I've been using Asahi based on Arch as my daily driver for over a year (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/ultimate-linux-arm64-wo...) and should mention that the experience has been stellar overall. This is mainly because I've used it on a desktop (Mac Mini, later Mac Studio), where hardware support came faster and is practically complete for M1 models.
That being said, I fully plan on moving entirely to Asahi Fedora at the end of August when it's fully released. Fedora has a stronger team and less issues as noted by Hector Martin: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109971521711413167
> Today at Flock, we announced that Fedora Linux will soon be available on Apple Silicon Macs. Developed in close collaboration with the Fedora Asahi SIG and the Asahi Linux project, the Fedora Asahi Remix will provide a polished experience for Workstation and Server usecases on Apple Silicon systems. The Asahi Linux project has also announced that the new Asahi Linux flagship distribution will be Fedora Asahi Remix.
While my particular experience has been stellar (i.e., the issues related to package maintenance have not affected me per se), long term distribution maintenance is an important consideration for me. This is why I applaud the efforts of the Fedora team here, and why I'll be switching to Asahi Fedora later this month when it's ready.
Krita is a great tool and works with a lot of the graphics tablets on the market (not sure about the ones with a display but maybe?), and I was using it on Linux many years ago.
Yes. It's an industry standard in any digital art related industry. I know nothing about Krita and don't care to. It's not up to me. We need industry standards. Industry standards are a good thing.
There is a GitHub repo with a one-click (curl pipe to bash) installer for Photoshop using wine. Works great. Not going to link it because of questionable legality haha but it's easy to find
The current state of Wine Photoshop for the past 5 years is that it's unusable alongside other modern graphics software on modern hardware. The only high dpi version that you can expect to get working is CC2018 and it has a lot of bugs when running on Wine. CS6 runs perfectly and it's an excellent version of Photoshop, but it doesn't support high dpi so you'll have to lower your display resolution until you can read the menu text.
This won't help anyone who requires Wine as part of their workflow, I luckily don't, but I understand that Wine should be on target to handle Wayland by the next release early 2024.
This will give it proper HiDPI support and Vulkan rendering to help speed things up.
Does that mean CS6 on Wine will then work as if it was a hiDPI application? That would be amazing.
I should also mention CS6 runs fast as hell on Wine. It was so good that when I tried using Linux as my daily driver (before I gave up) I would change my display resolution to use it instead of CC2018.
It would be fair to say it's "quite simple" to port macOS apps to Linux if macOS apps were written against the Unix/POSIX API, but they are generally written using Apple's macOS-specific proprietary frameworks, meaning a Linux port of a GUI application would really be a re-write.
Adobe products look the same across Windows and macOS. I don't think they are using so much native stuff. They even ported their software to ARM, I think they could manage a Linux transition
Which is close to trivial if you're mainly using macOS APIs.
Of course Adobe probably has a lot of platform-agnostic stuff but which wasn't that straightforward to port but I'm pretty sure the UI and system stuff is still mainly using Cocoa.
I'm not even sure the macOS version would be necessarily that easier to port than the Windows one (then again there is probably not that much .net code in their tools)
"Quite simple" is an enormous overstatement here. The API surface of macOS is a vast superset of POSIX, including lots of libraries (AppKit, e.g.) that are not open-source.
Battery life would be the big thing, I think. There's not a single person I know who wouldn't like having Linux on their M1/M2 Macbooks--they're beautiful devices--but if you're not getting something approaching MacOS's battery life, then there's not that much separating it from another similarly-specced ultrabook.
I've been running Asahi for a full year on my m2 air. The battery life is quite good. Yes, I think macOS has batter battery optimizations than linux, but compared to other laptops running linux it really is quite good.
I should probably have clarified, there's not a single person I know who uses Linux as their daily driver that wouldn't want the option of having it run on an M1 MacBook. I'll grant that the vast majority of Apple users probably don't care about running Linux on it.
That makes sense, apologies for the misunderstanding. I feel like that goes without saying, though. I'm having a hard time imagining someone who is a happy fedora user saying they want to run something else on an M1 Mac
I doubt there would ever be parity but it could be good enough.
Have to hand it Apple OS team, they know how to squeeze a lot out of there hardware.
