Coming Soon: Fedora for Apple Silicon Macs

https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-for-apple-silicon-macs/

341 165 3 years ago

This is so exciting! The Asahi team has done some really impressive work. I can't wait for it to start to make its way into mainstream distributions.

AdmiralAsshat2• 3 years ago

Battery life would be the big thing, I think. There's not a single person I know who wouldn't like having Linux on their M1/M2 Macbooks--they're beautiful devices--but if you're not getting something approaching MacOS's battery life, then there's not that much separating it from another similarly-specced ultrabook.

brundolf• 3 years ago

From anecdotes I've heard, battery life on Asahi Linux is already great

input_sh• 3 years ago

Annecdotaly, it'll last you through an entire work day, but probably not into double digits.

malermeister• 3 years ago

I'd love to see some benchmarks! I have an M1 device and don't really love macOS, but the battery life is just sooo good.

I'd be super happy if I could just run Arch on this thing instead.

aaomidi• 3 years ago

Why would battery life be impacted?

The main reason for bad battery life is hardware acceleration for certain tasks. Once that's settled, the computer shouldn't start producing more heat out of the blue.

callalex• 3 years ago

Hardware acceleration is not some binary state these days, there are a ton of specialized bits of hardware under the Apple M chip umbrella.

dev_tty012• 3 years ago

The main reason for bad battery life is hardware acceleration for certain tasks.

I guess this was a typo. MacOS/Apple Silicon (and other CPU architectures) save a lot of power via hardware acceleration. For instance, there are dedicated hardware video decoding blocks that use much less power than implementing video decoding with software.

The MacOS kernel takes advantage of all of these hardware specifics. MacOS also uses a number of other techniques like process wakeup coalescing, dedicated hardware for memory compression, process specific efficiency/performance core choices, ...

Apple is getting a lot of power improvements via codesign of the processor and the OS.

To do the same set of tasks with a similar power profile, Asahi will have to include system hooks that take advantage of all the dedicated lower power hardware functions and do a similar set of optimizations. They have done great work so far and will likely continue, but it isn't the simple tradeoff you are suggesting.

jtietema• 3 years ago

Because the linux drivers might not support all the power saving states for all the hardware in the device.

For example: I bought a Dell XPS 9 months ago. With the earlier Fedora 37 kernels, it didn't put the Nvidia card into power saving mode, causing battery life to be less than an hour. Now it seems to work correctly and battery life is 3-4 hours for me.

maccard3• 3 years ago

I'm perfectly content not having Linux on my M1 MacBook.

That said, I don't want that to stop someone else from having it!

AdmiralAsshat2• 3 years ago

I should probably have clarified, there's not a single person I know who uses Linux as their daily driver that wouldn't want the option of having it run on an M1 MacBook. I'll grant that the vast majority of Apple users probably don't care about running Linux on it.

SxC97• 3 years ago

There's not a single person I know who wouldn't like having Linux on their M1/M2 Macbooks

Well… OP probably doesn’t know you… /s

psanford2• 3 years ago

I've been running Asahi for a full year on my m2 air. The battery life is quite good. Yes, I think macOS has batter battery optimizations than linux, but compared to other laptops running linux it really is quite good.

paddim8• 3 years ago

It's good, but not amazing. With these laptops, you expect amazing.

beebeepka• 3 years ago

Talk with numbers. My cheap 6800H 14 inch laptop can do 12 hours.

a1o2• 3 years ago

I imagine a repurposed MacMini M1 will also be like raspberry pi on steroids.

saagarjha3• 3 years ago

Being like 20x more expensive helps ;)

NovaDudely• 3 years ago

I doubt there would ever be parity but it could be good enough.

Have to hand it Apple OS team, they know how to squeeze a lot out of there hardware.

A while back I was trying to get an old G5 running and looking at the various OS options, many said just go with MacOS 10.4 - it was the most optimized OS for the system even today. When software and hardware work together, it can be pretty cool.

xp842• 3 years ago

I mean, for a kind of museum piece, to get the true experience of using the computer I’d agree for sure just use original OS. But if one wanted to be able to use it for most functional purposes, it’s sad how the complete lack of backcompat in MacOS makes using an old MacOS tough — which is sad because new Linux often can work surprisingly fine on the same hardware. Like, current Debian on a 2008 Core 2 Duo is a fine computer that you can browse the Web and do basic office tasks on. It was shocking to me!

