jump at a moment's notice if I wish. While keeping iPhone, or ditching that too for Android.
I'd lose the App Store bought apps, but I don't use that many of those, and the non-cross-platform apps would be an issue if I jumped away from any other OS too. The most expensive apps I use (Lightroom, Resolve, Photoshop), are available for Windows too, and some even for Linux.
Music and Movies are streaming, and I use Music, Spotify, Apple TV, Netflix and Prime (and increasingly less anyway). But if jumped, I'd hardly miss anything except Apple-exclusive TV shows and my playlists (which I'm sure are portable in some way, either some existing tool, or if I need some LLM to hack sqlite3 dbs).
I'm not even sure about the unpaid part.
Then why bother installing a different OS?
All the wasted resources on most people's machines are going to a) pixel buffers b) browser tabs c) both.
Also computers should run and not run what you choose. Apple should not be able to for e you to run "services" (for themselves) and apps you cant delete
https://limi.net/checkboxes
The hardware is not even that good. Sure, the CPUs are nice.
You can dual boot Asahi when the time comes.
it's fast as greased lightning and fantastic. I've used it two or so years on M1, M2, M2 Max, and M5 and it's what I think you too will love.
Apple's indifference to OSS does not give me much hope.
Rather it seems that as time goes on Linux just outgrows old devices entirely, again excluding very niche distros. Not that it makes them increasingly efficient.
Have you seen Linux getting more efficient over time? What's your use case?
Maybe things will unlock soon and stay that way long enough for it to be viable for me. I'm just not holding my breath.
Of course it's great to have a supported OS for retired hardware--regardless of battery performance. That's a different use case. And I salute all those who work to keep old devices out of landfills.
Once the upstreaming was largely done, they first mentioned beginning the work of adding M3 support in the February progress report.
Now we have this:
> With all of this progress coming on top of milestones already reached on M3, we are pleased to announce that we are almost ready to cut an official release! We will have more to say about this in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!
I'm not seeing any reason for gloom or doom.
Display quality, trackpad quality, overall form factor, and very high RAM space in a laptop would be the primary reasons I'd go with Asahi Linux.
I’ve been a big Lenovo fan, settled on the X1 carbon. I’ve had three of them, G5, G6 and G9. The USB-C port broke on both G6 and G9 models. Apparently it’s a common problem. Unfortunately the ports are soldered directly on the motherboard making it difficult to fix(should be a small separate board for easy replacement). I was going to desolder and replace the ports, but haven’t gotten around to it.
I’m now using a MacBook Pro M2.
As long as you pay for Apple Care, not a problem. But maybe not the point…
With my old iPhone 12, 2019 16-inch MBP or my 2022 MBA? Not a single issue. The housing is simply constructed so tight and, being made of solid metal, rigid that the housing bears the torsion load and not the tiny PCB solder pads.
The only problem I have with my new USB-C iPhone 15 is that it is hard to clean pocket lint out of the socket, compared to the old Lightning connector.
What are you doing to these machines?! I work in the safety and security biz, including in the field, and my trusty HP EliteBook 2730p is still rocking along on its first USB ports. That machine is over 15 bloody years old!
I never needed one, but a good USB-C adapter (or maybe even small dock) with power passthrough should solve this. Burning through whole machines because a single USB-C port cakes out after just three years is an awful lot of waste.
Mostly, keeping them in my pocket with a USB cable attached to a power bank. Places an awful lot of torsion force on the connector. I tend to go through 2-3 charges a day.
Another issue is that I have cats that like to play with everything being too close to a table corner.
For 90% of the parts it’s honestly pretty easy to work with. You just need a few screwdrivers. And I sourced all my parts from eBay.
The documentation is excellent:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/100586
The only thing that’s egregious is the batteries. They tape the batteries to the case, and to remove them you have to do this complex twirling motion with tweezers to pull the tape out from under the battery. If the tape snaps during this then the documentation basically says get a new case.
