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brynet
kccqzy
The following is actually the most surprising part to me.
> This is quite limiting, as it forces PipeWire to waste CPU cycles (and therefore battery life) on resampling audio streams that are not either 48 or 96 kHz.
So the Asahi team thinks that only supporting 48 or 96 kHz wastes battery life by forcing the software to resample audio streams. But why does Apple still do this? Presumably Apple has a very high commitment to save power and increase battery life.
ryandrake
Always possible that it's the standard commercial software company reason: They do know about it and have a P2 bug tracking it, but the team that maintains that code has 5000 other things to do, and it never gets fixed.
jasomill
More likely it’s that 48 kHz is a more sensible default, since the majority of non-music digital audio is sampled at 48 kHz, almost anyone who cares about potential audio artifacts introduced by resampling is going to be using an external DAC, and (from an Apple-centric viewpoint) almost anyone concerned about the energy consumption of music playback on their MacBook is going to listen to music on their iPhone instead.
adgjlsfhk1
Likely because the only speakers Apple cares about are Airpods/Airpod max so they are free to only pick the 2 most common sample rates.
functionmouse
whoa, bit perfect CD/flac playback in 44.1, that's a killer feature.
IshKebab
There are many audio resampling libraries available that can convert from 44.1 to 48 kHz with no perceptible quality loss. E.g. see
https://github.com/hasenbanck/resampler#quality-analysis
This is presumably what Apple does. You kind of have to anyway or you have the stupid situation Linux used to have where only one app could play audio at a time.
chronogram
Hardware often reports supporting 44.1kHz but internally resamples it to 48kHz so you're better off properly resampling it yourself.
embedding-shape
> you have the stupid situation Linux used to have where only one app could play audio at a time
When was that? I think my first Linux distribution was Ubuntu 8.04 and fairly sure it shipped with PulseAudio which in mind always been able to play audio from multiple sources at the same time, maybe I misremember?
rasz
No its not. You wont be able to hear the difference between 44.1 vs 48.
kakwa_
While I absolutely love the technical write-up from the Asahi team, and being absolutely impressed by their accomplishment, to the risk of being an overly negative contrarian, I remain a bit skeptical.
I'm concerned that after all these years, it's still a separate project and not an effort sustained directly within the kernel mainline and mainstream distributions like Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora.
These kinds of reverse engineering projects are extremely challenging. With skills & field knowledge, it's "easy" to get to "80%" and have something useful for you and the most dedicated users. But reaching the "95%" required for a polished & general public ready experience needs nearly as much effort, often on tedious and time consuming tidbits.
dagmx
For what it’s worth, Asahi do upstream a lot of changes to do exactly what you’re saying.
That’s a big reason why progress slowed recently because they were focusing on reducing their diff count.
A lot of stuff has landed in the mainline kernel, but Asahi is how they keep experimenting on new functionality.
omcnoe
I think there is also the added challenge that ARM macs are a moving target, and Apple has less than no desire to provide any kind of stability or support for Asahi Linux. Unlike the PC space where laptop manufacturers have to maintain broad compatibility over time, Apple will make future changes that are really awkward for Asahi and will not care one bit because they can do the compat work on their own software.
xoa
>I think there is also the added challenge that ARM macs are a moving target
Yes, but also no? Because I think a reasonable argument can be made that ARM Macs are like game consoles with a more rapid generation: yes there are changes between each generation, but then you've got millions of units which are good for a very long time that are all near identical. Apple definitely is not changing everything between gens at all, work they've done for M1 has been plenty useful since. And support stretches awhile. The final M3 generation chip only came out about a year ago (the M3 Ultra for the Mac Studio was March 2025).
So sure there's ongoing effort needed for newer systems, and that may require ongoing RE more then typical. I don't want to brush aside the effort there at all. But at the same time there doesn't seem to be the same long tail of hardware variations and dozens to hundreds of players doing their own little tweaks either. Aside from memory and storage, every single Mac of a given SoC is the same so each time one gets covered they all get covered and are a stable experience. It's definitely a different thing then developing for PCs, and I definitely wish there was and support serious legal backing for no rug pulls being allowed, ever. Hardware owners should always have access to the root of trust if they want it. But that aside, I don't think their efforts are wrong or somehow wasted just because each new generation might need some new work. That doesn't appear from the outside to be intractable, and fact is the pace of hardware change for computers has slowed and continues to slow. A system from many years ago can still be very good for most tasks... so long as the OS can still be updated and work. Apple themselves seem more then limiting factor there, whereas Linux shines in long term support.
mort96
The huge advantage of x86_64 isn't that it's a stable platform, but that the big hardware vendors maintain their own Linux driver. Nobody needs to reverse engineer how AMD GPUs work, you can just use AMD's driver. Nobody needs to reverse engineer how Intel power states work, just use Intel's pstate driver. Nobody needs to reverse engineer how Broadcom's WiFi driver works, Broadcom maintains their own Linux driver and contributes to the upstream brcm80211 driver. And commodity hardware that's not directly supported by the vendor typically has detailed data sheets, meaning that someone has to contribute a driver but no reverse engineering is needed.
