AAA Gaming on Asahi Linux

I'm a little sad that this has seemingly taken precedence over all other hardware support. M3 support, dp-alt mode, making the microphone work are all things that I was hoping were going to land in the past year.

I'm aware of no better way to see your desired features land in open source than to build them yourself. That is the power of open source, nobody can stop you!

I understand the sentiment. But the people who could work on the Asahi Linux graphics stack are generally not the same as the people who could e.g. bring up Asahi Linux on M3 chips.

I would not consider the lack of activity in some Asahi Linux areas to be a conflict of priorities. It is in my opinion mostly a result of these lacking areas naturally attracting less developers capable of moving them forward.

i don't hate to be the one to tell you, but skills and context can be learnt. personally, i have found no better way to learn skills than to work on something i care about.

Sure, and it’s the same for quite a lot of people. It does not mean that anyone can do it, for a whole lot of reasons.

It's an Apple chip with no documentation and zero existent driver code to reference. You have to set realistic expectations here, and acknowledge that not every contributor is going to have the domain-specific knowledge required to make everything work. It's nothing short of a divine miracle that it has working Vulkan drivers you can download within a half-decade of it's release.

If you want more, you'll have to take it up with Tim Cook or God (both have a nasty habit of ignoring us little guys). Also an option: not using a laptop that treats Linux as a threat to it's business model.

Alyssa Rosenzweig already talked a bit about that on her Mastodon. She said that after having worked to implement a GPU drivers, it was annoying that she never had the time to quite finish them. On each device release, she had to support the new device instead of polishing what she got.

Perhaps the people who aren't willing or able to learn those skills shouldn't complain about what the people who do have decided to focus on.

honestly with chatgpt i don’t think not learning can really be an excuse anymore.

not saying have it write the code, but just recursively asking for explanations and resources can get you up to speed on tons of things

Yeah good luck with that in systems programming or anything complex. You’re not gonna get far.

I guarantee you'll get much further than you would have previously done in the same amount of time, just by virtue of it being able to point you in the right direction. You don't need perfection when learning, you need a wayfinder, and it can do that just fine.

It won’t point you in the right direction though. At least in my experience. It will only give very superficial answers. And fe just trying to write rust - it will try to explain the error message but most of the time says nothing new and to find out how to fix it you will have to read docs and understand things the old way anyway. At least in my experience

What can I say, Claude's been good to me for both computer science and Rust :-)

your experience is not my experience and i have done my share of systems programming

AFAIK the M3 is going to take a lot longer as the asahi team leverages apple silicon in their CI which means mac mini servers and the M3 generation never got their mac mini. Of all the generations to finally take the plunge into apple silicon, I had to choose the weird one... (typing this on an M3 mbair and not on linux sigh)

Ah yeah, here's the post: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/112277289414246878

The M3 GPU is a lot different and has a bunch of new features like ray tracing, so the super talented team working on the Asahi Linux graphics stack might have a lot of work ahead of them to support the M3's GPU fully as well.

God I wish I was smart enough to help out with Asahi Linux...

I do hope that LLMs learn more from the Asahi Linux team's code and their amazing blog posts, in order to provide better guidance for new systems programmers.

I mean this is the nature of the beast with arm and apple. It’s a closed system. There are some devs that are going to be willing to go through the effort just for the challenge of it, but most are just going to use x86/linux because you don’t have to actively fight against the vendor.

Good grief what an uphill battle. It’s amazing there are any devs willing to put up with Apple hardware at all.

I’m not sure why you are being downvoted. This is the truth people who buy Apple hardware need to hear.

Chipping into their Patreon helped me feel at peace with not being smart enough!

Have you considered selling your machine and getting an M2 of some sort?

anyone CAN do it