IntelMiner2• 3 years ago

As a Quad G5 owner, might I recommend OS X "Sorbet" It's an unofficial merging of OS X 10.5 with PowerPC builds of 10.6 components. Even on ancient G3's it out-performs both 10.4 and 10.5 in benchmarks

sharikous• 3 years ago

Yes but to be fair there haven't been a lot of ppc64 machines apart from Apple's G5 desktops.

And the same is true for Apple Silicon.

If you are basically the only one to use some piece of hardware (and you are the one who designed it) your software will be the most optimized out there almost by definition.

This is to say that the focus is on the decision to customize heavily your hardware. Once you decide that it's a pretty low bar to say that your software is the best there is for running on that hardware.

dangus• 3 years ago

Even if Linux kills 50% of battery life compared to macOS you’re still looking at a system that’s in the top tier of longevity compared to x86 Ultrabooks.

kbknapp• 3 years ago

The fact that my M2 has an effectively double size battery from my Fedora based Thinkpad (M2 has a 100Wh battery, while the Thinkpad has a 57Wh) means it just needs to be not terribly less efficient than x86 Fedora laptop for me to be happy, which from the sounds of it is already the case.

vbezhenar• 3 years ago

I don't care about battery life. By macbook is connected 99% of the time.

That said, I'm satisfied with Linux in VM. Especially with Rosetta. It's actually funny that I'd get degraded experience because of the lack of the Rosetta in native Linux.

e12e• 3 years ago

My main gripe with macOS is awful window management and missing apis to enable improvement (eg managing desktop/screens/workspaces). And no proper sloppy focus/focus follows mouse.

based_gigachad2• 3 years ago

I wonder when we'll have fully functional HDR and neural engine so that the creative professionals could try using Linux on their Apple silicon Macs (software support is another story, though Davinci Resolve is already there)

stirlo2• 3 years ago

There’s a work in progress/prototype Neural engine driver already.

fredski42• 3 years ago

Would something like KVM work?

wmf• 3 years ago

Yes, KVM works (but only to run ARM VMs).

dmvdoug2• 3 years ago

This is awesome news. I have been trying to tinker with getting Ubuntu working on both an older Intel Mac and my M1, but it’s an almighty pain in the ass hardware-wise. And I ran across more than one person who felt it necessary to point out that me buying an Apple computer was what the problem was. Like, really? That’s a real effective way to win people over.

defer• 3 years ago

Well, it's understandable. If you talk about it with other linux-on-MacBook tinkerers I'm sure they'll be more sensible to your cause.

But generally, if you pointed that out to me I'd say the same, picking that hardware puts you in a harder path. Also, I'm not sure if Linux users in general have any interest in winning people over.

dmvdoug2• 3 years ago

I’m not talking about Linux users in general. I’m talking about the subset who hang around forums and other online spaces and purport to help newbies with problems.

Ironically enough, then, I figured out on my own that the biggest obstacle I was encountering with my Intel MPB was Ubuntu’s distribution of firmware, where they officially pretend not to know about certain non-free device drivers, even though they vaguely gesture at the process of acquiring them in their respective official docs. Whereas Debian straight-up distributes them in their ISOs.

Can’t say I’m a big fan of Ubuntu’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge approach to “standing up for free software,” where they get you started down a path then steadfastly refuse to help because VIRTUE! Debian’s approach is saner. And so I’ll be tinkering with Debian, I guess.

alphanullmeric2• 3 years ago

I used to hate on Macs until I was given one by my employer. Then I realized that despite how awful macOS is, the laptop itself is completely unrivalled. There is no Lenovo/xps/framework/tuxbook/tongfang/clevo/whatever that comes close to the overall package of a MacBook. It has the stiffest body, the quietest fans, the biggest battery, the best screen and trackpad, etc. Even worse is the fact that a framework 16 is more than an M2 pro with an education discount. And now, the biggest flaw of a MacBook (macos) is fixed.

totallywrong2• 3 years ago

Still rocking a 2015 MBP with Fedora here. Screen, body, keyboard, and trackpad are so good. This news make me consider buying Apple silicon, which I'd never do if I had to use MacOS.

unethical_ban• 3 years ago

Does the trackpad function mac-like? Is it still overall better than a Lenovo, for example, or does the software bring it down?

mdasen• 3 years ago

Part of it is that Apple has the margins that they can spend a little more on parts. They know they don't have to compete on price as much as PCs do. People aren't going to ditch the Mac over $25 or $50. However, people do regularly compare prices on PC laptops looking to save small amounts of money. That means that Apple can spend a little more designing and ordering a fan that's quieter with a better design and more premium parts.