StillBored
Its more than that, its that x86 vendors know how to maintain hardware backwards compatibility, they don't throw out the entire USB subsystem every time a new phy/whatever shows up because there is a standardized mailbox interface sitting in front of the actual HW. Same with the core platform, which works out of the box using 25+ year old firmware standards that are flexible enough to support simple sensors and behaviors, like lid close notification on a laptop for example across multiple OS's. Even something as simple as the firmware interface for handing off a frame buffer to the OS isn't universally support on arm platforms because a significant fraction don't support uefi. Apple was an early uefi adopter, but whatever internal politics they have, means they tossed even that on the latest mac's.
unfitted2545
From an end user perspective, I think the best thing the Asahi team could have done was solely focus on getting the M1 Air/Pro working 100% before moving onto other devices.
But that would probably result in burn out from the crazily talented dev team :P
walterbell
Asahi focusing on M1 would also encourage secondary market sales of M1 laptops, which are already a primary competitor (see Apple marketing) to current Apple laptops. If Apple wanted to encourage Asahi Linux users to move from M1 or Qualcomm to M5/M6 Apple devices, they could improve device firmware compatibility with Linux, or contribute directly to mainline Linux.
mort96
I'm not really sure what it would mean for M1 air/pro to work better at this point to be honest, other than I guess power consumption during sleep but that's supposedly a super tricky problem that can't be "solved", it can just be incrementally improved through immense effort. But the main problems I have on my M1 Pro now are just the normal Linux laptop problems: bad trackpad palm rejection, input latency, inconsistent scroll speed between apps, high latency tap to click, somewhat janky fractional scaling (at least in GNOME). These aren't really problems for Asahi to fix, I feel.
rowanG077
Considering that M1 and M2 are almost the same architecturally isn't that exactly what they are doing? M3 are two new contributors who decided they wanted that.
miki123211
On one hand, yes they're a moving target, on the other, they're a lot more uniform than X86 machines.
X86 can also be a moving target now; with Windows's driver autodiscovery mechanisms, manufacturers that don't care about Linux could still make people's life hell.
walterbell
How does Ubuntu Linux on recent Qualcomm (ex-Apple Nuvia) Arm laptops compare to Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon?
neobrain
Most people don't realize that the Asahi team ship features only once they work without quirks. For the set of supported hardware features, Asahi is much closer to a macOS experience than to an average x86 Linux laptop experience.
Meanwhile, Linux on my Lenovo X13s "works" but has tons of quirks: Boot fails 2 out of 3 times, the device hard-resets sometimes when waking up with a display connected, and the speakers are unusable due to lack of active overheat protection (and somehow this affects even external speakers). It technically works, but it's incredibly frustrating to use in practice.
If you plan to use Linux and don't need an ARM laptop, there's little reason to prefer a Qualcomm device over an x86 one currently. On the other hand, M1/M2 easily outperform a broad class of x86 laptops, and they have a Linux experience that's for many use cases close to on par with official vendor support.
jauntywundrkind
Pretty rude to call this ex Apple Nuvia. I don't think any of those lawsuits by Apple or ARM have been won. Qualcomm declares this to be a new chip. But yes it has talent from those places. Still, let's not try to tip the scales of perception quite so indelicately?
I am curious what the boot situation is. It seems like Qualcomm actually has pretty good support for their cores. But since these PC systems sort of lack a bios, each one needing a hand built DeviceTree: it makes supporting them kind of a nightmare. Even a raspberry pi has a much more advanced and accommodating boot environment than these frustrating Qualcomm laptops. Alas. I don't know but I expect Asahi has to do similar hand tailoring. I am curious to know what the boot chain looks like! How much the system willingly helps vs how much hard to be bespoke hand coded system config! (Wish it wasn't like this, it's so bad)
mschuster91
> Unlike the PC space where laptop manufacturers have to maintain broad compatibility over time
LOL
If anything Apple is infamous for keeping around hardware blocks for as long as they can. IIRC the serial port driver for everything Apple ARM dates back to the very first generations of iPods.
Of course Apple will remain a moving target, but they are orders of magnitude more stable than everyone else in the non-x86 universe.
bennett_dev
There was a nice task on 39c3 https://youtu.be/3OAiOfCcYFM
They do try to upstream and eventually just have Linux natively support Apple Silicon!
