OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

Its been more than a year I'm running asahi on my macbook air and I can't stress how grateful I feel for enjoying such wonderful freedom.

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.

> at this point there is nothing lacking or unable to run

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.

> 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

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

I would like to see the volunteer pool grow, but I suspect a lot of things in the Linux kernel are maintained by a small pool of volunteers--it's not like all volunteers (or paid developers) work across the whole kernel, after all.

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?

Not sure why you're fixated on the whole Linux kernel - we're talking about a small pool of volunteers supporting complex modules.

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.

> 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.

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.