Also, because there are so many PC laptops, it's really hard to get a good review of a PC laptop. There are so many configurations and PC makers often make small (but meaningful) changes to designs during a product's lifecycle. All of a sudden, the one you bought has a less bright display or the cooling system isn't as good or whatever. It makes it hard to reward companies for creating good products. There are premium PC laptops, but they still suffer from some of these decisions and they often cost about the same.

I've looked for alternatives to the Mac, but at this point I've stopped. I'm sick of doing research on junk to try and save a few bucks, I'm sick of trackpads that are unusable, and with the new M-series processors I simply never want to go back to a high-wattage processor.

I actually like macOS, but I'm really glad happy to see Linux advancing on Apple hardware. The Asahi Linux developers are amazing and I love reading their write-ups.

lotsofpulp2• 3 years ago

Part of it is that Apple has the margins that they can spend a little more on parts.

This part is duplicated by the business or professional branded products of Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc.

I think the part that cannot be duplicated (without very significant time and money) is the tight integration between software and hardware. Even if the other companies spend a little more for the premium components, they are not able to squeeze out the same performance.

kaba09• 3 years ago

There are no ends to shitty, luxuriously priced laptops that are nowhere near the quality of any M-series laptop. Though I did hear good news about last generation intel processors, hopefully some competition will emerge - we can only win from thatz

andrekandre• 3 years ago

  > how awful macOS is

just curious, but what parts are awful? customization? or just generally bugs?

tristan957• 3 years ago

No window snapping.

alphanullmeric2• 3 years ago

The window management and workspaces are horrible compared to gnome. nothing you expect to work actually works. Basic things like putting more than 2 windows in the same workspace are impossible. The animations are also worse than gnome, which is very surprising considering how macOS is known for its animations.

AbacusAvenger• 3 years ago

Personally I have two major issues with macOS: CPU usage and bugs.

There are a ton of background services that periodically spin up for no obvious reason, consuming a ton of CPU for a few minutes at a time, then go back to idle. I don't know what they're doing or why. Luckily since they're background services, they're bound to the efficiency cores on Apple Silicon, so they don't hurt battery life or thermals too much most of the time.

And as far as bugs go, the worst part is that bug reports through the Feedback app go largely ignored and bugs seem to keep accumulating. Even for bugs with clear and well-documented repro cases, Apple doesn't seem to pay any attention.

I'm a game developer, so the majority of my bug reports come from issues I've experienced with the graphics drivers or with Xcode. Here's a few examples:

- On macOS devices with > 60Hz displays, there is some awful stuttering with Metal apps in full screen mode. For some reason, CAMetalLayer nextDrawable sometimes just takes a very long time whenever it uses direct-to-display mode for presentation. That mode is implicitly enabled for full screen Metal apps, in order to bypass the display compositor and theoretically reduce latency. This bug also applies to MacBooks with the built in "ProMotion" (120Hz) displays. I'd be perfectly happy if there was just some flag to say "don't use direct-to-display", but if there is one, it's not documented anywhere. I haven't found a workaround yet. I originally reported this in August 2022. Apple replied once in October 2022 to say "we can't reproduce this, please provide a demo app". I provided the app that reliably reproduces the problem within an hour of their reply, but they've been silent since.