__turbobrew__
Why would any group want to take on a project which could be instantly killed by an external for profit entity? For now Asahi is left alone by Apple but that could change in a single day and the entire project is dead. It doesn’t seem like a productive way to direct the limited energy that distribution foundations have on hand.
tomnipotent
Except there's no legal basis Apple could use to "instantly kill" the project.
__turbobrew__
Apple could change the platform/firmware to break Asahi if they wanted to. They could lock down the hardware to make it nearly impossible to install another OS like they do with iphone.
bri3d
> I'm concerned that after all these years, it's still a separate project and not an effort sustained directly within the kernel mainline and mainstream distributions
What does this mean? Hardware support is rarely developed inside these organizations; what makes it seem like these groups would be a good home for this effort?
It makes sense to have a group of experts in a field (Apple hardware/firmware) contribute patches upstream, which is the exact system here. And Asahi have done an above and beyond job also maintaining their installation framework while carefully moving changes upstream as well.
kakwa_
Well, after a while, the effort of maintaining and improving M-series kernel support should be directly be done by kernel maintainers, not within a fork with periodic merges (maybe some Asahi folks should become kernel maintainers).
Doing so would enabled mainstream distributions to provide maintainable M-series builds, with all that entails in terms of stability, enabling choice, maintenance or security fixes.
The whole fork + dedicated distribution made sense at the start of the project since it provided a playground for quickly iterating and experimenting (which is a no-no to do directly in the mainline kernel or in a major distribution).
But Asahi is still the only Linux on Silicon option after all these years, which is a bit worrisome. Asahi should have been a cool but temporary initiative.
At some point, the project will lose momentum and for its accomplishments to last, it should be merged into the general effort, i.e. drivers maintained directly in the Linux kernel, and the userland stuff made to be easily packaged and shipped by mainstream distributions.
bri3d
This is... literally exactly what they are doing?
Of all of the reverse engineering related Linux efforts (and most corporate Linux efforts), Asahi have been the most methodical and relentless about upstreaming changes into the kernel and all of their upstream intermediaries (freedesktop/Mesa etc.), specifically so it's maintained, even at the detriment of the project velocity and contributor health.
Asahi is explicitly not supposed to be a fork + dedicated distribution long term and over time, the delta between Fedora Asahi Remix and Fedora has grown smaller and smaller.
> Asahi is still the only Linux on Silicon option
What do you mean? There are non-Fedora Remix distributions which incorporate the "edge" Asahi changes, like https://ubuntuasahi.org . And again, as more and more gets mainlined, it becomes increasingly plausible that many distributions will be able to support Apple Silicon "out of the box" without much special consideration.
samiv
Like they say, "when you're 90% done you just need to take care of the other 90%"
mort96
The way mainline kernel development happens is that people work in their own fork and then send patches upstream, just like what Asahi is doing. The only thing that makes Asahi special is that there's so much weird bespoke hardware which requires special drivers. But nobody develops directly against Linus's tree.
flomo
What everyone is missing is any org who pays Ubuntu or RedHat for support is going to buy officially supported hardware from Lenovo, Dell, Framework or etc. Asahi is a cool project, but there's zero money in it.
cybercatgurrl
as someone who has had several official asahi fedora remix updates break the boot up of a m1 mac mini, this is it. it’s just too damn risky. i’ve had it happen so frequently that i’m genuinely at a point where im considering retiring the machine for something more stable and less likely to break during an update and it’s not even like i used it for a GUI, it’s a headless machine.
i would genuinely advise anyone thinking about seriously using asahi to consider another machine for uptime and stability
georgeburdell
I really hope this project continues to gain momentum. Apple Hardware + Linux is the least fscked OS running on the best hardware. MacOS continues to be a tire fire with endless bugs and churn between versions.
freedomben
You should give Framework a try. It's been a flawless experience with Fedora. And with the upcoming Framework 13 Pro, battery life and trackpad are expected to be on par (or in the case of battery, even better than macos)
jorvi
No, battery life isn't on par.
The only way to get the battery life Framework advertised is on Windows' 'Ultra Efficiency' mode which cuts CPU performance by 25-50%, lowers brightness by 30% and deprioritizes everything in the background to such an extreme that responsiveness of those is measured in seconds.
It is not comparable at all to M-series or Snapdragon laptops happily chugging along at full capability and getting (compared to AMD / Intel) stellar battery life.
bogzz
They're talking about the new model announced, with a larger battery and ARM architecture. Not released yet, I don't think.
srcreigh
I’m pretty sure macOS safari doesn’t execute JavaScript on background windows/tabs.
When I play Bitburner, if I want to run it in the background, I have to run the game on Firefox or chrome. It’s a shame because safari actually gives best performance by quite a large margin.