This
Find me another laptop that has everything, even if it's more expensive ! You can't, some have keyboard as good, some it's the display. In best case you got 2 or 3 things but then it goes downhill on the other, like the trackpad.
Heh, that's precisely one grouping of reasons I avoid Apple, especially with regards to trackpads and form factor (and, to a lesser degree, displays).
1. Trackpads. I hate 'em. Keyboard-integrated trackpoints and/or trackballs is what I need. Detachables with a trackpad are acceptable as one can bring a Bluetooth substitute (that's how I do it on my HP x2 G4); on a non-detachable only a trackpoint, in addition to the trackpad, is acceptable (on my HP 2730p or my workplace ThinkPads I only use the trackpoint, the trackpad is turned off).
2. Form factor. Not counting their "castrated" tablets, Apple doesn't build 2-in-1 or 3-in-1 detachables (the best general-purpose mobile computing form factor) or convertibles (T-hinge models represent the second best form factor). The last orthodox-chassis laptop purchase I made took place in 1999. Outside of a vintage or retro machine I might entertain (which itself loses out to wedge-style keyboard computer cases), that form factor is dead to me.
3. Apple is not the only outfit that ships with good displays. Et cetera.
I've had high-end laptops from all the big vendors, and even at the highest price tier, other vendors don't deliver such build quality. I hate how all non-Apple laptops feel. The case, the hinge, the materials, everything. If I coud reliably use linux on Apple hardware, I'd never buy another laptop brand again.
Have they? What AMD or Intel laptop with Linux on it can hold a candle to and M4 air or an M4max pro? Genuinely curious, cause I found none...
that is 1/3 the battery life of a macbook in the same use case. seems completely incomparable
This also means that battery cycles accumulate more slowly and the battery’s lifetime is stretched further.
Also, generally more efficient chips don’t get hot as easily which makes the laptop more comfortable to use and prevents fans from becoming audible unless you’re really pushing the system.
(Did we really forget how inflated Apple battery claims really are?)
Granted Im not compiling large projects on a train all day but who is.
I don't see how? it is a 50Wh battery. Even at 6W that is about 8h of usage? On what OS + workload on x86 are you seeing just 6W usage? Or is it that each day your usage is only 2-3 hours?
It's nice that I can go a full office day without charging - the previous x86 notebook couldn't, but a decent one from the M3 generation probably could as well. But also if I put proper load an that thing the Macbook battery is done in less than 2 hours.
That said these numbers are with windows.
Fingers crossed for them then. I love the idea of a Framework laptop but I’m only interested in Linux performance.
I just went by what Framework said on release a few weeks or month back. Maybe you can find a more up to date Linux test somewhere.
And I bet you can soon get a ThinkPad with the same intel chip, that should have similar battery life.
Yes you can, speaking from experience. I have the T14 gen 7 with the 75 wh battery, and the 356H CPU, it only uses 4-6w/hour when coding with a lot of browser tabs open, a headless VM running, docker containers and so on, online meetings is about 6-8w/hour, this is under Linux, with default power setting from Opensuse.
It can easily last more than 10 working hours, I limit mine to 80% charge as it's more than enough for when I'm on the go.
Works for me, just wish I had a better display. It's possible to upgrade it, just so much conflicting information out there.
> Its two working days. Around 15-18 hrs i get out, depending on usage and power profile. If you do heavy compilation or so its much shorter :D
> Generally used balanced profile most time with intel lpmd (lpe core task util till threshold).
https://www.reddit.com/r/cachyos/comments/1sstqon/comment/oh...
I'm not convinced it's only "several years".
Asahi was launched in January 2021. So 5 and a half years ago. Asahi, as far as I can tell, supports most of M1 and M2 features, so generations launched in November 2020 (6 years ago) and June 2022 (4 years ago).
I would be very surprised if a decade from now the story won't still be the same thing: 90% of features for systems half a decade old with software package gaps in important areas and everything slightly less optimized than MacOS.
Asahi is doing incredible work but it's still 5 people in a garage vs the huge corporation.