A while back I was trying to get an old G5 running and looking at the various OS options, many said just go with MacOS 10.4 - it was the most optimized OS for the system even today. When software and hardware work together, it can be pretty cool.
I mean, for a kind of museum piece, to get the true experience of using the computer I’d agree for sure just use original OS. But if one wanted to be able to use it for most functional purposes, it’s sad how the complete lack of backcompat in MacOS makes using an old MacOS tough — which is sad because new Linux often can work surprisingly fine on the same hardware. Like, current Debian on a 2008 Core 2 Duo is a fine computer that you can browse the Web and do basic office tasks on. It was shocking to me!
As a Quad G5 owner, might I recommend OS X "Sorbet" It's an unofficial merging of OS X 10.5 with PowerPC builds of 10.6 components. Even on ancient G3's it out-performs both 10.4 and 10.5 in benchmarks
Yup get ready for the Mac Pro that was on sale at full price until a few weeks ago at $7000 to be removed from the compatibility list for whatever comes after Sonoma.
Yes but to be fair there haven't been a lot of ppc64 machines apart from Apple's G5 desktops.
And the same is true for Apple Silicon.
If you are basically the only one to use some piece of hardware (and you are the one who designed it) your software will be the most optimized out there almost by definition.
This is to say that the focus is on the decision to customize heavily your hardware. Once you decide that it's a pretty low bar to say that your software is the best there is for running on that hardware.
The fact that my M2 has an effectively double size battery from my Fedora based Thinkpad (M2 has a 100Wh battery, while the Thinkpad has a 57Wh) means it just needs to be not terribly less efficient than x86 Fedora laptop for me to be happy, which from the sounds of it is already the case.
It's only 3x the price currently, as raspberry pis are very expensive (and need accessories to work, like good power supply, the good SD card and something to ventilate it, plus a case).
Even if Linux kills 50% of battery life compared to macOS you’re still looking at a system that’s in the top tier of longevity compared to x86 Ultrabooks.
I don't care about battery life. By macbook is connected 99% of the time.
That said, I'm satisfied with Linux in VM. Especially with Rosetta. It's actually funny that I'd get degraded experience because of the lack of the Rosetta in native Linux.
My main gripe with macOS is awful window management and missing apis to enable improvement (eg managing desktop/screens/workspaces). And no proper sloppy focus/focus follows mouse.
The main reason for bad battery life is hardware acceleration for certain tasks. Once that's settled, the computer shouldn't start producing more heat out of the blue.
>The main reason for bad battery life is hardware acceleration for certain tasks.
I guess this was a typo. MacOS/Apple Silicon (and other CPU architectures) save a lot of power via hardware acceleration. For instance, there are dedicated hardware video decoding blocks that use much less power than implementing video decoding with software.
The MacOS kernel takes advantage of all of these hardware specifics. MacOS also uses a number of other techniques like process wakeup coalescing, dedicated hardware for memory compression, process specific efficiency/performance core choices, ...
Apple is getting a lot of power improvements via codesign of the processor and the OS.
To do the same set of tasks with a similar power profile, Asahi will have to include system hooks that take advantage of all the dedicated lower power hardware functions and do a similar set of optimizations. They have done great work so far and will likely continue, but it isn't the simple tradeoff you are suggesting.
Because the linux drivers might not support all the power saving states for all the hardware in the device.
For example: I bought a Dell XPS 9 months ago. With the earlier Fedora 37 kernels, it didn't put the Nvidia card into power saving mode, causing battery life to be less than an hour. Now it seems to work correctly and battery life is 3-4 hours for me.
Additionally, Apple's always¹ been insanely great at power management even pre-Apple Silicon by virtue of (1) prioritizing it more highly than other vendors, and (2) implementing it in a way that takes advantage of the complete hardware and software stack.
I used to hate on Macs until I was given one by my employer. Then I realized that despite how awful macOS is, the laptop itself is completely unrivalled. There is no Lenovo/xps/framework/tuxbook/tongfang/clevo/whatever that comes close to the overall package of a MacBook. It has the stiffest body, the quietest fans, the biggest battery, the best screen and trackpad, etc. Even worse is the fact that a framework 16 is more than an M2 pro with an education discount. And now, the biggest flaw of a MacBook (macos) is fixed.
