>.. 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!
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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)
Without stirring the pot too much, I’m a bit out of the loop on what the above poster implied and you took slight to. Could you share a little more about this and why you feel what they said was rude?
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
The new model is Intel or amd unless I missed something. They said in the video the battery life was entirely from video playback, which can be run on efficiency mode
My apologies, I don't know where I got the ARM architecture part from. I really want one of those machines, but I guess if they can't approach MacBook battery life yet I'm stuck on MacOS for now.
I think they said 22 hours of video playback in the video. If it even gets half of that for normal usage I'd be sold, the only thing stopping me giving it a shot is they are currently more expensive than the MBP and I'm not sure if they are worth it until the first reviews come in
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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, and 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.
> 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.
I'm not saying that I was expecting to run a Hackintosh and suddenly get the advantages of Apple hardware. I am doing a pure software-to-software comparison.
There was no application in the MacOS desktop that made me feel like I was missing out on something. Of all the tools that I am used to use - emacs + developer tools, email clients, messaging clients, media players, media managers, browsers, the occasional office productivity - none of the MacOS counterparts had any significant advantage over what I have in a Linux desktop.
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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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)
> My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility.
Is that on Mac hardware? I run a 14 year old Mac Book Air, and it works flawlessly with the latest Nixos, and has done for the last 11 years.
If you have issues on random PCs, it's because there are an enormous variety of them out there, with all kinds of incompatibilities that have to be worked around. On Mac hardware, there tends to be a more restricted number of variants, and after a few years, Linux becomes rock solid on them.
So the OP is correct, Linux on Mac hardware is the best combo.
Liquid Ass enters the chat, Apple can’t even make rounded corners anymore.
I was burned by the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard, and once Liquid Ass was announced I knew it was time to get out.
Sold my MacBook Pro M2 Pro, which has a stupid gigantic notch that blocks the menu bar items with no built-in mechanism for getting to them when they overflow.
Now I’m on a Framework 13” and I’ve had zero issues with Linux. Everything just works. KDE Plasma is way more customizable than macOS or Windows. I’m finally able to ditch slow Homebrew and use a real package manager. I can finally play light PC games on my laptop without dealing with streaming or Crossover.
My preorder is in for the Framework 13 Pro, which looks to get even closer to delivering a MacBook Pro for Linux. Meanwhile, Apple hasn’t changed their chassis design in 5 years, while Framework updates their hardware constantly while maintaining cross-compatibility. A company with less than 500 employees is catching up to a trillion dollar corporation.
I’ve already got my fully modular LPCAMM RAM delivered and ready with no Apple tax. I’ll get better battery life watching YouTube videos than a MacBook Pro and the graphics are just as powerful as the M5 base chip.
And if something breaks I won’t have to deal with the nightmare I went through with my 2016 MacBook Pro.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
Being the least bad doesn't make something good. macOS is the least bad choice for the majority of people that just want a machine to mostly browse the Internet, look at their photos, do some light productivity work, and participate in their ecosystem. It also arguably hosts has the best software options for creative work (although that's reaping the fruits of seeds planted long ago - not sure there's much about macOS that makes it inherently better for those tasks these days). For development, its advantage is the hardware it's running on. To achieve any level of customization or to define my own workflow that isn't what Apple wants me to do or to work across multiple systems, I have to fight macOS rather than work with it. Linux on the other hand does what I tell it to do.
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.
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?
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.
The vast majority of people that buy Macs for the ecosystem aren't going to switch to Linux. That market will remain untouched. Outside of a few gamers who might want to put up with the x86-to-ARM translation layer and (for most A to AAA games) Proton to run some non-Mac games. And even they'll probably still dual-boot.
There's a portion of another market: people who want to run Linux and want a powerful laptop who buy x86 Laptops right now. Apple could expend very little relative effort while offering no official support by helping Asahi get that to a first class platform. They won't capture them in the ecosystem (and they never would have) but will still benefit from hardware sales to them.
Obviously, if they sold their hardware at a loss and subsidized that with ecosystem capture that would be a non-starter. But from everything we know, the hardware itself is very profitable.
Yeah, and having the only supported OS be MacOS means they can entice people to upgrade when they want. No continuing on with 8+ year old hardware and a lightweight Linux distro even if it's fine for the intended use case.
They do also make a lot of money selling hardware, and as things stand today that business happens to make them look like the first tech giant to actually profit from the AI boom (because the hardware they've been developing internally for years happens to be among the best consumer-grade options for self-hosting LLMs). Making their hardware more attractive to tinkerers could be a winning move right now.
This, but also you would be allowing people to learn Linux. Developer with a Mac has to be one of the most common linux defectors. I suspect most people don't realize how doable and comfortable the switch can be.
