OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

I wander if now that you can get a rack mount Mac Pro with Apple Silicon (launched yesterday, the second coming of XServe), running server workloads on them with Asahi Linux becomes a viable route for some people?

I don't feel like ever going back to x86 to be honest, at this point there is nothing lacking or unable to run and when the neural engine drivers come online now that the GPU is starting to mature people will be able to juice out every last bit of computation this machine is capable of.

For the record, I've switched to the edge branch a couple of months ago and honestly I noticed no actual difference in my day-to-day tasks which is really telling about how powerful even the M1 is when it can handle software rendering in such an effortless manner coupled with anything else running.

Really thank god for asahi being a thing.

I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be.

I know they are focused on getting it to a good quality on M1 first but eagerly consuming all project updates! Good job team!

This can do more for gaming on the Mac than Apple's efforts combined.

Although the Mac Pro's PCIe extensibility makes it a pretty mystifying niche product from Apple without providing memory and GPU expandability, once Asahi Linux gets running on there you should be able to not get the full abilities of the latest Vulkan and full OpenGL 4.6 by putting in a recent AMD card. The open source Radeon drivers should "just work" on ARM as they do in the Talos II POWER-based workstation, if they can be stably initialized that is. Heck, Nvidia publishes a binary Linux aarch64 driver and they sound petty enough with Apple to try to make that work.

You could have Asahi Linux running and delegate any not-yet-supported hardware to the 7 PCIe devices it supports. Would be quite a mighty ARM Linux workstation. Again though - only if Apple has the PCI Express support for it.

Has there been any ongoing work on this? It's been marked as "WIP" in GitHub for a while now, and I'd imagine it's one of the more complicated things to reverse-engineer.

I don't think it's hostile, I think they're just hands-off; they throw the hardware over the fence and say, "if you wanna make use of it, here's our software; if you don't like our software, sorry no docs but you're free to write your own". Which is exactly what's happening.

I mean it would be nice if Apple had released more documentation, but I totally understand if they don't want the burden of supporting it.

"Also in this update:

We now have a cpuidle driver, which significantly lowers idle power consumption by enabling deep CPU sleep. You should also get better battery runtime both idle and during sleep, especially on M1 Pro/Max machines.

Thanks to the cpuidle driver, s2idle now works properly, which should fix timekeeping issues causing journald to crash.

Also thanks to the cpuidle driver, CPU boost states are now enabled for single- and low-threaded workloads, noticeably increasing single-core performance.

Thermal throttling is now enabled, which should keep thermals in check on fanless (Air) models. There was never a risk of overheating (as there are hard cutoffs), but the behavior should now more closely match how macOS works, and avoid things getting too toasty on your lap.

Random touchpad instability woes should now finally be gone, thanks to bugfixes in both the M1 (SPI) and M2 (MTP) touchpad drivers.

A bugfix to the audio subsystem that fixes stability issues with the headphone jack codec.

New firmware-based battery charge control, which offers fixed a 75%/80% threshold setting. To use this, you need to update your system firmware to at least version 13.0, which you can do by simply updating your macOS partition to at least that version or newer. This new charge control method also works in sleep mode.

U-Boot now supports the Type A USB ports (and non-TB ports on the iMac), so you can use a keyboard connected to any port to control your bootloader.

And last but not least, this kernel release includes base support for the M2 Pro/Max/Ultra SoCs! We are not enabling installs on these machines yet as we still have some loose ends to tie, but you can expect to see support for this year's new hardware soon."

You'd temporarily lose some hardware support (documented) while it's being worked on. But I'm not sure why you expect losing performance? This is running native code. Same binary will run the same on both systems (+/- the llvm version differences).

Apple is one of the few companies smart enough to deliberately do this. It is both a testament to ability to do brilliant things, and akin to being trapped in a room with a lion that has twice your SAT score. The "golden handcuffs", as they say.

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support#m2-d...

Maybe not quite possible to do today but if Asahi keeps up the pace they've made so far I bet it will be soon.

It helps that Apple has popular hardware so there's a good bit of people out there interested in developing support for Apple processors.

There is nothing inherent about running Linux that will require it be slower, in some cases it will/is even faster, but the lack of everything being fully supported does actually impact performance right now. It has been getting better with time.

For anyone interested into the GPU side, I can't recommend Linas streams[1] enough.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@AsahiLina/streams

Amazing

https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi/search?q=ane https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi/search?q=neural https://oftc.irclog.whitequark.org/asahi-dev/search?q=ane

That said, Apple has been very hostile to hackers over the years imo. Hardware being hard to repair, access, upgrade, etc. I think at one point they were making it virtually impossible to replace components because they were serial locked.

As far as I am aware, progress Apple as made has been in response to public image issues or changes in consumer laws within the EU.

Plus Apple software is heavily indebted to Open Source software so they very easily could be releasing drivers for their hardware instead of relying on community to do backwards engineering.

Moneywise it was definitely worth it, both machines are still working many years later and have been pretty much trouble free after the initial bugs were ironed out.

If I was in the market for a new laptop right now I'd wait for a bit and then pull the trigger on the latest model with broad support.

There are a bunch of factors that could affect performance even under the same OS (try underclocking your CPU or play around with schedulers). Given the mostly non-existent documentation from Apple I'd strongly suspect that average-case performance will stay worse on the Linux side for a long time.

At least this is how I felt 2 years ago back when I bought it and more or less even to this day. I'm wondering how is the market as of now, two years later, and how the $1k arm laptops coming out today compare.

Makes you wonder about how the rest of the system components will compare when they're finished.

Filesystem performance used to be better than Docker Desktop, but they seem about on par w/ one another now.

We really need something like Mesa, but for compute accelerator APIs. I'm really hoping that IREE helps smooth out parts of the software stack and can fill in part of this, but the pieces aren't all put in place yet. You'll need the GPU for a substantial amount of accelerator work regardless of Neural Engine support.

I disagree that there is nothing lacking on these machines with Asahi, I still run into small nits all the time (from 16k page sizes biting back to software missing features). But my M2 Air is 100%, no-questions-asked usable as a daily driver and on-the-go hacking machine, it is fast as hell and quiet, it has nested virtualization and is the only modern ARM machine on the market, and I love it for that.

In my experience the experience for those is quite bad, as you're sharing that 8G across both the CPU and GPU...

Judging from the OP's post of 2.3k€, they're probably considering a maxed out version, which has a completely different experience since you can fully take advantage of the high memory bandwidth for hybrid tasks unlike the low-memory models where you're sharing the limited capacity.

As opposed to what company besides those tiny ones? Almost all of them are closed-source only and drivers have been painstakingly reversed engineered over decades.

They made an update that claims performance is comparable.

I tested realistic workloads last week and docker desktop was still meaningfully worse.

If your work computer has antivirus, the performance of docker desktop will be even worse if exceptions aren't or can't be added.

I need to try it again, bet it works out of box now.

Almost all laptops sold with Linux pre-installed or with support advertized only work well with Linux due to volunteer work similar to what is being done with Apple's stuff right now. Almost everything is proprietary with close to zero upstream support, you just don't notice it because the work has already been done.

The performance is there, it has been running stuff much faster than the vast majority of Intel/AMD laptops for over a year.

Regarding the capabilities not sure which one you miss. Do you plan to use it for development, or you want some kind of gaming/multimedia setup?

>To be honest this blog post seems like the project has a long ways to go, not that it is nearly completion.

It's the other way around. It has been usable as a daily driver for ages.

>I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be.

Then don't?

You can only have so many flexibility in design with modern hardware — they are not fitting things into 5 cm “thin” chassics anymore. How exactly are such a thin device be repairable? Similarly to how old car motors could be tweaked with, you need special tools to touch anything in a modern engine. This is not against the customers, these are trade offs.

But even this way, apple devices have by far the longest lifetimes, macs, iphones will have 2-3 owners easily - so is it really fair to call them out, or is it just baseless emotional reaction?

Also, what you heard about locked down components resulted in better security, a much lower risk of theft, and a much more clean second-hand market (where you won’t be sold a phone with a cheap chinese shittier screen for example).

So, are they really expensive?