This can be a good tradeoff. An M1 Ultra still runs circles around 90% of consumer hardware sold today, and with Linux it has easily another 10+ years. Now support for M3 is coming.
> Asahi is doing incredible work but it's still 5 people in a garage vs the huge corporation.
Not sure why the "vs" scenario, this is a project that makes no promises. And I think they do have some support from Fedora / Red Hat fwiw.
That's a good tradeoff for durable hardware with available spare parts. That's not a good tradeoff for hardware that was designed so it cannot be repaired, such as newer Macs.
They are building something in an environment that's not supportive of what they're doing. Contrast with Intel or AMD.
There was a time when Wi-Fi, or Wayland, or XComposite, or Linux gaming, or just accelerated graphics at all or, or, or... People get excited, they work on it, other people get excited and mess about, and eventually it just works.
I would love to one day pick up a decommissioned M1 Ultra and use my OS of choice on it, and I'm grateful for the people who are doing the hard thing now.
And macbooks are reaching 18-20 hours usage on battery nowadays, I have stopped carrying the power adapter most of the time.
Of course it’s significantly more expensive, but you do get what you pay for.
12 is still good, but intel as of lunar lake (2 generations ago!) matched that. Now, the performance is still behind, particularly single core. But the efficiency is there, and these are standard x86 chips.
The efficiency doesn’t come from ARM, it comes from the process node and chip design. Apple uses the latest process nodes with an SOC design. When intel does the same, as they have done, they match the efficiency easily on x86.
The real gain is the SOC. When you shove the ram and chipset into the CPU you save massive battery.
> On the battery life front, both Intel and AMD have caught up.
Intel and AMD's cpus don't have batteries ;)
Their chips are approximately as efficient as Apple's chips from ~2 years ago, but that's not their fault, it's Apple getting the entire allocation of new chips for about 1.5 years.
> to get 18 hours, you need the lowest spec model and you need to basically not use it. Chromium or Firefox open? Bluetooth active? Yeah, you’re looking at 12 hours, not 20.
I work on compilers, often maxing out all the CPU cores, and have stopped carrying the power adapter altogether. I plug it in maybe once in three days.
> The efficiency doesn’t come from ARM, it comes from the process node and chip design. Apple uses the latest process nodes with an SOC design. When intel does the same, as they have done, they match the efficiency easily on x86. The real gain is the SOC. When you shove the ram and chipset into the CPU you save massive battery.
Yes, I agree. IDGAF about whether the battery lasts longer because of ARM or magic pixie dust.
Source: I bought the same (with core i7, so it's performant, etc.).
I'm still hoping one of these mega AI LLMs will figure out how to install Linux on the many old iPads that become nearly useless after Apple stops updating them and you can't install new apps.
What do I need any higher specs for, other than battery life?
While we're at the point where traditional software is pretty much fast enough for all but extreme use-cases, with LLM's it feels like we're back to the days where you press compile and go have a coffee or chat to your colleague.
It takes a lot of expensive hardware, and most people don’t have extreme enough requirements to recoup that investment.
That might change, but it would require either that hardware gets much cheaper or everyone’s demands for LLMs increase significantly.
And given how fast the hardware and software is evolving, I can easily imagine a future where we all have very capable models running on our own devices for an embedded intelligence layer that's doing most of the day-to-day tasks, and only have to outsource to a super-smart cloud model for specific things.
To run poorly made software. Despite Apple having the best hardware around, they still manage to slow down M1 devices on Sequoia. Somehow.
I think it’s a double-edged sword. Powerful hardware means powerful hardware. But it also means developers get lazy, and start writing poor quality software because it still runs OK on the latest and greatest.
Luckily Linux doesn’t have that problem, which is why you can easily add 10 years to a laptops lifespan just by using Linux.
If you run noscript then yeah, why not keep rocking your pentium.
However they still have to nail single core performance on chips that can operate without a fan before they can be said to have caught up.