Part of it is that Apple has the margins that they can spend a little more on parts. They know they don't have to compete on price as much as PCs do. People aren't going to ditch the Mac over $25 or $50. However, people do regularly compare prices on PC laptops looking to save small amounts of money. That means that Apple can spend a little more designing and ordering a fan that's quieter with a better design and more premium parts.
Also, because there are so many PC laptops, it's really hard to get a good review of a PC laptop. There are so many configurations and PC makers often make small (but meaningful) changes to designs during a product's lifecycle. All of a sudden, the one you bought has a less bright display or the cooling system isn't as good or whatever. It makes it hard to reward companies for creating good products. There are premium PC laptops, but they still suffer from some of these decisions and they often cost about the same.
I've looked for alternatives to the Mac, but at this point I've stopped. I'm sick of doing research on junk to try and save a few bucks, I'm sick of trackpads that are unusable, and with the new M-series processors I simply never want to go back to a high-wattage processor.
I actually like macOS, but I'm really glad happy to see Linux advancing on Apple hardware. The Asahi Linux developers are amazing and I love reading their write-ups.
There are no ends to shitty, luxuriously priced laptops that are nowhere near the quality of any M-series laptop. Though I did hear good news about last generation intel processors, hopefully some competition will emerge - we can only win from thatz
>Part of it is that Apple has the margins that they can spend a little more on parts.
This part is duplicated by the business or professional branded products of Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc.
I think the part that cannot be duplicated (without very significant time and money) is the tight integration between software and hardware. Even if the other companies spend a little more for the premium components, they are not able to squeeze out the same performance.
I would have thought professionals are not cheaping out on a few hundred dollars for premium components, a negligible fraction of the income earned from the machine.
Still rocking a 2015 MBP with Fedora here. Screen, body, keyboard, and trackpad are so good. This news make me consider buying Apple silicon, which I'd never do if I had to use MacOS.
It's better than a Lenovo (I've used many) because the trackpad itself is better, the software doesn't have an impact. It's just the usual synaptics driver so you could configure it the way you like.
I'm on an MBA m1 running Ventura. MacOS is really horrible:
- I've given up getting the permissions on my folder share (Samba) to stick. MacOS keeps reverting to defaults, with means everyone has full read/write permissions. Network files sharing should be a fundamental feature without hassle. Not I'm forced to read up on how to share using NFS.
- I created a FAT32 partition to share files with Asahi. I also setup GDrive syncing on it. Unfortunately, MacOS keep creating these annoying files starting with ._xxx for each single folder and file (and there are hundreds of them). I'm not sure why.
- I had to wipe the machine and do a re-install to enable third-party kernel extensions to load
- The system volume (the primary SSD) on the system does not appear in finder. I keep dragging it to the finder side-bar, and it keeps disappearing under unclear circumstances.
- I just now got a black screen of death after ejecting some mounted drives on my other Mac, an intel running Mojave.
- When I maximize windows, they don't fill up the screen. Usually they increase in size by what seems a random amount. Most times I have to manually drag the edges to fill up the screen. Even after that, a lot of time there is some small margin below the window that cannot be fixed. it's a small issue, but very annoying.
The window management and workspaces are horrible compared to gnome. nothing you expect to work actually works. Basic things like putting more than 2 windows in the same workspace are impossible. The animations are also worse than gnome, which is very surprising considering how macOS is known for its animations.
Personally I have two major issues with macOS: CPU usage and bugs.
There are a ton of background services that periodically spin up for no obvious reason, consuming a ton of CPU for a few minutes at a time, then go back to idle. I don't know what they're doing or why. Luckily since they're background services, they're bound to the efficiency cores on Apple Silicon, so they don't hurt battery life or thermals too much most of the time.
And as far as bugs go, the worst part is that bug reports through the Feedback app go largely ignored and bugs seem to keep accumulating. Even for bugs with clear and well-documented repro cases, Apple doesn't seem to pay any attention.