This is interesting, am I correct in thinking this a feature implemented by Apple and now supported by the Asahi team? Does that mean that macOS supports this charge control feature?

I really hope Apple brings the same charge limiting to iPhone as well.

Why?

Please tell me where is it because I will buy it instantly, and I’m only half kidding.

I don’t see how making linux available on possibly the currently available best laptop hardware any different to the previous decades of hacking a working wifi driver into the kernel. It was always an uphill battle, and we should be thankful for those who take up the hard work!

Sure there is. You just haven't run into it yourself.

Faster, cooler and more power efficient hardware is great. I just don't think that it makes up for depending on a small team of volunteers to resolve all hardware issues in an ecosystem hostile to OSS, which might break at any point Apple decides to do so.

And the incompatibilities with ARM are not negligible. If all your software runs on it, great. If not, good luck depending on yet another translation layer.

I'm sticking with my slow, hot and power-hungry x86 machines with worse build quality for the foreseeable future. The new AMD mobile chips are certainly in the ballpark of what Apple silicon can do, so I won't be missing much.

Please don't forget to donate if you get value from Asahi.

This is tremendously detailed and laborious work that people are doing in their free time.

https://asahilinux.org/support/

This. The volunteer pool is too small. And you're supporting a shitty company.

Yes, battery charge control is a hardware(/firmware) feature supported on other modern laptops as well, such as the Lenovo ThinkPads, but it's not a standard so it requires explicit driver and OS support.

OpenBSD recently added support for this as well for both of these implementations (Apple silicon and ThinkPads).

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=168436150408382&w=2

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=168458409622780&w=2

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=168521616605492&w=2

I know certain Android/Samsung phones support this as well, not sure about iOS/macOS.

I would dispute this claim, e.g. Apple settles iPhone slowdown case for $500m[1], just the first link I found looking for "planned obsolescence apple" on DuckDuckGo. This is not exclusive to their iPhones as one can find with a quick search.

[1][https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51706635]

- OpenGL is a much easier target to support, in terms of having a functional desktop. Remember, hardware-accelerated apps have been runnable on Asahi for months now, while Vulkan support is still a while away. - Most of the work being done is common to OpenGL and Vulkan, so it's not exactly a ton of wasted effort.

You are describing how most OSS software has been developed. I don't see how this is any different than early linux when no hardware manufacturers had any interest in supporting it.

A lot of the work that the asahi team is doing is just fixing Arm issues in the linux kernel (and sadly user space). That work will benefit everyone using Arm systems, not just folks running asahi on Apple hardware.

Its good for there to be more hardware architecture competition! I'm glad I can run my server workloads on the Arm servers in AWS that are 20% cheaper than the equivalent x86 machines. I'm glad that I can run the software I like (linux) on legitimately nice hardware (m2 air). You can make different decisions on what architectures are best suited for your needs, but the competition in the market improves the options and prices for everyone.

I've been using Asahi since the fall of 2022. When I first started using it a lot of software was broken because of bugs in that software that had never been exposed before (specifically around page sizes larger than 4k). All of that software has now been fixed. Support for linux/arm will only continue to improve as more people use it.

But they should have made it an option (it is one now on these devices) instead, they might have even come out good from it (as an android manufacturer wouldn’t even care about such an old device at the time).

They are very much still doing that

-- a happy ThinkPad Debian user

Why reply that criticism of Apple must be purely an emotional one? Kind of diminishes your argument here.

Immediate search result for repairable phones:

https://www.androidcentral.com/best-sustainable-repairable-p...

https://shop.fairphone.com/en/buy-fairphone-4

Here's a laptop that you can upgrade:

https://frame.work/

Lifetime for Apple isn't as long as you make it out to be when batteries need replaced and software support for hardware ends:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/macos-sonoma-drops-s...

"Also, what you heard about locked down components resulted in better security, a much lower risk of theft, and a much more clean second-hand market (where you won’t be sold a phone with a cheap chinese shittier screen for example)."

Apple could just release stuff that didn't break so easily too so no need to risk changing out a screen if it ain't broke. There are plenty of ways to increase security of the device without making it less consumer friendly.

Additionally since the context here is whether Apple has been hacker friendly or not, why shouldn't you be allowed to upgrade and change the hardware of YOUR device? As in, you want to put in more storage or change the screen to one that's better in some manner (maybe it's just cost) then you ought to be able to.

That is it should be the device owners choice whether or not to replace their screen with one from Apple or a cheaper one.

Put a piece of paper over one of the batteries middle contacts. That will make the firmware think the battery is overheating. It will then refuse to charge, but will still happily discharge.

You can do that to keep your battery at 80% while still on AC power. Handy if you operate from AC power 99% of the time, yet don't want your battery to die from being stored at 100% charge and hot for many years.

The battery life is the best of any laptop I have ever used by far.

And the performance for number crunching is as high as any x86 machine I had previously and per watt it blows everything out of the water. And it is dead silent while doing so, whereas every x86 'work' powered laptop I ever used would wind up sounding like a jet engine with my workloads.

So for someone who runs linux.. if they want to run it on hardware that is this nice (to me at least)... this is it. This is worth it. It's worth developing for.

Also, Apple is going to stick with the M-series SOC's for a long time now that they have switched. And they tend to keep hardware interfaces for a long time too. So the development of Asahi now will bear fruit for... at least the next decade I'd say.

I still use OSX for daily activities, but the kernel Asahi is developing may be my plan to stretch this 2021 M1 MBP 14 out hopefully to the year 2030, as MacOS moves on. My 2013 intel i7 Macbook Pro made it to 2021... 8 years of daily use and world travel. I was beyond the moon with that product performance and I'm expecting similar from these new macbooks based on my current 1.5 years of use.

Does this mean Apple gave them prerelease hardware early? Might apple start helping these guys more - like for example donating a 5 person dev team for a few months maybe?

Please consider donating if you have the means. https://asahilinux.org/support/

> It's the other way around. It has been usable as a daily driver for ages.

Honest questions since I haven't been paying attention to Asahi for some time now:

- Does hardware accelerated video decoding work? Including in Firefox?

- Does sleep work properly or do I get significant battery drain after leaving it sleeping during the night time? Also, does it wake up from sleep reliably? Like if you open/close the lid 100 times in a row would it crash?

- How is wifi? Does it work as fast and reliably on Linux as the Intel cards? Supports latest WiFi standard and 6ghz?

This would be my most basic questions to buy MacBook as a daily-driver Linux laptop.

Send me the link, that sounds amazing.

System76? Star Labs? Purism? HP Dev One?

It’s great. The battery life is great, it’s quite fast with a lot of cores, when I need to do my genetics runs (plugged in). Build quality isn’t bad, plus affordable and lots of ports. After my initial transition away, not missing my 2015 Mac book pro.

Linux is the way to go. I don’t blame people with apple hardware for wanting it. I just don’t feel the x86 side is as bad as the everyone makes it out to be. We’ve come along way since my first Linux laptop and it’s not so great battery life.

Also, every device needs battery replacements, like this is just the physics/chemistry of batteries and it has an absolutely doable price for any apple device.

What breaks easily on an iphone? They are quite sturdy phones with metal casing. They wouldn’t get sold after 5-7 years of active use if they weren’t sturdy. And glass will still be breaking when it meets with big enough force - I again don’t see your point.

> re hacker friendliness

The RAM has different architecture on the M series, so it can’t be replaced even theoretically. Also, every moving part is one more point of potential breaking, plus it takes up space. This is not a rasppi, different design goals/constraints.

You can put in a worse screen but one will be able to see that in the settings so they can’t be scammed.

If your requirements are "must run an Apple designed ARM processor", then yes, your choices are pretty limited.

>Apple’s first iPhones ran on Samsung SoCs, and even as Apple famously announced that they were switching to their own designs, the underlying reality is that there was a slower transition away from Samsung over multiple chip generations. “Apple Silicon” chips, like any other SoC, contain IP cores licensed from many other companies; for example, the USB controller in the M1 is by Synopsys, and the same exact hardware is also in chips by Rockchip, TI, and NXP. Even as Apple switched their manufacturing from Samsung to TSMC, some Samsung-isms stayed in their chips… and the UART design remains to this day.

https://asahilinux.org/2021/03/progress-report-january-febru...

