I never understood why anyone would put their time into developing this instead of drivers for riskv or something.
This is not meant to fight but to reveal an alternate perspective.
I never understand why people leave these comments. That is, I do not truly understand the objection. I assume these comments are anti-Apple or anti-corporate in some way but I am really just guessing.
Here is what I think could motivate people to work on Linux support for this hardware.
1 - people have this hardware or like it and want to run Linux on it. In other words, people with the skills are serving their own interests and not driving towards some great social outcome like the question “why not riscv” would suppose. This is the “scratching your own itch” aspect of Open Source.
2 - people with the skills find this hardware interesting or are attracted to the challenge that it has been made difficult. Similar to #1 with a different motivations but still a personal one.
3 - some people are drawn to “freeing” things that are closed. The more proprietary, the more attractive it is as a target.
4 - people with the skills are thinking of their impact on the world and realize that these are extremely popular devices that are destined for the landfill after really short lives if allowed to remain fully proprietary.
If I had the skills, honestly I would find all of these compelling. The last one would provide the greatest fulfillment. There are A LOT of these devices being sold. I think Apple may be the single most popular laptop brand. The social good that comes from providing Linux support for Apple Silicon may be greater than time spent on any other hardware.
I am somebody that will ultimately benefit from all these efforts. It has been years since I have given Apple any money but quite like their hardware. I have 4 old Apple laptops, 2 iMacs, and one Mac Pro. These were all bought used or acquired for free. They are amazing Linux machines. I do not have any Apple silicon but I almost certainly will at some point. And it looks like the M1 and M2 hardware is already a great experience. In my view, old high-end gear is far better than new low-end gear. An Apple M1 laptop today is still nicer than the lower half of the Windows market. Buying a used Mac keeps two machines out of the landfill.
But, if I had the skills, the joy of just getting it to work would also be a motivator. It would be a fascinating project. And it is one that brings a lot of positive attention and even employment opportunity as we can see from where Asahi Linux contributors have ended up. Making Apple Silicon work provides a lot of what draws people to write free software.
Developing the RISC-V ecosystem would also be fulfilling. But this even helps with that. Creating a large and vibrant ARM Linux desktop community helps diversify and mature Linux in all kinds of ways that will also benefit RISC-V. One of these is just normalizing for us users the idea of running on something that is not x86. Another is increasing the size of the software ecosystem that builds and runs on RISC (either ARM or RISC-V.
And if the objection is that Apple will see greater demand for their proprietary products as a result of these efforts, I think we are greatly overestimating the current size of the community as a percentage or the overlap between “mainstream”’ Apple buyers and those of us with the patience to wait or suffer the limitations.
This is existing high performance hardware that you can buy. I’d love for there to be something equivalent built using RISCV, but there’s not.
Hopefully we will start to see some this year or next. Maybe not Apple Silicon level but Ascalon shows a lot of promise. And something may come out of the Qualcomm Ventana acquisition.
Still waiting for the latest Spacemit to drop as well, which will at least be RVA23. Ascalon will be the first “high performance” RISC-V though.
Hopefully this stuff pans out. I’d love see it happen.
Too bad I have an M4 MacBook Air.
I just want to game in my M4 Max already :’(((((
deleted by creator
it’s very affordable with the 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, 13.6" model available for $750
my new laptop literally is more than double in each spec and costed $100 less; i guess mac people have a definition of affordable whether they’re linux people or not.
still, it’s nice to learn that this is an option now.
my new laptop literally is more than double in each spec
13.6"
Where did you find a laptop with a 27.2" or larger screen?
missed that one, but it would have been nice. lol
Unified operations vs static resource operations. It’s like saying work smarter than harder. Container vs VM. Or even AMD vs Intel. They all accomplish the same things but do it differently. So you don’t need that much for Apple devices/workflows.
It’s not an apples to apples comparison because the architecture is so different. Notice his observation in the article:
I am very impressed with how smooth and problem-free Asahi Linux is. It is incredibly responsive and feels even smoother than my Arch Linux desktop with a 16 core AMD Ryzen 7945HX and 64GB of RAM.