I'm a game developer, so the majority of my bug reports come from issues I've experienced with the graphics drivers or with Xcode. Here's a few examples:
- On macOS devices with > 60Hz displays, there is some awful stuttering with Metal apps in full screen mode. For some reason, CAMetalLayer nextDrawable sometimes just takes a very long time whenever it uses direct-to-display mode for presentation. That mode is implicitly enabled for full screen Metal apps, in order to bypass the display compositor and theoretically reduce latency. This bug also applies to MacBooks with the built in "ProMotion" (120Hz) displays. I'd be perfectly happy if there was just some flag to say "don't use direct-to-display", but if there is one, it's not documented anywhere. I haven't found a workaround yet. I originally reported this in August 2022. Apple replied once in October 2022 to say "we can't reproduce this, please provide a demo app". I provided the app that reliably reproduces the problem within an hour of their reply, but they've been silent since.
- Metal and OpenGL (the latter is emulated via Metal on Apple Silicon Macs) both exhibit a bug with triangle merging that causes partial derivatives to go very wrong along primitive edges. There's a usable workaround for this on the Metal side (just enable a [[sample_mask]] even if you're not doing multisampling). There's no such workaround for the OpenGL side, unfortunately. I was able to work with Asahi Lina to fix this for Mesa on Asahi Linux, and the fix itself was actually really trivial and didn't require a sample mask hack (it took a lot of debugging to figure out, though -- but that's how reverse engineering goes). To solve it, Apple would simply need to set a particular bit to disable triangle merging whenever the fragment shader uses derivatives. I reported this issue in December 2022, and Apple hasn't replied.
- This one is not as egregious as some of the bugs I've reported, and the Xcode team has responded reliably in the past. This is the first Xcode bug report I've had where they didn't acknowledge the report within ~14 days or so. In the current Xcode beta, using the graphics debugger will suspend the app but hitting "resume" leaves the app stuck suspended. The normal application debugger path does not do this, just the graphics debugger. I reported this in mid-June 2023, but haven't heard anything yet.
I originally reported this in August 2022. Apple replied once in October 2022 to say "we can't reproduce this, please provide a demo app". I provided the app that reliably reproduces the problem within an hour of their reply, but they've been silent since.
This came up on the ATP podcast recently. Feedback is a very, very crappy front-end for Apple's internal bug tracker Radar (which itself I've heard is not great).
Long story short, you have to submit an entirely new bug report through Feedback with the sample project attached. Apple's developers basically can't see replies to Feedbacks.
I believe the reason has to do with fears over GDPR and data collection. The Feedbacks are scrubbed of any kind of personal or identifying information before they are re-entered into Radar. I don't understand all the reasons, but I 100% agree this is absolutely nuts and not an appropriate way to manage bug reports.
There's a social media app I use who's feedback tickets page (which is only reachable in app) does not work. I submitted feedback, devs asked for a reproduction (I clicked on the notification). Went back to make one, and tried to get back to the chat, but the tickets page just wouldn't load.... Guess the bug will never be fixed
Ah yes, then you download an app for that. And that app has its own updater.
Then you realize you want your mouse and trackpad to scroll in reverse directions. So you download an app for that, which comes with its own updater.
And then you want a flat acceleration profile for your mouse, and you download an app for that. That, too, comes with its own updater.
Next, you realize that the Mac app-based cmd-tab sucks and you'd much rather have Windows-like behavior. So you download an app for that, which also comes with its own updater. (Yes, yes, I know the arguments Apple users bring out, it's always been done this way on Mac etc etc. Still really bad.)
Then you get a taste of auto-tiling on Linux and spend a couple hours setting up yabai and skhd (thankfully updated via homebrew), before realizing that you'll need to turn off SIP [1] for a semi-usable experience.
Then you do go and turn off SIP, and you realize that your iOS apps no longer work because macOS has DRM built into its hardware that detects if you've turned off SIP.
And then, one of those apps prompts you for an update, and in doing so it steals your keyboard focus while you're typing. And you say "is this what I spent $2500 to experience", and cry.
> Then you realize you want your mouse and trackpad to scroll in reverse directions.
No, I don't. I want it to be like pushing or dragging a virtual piece of paper. That's what it is and how it feels the most natural to me. That being said I'm pretty sure you can already configure this without an app, in the system preferences.
> Next, you realize that the Mac app-based cmd-tab sucks and you'd much rather have Windows-like behavior.
No way. I love the cmd + tab and pairing that with keyboard shortcuts for navigating browser tabs is super powerful and doesn't require compromising the beautiful giant amount of screen real estate by inducing multitasking with multiple windows open. It's okay if it comes as a configuration but I would hope the default behavior stays this way.