Also, which are the virtuous hardware companies and what's stopping them from making compelling products? And since I'm already a Mac user, I've already supported this evil company, so what does it matter if I change out the operating system?

> I don't see how this is any different than early linux when no hardware manufacturers had any interest in supporting it.

A "pure gold hammer" is a terrible idea and would also be terribly expensive. But asking for a "comparably spec'd" hammer presumes the absurd premise that the material of the hammer must be kept consistent regardless of its intended use just for the purpose of being comparable.

To preface, I totally understand the value proposition of Apple devices for some use cases, but it is important to recognize that they are aiming for certain workloads.

As examples:

I have one friend that runs virtualization workloads that require a lot of memory, a lot of storage, a lot of cores, but they don't really care about memory bandwidth, "having a display", or even the noise of the device. An older server with 192G of RAM, 24 cores and >8TB of storage can easily be had and upgraded within $1k, whereas a "comparable" Mac Pro costs upwards of $10k! (Of course nobody would use a Mac Pro for this workload, so the comparison is moot)

I also have friends that are digital artists. They care about having a high brightness and color accuracy display but otherwise don't do anything that taxes the computer. They also appreciate having high quality speakers and long battery life. Some of them run M1 Macbook Airs at the lowest 8G memory configuration for ~$800 (discounted new from other retailers) + a digitizer for ~$100, while the closest comparable non-Apple laptops are all premium devices upwards of $1.5k and even then they are still worse in the battery department!

As for myself, I do light dev work, virtualization, gaming, but also travel a lot and present at conferences. I use a GPD Win Max 2 for a little over $1k (early Indiegogo pricing). The closest Apple offering would be a 14" MBP, and configured as needed (32GB/2T) would be about $3800 and still be short a 4G modem and a couple of extra devices like a digitizer, game controller, and dongle for USB-A. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Can't win 'em all.

This was added to iPhones in 2019.

> If your iPhone stops charging at 80%, it's most likely due to a feature Apple introduced in iOS 13 called Optimized Battery Charging. It aims to prevent over-stressing the battery and hence extend the battery life of your iPhone by limiting the charge to 80%.

Your iPhone learns your usage patterns and delays 100% charging until moments before you wake up in the morning.

https://www.makeuseof.com/why-your-iphone-stops-charging-at-...

Sounds like the original install and then for firmware updates? I’d like to keep telemetry to a minimum and not use macos if possible.

The machine was quite a bit slower than an M1 Air, would have loud fans during video meetings, and on Linux the battery would typically last 3 hours (6-7 on Windows, yes I did all the usual power optimizations). In S3 sleep it would discharge overnight and the next day it would refuse to charge with Lenovo’s included USB-C adapter. When waking up the machine from sleep the track point or trackpad wouldn’t come up 1/3rd of the time on Linux.

I used the laptop for work and the question ‘does the laptop work’ when having a meeting or having to teach became so stressful, that one day after another Linux hardware episode I immediately went to a store after work and picked up an M1 Air and never looked back (well, got an M1 Max after that).

There is no way I am going to touch Linux on laptops within 5 years.

(I use a headless Linux GPU machine daily, first used Linux in 1994, and was paid to work on a Linux distribution in the past.)

Nothing wrong with being a late adopter. Nothing wrong with being an early adopter either.

There do not exist "equivalent"s to any Apple devices (I don't see them licensing the M1/2 chips to anyone else anytime soon). But depending on what you care about, a "comparable" Apple device could be 10x more expensive. Of course, for other tasks a "comparable" Apple device can also be _cheaper_ than any non-Apple device available!

Only looking at aiming for similar "longevity" (since the parent is using that as a benchmark), there are plenty of devices that have a useful life comparable to Apple devices at 1/4 - 1/10 the price.

Are you referring to a used server, or just buying a minimally-equipped new server and upgrading it with aftermarket RAM and (low-quality) SSDs?

This is a pretty common practice for homelab enthusiasts, or so I hear.

I'm assuming you're using Asahi Linux on your Macs (though you said you wouldn't touch it..). The lack of hardware diversity should make comparability easier, even if everything need to be reversed engineered.

I get 6 hours or so on my machine. Its pretty much silent, unless I push it. Its a Ryzen 7 5700u. We do a lot of parallel compute and genetics code tends massively parallel and x86 optimized. Mostly run on cluster though. I haven't done any maintenance and have had not hardware issues.

I don't link I could ever go back to macos, or windows.

There are good laptops out there other than Macs... Lenovo, HP, Dell, etc all have offerings which are supported out of the box by Linux because they aren't using their own hardware or do contribute the necessary code to run FOSS OSs.

I'm not asking you to now dump your Mac. That'd be silly. Continue to use your Mac with Asahi, just don't complain if Apple decides to break anything at any time, and expect it. Know that what you type on now is already planned for obsolescence and most likely has intentional design flaws as shown again and again by people like Louis Rossmann.

When your Mac dies, I am asking you to not buy Apple for your next laptop. That's all that can be reasonably asked.

As for longevity, if you consider software support ending as EoL, software/OS support for a huge swath of Intel iMacs (especially those with DGPUs) was dropped by Apple quite a few OS releases ago and you have to run community patches to keep them working. Whereas similar decade old hardware still run Win 10 and Linux out of the box.

*: Don't get me wrong though, the markups are for good reason. x86 platforms don't offer anything close to Apple's ARM chip memory bandwidth (which are closer to DGPU levels). Similarly, for flash/SSDs.

1199 EUR is not insanely expensive, specially considering that I can put up-to 64GB of RAM in a Framework laptop with a reasonable amount of money, while I would need to pay almost the price of a full Framework laptop to do the same in a Macbook Pro [1]. This is IMO, insanely expensive.

And yes, I can definitely use those amount of memory during mass rebuilds that I sometime like to do in NixOS. I don't even try to do those same workloads in my macOS because they start to become hugely slow once you hit the swap.

[1]: by the way, this get even worse considering that I also need to upgrade from an M2 Pro to M2 Max to have the option to do so. I just did a quote for the cheapest Macbook Pro with 64GB of RAM, and I got a 4000EUR quote for 512GB of storage that is laughable low for something that expensive. At that price, I can get 2 of the most expensive Framework AMD and I would still have sufficient money to get another one of the older Intel ones as a spare.

The negative experiences with the thinkpad are typical of all the intel laptops I have recently used, preloaded OS (including Windows, and to a lesser extent, Linux and MacOS), or not.

Whenever I look for an AMD laptop, it has a low resolution (1080p) display, and/or an off-center keyboard/trackpad (or has some other obvious fatal flaw).

I'm typing this on an M2 macbook. I do 100% of my work in an "8 core" arm Linux VM that can only use one core for userspace stuff (according to top), but that still kicks the pants off my previous laptop.

I'm strongly considering dual booting into asahi.

>Whenever I look for an AMD laptop, it has a low resolution (1080p) display, and/or an off-center keyboard/trackpad (or has some other obvious fatal flaw).

yup it has both of those. But the screen is only15", and I'm old so it doesn't matter. It not glossy which I really like though.

If you love the mac hardware, give Asahi a try. My understanding its the best linux for the M-series macbooks. Linux is great for developing on and they seem to be making great progress.

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/rafael/linux...

For the love of all that is holy, name one model that has the following properties:

- 6 hours real life battery doing C++ development work.

- 7+ days suspend battery life

- 99.99% success rate resuming from suspend under linux (~ 1 kernel panic per year is OK)

- Centered keyboard and trackpad

- >> 1080p screen

- bluetooth, wifi, webcam, etc, etc, all work reliably (~ 1 device "need to reboot" failure across all categories, per year)

- un-noticable fan

- less than 10% permanent hardware failure rate per year

None of the last ~ $10K worth of intel machines I've used (including high end macs, linux and windows machines) met the above criteria.

My M2 macbook actually ticks all the boxes.

However, I really, really, dislike MacOS.

Where did I make that claim in this thread?