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porphyra
The new Framework 13 Pro is undeniably really nice and a huge step up from the earlier Framework laptops. But the sad reality is that x86 processors are falling behind in performance. The Intel Core Ultra X7 358H is a whopping 35% slower than the M5 Pro (15 CPU 16 GPU) in both single core and multicore benchmarks, while the Framework 13 Pro with the 358H costs about the same as the Macbook Pro 14 with the M5 Pro ($2200 each).
Of course, currently Asahi only supports up to M2, so if you really want Linux, the Panther Lake should still outperform most of the 4 year old M2 devices. It remains to be seen which of the following can come sooner:
* new faster chips come out that support Linux
* Asahi finally supports M5
Right now it seems that the former is more likely to be true. But we shall see.
ezst
> But the sad reality is that x86 processors are falling behind in performance. The Intel Core Ultra X7 358H is a whopping 35% slower than the M5 Pro
35% is the generational difference between the M4 pro to the M5 pro¹. Don't drink Apple marketing koolaid: this has less to do with x86 falling behind than it has to do with Apple using their stash of gold to outbid the intel/AMD competition out of the latest TSMC capacity.
An M4 Pro 12c gets 32731 out of TSMC's 2nm-E².
An AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 gets 35093 out of TSMC's 4nm³.
The true unsung hero of the "Apple M miracle" is TSMC, not ARM, and Apple mostly in the sense that it has the deepest pockets.
With the first M chips, anyone who could afford to wait 18-24 months was pretty much where Apple was at. This decreased to 12-18 months in the last couple years. Panther lake signifies that it could further decrease to 9-12 months.
¹: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6346vs6345vs7230vs6397v...
²: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-M4-Pro-12-cores-Processo...
³: https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/ryzen-ai-9-hx-370.c365...
awithrow
I really want this to be true but for me its not close. Maybe its better on the new 13 but its still night and day between my mac book and my FW 16 that's about a year old. My macbook works for days without a charge. My FW last maybe 6-8 hours on battery.
Don't get me wrong. I do really enjoy my FW but the mac hardware is still number one for me. I'd really love is an ARM based FW. Though if I could wave a magic wand it would be mac hardware running pure linux with no caveats. I really love seeing what Asahi is building
mapleleaf1921
I've run all 3 major OSes before. MacOS by far has the least bugs and kinda just works.
My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility.
My windows days were plagued with battery issues.
I feel like most Linux ricers wishs for a MacOS-like experience, except with more customisation. (Which is entirely possible now with the ricing on Mac)
rglullis
> My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility.
This is the kind of dated argument that really makes me dismiss most of the critics. I was running xubuntu as my main desktop since 2010 at least, switched to Debian + nix + XFCE in 2022 and switched to full-on nixOS in 2024. I never had issues with audio then and had to go out of my way to "break" audio on NixOS when I wanted to try pipewire instead of pulse.
> feel like most Linux ricers wises for a MacOS-like experience
I've put together a Hackintosh once, tried for a few weeks as the daily driver. Aside from being able to use tools that dealt with real-time audio processing, there was nothing else I wanted to copy or bring to my Linux system. It cemented my opinion that most software developers that keep touting the "superiority of MacOS" never gave a fair shot at Linux on decent hardware and were just rationalizing their prior choice.
eightysixfour
Earlier this year I built a new desktop and installed my normal Linux distro and the screen wouldn’t work after login. I worked on it for a day, still couldn’t get any desktop except a terminal.Tried a different distro, it booted but no matter what resolution or refresh rate, the display showed severe artifacts when scrolling. Tried to fix it for a few days, gave up.
I am not a Linux novice, I have been using every major OS for decades at this point, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t install Windows, decrapify it, and everything just worked. You can say I should have done more research on hardware compatibility or whatever, but I didn’t have to for Windows.
And I like how you complain most devs never give Linux a fair shot on decent hardware right after describing that you MacOS experience is a hackintosh. That makes a lot of sense.
mapleleaf1921
I can only speak from personal experience. But I've had multiple Lenovo laptops not work with Ubuntun or nixOS in multiple situations.
Any new yoga variants just always had trouble.
E.g. my yoga slim 7i had a keyboard issue in Ubuntu such that for the first minute, I can't use my keyboard. Had to change boot configbto use "dumb keyboard" or something
The yoga also had speaker issues in nixos as the drivers haven't been mainlined yet. It was onenof those 6 speaker (2 tweeter) setups. I had to download a random driver and chuck it in my nix config to get the subwoofers working.
I gave up after mic issues in multiple zoom calls or gmeet calls.
You can say it's all skills issue, but Mac worked first try.