> No, I don't. I want it to be like pushing or dragging a virtual piece of paper. That's what it is and how it feels the most natural to me.
Yes, that's what makes sense for a trackpad. Many people want that behavior for their trackpad, and also for their mice to scroll in the traditional direction, which is the opposite that of a trackpad.
> That being said I'm pretty sure you can already configure this without an app, in the system preferences.
Have you actually tried it out?
> No way. I love the cmd + tab and pairing that with keyboard shortcuts for navigating browser tabs is super powerful and doesn't require compromising the beautiful giant amount of screen real estate by inducing multitasking with multiple windows open.
I really don't know how macOS-style application vs Windows-style window switchers have any bearing on this. Why should two Firefox windows next to each other be treated differently from a Firefox window next to Safari window? A browser window is a browser window.
To be clear, they’re asking about having scrolling on a mouse and trackpad act differently from each other. The System Preferences / System Settings ‘Natural Scrolling’ option affects both mouse and trackpad, even though they’re in different places, and without third-party software it’s not possible to do what the commenter is asking.
I haven't missed window snapping since going full Apple a couple years ago. Whenever I need to see another tab or window, like if writing code and wanting documentation at the same time, command + tab and browser tab shortcuts are really fast and responsive and seamless. I prefer the larger amount of screen real estate in use without snapping plus the keyboard shortcuts over reducing the screen real estate to multitask via snapped windows, because windows side by side affect my focus more than just tabbing when needed.
Everyone mentioning multiple apps such as "rectangle" or "amethyst" doesn't really understand how restrictive they are compared to tools like i3 or sway.
Window snapping, tiling and screen navigation is a HUGE deal. I basically don't use my mouse when programming in Linux and it's really difficult to do the same on Mac.
I used to love tiling window managers. But I found out that UI heavy applications (those with a lot of extra things around the data itself, eg an IDE with toolbars and stuff around the actual editor) don’t seem to fit well into half a screen, so I prefer to use a predictable arrangement where for instance the left and bottom bit of my terminal is visible even though part of it is obstructed by the web browser. (Then I can click the web app and see if the log message I was waiting for appears in the terminal.)
I use Hammerspoon for this and I have keyboard shortcuts that will move the window and resize it to a predefined position. And I have shortcuts to select certain apps quickly.
Hammerspoon is scripted in lua so I don’t feel very constrained in what I can do.
I have the opposite opinion for macOS shortcuts vs Linux/Windows/IBM shortcuts.
Practically everything is handled with Cmd, with Option/Shift/Control being modifiers. It's the exception if something is handled exclusively with Option/Shift/Control, example being web browsers and Finder for tabs.
Text selection is superior in macOS, and anyone who argues PgUp/PgDn/Home/End being a better solution in combination with Shift and Ctrl is insane.
Depending on the port of a 3rd-party application, it may adopt macOS shortcuts and be consistent with everything else, or keep IBM/Windows-style shortcuts and break compatibility with other apps.
On the other hand, in a terminal, I can use Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V/etc for their intended (in-terminal) purposes and Cmd-C/Cmd-V/etc for their intended (macOS-wide) purposes...
Which is much worse - why is it me, the user that have to care about whether I’m in a terminal or a browser window and switch the shortcuts I use for the same functionality? It should be the same, and macs actually got it right. The first time I had a mac (from an employer), I was annoyed by it, but it is the superior way. Especially that not all terminal emulators go with ctrl+shift either, so there is also the “let’s copy it with shift, nope, without shift, nope, again, oh I killed the process”.
> Which is much worse - why is it me, the user that have to care about whether I’m in a terminal or a browser window and switch the shortcuts I use for the same functionality?
How is it worse? Ctrl + C, Ctrl + D, Ctrl + Z all work as expected in the terminal.
Now you want to copy something, which is obviously not going to work with Ctrl + C, so you just add a Shift to it instead of moving to a totally different key (which you absolutely still could, btw).
No, ctrl+c works one way in the terminal, and a completely other way in every other GUI app. There is no good reason for this arbitrary change in meaning, objectively, otherwise from your logic it would follow that taking a screenshot would be logical in, say, gimp only by pressing ctrl+alt+shift+c, which I hope we can agree would make no sense.