The way it's implemented on my mom's android, it always shows 80 or 85% (can't recall which one it is), even if she leaves it plugged in for the whole weekend.

On my HP laptop, if I activate the "battery saver mode" (as opposed to "AI"), it reports the maximum capacity as somewhere around 80% of the design capacity. I don't know whether Linux cooperates with this, but probably not. HP only talks about OS compatibility for the "AI" mode, which not only requires Windows but a specific HP app.

Apple officially supported running Windows on Macs for many years.

Yes.

It learns your normal waking time (if you have one) and gives you a full charge before you wake up.

Which is what I want. A full charge for the working day, without needlessly shortening the batteries functional lifetime.

It's very different. Hardware manufacturers in the 90s were incentivized to support Linux to expand their customer base. A trillion-dollar corporation has no incentive to sell their hardware to a niche of a niche of technical users who are not part of their software ecosystem.

Another major difference is that Asahi is a small team of dedicated volunteers who want to run Linux on their Macs. They're a niche intersection of Linux hackers and Apple fans. Unsupported hardware in the 90s typically had a much larger customer base and group of hackers willing to spend time adding supporting for it.

Even worse: Apple can decide at any point to make their hardware much more difficult to support. Newer models or firmware updates might break things. Being at the whims of a corporation that is the antithesis of F/LOSS to run Linux on their hardware doesn't inspire confidence.

> Its good for there to be more hardware architecture competition!

> Support for linux/arm will only continue to improve as more people use it.

Agreed. I'm glad that Asahi exists. But we've had ARM Linux distros for decades now. What Asahi is doing is specifically to support Apple hardware. Some improvements will trickle out to improve general ARM support, but this points out the gargantuan task they're actually up against. Not only do they need to reverse engineer the hardware, they have to resolve all software issues with Linux and ARM. My hat's off to them. The willpower, patience and skills required to wade through the absolute mountain of issues must be astronomical. Yet this is also part of my concern; how long can a developer keep the motivation and sanity to swim against the current?

It's great that Asahi works for you and everyone else. I'm just pointing out why it will likely never be my choice for any serious work.

This also seems to work only if you've drained the battery below 80%. If it says 90% and I plug it in? It'll charge it fully right away.

I typically work on my work issued linux workstation (pretty old now and less powerful than my Macbook Pro), but often need to do development from my laptop too. I run a Fedora arm VM in UTM full screen. It generally works well, although I'd much prefer to have native linux on my laptop. It would be nice of mac os didn't interrupt full screen mode randomly and allowed UTM to capture all keys and touchpad gestures.

I personally am incredibly unproductive on a mac, and have no idea how anyone does anything with how terrible the window management and virtual desktops are. Plus, I find all my linux based tools that I am accustomed to just work so much better under linux. So for me, even a VM is still a huge leap in productivity.

Also, say you have one of these phones, and are in a major city, then break it. How will you get the parts you need to repair it? How many hours will you be without a phone?

With Apple phones, it's typically same day service to get it repaired. Worst case, you can get a new phone with your data mostly transferred, again, same day.

The Ars article you link is pointing out that Apple is dropping software support for laptops that are 6 years old. That's better than pretty much any other vendor.

As far as laptop repairs go, frame.work is probably the best non-apple option, but they don't have a fixed policy for how long replacement parts will be available. The story is similar for Apple:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624

says they provide parts for up to 7 years, and battery swaps for up to 10 (subject to part availability). I hope frame.work will be able to do better, but I challenge you to find any laptop company significantly better than this.

(Other than soldered ram and disk, I honestly don't care about third party parts. It's not like Apple replacement part markups are insane or there are significantly better parts available. I've definitely never used third party parts for other brands of laptops, even when they were available. However, I've been repeatedly screwed over getting other brands of laptops repaired, especially under warranty.)

Anyway, I get why Apple has a bad reputation for support and repairability. There objectively bad. However, that doesn't mean they're not simultaneously also the best option (or close to being the best).

I do not follow Apple's release notes so I cannot compare.

"This is not a rasppi, different design goals/constraints."

That we can agree on.

Apple is a business with specific goals and so far as a business in terms of profits they have been successful.

All I wanted to point out was that Apple is not hacker friendly in my opinion, and I have listed good reasons that you don't want to accept. There's no amount of going in circles here that will change either point of view I fear.

Have a blessed day!

If I could, I'd configure grub or whatever to serial-lock my Linux install to my desktop hardware (and keep a recovery key that would unlock it at another location).

I'm not arguing over better hardware (performance) or price. I am arguing over hack-ability; that's it. I hope you can understand that.

Thinking about taking the dive...

(Also, the last time I looked, TPM keys could be grabbed with ~ $100 of hardware, but I think that's fixed by some newer standard.)

But, yeah, it's not a big tradeoff in practice. I think their point was that Apple had to expend effort to enable the use case, which isn't "hostile" toward the use case.

Bad, very bad idea if you don't know what you are doing - depending on where the "smarts" in the BMS are, you may damage your battery or make your BMS think the pack is broken or prevent your BMS from recognizing a charge state mismatch (and in the worst case, a cell going undervoltage or reverse polarity) as you have a good chance that you cut off one of the cell balancer contacts. This trick only works with removable phone batteries.

Things have changed a bit since then[1]. The new Phoenix chips are quite competitive with the M2 as far as performance and TDP goes. Your other complaints are with Lenovo, not AMD.

I doubt anyone will argue that Apple laptops don't have the best build quality. Apple has the advantage of full vertical integration, so it's very difficult for any other manufacturer to compete on things like battery life and power efficiency.

The Linux glitches you describe is the usual Linux jank. I don't disagree that even the most well-supported Linux laptop will have these. As a Linux user, you choose to deal with these issues because the alternative of relying on a corporation to decide how you're going to use your computer is not an option. I've also heard and experienced my share of issues with macOS and Windows. In the eternal words of a modern philosopher: every OS sucks[2].

[1]: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m2-max-vs-amd-ry...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPRvc2UMeMI

It doesn't charge the battery over 80% at all, unless it detects that you have a normal waking time, in which case it charges fully right before you normally wake up.

Unfortunately, other companies copied the 80% charge bit without copying the part about figuring out if you have a normal waking time and giving you a full charge right before that.

For instance, Samsung's S23:

>Once you turn off the battery protection function, you'll be able to charge your battery up to 100%

https://www.samsung.com/ae/support/mobile-devices/battery-pr...

> You are describing how most OSS software has been developed.

Nope. Disagree here

Some of this stuff is handled by binary blobs that get installed/upgraded by MacOS, and are running by the time Linux boots.

With the previous release, power per watt and absolute performance were already better than high-end x86 laptops, so if your question is "is this faster and more power efficient than my other Linux laptop?", the answer is probably yes.

If you're asking if it will beat MacOS's perf/watt in all scenarios, the answer will be no for a long time. However, it is probably already beating MacOS in many practical scenarios.

I know rosetta doesn't exist under Linux, but I don't see any options to run steam / proton under rosetta either.

That is not an accurate description of linux support by hardware manufactures from that time period.

> Unsupported hardware in the 90s typically had a much larger customer base and group of hackers willing to spend time adding supporting for it.

I also don't think this is generally correct. Have you looked at all the random drivers in the linux kernel for niche hardware. A ton of that is from one or two hobbyists taking the time to add support.

> Apple can decide at any point to make their hardware much more difficult to support. Newer models or firmware updates might break things. Being at the whims of a corporation that is the antithesis of F/LOSS to run Linux on their hardware doesn't inspire confidence.

I guess, but so what? Apple can't break the hardware they are already shipping if you are just running linux on it. Its true, I might not buy a theoretical future laptop from Apple if I can't run linux on it, but I don't see how that would affect my purchasing decision for hardware that is currently available.

> The willpower, patience and skills required to wade through the absolute mountain of issues must be astronomical. Yet this is also part of my concern; how long can a developer keep the motivation and sanity to swim against the current?