It’s been my experience that developers running Mac already know how to use Linux and actively choose to use Mac. Unless the company is forcing it at least.
They pay for the hardware that they run Linux on. Apple's hardware division is very profitable without the "value" adds they run through their ecosystem, and those people never would have bought into the ecosystem whether they used MacOS or not.
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).
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.
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.
Do you seriously think someone who installed Asahi is gonna walk into a genius bar and ask for help with it? And often enough that it becomes a burden??
And according to their stats page that sibling linked it’s more like a few tens of thousands of users.
We really need to retire this phrase, it’s become a humblebrag way of calling the other party delusional without even trying to understand.
The list here though is long: priorities, accuracy concerns, blurring the line on official support, IP restrictions with third parties (even Apple uses plenty of licensed cores), etc.
I don't see it that way. It's just the GP poster saying that they don't get it. Usually that means the GP poster isn't experienced enough to understand the rationality. So I generally assume the GP poster is simply naive.
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.
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!!
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... :-/
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.
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.
Unfortunately iPhones have locked bootloaders that prohibit installing other operating systems. People have gotten Linux running on iPhones, but it requires jailbreaking and that has gotten much harder over time. And it's not really worth putting effort into developing an OS if nobody is going to be able to install it.
Nothing is stopping you from using LLMs when contributing to their project (I think). One reason might simply be that they would rather spend the (very sparse) donation money on anything else but tokens.
I'm glad they dropped the ban on HN readers[1]. That was my very first impression of Asahi Linux that I ever encountered and it's unfortunately what I think of every time I see it show up here.
Honestly, knowing what I know about marcan, the decision was probably the result of an overwhelming/strong emotional reaction.
Not to just shit all over him or anything, but it really sucks to see someone who is genuinely top-ten-on-earth when it comes to "real hacking" struggle so much with socialisation and mental health.
It is weird to blame the victim for reacting to being harassed by a mob. That is a normal thing to have a reaction to. Perhaps rather than blaming people's social skills and mental health, we should instead blame the culture that normalises harassing people on the internet, even to the point of suicide (as happened in byuu's case). You are basically advocating that it is better for individuals to change to accept a shitty society as a given rather than advocating for society to change to be less shitty.
>It is weird to blame the victim for reacting to being harassed by a mob.
It's not victim blaming, marcan was clearly mentally unwell. He delusionally thought there was some harassment mob after him. After the fallout with Linux kernel devs, the lolipedo accusations, and him being outed as the vtuber Asahi Lina, he arguably did the correct thing: deleted every social media account and abandoned Asahi Linux. I hope he stepped away from screens and spent some time outdoors.
I'm genuinely unfamiliar of the harassment campaign that HN launched against him.
(I am familiar with some comments debating the validity of Byuu/Near's gender identity, and marcan's extremely strong reaction to that, but no actual harassment campaigns)
This marcan person had problem with Go, he had problem with Apple fans, he had problems with linux committers, so much he left internet or something. To say everyone but marcan was wrong is just a kind of fanboyism and it hardly helps marcan.
This person liked to dish out as much as next person but display extreme reaction when served.
This is not a dichotomy. It's not healthy to take random online comments to heart so much. It's also bad to make such ridiculous comments. Both can be true at the same time.
>.. 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!
whoa, bit perfect CD/flac playback in 44.1, that's a killer feature.
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.
Hardware often reports supporting 44.1kHz but internally resamples it to 48kHz so you're better off properly resampling it yourself.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
How does Ubuntu Linux on recent Qualcomm (ex-Apple Nuvia) Arm laptops compare to Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon?
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)
Without stirring the pot too much, I’m a bit out of the loop on what the above poster implied and you took slight to. Could you share a little more about this and why you feel what they said was rude?
> 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.
Like they say, "when you're 90% done you just need to take care of the other 90%"
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.
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)
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.
They're talking about the new model announced, with a larger battery and ARM architecture. Not released yet, I don't think.
The new Framework Pros are still x86, but the newest Intel generation appears to provide a substantial boost to efficiency.
The new model is Intel or amd unless I missed something. They said in the video the battery life was entirely from video playback, which can be run on efficiency mode
My apologies, I don't know where I got the ARM architecture part from. I really want one of those machines, but I guess if they can't approach MacBook battery life yet I'm stuck on MacOS for now.
I think they said 22 hours of video playback in the video. If it even gets half of that for normal usage I'd be sold, the only thing stopping me giving it a shot is they are currently more expensive than the MBP and I'm not sure if they are worth it until the first reviews come in
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
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)
> 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.
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.
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, and 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.
> 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.
I'm not saying that I was expecting to run a Hackintosh and suddenly get the advantages of Apple hardware. I am doing a pure software-to-software comparison.