Not giving Linux a fair shot is not something I'd categorise myself doing given how much I riced my dell xps back in the day.
rafaelmn
>This is the kind of dated argument that really makes me dismiss most of the critics. I was running xubuntu as my main desktop since 2010 at least, switched to Debian + nix + XFCE in 2022 and switched to full-on nixOS in 2024. I never had issues with audio then and had to go out of my way to "break" audio on NixOS when I wanted to try pipewire instead of pulse.
Did you ever do any DAW ? Did you have to use is jackd ?
Stuff like streaming games from my desktop in a non native resolution is a no-go with Wayland. I can't do HDMI 4k/120 with HDR/VRR like I can on windows (I know it's HDMI fault, but that doesn't change the fact it doesn't work).
Oh and I've given up on using Linux for productivity a year ago - one can take only so many full browser crashes for simple stuff like desktop sharing, camera/mic stopping mid call.
I'm running linux on my desktop with about as vanilla hardware as you can imagine - the amount of compromises/stuff that just doesn't work is quite annoying.
It's just nowhere near the level of reliability of MacOS - that's why I use my air for productivity and I SSH into the workstation to do actual work in VMs (with all the recent supply chain compromises no way in hell I'm ever doing dev work outside of a sandbox environment).
I've never used a device that claims first party linux support so maybe it's better.
But honestly I'm not a fan of linux desktop in general - flatpack is nice in theory but comes with so many "gotchas" and installing stuff otherwise is just "here you have all the privileges of my user". MacOS sandboxing/security scoping feels way better for desktop use.
jorvi
MacOS has solved laptop suspend since the 2000s. Windows and Linux still struggle with this, especially due to the switch from S3- to S0ix-style sleep.
Modern Apple laptops seem less special now but you also have to look at them through the lens of their introduction.
A similar thing is true for Sonos. They don't seem all that special now, but you have to realize they have been offering multi-room synced audio with a good UX since 2006. That's before the iPhone even was released.
cybercatgurrl
the last time i tried changing the audio sample rate for an external dac on a silver blue based immutable distro it would reset every time i rebooted so no this is not an outdated argument. linux still has serious issues with the basics
nothinkjustai
Idk, I tried Linux last year and couldn’t get my USB wifi to work, even bought a new one that claimed to support Linux, and even tried an entirely new distro (went from Arch to Mint) and still had major problems. Windows handled it just fine.
That combined with a lack of good creative software on Linux kind of kills it for me. I’d rather use it than Windows, but MacOS seems like the best option currently.
TingPing
In my personal experience macOS is fine but updates are often buggy or regress performance. Linux has just been the more polished option. Plus it just has a nicer desktop and apps.
alemanek
I stay 1 major version behind with MacOS. If you do that you should have a pretty stable experience. You still get all the security patches but skip most bugs/regressions.
dwedge
I use macos because of the battery life and because I want a Linux like experience without wondering if some weird software a company update forces on us will work, like citrix desktop or their random vpn client. But for someone who spends most of their time in the terminal, and the rest of the time in a browser, macos has some really annoying quirks especially when it comes to window management
Escapado
"entirely possible" is a bit of a stretch. You can install some hacky WM and sketchybar but system settings, workspace three finger scroll speed, the finder app, window chrome, login screen etc are not something that can easily be changed. And the default apps are really not that great for power users. Calendar, Mail and Finder are all slow, dumbed down and only very superficially customizable. I daily drive an M2 Pro MBP and I was running a Linux desktop up until 2 years ago and I felt like there were barely any limits to customizing the latter while I have to fight macOS at every step if I want to do something that apple does not want me to do.
graemep
Not a problem I have had on Linux.
Some people seem to get better battery life with Windows than with Linux.
Most users on any OSes are not ricers. Most of my customisation is functional - panels and widgets placed for practical reasons. A lot of people do not seem to customise at all, or barely.
OsrsNeedsf2P
Ricing is big, but I also like the hackability and development friendly environment of Linux that isn't there on Macbooks (been running MacOS as a secondary for ~5yrs now)
eikenberry
The difficult thing with Linux has always been finding well supported hardware. People always try to get it running on whatever random collection of hardware they have on hand and then are surprised that they have some problems. If you buy with Linux in mind you can get hardware that just works.
ezst
> MacOS by far has the least bugs and kinda just works.
MacOS is sometimes so weird and inconsistent that it's hard to tell whether it's a bug of Apple usual's "you are not smart/cool-enough to understand" kind of feature.
jauntywundrkind
Generally yes, but the community around MLX has rallied pretty strong. Sure your disk io is awful, and your OS is buggy, but at least ML compiles and works on a modern OS.
Works like rocm seem so close. But you need either the pre-compiled packages or 2+ year old Ubuntu to compile them. https://github.com/ROCm/TheRock/issues/3477
com2kid
I'm still on Ubuntu 22 because everything works. Got enough packages that still request I don't use wayland that I don't want to risk an upgrade.