- Metal and OpenGL (the latter is emulated via Metal on Apple Silicon Macs) both exhibit a bug with triangle merging that causes partial derivatives to go very wrong along primitive edges. There's a usable workaround for this on the Metal side (just enable a [[sample_mask]] even if you're not doing multisampling). There's no such workaround for the OpenGL side, unfortunately. I was able to work with Asahi Lina to fix this for Mesa on Asahi Linux, and the fix itself was actually really trivial and didn't require a sample mask hack (it took a lot of debugging to figure out, though -- but that's how reverse engineering goes). To solve it, Apple would simply need to set a particular bit to disable triangle merging whenever the fragment shader uses derivatives. I reported this issue in December 2022, and Apple hasn't replied.

- This one is not as egregious as some of the bugs I've reported, and the Xcode team has responded reliably in the past. This is the first Xcode bug report I've had where they didn't acknowledge the report within ~14 days or so. In the current Xcode beta, using the graphics debugger will suspend the app but hitting "resume" leaves the app stuck suspended. The normal application debugger path does not do this, just the graphics debugger. I reported this in mid-June 2023, but haven't heard anything yet.

prmph• 3 years ago

I'm on an MBA m1 running Ventura. MacOS is really horrible:

- I've given up getting the permissions on my folder share (Samba) to stick. MacOS keeps reverting to defaults, with means everyone has full read/write permissions. Network files sharing should be a fundamental feature without hassle. Not I'm forced to read up on how to share using NFS.

- I created a FAT32 partition to share files with Asahi. I also setup GDrive syncing on it. Unfortunately, MacOS keep creating these annoying files starting with ._xxx for each single folder and file (and there are hundreds of them). I'm not sure why.

- I had to wipe the machine and do a re-install to enable third-party kernel extensions to load

- The system volume (the primary SSD) on the system does not appear in finder. I keep dragging it to the finder side-bar, and it keeps disappearing under unclear circumstances.

- I just now got a black screen of death after ejecting some mounted drives on my other Mac, an intel running Mojave.

- When I maximize windows, they don't fill up the screen. Usually they increase in size by what seems a random amount. Most times I have to manually drag the edges to fill up the screen. Even after that, a lot of time there is some small margin below the window that cannot be fixed. it's a small issue, but very annoying.

- And too many other weird stuff to list here.

NayamAmarshe5• 3 years ago

I could live with it but the keyboard shortcuts are generally worse than Linux.

https://gist.github.com/NayamAmarshe/c8dfabefc5a25df518edd34...

binkHN• 3 years ago

It has ... the quietest fans...

Part of this is related to having one of the most power efficient CPUs.

favadi2• 3 years ago

Even the fanless configuration is still fast enough for most use cases.

torstenvl2• 3 years ago

I don't understand how people hate macOS. There are some frustrations (e.g., rapid deprecation of things like GC'd Obj-C or 32-bit apps, code signing and notarization) but they pale in comparison to other platforms (glibc compatibility, $500+ code signing certs for Windows/Android, etc.)

drawnwren• 3 years ago

The os being compared to here is linux. I fully understand that most devs don’t want to spend significant time customizing their OS to meet their workflow needs, but once you have a linux distro with a custom window manager —- I don’t see how you could reasonably claim the macos experience is comparable.

mixmastamyk3• 3 years ago

Has more to do with privacy in my opinion:

https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-n...

The fact that you can no longer modify the boot volume and disable invasive services is the clincher.

TheDong2• 3 years ago

I don't understand how people hate macOS

This is hacker news, so presumably we are hackers. I like being able to look into the system I'm running. When I'm seeing a weird network issue, I want to be able to peer into the kernel's tcp stack. When I see an error, I want to be able to add debug statements and understand it.

That's easy to do on linux. There's great tooling. That's hard to do on macOS.

I run websites and services. I like being able to run them locally, to try and reproduce bugs I see on my server. You can't run macOS on a server in a reasonable way, so the only reasonable choice there is linux.

I can understand how someone who doesn't really want to understand the software they use might want to use macOS or windows. On hacker news, I'd expect most people to understand the desire to be able to tinker and understand the system to a greater degree.

bodge50004• 3 years ago

The fatal flaw with its hardware, for me, is the lack of upgradability. I brought the lowest spec M1 air ~6 months ago, these are pricey machines and I had no idea whether I'd like the hardware/software, so wanted to go easy. Turns out, I really like it, but 8gb ram and 256gb ssd isn't enough. In the world of most laptops, this upgrade would cost me maybe £150. For Mac, this upgrade costs me £3,500 (for half as much storage as well), because I'd need to buy a whole new machine.

walthamstow• 3 years ago

Where did you get those numbers? By my reckoning the upgrade would cost you net about £700 brand new and the upgraded machine could last the rest of the decade.