There was no application in the MacOS desktop that made me feel like I was missing out on something. Of all the tools that I am used to use - emacs + developer tools, email clients, messaging clients, media players, media managers, browsers, the occasional office productivity - none of the MacOS counterparts had any significant advantage over what I have in a Linux desktop.
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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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)
MacOS is also optimised for M series chips in a way that realistically no linux distribution ever will be.
Definitely good to have the option, but you'll most likely never get quite the same performance or battery life on linux
> My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility.
Is that on Mac hardware? I run a 14 year old Mac Book Air, and it works flawlessly with the latest Nixos, and has done for the last 11 years.
If you have issues on random PCs, it's because there are an enormous variety of them out there, with all kinds of incompatibilities that have to be worked around. On Mac hardware, there tends to be a more restricted number of variants, and after a few years, Linux becomes rock solid on them.
So the OP is correct, Linux on Mac hardware is the best combo.
Liquid Ass enters the chat, Apple can’t even make rounded corners anymore.
I was burned by the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard, and once Liquid Ass was announced I knew it was time to get out.
Sold my MacBook Pro M2 Pro, which has a stupid gigantic notch that blocks the menu bar items with no built-in mechanism for getting to them when they overflow.
Now I’m on a Framework 13” and I’ve had zero issues with Linux. Everything just works. KDE Plasma is way more customizable than macOS or Windows. I’m finally able to ditch slow Homebrew and use a real package manager. I can finally play light PC games on my laptop without dealing with streaming or Crossover.
My preorder is in for the Framework 13 Pro, which looks to get even closer to delivering a MacBook Pro for Linux. Meanwhile, Apple hasn’t changed their chassis design in 5 years, while Framework updates their hardware constantly while maintaining cross-compatibility. A company with less than 500 employees is catching up to a trillion dollar corporation.
I’ve already got my fully modular LPCAMM RAM delivered and ready with no Apple tax. I’ll get better battery life watching YouTube videos than a MacBook Pro and the graphics are just as powerful as the M5 base chip.
And if something breaks I won’t have to deal with the nightmare I went through with my 2016 MacBook Pro.
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.
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.
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.
That’s called support. We count that as support.
They could anonymously drop off a package to the Asahi team.
> 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.
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.)
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?
Little to no monetary benefit, hardware changes now need to be documented for Linux, loudest and most critical users but smallest volume.
And risk of loss of control on the software ecosystem.
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.
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.
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.
They are operating under a patchwork of NDAs. It would take some effort to determine what they can disclose.
> Focus is about saying no to 100 good ideas so you can pursue one great idea.
Important context to understand why.
If they think macOS is one great idea, that's a terrible misjudgment.
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.
Being the least bad doesn't make something good. macOS is the least bad choice for the majority of people that just want a machine to mostly browse the Internet, look at their photos, do some light productivity work, and participate in their ecosystem. It also arguably hosts has the best software options for creative work (although that's reaping the fruits of seeds planted long ago - not sure there's much about macOS that makes it inherently better for those tasks these days). For development, its advantage is the hardware it's running on. To achieve any level of customization or to define my own workflow that isn't what Apple wants me to do or to work across multiple systems, I have to fight macOS rather than work with it. Linux on the other hand does what I tell it to do.
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.
They get more public goodwill from a single ad. The chronically online Linux-using engineer community is too small to matter.
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?
Developers build many of the applications that make the platform desirable. Steve Ballmer at least seem to get that part. ;)
The developers for their platforms. Which, crucially, Linux developers are not.
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.
The cynical take is that they make a shit ton of money from services and Linux running on a MacBook won’t help them do that.
The vast majority of people that buy Macs for the ecosystem aren't going to switch to Linux. That market will remain untouched. Outside of a few gamers who might want to put up with the x86-to-ARM translation layer and (for most A to AAA games) Proton to run some non-Mac games. And even they'll probably still dual-boot.
There's a portion of another market: people who want to run Linux and want a powerful laptop who buy x86 Laptops right now. Apple could expend very little relative effort while offering no official support by helping Asahi get that to a first class platform. They won't capture them in the ecosystem (and they never would have) but will still benefit from hardware sales to them.
Obviously, if they sold their hardware at a loss and subsidized that with ecosystem capture that would be a non-starter. But from everything we know, the hardware itself is very profitable.
Yeah, and having the only supported OS be MacOS means they can entice people to upgrade when they want. No continuing on with 8+ year old hardware and a lightweight Linux distro even if it's fine for the intended use case.
They do also make a lot of money selling hardware, and as things stand today that business happens to make them look like the first tech giant to actually profit from the AI boom (because the hardware they've been developing internally for years happens to be among the best consumer-grade options for self-hosting LLMs). Making their hardware more attractive to tinkerers could be a winning move right now.