Okay, I see your point now but it's a bit weird for me because having the Ctrl key only for a specific app seems unwise and still less efficient. It's not about Gimp, it's just the terminal that's special.
I've never had an issue with Ctrl+Shift+C. I also don't press Ctrl+C accidentally because I know when I'm using the terminal.
Even on macbook, I don't have issues with accidental presses but I don't like that I have to press an entirely different key on the keyboard to use the terminal.
The fatal flaw with its hardware, for me, is the lack of upgradability. I brought the lowest spec M1 air ~6 months ago, these are pricey machines and I had no idea whether I'd like the hardware/software, so wanted to go easy. Turns out, I really like it, but 8gb ram and 256gb ssd isn't enough. In the world of most laptops, this upgrade would cost me maybe £150. For Mac, this upgrade costs me £3,500 (for half as much storage as well), because I'd need to buy a whole new machine.
Where did you get those numbers? By my reckoning the upgrade would cost you net about £700 brand new and the upgraded machine could last the rest of the decade.
Buy the model I have, the 16gb 512gb M1 Air at £1400 new (or ~£1100 new-ish on eBay).
Keep both for a few weeks, transfer your stuff over, then sell your 8gb 256gb M1 Air for ~£700.
The numbers for the standard upgrade were from a quick search on amazon (2TB NVME = £100, 32gb DDR4 = £50), and for the MacBook was just the cheapest I could find for the closest specs (£3,500 would actually only get me 1TB storage, that's just the most apple has for a laptop it seems).
1TB would be the minimum for me, especially spending that kind of money. Also I doubt I'd get £700 for my MBA, seeing as that's how much I brought it for (refurbished from Apple). When I was buying it originally, the prices on eBay were more along the lines of £600. Even still, I don't factor in the money I'd get back from selling my previous machine
Its not an upgrade either way if you're buying a whole new machine.
As for my reasons, there's a few. First of all, particularly on higher priced items, a lot of the trouble with the price comes to having the full amount in the first place. I can't walk into an Apple Store £700 short but tell them "don't worry, I'll have the rest later".
Aside from that, actually selling the thing is no guarantee, especially not for £700. I remember going to buy a laptop on eBay over 3 years ago and I still see it up there now. It might not be as in demand as the MacBook would be, but the point holds. Even if it does sell, the question then is how long it takes before it does.
Based on that, I assume if I can only afford something if I sell something else, I can't actually afford it. There's just too many factors involved. If I can afford the thing and I sell the old thing after, great, that's a nice bonus.
I don't understand how people hate macOS. There are some frustrations (e.g., rapid deprecation of things like GC'd Obj-C or 32-bit apps, code signing and notarization) but they pale in comparison to other platforms (glibc compatibility, $500+ code signing certs for Windows/Android, etc.)
This is hacker news, so presumably we are hackers. I like being able to look into the system I'm running. When I'm seeing a weird network issue, I want to be able to peer into the kernel's tcp stack. When I see an error, I want to be able to add debug statements and understand it.
That's easy to do on linux. There's great tooling. That's hard to do on macOS.
I run websites and services. I like being able to run them locally, to try and reproduce bugs I see on my server. You can't run macOS on a server in a reasonable way, so the only reasonable choice there is linux.
I can understand how someone who doesn't really want to understand the software they use might want to use macOS or windows. On hacker news, I'd expect most people to understand the desire to be able to tinker and understand the system to a greater degree.
The os being compared to here is linux. I fully understand that most devs don’t want to spend significant time customizing their OS to meet their workflow needs, but once you have a linux distro with a custom window manager —- I don’t see how you could reasonably claim the macos experience is comparable.
You miss the forest for the trees — fedora also has a version with immutable roots, it is a feature, and is absolutely not meant as anti-privacy, it is there for proper rollbacks and imo it is absolutely superior (with NixOS’s model).
I don't know how it works for Macs, but on Fedora Silverblue you can definitely disable anything you consider to be an "invasive service". Also, if the immutable root comes with software you don't want, you can uninstall it by adding a layer to the root image.
I am no Mac expert, but it is surprisingly flexible contrary to their image as a walled garden. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some magic incantation to turn off many of those “invasive services”.
For what it’s worth, Plasma’s file indexer is much more invasive in terms of running at the wrong times in my experience, so depending on what one mean, Linux also have similar services.