Buy the model I have, the 16gb 512gb M1 Air at £1400 new (or ~£1100 new-ish on eBay).

Keep both for a few weeks, transfer your stuff over, then sell your 8gb 256gb M1 Air for ~£700.

omgmajk• 3 years ago

Hell yeah, might finally buy a mac if I can run native linux on it. I like the hardware but am allergic to MacOS.

Octabrain3• 3 years ago

After the painful experience I've had with the last ThinkPad I purchased (and before that, a Dell XPS, if Linux reaches a point where widely used distros are able to run on Mac M* flawlessly...personally I'm not gonna think it twice.

favadi2• 3 years ago

Something is very off with ThinkPad development recently. A few years ago, I could pick any T-Series ThinkPad and expect them to have excellent Linux support.

My last two ThinkPads have various annoying issues: battery drain when sleeping, trackpoint freezing after a while, fan kicking in for no reasons.

I have used a System76 laptop in the past, everything is working as it should, but the hardware quality is not comparable to Thinkpads.

Octabrain3• 3 years ago

battery drain when sleeping, trackpoint freezing after a while, fan kicking in for no reasons.

With the exception of the trackpoint freezing I've had exactly those issues. I even had to send the laptop to the repair service because the battery thing was unbearable.

I was tempted to get a System76 but went for a ThinkPad mostly due to fear of the unknown. Lesson learned, I guess.

bodge50004• 3 years ago

I doubt you're looking to burn more money but you could also try the framework laptops, I hear they're very well supported. Older Thinkpads also work if you want something cheaper (I don't really use my X220 anymore but I could never get rid of it), but then you do lose some performance.

Octabrain3• 3 years ago

I had a look to the Framework one, however, I've read (here, on HN, mostly) things about the battery life, the screen size and the feeling of flimsyness due to its DYI nature that were a turn off for me.

jasoneckert3• 3 years ago

You can watch the FlockToFedora announcement here (starts at 6:25:15): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD2R4Yt8m88

gavinsyancey• 3 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD2R4Yt8m88&t=23115s

jasoneckert3• 3 years ago

I've been using Asahi based on Arch as my daily driver for over a year (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/ultimate-linux-arm64-wo...) and should mention that the experience has been stellar overall. This is mainly because I've used it on a desktop (Mac Mini, later Mac Studio), where hardware support came faster and is practically complete for M1 models.

That being said, I fully plan on moving entirely to Asahi Fedora at the end of August when it's fully released. Fedora has a stronger team and less issues as noted by Hector Martin: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109971521711413167

c-hendricks• 3 years ago

I installed Arch to prep myself for the Steam Deck, and ended up liking it so much it's on all my machines.

Arch Linux Arm, however, ugh. It works, sure. That post explains it pretty well.

OO000oo5• 3 years ago

It's such a magnificent failure of the human race that this was possible but Photoshop for Linux is eternally out of the picture.

brucethemoose2• 3 years ago

https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...

Some say Wine is "cheating," but I say Wine is a platform. A good platform.

That being said, I feel like the various editors integrating Stable Diffusion eat into a whole bunch of Photoshop functionality.

Knee_Pain2• 3 years ago

Photoshop exists on macOS, which is a *BSD. If something already runs on *BSD it's quite simple to port it to Linux.

But they just won't do it until it becomes used enough

nils-herzig• 3 years ago

There is a GitHub repo with a one-click (curl pipe to bash) installer for Photoshop using wine. Works great. Not going to link it because of questionable legality haha but it's easy to find

mechhacker• 3 years ago

Is photoshop absolutely necessary?

Krita is a great tool and works with a lot of the graphics tablets on the market (not sure about the ones with a display but maybe?), and I was using it on Linux many years ago.

https://krita.org/

xgbi• 3 years ago

I've been using Asahi based on Arch [...] and should mention that the experience has been stellar overall.
I fully plan on moving entirely to Asahi Fedora [...] Fedora has a stronger team and less issues

Why do you plan to change if the experience has been stellar? You mention issues, what kind did you encounter?

