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- Hacker News
- I was seriously worried the various incompatibilities the M3 bootloader had with Asahi's debugging setup would mean way slower bring-up than M1 and M2 had. Seems like that wasn't the case - or, at least, won't be the case anymore.by kmeisthax
- The processor version with the debugging incompstibilities was M4, I think.by timschumi
- Seems like once they got past that things weren’t too bad. Could have been way more incompatibilities waiting on the other side.by MBCook
- Is Asahi an LLM-hostile project? I'd imagine this is something that would be benefitted tremendously with a Fable class model
- Asahi appears to be LLM-hostile with extreme prejudice:by robocat
- Using LLMs in a project like this is also somewhat illegal, because LLMs may have inside information about apple devices and it's not allowed to use it.by worldsavior
- > It is the opinion of the Board that Large Language Models (LLMs), herein referred to as Slop Generators, are unsuitable for use as software engineering tools, particularly in the Free and Open Source Software movement.by superdisk
- > Meanwhile, donations and pledges kept slowly decreasing, and have done so since the project launched. Not enough to spell immediate doom for my dream of working on Asahi full time in the short term, but enough to make me wonder if any of this was really appreciated. The all-time peak monthly donation volume was the very first month or two. It seemed the more things we accomplished, the less support we had.
I think the issue is funding is so low the developers don’t even have access to newer Apple Siicon, let alone funding for token costs, etc.
https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-l...
by alberth - I truly understand the frustration of people asking when will it be done, and that DP Alt Mode got past that point. However it was in an official progress report, but then the last three don't mention it at all. (I have been running it without issue that whole time). A single line on the current scale of outstanding bugs would really help.by ZiiS
- I've pretty much given up on Asahi because of the years-long delays, and because there's no performant way to share disk space for data with MacOS.
By running Linux in a VM on MacOS on Apple silicon, you sacrifice some raw speed but in return you still get to run MacOS apps occasionally and have access to the same data from either MacOS or Linux without having to duplicate everything. And battery life is reasonable, which is not true yet with Asahi.
- Not saying your VM approach isn't right for you, but:
>and because there's no performant way to share disk space for data with MacOS
Have you tried a ZFS partition? If it's a desktop system use iSCSI to network storage (I'm not running Linux directly on my Studio or M4 mini but I still put my Home folder on the network)?
by xoa - Amazing progress as usual. It’s been fun watching just how much a few people can accomplish over the last few years despite working on sometimes unstable sand.by MBCook
- >The ARM specification mandates that cores in WFI loops should preserve all state. This is not the default mode on Apple Silicon.
I sometimes do wonder at what point do ARM find and test these stuff and ask Apple to follow. Obviously this is not the first time we see such thing happened.
by ksec - My understanding is that Apple has an extremely special license with ARM partially because they helped fund ARM when it was spun out of Acorn and they are not required to conform to the specifications like other licensees.by Eufrat
- This is allowed as long as you hold the architectural license (which Apple does), and the register is not exposed to userspace (this register is accessible only from kernel)by j16sdiz
- Yeah, you'll find out that va-api is not a good match for v4l2-requests. It does not pass decoded bitstream to the drivers as is, but pre-computes some things for some codecs, while v4l2-requests mostly expects original information parsed from the bitstream.by megous
- This project has been so impressive and exciting. I hope power management is a serious concern once they nail all the reverse engineering and functionality. Battery life would be a huge differentiator for the day to day macbook usage and traditionally Linux has been terrible at that due to lack of proprietary & highly tuned driversby owaislone
- How likely is such tuning to happen within the practical lifetime of these devices? It's already been years and Linux isn't even feature complete on newer models.
Apple's indifference to OSS does not give me much hope.
- We seriously need an open hardware law or something. Like it doesn't have to be regulation necessarily (as by law) but we really need to start very strongly pressuring/forcing companies to open up their hardware and provide all documentation to get any operating system to run on it, and to hell with what the manufacturer wants (to prevent things like attestation requirements). This entire "just let random volunteers figure it out" isn't sustainable and locks out competition.by ethin
- this seems like it should fall within a right to repair context
- I like this idea, but a prerequisite would likely be removing or substantially revamping patent and related IP law. That is probably also a good thing; I’d love if the bar to which process specificity in a patent was held was one that was sufficient for behavior reverse-engineering, but it seems very difficult to enact that change.by zbentley
- I think you’ll also find that the best way to strongly pressure companies to do something is by law. The work that Right to Repair advocates have been doing across the industry is fantastic.by arn3n
- I hope they will support M4 soon, I cant stand macos and its desire to be different than everything else by custom keyboard shortcuts etc.
After 2 years of usage, I still have issues with basic actions like copy paste.
edit: omg, writing this post, i checked if there is some way to use linux shortcuts and there is (Kanesh/KMonad or Karabiner-Elements). Maybe my suffering will finally stop.
by stiray - What issue do you have with copy/paste?
Command+c command+v has worked every single timein every program since macOS 7.0 when I started.
by testing22321 - If someone needs it, https://github.com/Fuzzy-and-Fluffy/windows-keyboard-for-mac
(to replies, yes, i understand that macos keyboard shortcuts might objectively be better, but if you are using multiple computers and macos is the only one of OSs, those shortcuts become pain in the neck)
by stiray - Or the more usual argument: Macos is broken in many ways and you're not allowed to fix it. But you can install some kind of add-on that will sit between you and the broken-as-designed UI and makes it look non-broken.by a96
- What I did was to simply remap Command to Control in the built-in keyboard settings. I don't know if that would solve your problems with shortcuts, but it solved mine. Muscle memory remains intact. The physical key combos on the Mac are now largely the same as on Windows or Linux.by wishfish
- Aren’t the shortcuts with the command key older than the PC ones (which started out as Shift+Insert etc. actually)? I wouldn’t call that desire to be different (also as mentioned below it has a lot of advantages in a terminal)by brewmarche
- Counterpoint: OSX has the only sane copy paste shortcuts. The linux standard of "sometimes ctrl-c/v, sometimes shift-ctrl-c/v, and if you mess up you might kill your task" is preposterous.by strbean
- I have immense respect for the incredible work that the Asahi team does, but at the rate that Intel and AMD have been catching up on power efficiency I wonder whether anyone will really _have_ to run Linux on M series laptops. There was a clear case for it back when Apple silicon absolutely dominated anything else you could buy but with Panther Lake I'm not so sure that Apple's lead will continue to be big enough to justify needing to wait several years for full Linux hardware compatibility to be reverse engineered.by dgunay