This, but also you would be allowing people to learn Linux. Developer with a Mac has to be one of the most common linux defectors. I suspect most people don't realize how doable and comfortable the switch can be.
It’s been my experience that developers running Mac already know how to use Linux and actively choose to use Mac. Unless the company is forcing it at least.
Linux users don't pay for anything anyway
They pay for the hardware that they run Linux on. Apple's hardware division is very profitable without the "value" adds they run through their ecosystem, and those people never would have bought into the ecosystem whether they used MacOS or not.
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).
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.
so they don't care about users, they care about themself?
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.
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.
Do you seriously think someone who installed Asahi is gonna walk into a genius bar and ask for help with it? And often enough that it becomes a burden??
And according to their stats page that sibling linked it’s more like a few tens of thousands of users.
> I don't understand
We really need to retire this phrase, it’s become a humblebrag way of calling the other party delusional without even trying to understand.
The list here though is long: priorities, accuracy concerns, blurring the line on official support, IP restrictions with third parties (even Apple uses plenty of licensed cores), etc.
I don't see it that way. It's just the GP poster saying that they don't get it. Usually that means the GP poster isn't experienced enough to understand the rationality. So I generally assume the GP poster is simply naive.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!
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... :-/
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.
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.
It's always sad to think what more can be achieved / how faster we might've arrived at M3 support if Asahi Lina is still active.
Is anybody running Linux headlessly on the m4 mac minis successfully? I'm seeing them flying around used now at tempting prices...
Fascinating project like always. Thank you Asahi team!
Is there an equivalent of this for iphones so we can give them a second life?
Unfortunately iPhones have locked bootloaders that prohibit installing other operating systems. People have gotten Linux running on iPhones, but it requires jailbreaking and that has gotten much harder over time. And it's not really worth putting effort into developing an OS if nobody is going to be able to install it.
You can run Android on an iPhone 7 as a demo, but not for any practical benefit: https://projectsandcastle.org/
Running what exactly? Older iOS versions? Android?
Linux.
Genuine question: can't LLMs be used to accelerate this project?
They've really strict policy on LLMs. They pretty much don't allow using them, because the slop so much in this kind of region.
Nothing is stopping you from using LLMs when contributing to their project (I think). One reason might simply be that they would rather spend the (very sparse) donation money on anything else but tokens.
Does anyone knows if it runs on M4 Mac machines?
It runs only on M1 and M2. M3 is being worked on.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m4/
Thanks! That is a good page for me to monitor!
I run Asahi (the previous release) on an M2 Air and it works great except for high power drain when sleeping.
I still want to run it on an M3 MBP so it's nice to hear progress on that is happening.
Do you use a docking station and an external display?
I'm glad they dropped the ban on HN readers[1]. That was my very first impression of Asahi Linux that I ever encountered and it's unfortunately what I think of every time I see it show up here.
[1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/commit/e0...
Because they got a lot of trolls and Apple fans. The decision was not made lightly.
Honestly, knowing what I know about marcan, the decision was probably the result of an overwhelming/strong emotional reaction.
Not to just shit all over him or anything, but it really sucks to see someone who is genuinely top-ten-on-earth when it comes to "real hacking" struggle so much with socialisation and mental health.
It is weird to blame the victim for reacting to being harassed by a mob. That is a normal thing to have a reaction to. Perhaps rather than blaming people's social skills and mental health, we should instead blame the culture that normalises harassing people on the internet, even to the point of suicide (as happened in byuu's case). You are basically advocating that it is better for individuals to change to accept a shitty society as a given rather than advocating for society to change to be less shitty.
>It is weird to blame the victim for reacting to being harassed by a mob.
It's not victim blaming, marcan was clearly mentally unwell. He delusionally thought there was some harassment mob after him. After the fallout with Linux kernel devs, the lolipedo accusations, and him being outed as the vtuber Asahi Lina, he arguably did the correct thing: deleted every social media account and abandoned Asahi Linux. I hope he stepped away from screens and spent some time outdoors.
I'm genuinely unfamiliar of the harassment campaign that HN launched against him.
(I am familiar with some comments debating the validity of Byuu/Near's gender identity, and marcan's extremely strong reaction to that, but no actual harassment campaigns)
This marcan person had problem with Go, he had problem with Apple fans, he had problems with linux committers, so much he left internet or something. To say everyone but marcan was wrong is just a kind of fanboyism and it hardly helps marcan.
This person liked to dish out as much as next person but display extreme reaction when served.
This is not a dichotomy. It's not healthy to take random online comments to heart so much. It's also bad to make such ridiculous comments. Both can be true at the same time.
How is that a ban?