I'm sorry if this feels rude, but I read your comment as a praise to Arch and then took an 180° turn to "I will switch to fedora ASAP".

nepger21• 3 years ago

Today at Flock, we announced that Fedora Linux will soon be available on Apple Silicon Macs. Developed in close collaboration with the Fedora Asahi SIG and the Asahi Linux project, the Fedora Asahi Remix will provide a polished experience for Workstation and Server usecases on Apple Silicon systems. The Asahi Linux project has also announced that the new Asahi Linux flagship distribution will be Fedora Asahi Remix.

This should clear it up from the article itself.

jasoneckert3• 3 years ago

While my particular experience has been stellar (i.e., the issues related to package maintenance have not affected me per se), long term distribution maintenance is an important consideration for me. This is why I applaud the efforts of the Fedora team here, and why I'll be switching to Asahi Fedora later this month when it's ready.

gigatexal3• 3 years ago

A thousand hugs and thank you’s to the team behind this. I’ve been waiting for this very thing!!! And once more and more devs get this going they’ll be more likely to have more work being reverse engineered and added to keep Linux on the m series going for years and years!

Edit: the reason I’m stoked I because fedora is the distro of Linux that I run on everything.

gigatexal3• 3 years ago

Honestly Apple should open up the hardware specs and make this easier for devs because I wasn’t in the market for an m1 mini if it was going to run macOS but now with my favorite distro with a remix available?! I’ll give Apple my duckets

dividedbyzero• 3 years ago

I'd like to see them do that, but the fraction of their (potential) users that would care at all must be microscopic.

kaba09• 3 years ago

I’m like 98% sure that your current hardware has no open specs, why should apple open theirs? Of course, idealistally I am all for it, but realistically that ship has sailed a long time ago, plus most companies have a jungle of patents that disallow them from doing so even if they wanted to.

gigatexal3• 3 years ago

Well the GPU for example AMD has been happy to work with the open source community. Sure the open driver still ships a giant blob iirc but it’s still better than nothing. Such an approach would be dope from Apple.

Of course they don’t have to. It would be nice if they did. I would argue they’d sell even more devices this way.

fsckboy• 3 years ago

I'm only looking for facts, not trying to stimulate FUD etc: didn't RedHat announce something that seemed to decrease their commitment to Fedora, or was that just RHEL and CentOS type enterprise stuff? (I'm a Fedora user, and I do/would not look forward to switching.)

bubblethink• 3 years ago

No, Fedora is upstream. Nothing changes for Fedora. Original CentOS is discontinued, CentOS Stream is downstream of Fedora but upstream of RHEL. RH has taken measures to thwart clones of RHEL.

noizejoy• 3 years ago

No, Fedora is upstream. Nothing changes for Fedora.

I sincerely hope so - but after 2 significant rug-pulls, I'm not so sure of any forward looking statements by RH or about the RH ecosystem anymore ...

9front• 3 years ago

The issue with AsahiLinux is its dependency on macOS.

nextos• 3 years ago

And patchy support for M2, which is understandable.

A shame, as the basic Mac Mini M2 is really competitive in terms of pricing and energy usage for a home desktop or server.

It is below $600 with an education discount.

dev_tty012• 3 years ago

That is its core feature. The only reason Asahi exists is to run linux natively on Apple Silicon Macs. There are plenty of linux variants for other systems.

What dependency are you speaking of? It uses the external OS hooks built into the firmware. Is that the issue you are referring to? After boot, MacOS is not running in any way.

KennyFromIT• 3 years ago

So other than less battery performance, what other notable differences should I expect from Fedora on M2 vs the native MacOS. (I'm not being snarky, just trying to get a feel for how similar I should expect the performance and peripheral support to be; not focused on differences between gnome and the MacOS UI)

Espionage724• 3 years ago

I think getting information about devices in and connected to the system would be easier from Linux; might be nice for device and board programming or diagnosing USB devices.

I don't remember specifics but terminal use felt odd on macOS to me. I do Terminal no problem from Linux, but maybe it was the file structure or command syntax on macOS that felt different.