Hmm, maybe you've not worked on projects like this, or are motivated by different things. To me, reverse engineering a thing to figure out how it works and then writing software to get it to do things the original designers hadn't planned for is one of the more satisfying and fun activities of being a software engineer. I suspect the asahi team is having fun doing a lot of this work. (That's not to say its all fun. It sounds like getting things upstreamed has been trying. I also think having to read giant comment threads where people are needlessly negative about their work might be a bit demoralizing.)

> It's great that Asahi works for you and everyone else. I'm just pointing out why it will likely never be my choice for any serious work.

You should obviously run whatever works for you.

That came partially out of the desire to reduce the lure for thieves and robbers. It was really bad during the first generations that regularly had jailbreaks and ways to bypass "Find My..." or whatever, then the first tightening reduced resale values of stolen iPhones by a good amount (as they were only good enough to slaughter for parts once reported stolen), and the latest round made it even worse for criminals.

Personally though, I'd preferred they simply provided "unlock codes" with a phone that could be used to remove the association between a part's SN and the IMEI/SN of the phone. That way, buyers of iPhone have something similar to a certificate of authenticity.

Because these things are rare as gold in the first place as being Linux ready isn't a focus for most OEMs, sometimes severely lag behind the competition in feature support (e.g. limited to UVC webcams with crap quality), have serious availability issues (Framework), you have a tough time getting service or spare parts, or barely any resale value, or limited choices in screens (which is the one and only thing keeping me from a Framework - who the fuck wants a 3:2 screen?). Also, tough luck getting firmware updates for embedded components.

Apple devices, spare parts and repair centers, in contrast, are widely available across the world (okay, maybe not in places sanctioned by the US), firmware updates come around when needed and hold their resale value for years.

And playing devil's advocate, Apple has open sourced their macOS and iOS kernels, and has some open source presence[1]. None of their contributions are crucial parts of their business, of course.

[1]: https://opensource.apple.com/

https://system76.com/laptops-ultraportables https://system76.com/laptops-powerful

The only exception is the Bonobo, but it comes with a discrete GPU, so its battery life + weight are going to suck. Also, its keyboard is off center.

Most of the star labs machines have low resolution displays, but I can find nothing wrong with this one. If you choose AMD, a reasonable config is $2600, which is comparable to Apple. However, they are only building 10,000 units, and taking preorders, so it might be unobtainable:

https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starfighter

The purism offering seems OK except that it is a 10th generation intel, and those were extremely bad, even by recent intel standards. Maybe they'll get an AMD refresh out the door with the same ergonomics.

The HP has an off-centered keyboard and trackpad and a 1080p display.

So, of those four vendors, there's one model that's vaguely competitive, but it's a limited production run pre-order.

From last December:

> "This release features work-in-progress OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support for all current Apple M-series systems. That’s enough for hardware acceleration with desktop environments, like GNOME and KDE."

https://asahilinux.org/2022/12/gpu-drivers-now-in-asahi-linu...

There are other issues as well.

For instance, on a PC the security settings are applied per machine and not per partition, so you can't mix an unsigned OS on one partition with full security on another partition.

Also:

> On Wednesday, researchers at security firm ESET presented a deep-dive analysis of the world’s first in-the-wild UEFI bootkit that bypasses Secure Boot on fully updated UEFI systems running fully updated versions of Windows 10 and 11.

Despite Microsoft releasing new patched software, the vulnerable signed binaries have yet to be added to the UEFI revocation list that flags boot files that should no longer be trusted.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/unkil...

What has changed that prevents Apple from officially endorsing another OS nowadays when it clearly was able to do so in the past?

Sure, for _niche_ hardware. When was the last time a GPU driver was added by reverse engineering it? The single Nouveau maintainer was burnt out, last I heard, and the project was never a serious alternative to NVIDIA's closed driver. Kudos to whoever found the energy to contribute to it, but these projects usually don't have a bright future.

Now expand that to include maintaining all Apple devices, and it's an insane amount of effort realistically unsustainable for any group of volunteers. But good luck to the Asahi team.

Also, the bind mount of the external MacOS directory is extremely slow. I do out of tree builds so that the builds land in ext4.

I haven't gone the next logical step because (1) it is plenty fast for rust development, and battery life is fine, and (2) I'd like webcam and speaker support.

Also, I just checked, and I have a 2023 model, and the installer status is "WIP", so I guess I'll be waiting a bit longer.

I've run linux on many Dell and Lenovo systems over the last 25 years. Most of those systems were fully unsupported by the manufactures for anything but windows. And yet, random people on the internet contributed to make that hardware (mostly) work. I've not seen any particular improvement in the driver situation since Dell started selling linux certified systems.

Its not really surprising though, Dell is just an integrator. All they do for their systems with linux pre-installed is to pick hardware that already has drivers. They took a little bit of work out of needing to research if a given configuration is likely to work or not with linux (which is good). They don't really deserve much credit beyond that.

Its also a little funny because most drivers from hardware manufacturers suck. I don't know why, but most hardware companies are terrible at writing software. Its easy to list off hardware companies that have a long history of shipping mediocre, buggy linux drivers: nvidia, amd, broadcom, realtek, (maybe i should just list every nic and wireless chipset manufacturer). Some of these companies have gotten better and have learned how to be good kernel contributors, but they were mostly bad for years and years. Thankfully in some of those cases random people on the internet reverse engineered the hardware and contributed from scratch drivers to the kernel. Most of the time I've been happier with the experience of running those from scratch drivers than what hardware manufactures ship.

The installation experience is very smooth, so it's very easy to try it out. You can nuke it afterwards if it doesn't work for you.

Nvidia now only sort of cares about linux because of gpgpu applications. They still clearly don't care about gaming on linux; or desktop stability.

Yes, I will take Nouveau over the official drivers whenever I can.

A valid complaint from me is linux based container resource utilization. The only really good fix for that IMO is if apple did something like WSL2 or FreeBSD's linux ABI and had an efficient compatibility layer. For now I just run dev containers on my (linux) desktop.

Nouveau has never been more stable, or nearly as performant as official NVIDIA drivers. I've had the exact opposite experience from you on every laptop I've had since Nouveau was released, so we must live in different universes.

> Linux clearly was a second class citizen for nvidia

And Linux is not even on the radar for Apple. :)

Anyway, I think we've exhausted our arguments here, and are just talking past each other now. Have a good day.

It does, but in a weird way. You can turn on "adaptive charging" and it will randomly decide to charge to 80%.

If you want to properly control it, just install the wonderful AlDente utility ( https://apphousekitchen.com/ ). Then you can manually control the max charge percentage. Mine is permanently set to 80% because I never really use even 40% of the battery on my M2-based laptop.

s/jacking/cracking

That’s the only thing I’m really missing currently.

While I don't have Apple hardware so haven't been closely following Asahi I dont't think that is true. Linux has supported Arm for years (more like decades) now. They've been doing excellent work on support for Apple specific hardware sure, generic Arm not so much since it was mostly done.

Very few match on all aspects. I'd tried a few and always had one terrible issue. Terrible battery life, lousy screen, and/or terrible touchpad. Apple does seem willing to make improvements without as much worry about backward compatibility. There are a few that match on everything I care about, but often cost more than the Apple.

People like to complain and mention byzantine purchase methods. Wait for a lenovo sale, buy the bare bones model, apply the discount code, then buy dimms and SSDs from random bargain basement sellers. Oh and buy the linux compatible wifi card and do surgery on your laptop to get wifi working after suspend.

MBA is pretty compelling mix of performance, size, cost, and battery life. Unlike any x86-64 laptop, you can pay $500 more or so and get double the memory bandwidth. Or another $500+ and double it again. Definitely makes the macs better any PC at some workloads. Sure some x86-64 with a nice discrete GPU is way faster ... when plugged in to wall power.

Freedreno (for the Adreno family) Etnaviv (for the Vivante family) Panfrost / Bifrost (for Mali)

All these RE efforts built on each other, although the GPUs are different the tools built to do the RE were shared (and I think ashai is benefiting too).

AFAIK Google has now hired Rob Clark the Freedreno maintainer who started all this to work on Freedreno for Android / ChromeOS

Upstream Linux now has pretty good GPU support for all the major mobile GPUs these days. The hold out has been PowerVR but they are now working on an official (not reverse engineered) driver.

