OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Send me the link, that sounds amazing.

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, 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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

Nope. Disagree here

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I wasn't making a historical claim, but a philosophical one. Hardware manufacturers in the 90s had that incentive, if they wanted to pursue it. To Apple, a trillion dollar corporation, selling a negligible amount of laptops to a niche crowd of tech enthusiasts who will never become part of their software ecosystem is just not worth the effort to even pursue.

> 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.

Right. And how many of those buyers are also Linux hackers willing to dedicate their time to work on projects like Asahi? How many of those would even be willing to run Linux instead of macOS? We're talking about an extremely small community of users compared even to the small Linux community in the 90s.

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

Never said it didn't. Except that Apple is known for locking down their products, so the good faith they're showing now with leaving Macs relatively open can disappear at any moment.