Sad because I really want the better One drive integration that Ubuntu 24+ comes with.
jauntywundrkind
I sympathize. But it seems so weird to me to be a Linux open source adopter, who is also so am conservative. Heck yes KDE, sway, Niri, and so many other new desktops are so so so nice. I can't imagine staying in the old world.
But who should AMD for example target? It seems obvious to me. Personally I think if you are trying to make tools like ai acceleration software, you should 100% be focused on the alpha geeks. The people who want bleeding edge new stuff, the people who will take that and roll with it and expand your ecosystem are almost entirely the early adopters. The progressives are the social tastemakers, are the point on the adoption curve where cool and good happens.
It's infuriating watching AMD bungle their chances by targeting people interested in ancient technology, for their incredibly advanced powerful rich new stack. What are you doing?!?! There needs to be a starting point for the alpha geeks, those who are willing.
LtWorf
Having used a macbook air for work just recently… not the best hardware at all. I think I can spend 5€ and get a better keyboard.
iknowstuff
There are fringes that have wacky and particular priorities, but not recognizing that you are such a niche and asserting that your silly requirement makes them “not the best” for the vast majority of people is silly
LtWorf
Sorry I wanted to mention a few hundreds other reasons but I thought it'd be too long.
jwr
When I think about it, I don't understand why Apple wouldn't want to help this effort and just provide all the documentation.
All the classic reasons ("competitive advantage", "secrets", etc) do not hold water in this day and age.
saadn92
The real answer is probably simpler than anyone here is making it. Apple hardware margins are healthy enough that selling macbooks to linux users is pure profit, so no services lock-in needed. However, the moment they officially acknowledge Linux support, then it becomes a support surface. Every kernel panic becomes a genius bar visit. Every driver bug becomes a tweet at @AppleSupport. It's the value of plausible deniability. The Asahi team being unofficial is actually the best possible outcome for Apple in that they get hardware sales to Linux enthusiasts without any support burden.
Wowfunhappy
> However, the moment they officially acknowledge Linux support, then it becomes a support surface.
Apple documents lots of things the genius bar won't help with. For example, Apple provides instructions for compiling custom builds of the XNU kernel. However, if you replace the stock kernel and your Mac kernel panics, the genius bar isn't going to help you. (Maybe they'd help you wipe the computer and restore everything to stock, but I imagine they'd do that if a Linux user walked in too, even today.)
I suspect Apple hasn't shared documentation because it would take time to prepare for external release (legal stuff, plus the need to avoid leaking future products). What I don't understand is why Apple hasn't made an engineer available to talk on the phone for a couple of hours a month. This would amount to a rounding error in their budget.
saagarjha
You’d need legal to sign off on that too.
mrj
They don't have to support it, just document the system or release their own kernel code. They don't even have to mention Linux.
saagarjha
They do release their own kernel code.
internet2000
That’s called support. We count that as support.
exe34
They could anonymously drop off a package to the Asahi team.
graemep
> Apple hardware margins are healthy enough that selling macbooks to linux users is pure profit, so no services lock-in needed.
What do you mean by needed? A lock-in is more profitable so is needed to maximise profits.
cromka
> What do you mean by needed? A lock-in is more profitable so is needed to maximise profits.
You can't lock-in Linux users because vast majority of them won't switch to macOS and ecosystem at large. This is simply a currently untapped market they could easily almost entirely own if they wanted to. With growing Linux popularity, extra 3-4% of the laptop market share is nothing they can ignore in front of shareholders.
p0w3n3d
> the moment they officially acknowledge Linux support, then it becomes a support surface
untrue. There are no obligations from other hardware vendors, yet you can sometimes get good drivers from them, or at least specs. I think Apple indeed want their hardware to fade out to enforce buying another. Imagine that 20% of your returning customers no longer return after 3-5 years of planned obsolence
rasz
No, selling laptops to Linux users is loss of services revenue, which is currently at 25% of total Apple takes and ~40% of all profit.
cromka
I am baffled by how people commonly parrot that flawed logic. Hint: by not seeling those laptops to Linux users they're not making money at all, neither on hardware nor on services.
aurareturn
Little to no monetary benefit, hardware changes now need to be documented for Linux, loudest and most critical users but smallest volume.
joelthelion
And risk of loss of control on the software ecosystem.
freedomben
This is the big one IMHO. Apple is all about control of the stack, top to bottom. Any sort of "help" with linux on macos would be threatening to that control. Apple "helped" even more than I would have expected by not locking alt OSes out of the bootloader. Probably for less than altruistic reasons, but they did do it.