For example for GPU drivers Mesa has tons of common code (NIR, GLSL parser etc) that is shared by all drivers with just the hardware specific parts being per driver whereas closed source vendor drivers reinvent the wheel each time.

Similarly for kernel wifi drivers there is a single MAC802.11 stack shared by all drivers.

Vendor drivers have an initial head start since those writing them have access to internal documents describing the hardware interface and don't have to do reverse engineering. But, over time, OSS drivers can be better as improvements to common code help all drivers.

In fact I think the best way hardware vendors could help OSS is not to provide drivers but documentation.

It has the worst LCD panel I've seen in many years. It's not the resolution just poor contrast and poor color accuracy. It pains me to see it.

They went on sale recently, I bought one, and shortly afterwards (a few months ago) they stopped selling them.

Maintainers of other non-x86 architecture have said that this is improving things for them[1].

[0]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Broken-Software [1]: https://www.talospace.com/2022/03/asahi-linux-gives-hope-for...

I don't think it helps at all with running x86-64 code on arm.

Simply not true. I recall in the mid '10s using it because the proprietary driver was crashy garbage. No, I didn't get the same performance possible with the proprietary driver, and I didn't have a bleeding-edge video card, but it was more than usable as a daily driver.

Also found this:

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/311947/how-to-upda...

Still I'd rather have no MacOS.

On the other hand a cheap M1 Mac Mini would make a great machine to try it out. The M1 Mac Mini is the best supported machine currently.

[1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support#m2-d...

It seems they didn't make any massive changes and instead just put switches on the existing PCI-E Lanes. That probably doesn't bode well for full GPU support :(

And yes, that sucks. We should have first-class support. It's no wonder macOS gained popularity among developers. But I've been running Linux on laptops for 15+ years now (even on Macs), and I've seen how it's changed from barely-working and having to futz with things at every kernel upgrade, to pretty much seamless (and these days I really have little patience for futzing around with things; I want something that works so I can do useful things on it). But, again: you need to choose your hardware carefully.

For reference, I had a 2016-model Razer Blade Stealth, which had no issues with Linux. Then in early 2019 I bought a 2018-model Dell XPS 13 that worked flawlessly (except for the fingerprint reader, which I knew ahead of time and accepted as ok). For the past yearish I've been using a Framework Laptop, which has had some problems (unrelated to Linux; Windows users have the same problems), but the hardware support on Linux has been solid.

Meanwhile, I'd constantly hear problems from my friends with Macs about how it could never stay connected to a wireless network after a couple hours (requiring a reboot to fix), or would frequently "beachball" under not that much load, or how the yearly major OS update would usually break their development setup. I used macOS on and off between 2005 and 2017 or so, and ran into plenty of issues as well.

While I certainly agree there's some laptop hardware that you just shouldn't run Linux on, the still-kicking Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field somehow causes people to ignore or explain away all the issues macOS has.

Through FEX, yes https://vt.social/@lina/110068264684987710

> I know rosetta doesn't exist under Linux

It does these days! https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

Nouveau is an awesome project, but for later cards it's basically a dead project. You can get some features to work, but without proper power management there's no justifiable reason to daily-drive it. The proprietary driver is by no means perfect (particularly for Wayland) but it's the only real option if you own a modern card.

> And Linux is not even on the radar for Apple. :)

They must be awfully curious about why Xserve failed, then.

Take up playing a resource intensive game like Genshin Impact and you can very easily drain the battery in a day.

> 60fps highest settings 100% brightness Low sound Home WiFi 3:20 total

https://www.reddit.com/r/SonyXperia/comments/onb3dw/genshin_...

Knowing that at least some x86-64 steam games could work is promising, thanks.

For me it all comes down to the extra memory bandwidth.

A recent metal port of llama is pretty tempting and being able to run GPU accelerated LLMs with greater than 16GB (mid range GPUs) or 24GB (highend/RTX 4090) on the mac studio is interesting. $3,600 (for 96GB ram) interesting, not so sure.

https://www.macworld.com/article/235001/macos-big-surs-batte...

I had completely forgotten how it is to own a phone that doesn't need to charge everyday...

Namely?

Laptop displays are also a common frustration, though this has been improving lately. Still too many models stuck on 16:9 aspect ratio though, which is suboptimal for anything but watching movies due to lack of vertical real estate. By the time you've factored in all the taskbars, titlebars, toolbars, menubars, tab bars, and status bars you've got a keyhole left to peer through. This is less of a problem for those using something like i3 or Sway where half of those bars are hidden but tiling WMs just aren't my thing.

Where many steam games where tried live and debugged to run FEX + wine + Asahi GPU driver through its paces. Highlights include Portal working, Fallout NV working. Crysis running with graphical artifacts and lots of other games. The main limitation currently is simply GPU driver feature support. To run modern D3D12 games you basically need Vulkan which Asahi GPU driver doesn't support yet.

It's really nice being able to four-finger swipe between Macos and Linux full-screen desktops when I want that.

But usually I SSH into the Linux VM so that I can use iTerm2 as my terminal, and use Mac native GUI Emacs (railwaycat & Mitsuharu Yamamoto's version) to have its graphical features working alongside my iTerm2 and Firefox.

Linux in a VM runs some things much faster than the host MacOS on the same laptop! In particular filesystem intensive builds. I found some Docker-based test system I had to use for work ran an order of magniitude faster in the Linux VM than with Docker on the Mac host.

I did test running Linux natively on this MBP (no MacOS host) but found to my surprise the battery drained faster than using it in a VM, and the VM is almost as fast. So I stick with the VM and I get to use both OSes side by side.

I don't use the VMware file sharing as it is extremely buggy and regularly corrupts files when operating on them with Git or some other activities due to buggy cache settings which cannot be set to non-buggy values.

Instead I use some crazy combination of Samba and NFS which works reasonably to get the right permissions and ownership as seen by each side of the other's files. The upshot is two-way file sharing works, but this was actually difficult to make reliable.

(I found the Mac SMB2 client is prone to occasionally deleting files that aren't even being accessed by it at all, but are in a directory where other files are being updated. A shocking bad SMB2 protocol bug in the Mac client where it sends the wrong filename for renames occasionally, using a name from a recent directory listing. It took me a year to diagnose that and I thought it must be a bug in my code in a critical Linux database application I was writing, which I didn't dare deploy upstream for all that time, because important random files like invoices and data files would occasionally disappear and be noticed days later causing me to doubt myself. That is until I did a very deep dive with every debugging tool you can imagine, to find the true cause was MacOS when I edited unrelated files, and my application had been fine all that time to deploy to prod. Solution was force MacOS to use CIFS instead of SMB2.)

I hope to replicate something like that when I get an ARM Mac at some point, though I hope the MacOS SMB bugs are fixed. Currently holding out for an M3.

Sounds like the OpenGL work can mostly be reused for improving the Vulkan driver and sounds quite promising.

Every month that passes, with similar HN comments insisting it's a bad time... I wonder: "am I 'special' or just spoiled by nix(os/pks)". Or maybe, just maybe, people's expectations of their distros are shockingly low. And maybe rightly so at times.

Non-sbc aarch64 devices with good upstream support are damn near non-existent. I understand the Linux user market is small, but it's baffling to me that companies can't invest a small amount in having coordinated upstreaming efforts.

That said, I'm so delighted with my G14 2022 experience that I might just buy the 2024 version of it's all AMD again. I have better hardware control in Linux than Windows, I can play Halo Infinite in Linux (praise be Proton) and Windows. But... I suspect I'm going to be able to do the same thing on a likely more-battery efficient and nicer hardware M2 MBA by the end of the year. Nice to have options.

Edit: it's really soulcrushing to think about. Sdm845 devices are insanely cheap and yet upstream support still barely limps along, mostly with volunteer/donated efforts.

Every laptop since the 90's has the balancing and protection circuitry inside the battery, not inside the laptop.

That is the case with every single PC maker who doesn't ship all their PCs with Linux.

I just don't understand why Apple has to be treated differently. They just went through a traumatic transition where they could have locked their computers very tightly, preventing you from booting anything but macOS. They did no such thing. They did the reverse. No they didn't formally support it, but they own their own OS. How could they be expected to?