A thousand hugs and thank you’s to the team behind this. I’ve been waiting for this very thing!!! And once more and more devs get this going they’ll be more likely to have more work being reverse engineered and added to keep Linux on the m series going for years and years!
Edit: the reason I’m stoked I because fedora is the distro of Linux that I run on everything.
After the painful experience I've had with the last ThinkPad I purchased (and before that, a Dell XPS, if Linux reaches a point where widely used distros are able to run on Mac M* flawlessly...personally I'm not gonna think it twice.
Something is very off with ThinkPad development recently. A few years ago, I could pick any T-Series ThinkPad and expect them to have excellent Linux support.
My last two ThinkPads have various annoying issues: battery drain when sleeping, trackpoint freezing after a while, fan kicking in for no reasons.
I have used a System76 laptop in the past, everything is working as it should, but the hardware quality is not comparable to Thinkpads.
> battery drain when sleeping, trackpoint freezing after a while, fan kicking in for no reasons.
With the exception of the trackpoint freezing I've had exactly those issues. I even had to send the laptop to the repair service because the battery thing was unbearable.
I was tempted to get a System76 but went for a ThinkPad mostly due to fear of the unknown. Lesson learned, I guess.
I doubt you're looking to burn more money but you could also try the framework laptops, I hear they're very well supported. Older Thinkpads also work if you want something cheaper (I don't really use my X220 anymore but I could never get rid of it), but then you do lose some performance.
I had a look to the Framework one, however, I've read (here, on HN, mostly) things about the battery life, the screen size and the feeling of flimsyness due to its DYI nature that were a turn off for me.
This is awesome news. I have been trying to tinker with getting Ubuntu working on both an older Intel Mac and my M1, but it’s an almighty pain in the ass hardware-wise. And I ran across more than one person who felt it necessary to point out that me buying an Apple computer was what the problem was. Like, really? That’s a real effective way to win people over.
Well, it's understandable. If you talk about it with other linux-on-MacBook tinkerers I'm sure they'll be more sensible to your cause.
But generally, if you pointed that out to me I'd say the same, picking that hardware puts you in a harder path. Also, I'm not sure if Linux users in general have any interest in winning people over.
I’m not talking about Linux users in general. I’m talking about the subset who hang around forums and other online spaces and purport to help newbies with problems.
Ironically enough, then, I figured out on my own that the biggest obstacle I was encountering with my Intel MPB was Ubuntu’s distribution of firmware, where they officially pretend not to know about certain non-free device drivers, even though they vaguely gesture at the process of acquiring them in their respective official docs. Whereas Debian straight-up distributes them in their ISOs.
Can’t say I’m a big fan of Ubuntu’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge approach to “standing up for free software,” where they get you started down a path then steadfastly refuse to help because VIRTUE! Debian’s approach is saner. And so I’ll be tinkering with Debian, I guess.
So other than less battery performance, what other notable differences should I expect from Fedora on M2 vs the native MacOS. (I'm not being snarky, just trying to get a feel for how similar I should expect the performance and peripheral support to be; not focused on differences between gnome and the MacOS UI)
I think getting information about devices in and connected to the system would be easier from Linux; might be nice for device and board programming or diagnosing USB devices.
I don't remember specifics but terminal use felt odd on macOS to me. I do Terminal no problem from Linux, but maybe it was the file structure or command syntax on macOS that felt different.
Niche hardware stuff is likely cheaper to manage on Linux. I had to buy SwitchResX to set a higher resolution for my monitor, but I can do it from kernel parameter (video=), xrandr, or EDID override all for free on Linux.
eGPUs acted notably differently from macOS vs Linux on the same laptop, and iirc it had to do with the Apple firmware doing something differently when booting non-macOS. I preferred it on Linux because it shut-off the iGPU completely but required full shutdowns to switch to internal; hot-swap worked fine from macOS even on unsupported TB2. Iirc there was also some EFI binary that could be booted first before Linux in order to trick the Apple firmware in keeping macOS-specific config, and I kept that on a flash drive to boot from the rare times when I wanted dual graphics. Windows was even more different in that the eGPU straight up didn't work.
> I don't remember specifics but terminal use felt odd on macOS to me. I do Terminal no problem from Linux, but maybe it was the file structure or command syntax on macOS that felt different.