Barbing
loss of control, fewer services sales w/o their built-in upsells etc… tragedies
Go team Asahi!
cromka
> Little to no monetary benefit
A 1-3% of the market out of the 5% that Linux already is, is little to no monetary benefit?
aurareturn
Apple has many easier ways to win 1-3% of 5%.
mhh__
I don't know if that's true. Linux users are curious and will try more stuff but people mistake that they file bug reports (and usually detailed ones...) with complaining more.
Apple's MO is that it's their baby. End of. They don't do open. Their compiler is closed source, and so on.
ansgri
One of the reasons I can see is it’s much easier to say “we don’t play this game” than get a lot of negative press for selective openness and breaking compatibility of non-public interfaces. Maybe it’s even more important internally, as it enables new kind of internal discussions distracting from priority work.
kevin_thibedeau
They are operating under a patchwork of NDAs. It would take some effort to determine what they can disclose.
gorgoiler
It feels very close to “right to repair”. The coffee grinder you bought came as a single package but it has burrs, gears, machine screws, a motor, etc. If one of those components fails, we should be able to replace it ourselves and as such they should be documented.
The laptop has various pieces of hardware in it and corresponding drivers in macOS to make them tick. Did we buy the hardware and the drivers as an inseparable package, or should we be provided with the manual to make one component work when the other breaks, be that either third party trackpads or third party (Linux) drivers.
Apple might argue that drivers, unlike gears or motors, will never wear down and fail. They won’t need repairing so you don’t get to know how they work. Does right to repair only apply to products that could ever need repairing? Does it also extend to knowing how your purchased product is built so that you could repair it?
Maybe we’ll see a test case some day when a cosmic ray blows out /System/Trackpad.kext and a litigant applies to a court for the documentation to repair their laptop — to write their own driver!
(Or vice versa: a manufacturer of coffee grinders arguing in court that they are exempt from right-to-repair because they repair their machines for free at their Genius Espresso Bar.)
sounds
This is an interesting thought exercise. I immediately thought of the counter argument that Apple's driver quality is worse, especially for laptops nearing end of life (for the sake of argument assume this were true).
Could I then submit a warranty claim and demand Apple replace my aging laptop with their latest model?
nxpnsv
Hmmm, both my grinder and espresso machine are quite reparable with parts you can order from the manufacturer. Very much unlike my iphone…
apatheticonion
I think there is a strong case that "the right to repair" includes software. If that doesn't mean drivers must be open source, it should at least mean hardware is documented such that a driver can be written from it.
But the US still doesn't have the right to repair hardware, haha.
I hope the EU is listening. They won't get far with their sovereign software push if hardware cannot be used. Even on the Android side, you can't write an alternative to Android because all of the hardware has locked bootloaders and hidden drivers. Good luck reverse engineering the hardware/drivers on a Samsung Galaxy - let alone an iPhone or MacBook.
mmcnl
I was trying to come up with a response but you're right. It would be easy for Apple and Apple would get so much goodwill from the community in return.
gjsman-1000
They get more public goodwill from a single ad. The chronically online Linux-using engineer community is too small to matter.
u_fucking_dork
And let’s be honest, they still wouldn’t be satisfied. The goal post would move to something else. Why don’t my AirPods seamlessly handoff to my Linux MacBook?
mmcnl
I doubt that. The developer community is what made the MacBook predominant in every tech organization. Before that Macs were mostly popular in the creative sector.
bjelkeman-again
Developers build many of the applications that make the platform desirable. Steve Ballmer at least seem to get that part. ;)
rowanG077
Looking at: https://stats.asahilinux.org/ there is still a pretty large userbase who are so interested in it they go this route. I imagine that count would easily 10x if it would be officially supported. Those numbers are nothing to sneeze at.
I'm running asahi on my macbook. And never touch OSX. I wouldn't even had gotten it if asahi wasn't so well supported.
huflungdung
[dead]
internet2000
> Focus is about saying no to 100 good ideas so you can pursue one great idea.
Important context to understand why.
robmccoll
If they think macOS is one great idea, that's a terrible misjudgment.
u_fucking_dork
And yet it’s incredibly popular and successful. Windows is also ass, and the year of the Linux desktop is perpetually a few years away.
basisword
I imagine the real reason is that if they change things they now have an obligation to promptly share technical docs and if they're slow people will whine and bitch online about them. Not worth it. They have zero to gain (and I say this as someone who would love to dual boot Linux on my M4).
mrj
Plenty are whining now and that doesn't seem to bother them. I mean, this is one of the largest companies in the world. This is the company that once told people they were holding the phone wrong. I can't see them being particularly more bothered by people complaining in a slightly different way.
confiq
so they don't care about users, they care about themself?
afavour
I think a more accurate statement is that they don’t want to take on the outsized burden relative to the number of users it would actually affect.