M1 architecture has a huge advantage being a SoC and having shared memory between the CPU and the GPU which avoids the need for a bus. I’m still using M1 macbook with 8gb of RAM that I got to keep at one of my jobs a few years ago, and it’s incredibly snappy. I’ve tried x86 laptops with way better specs on paper, and they don’t come anywhere close in practice.
macs always feel smooth and snappy; they’re well polished compared to the core/libreboot clevos i had previously and i really like my macbook m2.
the price tag always get me with macs and they were the primary reason why i bought those clevos: i had the dubious pleasure of carnally getting to know a quartet of very highly placed engineers/directors/managers while i lived in silicon valley and what i learned during the pillow talk about both the company and about the employees makes me refuse to ever buy from them.
so, instead of spending the $$$ on mac hardware; i spent it on core/libreboot as my feeble and almost infinitesimally small middle finger to apple as well as my equally feeble & small (plus lazy) attempt to leave this world slightly better that i found it. lol
i haven’t yet figured out if it’s the institution or the employees that makes apple the biggest display of labor aristocracy i’ve ever seen and i doubt i ever will since not even most of their employees are aware of oniony layers of palace intrigue that goes on at the top. (no wonder why the forced chinese had to sell off grindr; that’s the only other way you can find this shit out). lol
My view is that all corps are slimy, some are just more blatant about it than others. I do agree that Apple stuff tends to be overpriced, and I’ve love to see somebody else offer a similar architecture using RISCV that would target Linux. I’m kind of hoping some Chinese vendors will start doing that at some point. What Apple did with their architecture is pretty clever, but it’s not magic and now that we know how and why it works, seems like it would make sense for somebody else to do something similar.
The big roadblock in the west is the fact that Windows has a huge market share, and the market for Linux users is just too small for a hardware vendor to target without having Windows support. But in China, there’s an active push to get off US tech stack, and that means Windows doesn’t have the same relevance there.
Also the article says that in the context of paying for the apple physical laptop experience, which is really top notch (so everything other than the mobo and is immediate bits).
Eg my use-case - I only ever need my laptop for extremely light work, so experience in handling it is way more important than the computing hardware.
Actually I would still want a MacBook with like an Intel Pentium in it - but I can’t buy a good frame with a shitty CPU, I need to buy a better overall laptop.I still don’t own anything Apple, but with Linux I just might, that’s why I keep tabs on this project.
I really hope the project doesn’t die, they had some people leave recently and there was some drama over that. Apple hardware is really nice, and with Linux it would be strictly superior to macos which is just bloated garbage at this point. I’m also hoping we’ll see somebody else make a similar architecture to M series using ARM or RISCV targeting Linux. Maybe we’ll see some Chinese vendors go RISCV route in the future.
Yeah, I never though the project would cover apple silicon tbh, it’s amazing what they are doing.
I too really hope RISC-V becomes a thing, slowly getting them foss PCs would be such a nice thing for humanity.
(With EU curiously looking into it’s own independence maybe we could invest into our own RISC-V production …)Exactly, and there is already some work happening in that regard. This project is focusing on making a high performance RISCV architecture https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan
If an old CPU would work for, I highly recommend and older Intel based Mac. They run amazingly well with Linux and, as you say, the “experience” is excellent.
The MacBooks with T2 chips are a bit less ideal as they require a special kernel. And the 2020 MacBook Air has crappy thermals and runs up the fan. There is a version of EndeavourOS that installs everything ou-of-the box through. The WiFi in these old Macs is out of tree but many of them require the Broadcom wl driver which Arch Linux distros ship by default. Depending on model, the out-of-tree FaceTimeHD camera module may be required but it ships in Arch distros as a DKMS packages. So, again, everything just works.
They really are a joy to use. I bought a 2013 MacBook Air a few years ago for less than $100. I bought it to go on backpacking trip because it was light and I did not worry about breaking it or having it stolen. I love it so much I still use it several times a week and it still amazes me what it can do.
Yes, I’m looking at an Intel Air bcs of exactly what you point out, but then my brainhole always goes like ‘you don’t even need a laptop, you use it a couple of times a year, it’s just about a new gadget’.
Is Asahi totally ready for daily driving yet?
In terms of functionality, it works well. The main limitation is software availability. If you rely on anything that can’t be built for the architecture then it’s not going to be a good daily driver.
I’m pretty sure HDMI out through USB is still not supported also
I haven’t actually tried that. I got it running on my M1, but only used it with the laptop screen.