If someone told me 20 years ago that I'd be using an Apple-made ARM workstation running Linux to do all of my development work today, I would have never believed them.

Seems designed more to support lots of low/medium bandwidth cards, not a few high bandwidth cards.

While I understand what you’re saying, the developers of Asahi have said before that Apple appears to be going out of their way to leave things open for them.

Apple’s boot security is enough they could easily prevent anyone from ever running a non-Apple blessed OS. But Apple made it fully supported to boot directly into a non-Apple OS as your primary OS.

They’re not helping by giving code or documentation, but they’re not putting up roadblocks. Apple seems to be happy with a stance of benevolent indifference.

It’s not official support. But a number of PC vendors don’t give official support either.

Neither was the comment you replied to.

They were arguing that Apple provides excellent hardware support (in terms of repairs and how long they take) and lifetime (in terms of how long updates are provided for the device).

Hackability is irrelevant. Apple clearly doesn’t target that market and hadn’t since the Apple II days.

Would you buy a Lamborghini and complain it makes a terrible truck?

That’s not something Apple designs their products for, and their users are either fine with that or willing to make the trade off for the other things Apple does prioritize.

Intel sells parts to other people, and those buyers expect that kind of documentation. And when it comes to GPUs they’re in 3rd place for high end GPUs and are incentivized to give people as much info as possible to optimize for their hardware.

Apple doesn’t sell their computer hardware to any other OEMs, or hsve a 3rd party making their OS, so they don’t need to produce documentation for anyone.

I agree it would be nice if it was documented. But absent a law forcing them I don’t see it happening.

Linux tends to be faster because the kernel is just far better optimized than Apple’s appears to be. Massive sums of money (and person hours) have been spent speeding up Linux networking, file systems, scheduling, etc. and it was all sent back to mainline.

Apple’s kernel team can’t possibly compete based on resources alone. They do their best but MS, Google, Amazon, Redhat, and so many others are constantly improving Linux to squeeze out every last drop of performance.

So in many ways Linux is better optimized. I remember one of the developers posting a few weeks ago about just how much faster code compilation was under Linux, because the file system layer is so much better. It was like 6x or something. Sort of an accidental ideal benchmark for stressing that.

But you won’t be disappointed.

Boot Camp was officially supported. It gave them an advantage because it helped people move over to a Mac from windows because they could still run some of their software.

If Apple was to help Asahi officially, I think they would be worried that they would be on the hook either for continuing to support it or for damage done to the hardware by other peoples changes to the code.

Basically I think it’s a combination of not wanting to spend the money and being worried about the potential downsides of doing it.

The upside, in terms of additional sales, is likely very small.

I think the main problem would be where would you get ARM drivers?

On Intel people were able to existing driver blobs. But if there are no official ARM blobs anywhere, it would be a much bigger effort.

I believe they said they will work on it but they can’t promise a support date because they don’t know how long it will take once they have the hardware. And I don’t know when they’ll get the hardware.

So basically the recommendation was “don’t buy it to run Asahi yet, you’ll probably be waiting a bit”.

The biggest problem is chicken and the egg. There is no high-end gaming hardware, there are few games, and there isn’t much demand for the kind of games Windows gets.

But without the hardware it’s not clear the games makes sense. And without the gamers it’s not clear porting makes sense. And without the hardware the gamers and the games won’t come.

Even if Apple released a 100% functional and performant Vulcan implementation tomorrow I seriously doubt it would make any real difference to the gaming market on the Mac.

I know there are faster machines, but they’re usually hotter. There are cooler machines, but they’re usually not as fast. There are cheaper machines but the screens are worse. And there are long battery life machines but they’re usually low performance Chromebooks.

I don’t know of any other machine that made the trade-offs to end up offering a similar combination. At any price.

And I said nothing about noise or thinness.

Once you’ve used one, it’s a very seductive combination of features. I don’t want to go back to “6-8 hours of battery life is enough”, or hearing fans, or using my laptop as a hand-warmer in summer. And I don’t understand how 1080p is still so common.

Naïve me doesn't understand why it can't be done from userspace, but I'm sure there is a good reason...

For most a console make more sense and if someone wants gaming a gaming PC/Laptop usually a better deal.

As far as I know MoltenVK (Vulkan on top of Metal) is available as part of the Vulkan SDK.

DX12 on MacOS was announced a while ago https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/cjsilver/2021/12/22/were-ge... and started to run recently https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/mjohnson/2023/6/1/unleashin...

On some of the older devices, nouveau actually works very well right now. On these devices the open driver is as stable and performant as the closed driver and has all of the same features with the exception being GPU compute stuff.

I think mostly people misunderstand the limitations of the nouveau drivers and just assume they are bad in general, but it's very much dependent on the device.

One of the big issues right now is that nouveau can't bring the newer GPUs out of "idle mode". Nvidia has explicitly restricted this feature and the chances of the issue being resolved without cooperation from Nvidia is very low. I think a lot of people try nouveau on the effected GPUs and have horrible performance and then assume it's because nouveau is bad.

I have had an interesting experience with nouveau on the GT 710. For a little while there was a bug that would cause sway to crash back to tty, at first it would happen maybe once a day, then it became so bad that it would crash as soon as sway was launched. Now in kernel 6.3.3 it seems to be working flawlessly, which is how it was at some point in the past too.

Right now nouveau is working great for me though, so it is possible for nouveau to compete with the closed drivers in specific cases, but in general, for more modern GPUs it will have very low performance due to the reclocking thing.

Everyone who is interested in games (like me) gave up on gaming on the Mac a long time ago because of the other issues.

My iPhone disagrees with you. I go to bed and wake up at just about the same time. If I somehow managed to drain the battery below 80%, when I plug it in, it'll charge to 80 and then tell me that by the time I wake up in the morning, it'll be fully charged. Which is the case.

But the most common use case, for me, is waking up, leaving the phone plugged in (WFH). Maybe go for a walk around noon, snap a picture or two. Forget to plug it back in and get back to work. Plug it in as I go to bed at 95%. It tops right up, doesn't wait until the morning.

> Unfortunately, other companies copied the 80% charge bit without copying the part about figuring out if you have a normal waking time and giving you a full charge right before that.

But that's actually what I want. With very, very rare exceptions, I never need a full charge on my phone. Hell, until a few weeks back, I was rocking an iphone 7 with a battery in a questionable state (started bulging). That thing never went below 60% with my use patterns. 60% meant night out, so a hefty dose of maps use. Normal days, it didn't go below 85-90%.

I think the issue is that Apple expects that when you wake up in the morning, you unplug your phone for the day and actually use it a significant amount. Which isn't my case at all. If I don't leave my house, it'll stay plugged in. I usually forget about my phone since everything I need to do, I do on my computer. For the occasional phone call, I can either keep it plugged in (the cord is long enough) or it's already connected to my headset, so don't even need to go fetch the phone. If I don't go to work, it can stay plugged in for days on end (I don't always grab it when I go out).

I feel the same way. I made a small driver for my laptop's keyboard lights and it was one of the most fun projects I've ever made. I can't even imagine how satisfying it must have been for the Asahi developers to get OpenGL running on that hardware.

Because it can't properly clock the card since nvidia uses DRM to lock it out. Were it not for that, I'd be using nouveau every single day. In my experience it's more stable than the proprietary driver.

The comment you're replying to is just paranoic FUD. Which removable laptop battery has external balancing contacts!?!? They're all +/-/data.

Whatever hardware you're using, it's not like the company has signed a contract to support Linux for life.

I use a lot of openbsd and you won't be running nvidea drivers on openbsd for love or money. there is nouveau and they are doing amazing work, however, they are also up against a petty, secretive company that appears to hate them. So nvidea is out.

Understandably openbsd gets zero support from the manufactures. So we need an opensource driver and some brave heroic soul to volunteer their time to get it running.