Niche hardware stuff is likely cheaper to manage on Linux. I had to buy SwitchResX to set a higher resolution for my monitor, but I can do it from kernel parameter (video=), xrandr, or EDID override all for free on Linux.

eGPUs acted notably differently from macOS vs Linux on the same laptop, and iirc it had to do with the Apple firmware doing something differently when booting non-macOS. I preferred it on Linux because it shut-off the iGPU completely but required full shutdowns to switch to internal; hot-swap worked fine from macOS even on unsupported TB2. Iirc there was also some EFI binary that could be booted first before Linux in order to trick the Apple firmware in keeping macOS-specific config, and I kept that on a flash drive to boot from the rare times when I wanted dual graphics. Windows was even more different in that the eGPU straight up didn't work.

sbuk• 3 years ago

I don't remember specifics but terminal use felt odd on macOS to me. I do Terminal no problem from Linux, but maybe it was the file structure or command syntax on macOS that felt different.

That'll be the GNU coreutils vs macOS's BSD userland. You'd likely have a similar frustration if you were to use FreeBSD. You can replace these with coreutils from Homebrew or MacPorts on the Mac. Also, the file system layout is different, again, much like the BSDs vs Linux/GNU. Even Linux distros vary slightly.

stirlo2• 3 years ago

Unfortunately no Asahi release has support for Thunderbolt currently so eGPU will not work yet

Aldo_MX2• 3 years ago

There's a matrix where you can find which hardware is supported in a specific model: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support

My non-educated guess is that the hardware currently in WIP (like Thunderbolt or DP Alt Mode) is the one they'll release at the end of August.

mixmastamyk3• 3 years ago

Can you install it without connecting to Apple/iCloud first? Like from flash drive to obliterate macOS, or does a partition have to be kept around still?

mort96• 3 years ago

You don't have to connect to iCloud or have an Apple account to set up macOS, you just click "skip" or "set up later" in necessary places in the setup flow. It's not like Windows where installing it without connecting to your Microsoft account is hard.

Aldo_MX2• 3 years ago

Apple requires a hardware activation, especially if you forgot to sign out from Find My Mac before a factory reset. So the answer is no.

pengaru2• 3 years ago

I'm excited about this despite not owning any Apple hardware, nor intending to own any in the future.

Just to see what a mature native Linux port does in terms of performance and battery life numbers.

We've had to suffer so much Apple fanboy b.s. ever since Apple Silicon became a thing, touting how special the software optimizations are for making this TSMC node's product so fast and efficient. Let's get a sense of what really happens without Apple's software, with an alternative unix-like OS that has similarly modern compositing desktops.

My money is it's 90% TSMC that made Apple Silicon so much better than the Intel trash Apple was stuck with, they never even tasted the AMD+TSMC glory first.

wtallis• 3 years ago

touting how special the software optimizations are for making this TSMC node's product so fast and efficient.
My money is it's 90% TSMC that made Apple Silicon so much better than the Intel trash Apple was stuck with,

This comes across as quite bizarre, as though you believe Apple Silicon Macs are a combination of TSMC chips and Apple software, rather than Apple chips (manufactured by TSMC) with Apple software. Is it really that hard for you to believe that Apple could have come up with chip designs that are genuinely good even when fab process differences are not a factor?

How will running Linux instead of macOS shed any new light on how much credit for the hardware quality should go to TSMC rather than to Apple?

pengaru2• 3 years ago

This comes across as quite bizarre, as though you believe Apple Silicon Macs are a combination of TSMC chips and Apple software, rather than Apple chips (manufactured by TSMC) with Apple software.

No, it's deliberately bizarre. I'm speaking to specifically all the ridiculous nonsense I've read on HN from Apple fanbois trying to convince the world that these are so good because of magical synergies of Apple software with Apple Silicon.

Apple seems to have designed a good chip, TSMC manufactured it. I don't deny either of those things. The same can be said of AMD.

kaba09• 3 years ago

Wtf, it has nothing to do with fanboys, and noone said that software optimizations are the reason why the M-series chips are so good - otherwise why did the intel ones not perform better under macs?

What was highlighted on the software side is the way Rosetta works/performs.

meeho• 3 years ago

Now do a battery test and compare it with macos.

Coming Soon: Fedora for Apple Silicon Macs

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