I’d love to dual boot Linux too but I’m under no delusions about being a very small segment of the Mac population.
basisword
Apple's whole thing is hardware + software working together. Endless other options available to Linux users. They'd also need to be prepared for people bringing laptops to stores with hardware problems that aren't running macOS. Again, more burden for Apple for no gain other than winning over a couple of dozen users.
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felixding
"Amaze, amaze, amaze!"
I wonder if there would be interest in an Asahi Remix spin focused on a more Mac-like out-of-the-box experience: cmd as the main modifier key, Mac-like keyboard shortcuts, theming, gestures, etc.
Of course, you can tweak any distro however you want, but I think a curated default experience is a different thing.
WhyNotHugo
Cmd as a “main” modifier?
Ok typical X/Wayland setups, Cmd is already the main modifier for DE features, while Ctrl is the modifier used at an application level.
There would be a lot of weird overlap with changing that.
throwaway27448
> while Ctrl is the modifier used at an application level.
DE features don't matter at all outside of cmd-tab and whatever the equivalent of spotlight is. The application level is the main modifier, and changing them all to cmd is essentially impossible at this point. A detail Haiku got just about perfect, I think.
Either way, ctrl as a gui modifier is a dealbreaker for me. It also breaks the use of readline keybindings for text entry.
Nevin1901
I've managed to get close enough w/ kde. I just asked claude code to implement it for me, and it web searched and built config files.
omnimus
Cmd as main modifier is lost battle. I've tried it multiple times. In the end just accepted ctrl life and sold my last macbook.
GeekyBear
Nice to see M3 support coming along as they work their way through the upstreaming backlog and improve tooling:
> finding their way into the Asahi kernel tree are patches to enable more hardware on M3 machines. This includes support for PCIe, MacBook keyboards and trackpads support, the SMC-based RTC and reboot controller, and the NVMe controller, courtesy once again of Michael Reeves and Alyssa Milburn. This brings Linux support for the M3 up to roughly the same level as the first Asahi Linux alpha for M1!
bogzz
I wonder if the hardware or the software will be the first to make a dream dev machine happen - a MacBook Pro + Linux experience
either Asahi gets there from the software side or Framework gets there from the hardware side
mbeavitt
These kind of project reports showing consistent breakthroughs and clearly a finger on the pulse of what users are encountering as pain points are a good indication that the Asahi team are real pros :)
Look forward to switching back to Asahi full time soon!!
sandreas
While I love Asahi as such and am really blown away by the effort, my setup requires an encrypted ZFS root file system, which is unreasonably hard to achieve with a Mac.
The fact, that there has to be a macOS partition for maintenance ruling out ZFSBootMenu somehow is very unfortunate - but I've accepted it.
Maybe the new Framework 13 Pro will be at least in the region of an alternative... :-/
incanus77
I’m curious, broadly, what is involved with this. I just got encrypted (LUKS) BTRFS root going on my two Asahi machines and it wasn’t _terrible_… but also definitely not easy.
sandreas
Well... I'm never using BTRFS again, see [1] for why - disclaimer: This is a personal opinion, not a recommendation. Since I switched to ZFS, everything is awesome ;) Besides creating zarch[2], I recently noticed that there is weird stuff happening in some of the used components, so I switched to CachyOS, which contains a ZFS Kernel and a good enough installer to get started with encrypted ZFS root. And I think they are also working on ZFSBootMenu integration, but I don't find the link right now :-)
1: https://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=39143#p3...
jordand
M3 support nearly at alpha is fantastic news, and I'm really looking forward to M4 in the future. I am not looking forward to whatever Apple has planned this year for macOS, or next.
p0w3n3d
The mentioned light sensor started malfunctioning on my work's m3 after upgrading to tahoe. After a sleep it sometimes dimms the screen at max. Thankfully I have the monitor control app which brings it back for me. Such unneeded and faulty mechanism.
giancarlostoro
Really hope that by the time all my M4 Macs are no longer updated by Apple I can just switch to Asahi and get a 1:1 compatible OS in terms of supporting all the hardware my Macs come with.
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>.. macOS only ever programs CS42L84 to operate at either 48 or 96 kHz, we could only add support for those two sample rates to the Linux driver ..
> However, CS42L42 supports all the other common sample rates, and while the register layout and programming sequence is different, the actual values programmed in for 48 and 96 kHz are the same across both chips. What would happen if we simply took the values for all other sample rates from the CS42L42 datasheet and added those to the CS42L84 driver? As it turns out, you get support for those sample rates!
> The patch to enable hardware support for 44.1, 88.2, 176.4 and 192 kHz sample rates on both the input and output of the headphone jack was submitted directly upstream, and has been merged for 7.1. We also backported this to Asahi kernel 6.19.9, allowing users to take advantage of this immediately.
Nice bit of chip sleuthing and reverse engineering from the Asahi team!