AMD drivers worked well enough and if you want decent 3d acceleration the only real choice. However they tended to crash and 3d acceleration is usually not a priority if using openbsd. Also starting with amdgpu the drivers got big, really big. The amdgpu driver nearly has more code then the rest of the openbsd kernel[1]. it is this big mess of generated code where each card uses a slightly different ISA. I understand why having a stable ISA is not a priority for AMD(it lets them change the card architecture easier) however sometimes i wish it were documented and pinned down. it would certainly make for a more stable driver that is easier to integrate.

And then there is intel, Note that I have not used intel graphics since 2016 so my experience is out of date. but once you got past the first generation of intel graphics the experience was rock solid, the drivers always worked well for me. if asked for the best openbsd experience I would recommend intel every time. However my last few machines have been amd and unfortunately there is no intel graphics add-in card(i looked). My last intel box I had an amd 3d card but I only used it under windows to play games. for work/openbsd I would just use the onboard intel graphics as they were more stable.

1. https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/watc

Yes, it was Linux-certified.

I've seen how it's changed from barely-working and having to futz with things at every kernel upgrade, to pretty much seamless (and these days I really have little patience for futzing around with things; I want something that works so I can do useful things on it)

Dig up any post from 5, 10 or 15 years ago and Linux users will say literally the same thing.

And then it needed some fractional scaling factor. Wayland apps worked ok with that scaling (though rendering was perceivably jankier), but some X11 apps would just be blurry. At the time there was no solution for there apps and looking at an extremely blurry CLion all day is no fun. The only solution was to run the whole desktop environment in 1x scaling and use this GNOME option to use larger fonts and widgets. Which worked ok-ish, but many things are sized in a funny way.

I just couldn't tolerate so much brokenness.

(And don't get me started on sharing a screen in Zoom conference calls.)

> Hardware manufacturers in the 90s were incentivized to support Linux to expand their customer base.

Outside of some server niches (though even then, mostly not til the noughties), not really. You generally weren't looking at much first-party support at all in the 90s.

> Unsupported hardware in the 90s typically had a much larger customer base and group of hackers willing to spend time adding supporting for it.

This... is really not the case. The M1/2 Macs are _close_ to being one platform with something on the order of a hundred million units out there. Hardware in the 90s was pretty diverse; if you wanted support for your video card, say, there might be twenty chipsets out there, with maybe fifty manufacturers. Later on, there was a fair bit of consolidation, with virtually every computer, say, ending up with pretty much the same sound card chipset, but not in the 90s.

> Apple can decide at any point to make their hardware much more difficult to support. Newer models or firmware updates might break things.

Yeah, again, that _very_ much happened in the 90s.

This is the general idea behind TPM/Secure Boot, but as you present it, it just sounds like a headache for performing system recovery, at no obvious benefit for security.

What's your threat model? In the 99.(9)% case it's a crook snatching the laptop, wiping the HD, and selling the whole thing and/or the parts. Evil maid is a real threat, but only practical (in terms of sophistication/cost vs benefit) for high-value targets, like C-levels, devs holding company secret keys, etc.

Why protect your battery's ability to hold a full charge over a longer lifespan if your battery is constantly throttled to a partial charge anyway?

I've used my old phone for a good six years. I've swapped its battery some three years ago, and it would've needed a new one now, had I continued using it.

If that phone is any indication, my current one should be in service for at least as long. If I can avoid having to swap its battery, it's a win in my book.

It can also sometimes happen that I foresee being away from an outlet or otherwise need as much charge as possible. In those situations, I'd just deactivate the battery saver feature and let it charge to 100%. So if the remaining capacity is closer to its original one, again, it's a win.

If you don't charge fully until just before the user's normal wakeup time you aren't keeping it all the way full all the time.

You protect the battery lifespan and get a full charge at the beginning of the day, instead of having a battery that constantly holds less charge.

You keep repeating this and seem to ignore my observation that if the battery isn't drained below 80% when I plug it in, it will recharge it fully immediately. It will not wait until the user's wake-up time.

And in my case, it's rare that the battery falls below 80%, so whenever I plug it in, it gets recharged fully right away.

So, in practice, it's all the way full all the time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3132752

New silent HN policy to avoid showing its users that some people don't like them.

I find it pretty tasteless for HN to do that.

For one, I don't believe this place fosters a hostile environment, although it's definitely a place where people love to tell you how you're technically wrong about something.

For another, I would guess that there are a very limited number of websites that would opt into this sort of anti-traffic behavior. Hacker news could certainly choose to honor it, but it also feels within their right to bypass the block.

I wonder if there's a sort of middle ground, where HN alerts the user of the redirect that would have occurred, but still shoots the user to the desired location.

But now you're getting into user flows and begging the question as to why the redirect is there in the first place.

I'd love to know more about the perceived hostility, even reading up on Mastodon left me with more questions than answers.

Now waiting for the Ryzen 7840U configured to 15W to be available with 64GB ram.

It’s not limited to the Asahi project, either. The site isn’t safe for queer folks.

Yet year after year, surveys show that more battery life is the feature people want in a phone the most.

> 9 out of 10 phone users have low-battery anxiety

https://electrontogo.com/blog/9-out-of-10-phone-users-have-l...

Intentionally throttling the battery's ability to charge no matter what is going the wrong way.

This wasn't true for a low-end Acer I bought a while ago, and it's not true on an Asus motherboard I use. You can add keys to the bios, and then it'll let you run with either key. That lets you use the grub shim key. On the Acer, you can even tell it to screw PKI, and just check that the hash of the bootloader hasn't changed.

Also, ignoring what it is worth to the attacker, having to roll over all my credentials, freeze accounts, etc, etc, because my desktop was stolen would cost way more of my time than buying a new desktop (happily, the drive is encrypted).

When I mess around with hobby hardware, it's esoteric stuff, not readily-available laptops that are being built by the millions. For that, sometimes you need a volt-ohm meter, or diagnostic rigs.

Every few years I even bring some piece of a Linux box to a repair shop, to narrow down some fault.

However, Macs are all identical, so repairs boil down to "yank component, throw in the recycling shredder box, and (if you just replaced the mainboard) restore from iCloud Backup". Apple hardware switched over to being livestock, not pets a long time ago, so I'm not seeing the point in spending lots of effort on custom repairs (vs. replacing + recycling the bad components).

Some are more "hackable" than an iPhone, but only in some strange symbolic way, since once you de-googled android is somehow more user-hostile than iOS and completely unhackable in practice (in the sense that I can't make it do what I want and also be usable as a daily driver that lets me do stuff like pay for stuff, use public transit, charge my car, park, or take an uber/lyft).

I'm a happy owner of a pine book pro, and a pc engines router; I get it. However, I don't think there are any viable Linux laptops or phones that compare favorably to the linux laptop + phone I had a decade ago.

Also, at any given time 6 of the keyboard buttons stuck, and the touchbar constantly phantom pressed the siri button when I pressed backspace. It got under 90 minutes of battery when brand new. It reliably kernel panicked on resume 1-2 times a week. It was also loud and hot.

Maybe I should give lenovo another try.

They completely screwed me over on a warranty repair right after the IBM acquisition. When I got the laptop back after over a month, it was diagnosed "no fault detected" and had a new symptom: it leaked high voltage from the backlight transformer into to the case during boot shocking the heck out of me!!!

Also, when I look at their web page, I always have the problem that they offer too many sub-configurations, and there isn't a button that says: "just give me the one that definitely runs Linux with the taint bit turned off, and only contains components that have had stable OSS drivers for over a year, and whose BOM hasn't changed for at least 12 months".

Ironically, Apple's web page is pretty close to having a de facto button like that.

Could you be so kind as to link me to an example?

People have discussed Marcan's anime alter ego, certainly, but I've never seen anything transphobic in the slightest. Maybe it's all flagged before I get to see it, but I honestly can't figure out what you might even be referring to. I enjoy reading Asahi updates when they come up, so I am unsure how I could be missing something so 'constant'.

> It’s not limited to the Asahi project, either. The site isn’t safe for queer folks.

As a 'queer person' myself, I find that statement utterly ludicrous and I reject it completely.

But that's why they're dead. Turn off "showdead" if you don't want to see them.

The ones that aren't dead, I would assume the moderators haven't seen yet and/or haven't received enough flags yet. Moderation is hard.