Also Tahoes absolutely horrendous performance for the last year..
I really want to go back to linux, but mbp is just too good!
I think the issue is funding is so low the developers don’t even have access to newer Apple Siicon, let alone funding for token costs, etc.
https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-l...
https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/policies/slop/
These large tech companies can't have their cake and eat it too.
In Asahi Linux specifically, there was not long ago a PR for M3 or similar for removing a big roadblock that existed (and I think still exists). Turns out this whole PR was implemented by an LLM (using copyrighted materials, probably most of it is Apple's) and it was immediately closed. Yes, it's a problem and illegal.
It doesn't matter if they can't prove it, their legal budget is just too big compared to anything Asahi team can do.
(I realize these little things may seem insignificant, but (1) it's customary for people to underestimate the provocations in their own posts and overestimate those in others, and (2) they add up like mercury in the bloodstream.)
https://asahilinux.org/slop/
Considering how much better m-series CPUs are, i’d say actually keep thinking different.
For example: "AFAIK the TLA is NFG for well written prose."
It is awkward to parse them and is infuriating when the author can clearly write well otherwise, because they don't use three- or four-letter-acronyms to replace standard sentence structures for the rest of their prose.
And I give some thoughts into may be they are not "much better". And in that case may be sticking to spec and not Thinking Different on certain things matters more.
they are still better. better than previous gen, essentially better than competition.
only the latest intel cpu are beginning to get "comparable" with previous m-series cpu.
>only the latest intel cpu are beginning to get "comparable" with previous m-series cpu.
I am comparing ARM CPU against ARM CPU Core. Which is why it needs to there to the ARM Spec specific to ARM ISA. And those are standard ARM CPU design tested across industry benchmarks. Not sure what is baseless about it.
It’s still an improvement.
I sometimes do wonder at what point do ARM find and test these stuff and ask Apple to follow. Obviously this is not the first time we see such thing happens.
See also when Microsoft introduced DocX, Apple products corrupted documents because Apple followed the standard that Microsoft had specified but turns out they didn't follow it themselves.
Sabotage others on things you don't have to do.
I wish the amount of time and brain power spent on this project was instead used to work on something more friendly to the Linux community.
For example to improve Strix Halo GPU and NPU support.
All the fun of reverse engineering and we know the processors already run Linux...
After 2 years of usage, I still have issues with basic actions like copy paste.
edit: omg, writing this post, i checked if there is some way to use linux shortcuts and there is (Kanesh/KMonad or Karabiner-Elements). Maybe my suffering will finally stop.
(to replies, yes, i understand that macos keyboard shortcuts might objectively be better, but if you are using multiple computers and macos is the only one of OSs, those shortcuts become pain in the neck)
Command+c command+v has worked every single timein every program since macOS 7.0 when I started.
It’s simply a business decision for Apple. And quite a dumb one at that. Here’s hoping that Ternus reverses that shortsighted decision.
By running Linux in a VM on MacOS on Apple silicon, you sacrifice some raw speed but in return you still get to run MacOS apps occasionally and have access to the same data from either MacOS or Linux without having to duplicate everything. And battery life is reasonable, which is not true yet with Asahi.
>and because there's no performant way to share disk space for data with MacOS
Have you tried a ZFS partition? If it's a desktop system use iSCSI to network storage (I'm not running Linux directly on my Studio or M4 mini but I still put my Home folder on the network)?
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0: By which I mean, for equivalent features. It's possible to go really far out of the normal with ZFS in terms of silly compression and multiple copies of data even within a single OS and checksumming and so on in ways that add computational overhead, but I don't hold that against it vs APFS.
If you really think about it, it's kinda amusing how far we came from https://wiibrew.org/wiki/MINI being used to bootstrap homebrew on the Nintendo Wii on PPC to being used to fire up our Macs daily running Asahi on ARM.
https://bugs.dolphin-emu.org/issues/12662
That being said, the Asahi team is doing incredible work. I am very thankful for what they are doing.