That'll be the GNU coreutils vs macOS's BSD userland. You'd likely have a similar frustration if you were to use FreeBSD. You can replace these with coreutils from Homebrew or MacPorts on the Mac. Also, the file system layout is different, again, much like the BSDs vs Linux/GNU. Even Linux distros vary slightly.
I wonder when we'll have fully functional HDR and neural engine so that the creative professionals could try using Linux on their Apple silicon Macs (software support is another story, though Davinci Resolve is already there)
I'm excited about this despite not owning any Apple hardware, nor intending to own any in the future.
Just to see what a mature native Linux port does in terms of performance and battery life numbers.
We've had to suffer so much Apple fanboy b.s. ever since Apple Silicon became a thing, touting how special the software optimizations are for making this TSMC node's product so fast and efficient. Let's get a sense of what really happens without Apple's software, with an alternative unix-like OS that has similarly modern compositing desktops.
My money is it's 90% TSMC that made Apple Silicon so much better than the Intel trash Apple was stuck with, they never even tasted the AMD+TSMC glory first.
> touting how special the software optimizations are for making this TSMC node's product so fast and efficient.
> My money is it's 90% TSMC that made Apple Silicon so much better than the Intel trash Apple was stuck with,
This comes across as quite bizarre, as though you believe Apple Silicon Macs are a combination of TSMC chips and Apple software, rather than Apple chips (manufactured by TSMC) with Apple software. Is it really that hard for you to believe that Apple could have come up with chip designs that are genuinely good even when fab process differences are not a factor?
How will running Linux instead of macOS shed any new light on how much credit for the hardware quality should go to TSMC rather than to Apple?
> This comes across as quite bizarre, as though you believe Apple Silicon Macs are a combination of TSMC chips and Apple software, rather than Apple chips (manufactured by TSMC) with Apple software.
No, it's deliberately bizarre. I'm speaking to specifically all the ridiculous nonsense I've read on HN from Apple fanbois trying to convince the world that these are so good because of magical synergies of Apple software with Apple Silicon.
Apple seems to have designed a good chip, TSMC manufactured it. I don't deny either of those things. The same can be said of AMD.
Wtf, it has nothing to do with fanboys, and noone said that software optimizations are the reason why the M-series chips are so good - otherwise why did the intel ones not perform better under macs?
What was highlighted on the software side is the way Rosetta works/performs.
That is its core feature. The only reason Asahi exists is to run linux natively on Apple Silicon Macs. There are plenty of linux variants for other systems.
What dependency are you speaking of? It uses the external OS hooks built into the firmware. Is that the issue you are referring to? After boot, MacOS is not running in any way.
Can you install it without connecting to Apple/iCloud first? Like from flash drive to obliterate macOS, or does a partition have to be kept around still?
You don't have to connect to iCloud or have an Apple account to set up macOS, you just click "skip" or "set up later" in necessary places in the setup flow. It's not like Windows where installing it without connecting to your Microsoft account is hard.
Honestly Apple should open up the hardware specs and make this easier for devs because I wasn’t in the market for an m1 mini if it was going to run macOS but now with my favorite distro with a remix available?! I’ll give Apple my duckets
I’m like 98% sure that your current hardware has no open specs, why should apple open theirs? Of course, idealistally I am all for it, but realistically that ship has sailed a long time ago, plus most companies have a jungle of patents that disallow them from doing so even if they wanted to.
Well the GPU for example AMD has been happy to work with the open source community. Sure the open driver still ships a giant blob iirc but it’s still better than nothing. Such an approach would be dope from Apple.
Of course they don’t have to. It would be nice if they did. I would argue they’d sell even more devices this way.
I'm only looking for facts, not trying to stimulate FUD etc: didn't RedHat announce something that seemed to decrease their commitment to Fedora, or was that just RHEL and CentOS type enterprise stuff? (I'm a Fedora user, and I do/would not look forward to switching.)
No, Fedora is upstream. Nothing changes for Fedora. Original CentOS is discontinued, CentOS Stream is downstream of Fedora but upstream of RHEL. RH has taken measures to thwart clones of RHEL.
That being said, I fully plan on moving entirely to Asahi Fedora at the end of August when it's fully released. Fedora has a stronger team and less issues as noted by Hector Martin: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109971521711413167