Spoiler: We have Vulkan 1.4 working, all of M4 and most of M5 working, are making significant progress towards full suspend to ram (no version of Asahi supports this) and this will all be shipped to users very soon!
If I could run linux on apple hardware without compromise, my life would meaningfully be improved.
It's not well understood how important it is that humans feel in control of their environment. I feel like it's a fundamental to human happiness. Software that takes that away contributes to the general malaise and hopelessness that many are feeling today. It's just water to them at this point. They don't even see it. But it's the primary means of interaction.
Making that a true option to millions of people could do a lot of good for the world.
> I feel like it's a fundamental to human happiness. Software that takes that away contributes to the general malaise and hopelessness that many are feeling today.
I would like to see a full-featured Linux on Apple hardware too, but I think over 99% of people don't feel anywhere near this strongly. Do you feel this strongly about being able to replace the engine in your car with one you made yourself? I don't, and I think most people view computers the same way.
> Do you feel this strongly about being able to replace the engine in your car with one you made yourself?
I am not one of those people, as I do not do cars, but I would hazard a guess that most car people over a certain age do in fact feel very strongly about what modern cars have become. The ones who grew up without knowing what ownership feels like less so, which reflects the exact same dynamic with younger generations who are growing up without ever knowing what it feels like to own the hardware they use.
Cool, I'm glad someone is taking a more aggressive and LLM friendly approach to doing Linux on Mac. Too bad there's no M3 since that's what I have :P
Not sure if it would be useful for you, but I did get an M3 GPU driver kinda working (it boots KDE, runs Quake and GLXGears, etc) but isn't quite usable yet. But feel free to yank the code if it's helpful: https://github.com/SuperDisk/asahi-plus-slop
> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon.
Is this referring to Omarchy? Anyone have context? TBH I'm surprised their work was ever MIT-licensed instead of GPL.
I saw that's there is an Omarchy for Mac "team" consisting mostly of one guy who is active on Twitter (and amassed many followers) who doesn't seem to have prior experience of working on Linux Kernel. They do not mention Asahi anywhere which isn't surprising to me given the reputation of DHH and Omarchy. This hijacking of open source by bad faith actors is very concerning.
Omarchy has gotten somewhat of a reputation for getting a lot of sponsorship money from commercial actors. If by monetize you mean "Get people to pay us" omarchy are definitely monetizing. Not much different to Asahi themselves of course, but is it right/moral to fork another active projects code and use it in order to gain your own patrons? I don't hold the answers. But no they aren't selling anything.
edit: worth noting this example, where DigitalOcean started cutting OSS support only to pledge millions of dollars to Omarchy. No wonder people consider the project a leech to the OSS community, but also consider correlation != causation: https://itsfoss.com/news/digitalocean-open-source-credits-en...
> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.
They are mad that vibecoders are building on top of their work, making real progress, then re-releasing it as "look it works" while containing a bunch of their work. Which is sort of fair but I don't get how that works in practice because in reality anyone can read the code which is open source and do whatever they want. Licensing won't stop them.
I really don't get why people even start with permissive licenses if they have people they don't like to use their software or if they're just going to go "not like that" at the first real use.
It seems like many times it's open source but "just to look".
Because permissive licensing, and free software in general, rightfully comes with a certain cachet, and it turns out some people want the benefits of that reputation, but don’t actually believe in the freedom “to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose.” Hence the treadmill from permissive licensing to copyleft, and then later from copyleft to “source available”…
“But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.”
I'm glad that Asahi is switching from a cuck license to a reasonable copyleft license. Even though the circumstances that made this necessary are, of course, unfortunate.
I still don't understand the motivation for Asahi and other similar efforts. My impression is that Apple fully supports Linux virtualization on Apple Silicon. Why isn't that sufficient? Just asking.
Imagine deliberately buying a $2000+ computer that doesn't work with and is actively hostile towards your OS of choice, then embarking on a multi-year bitch-fest to shoehorn the OS onto it.
I struggle to wrap my mind around it. It's like buying an EV so you can convert it to work on gasoline.
- MacBooks are still among the nicest if not the nicest laptops hardware-wise, so some people like to run Linux on it.
- People have older Macs that they like to repurpose. E.g., we still have an M1 Mini that was used by our daughter before she got handed down a MacBook from my wife. It's now collecting dust, but I might install Linux to use it as a headless server.
> MacBooks are still among the nicest if not the nicest laptops hardware-wise, so some people like to run Linux on it
Yes, daft people.
There are plenty of very nice PC laptops out there that are built and TESTED with explicit Linux support in mind, out of the box.
I know this because I own a Red Hat Certified laptop.
With a Mac you can count on it never working 100% as well as it could, and will receive NO support. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple voided the hardware warranty, claiming it overheated or something and Linux was to blame.
You are paying Apple hand over fist for a subpar experience and to screw you over.
Repurposing old OOP hardware is one thing and there are plenty of those projects about. Use at your own risk.
But deliberately buying incompatible hardware? Retardation.
On abstract utilitarian grounds you might have a point, but you won't find much sympathy in the real world. People like macs, simple as, and find value in running Linux on them regardless. To an extent that is part of what it means to be a hacker.
You're also not looking at the whole picture, at the time of Asahis creation it was both the Linux on Mac project but ALSO one of the most mature Linux on arm projects; surely you wouldn't say that is daft too?
I don't think you understand how Linux works overall. It's only relatively recently that manufacturers have catered to the Linux ecosystem and started to treat it as a first class build target. In the early days of Linux every piece of hardware had to be provided for and it sucked but people did it anyway because they wanted to run their own software free as in beer and have full control of it. Now they wanna do the same thing with Apple hardware. There is nothing inherently retarded about it but I do think you're kind of an idiot for writing these comments.
> I wouldn't be surprised if Apple voided the hardware warranty, claiming it overheated or something and Linux was to blame.
Well, you made it half way through the comment before running out of real points and deciding to make up imaginary ones to support your point. That's not nothing!
Crikey lol. I haven't seen a single laptop that reaches Apple's HW quality. Besides, why are you assuming that we're buying new laptops?? Also, just generally, don't be such a dick.
I’ve just build the kernel from Omarchy on my fedora asahi remix and got thunderbolt and Touch ID working. You do need to patch m1n1 with their changes as well. But I’ve been able to finally ditch an extra usb hub and hdmi cable.
In the PR’s that were merged in that kernel I also see they are actively working towards m4 and m5 as well. Must be hard for Asahi to keep up this way.
Not sure what will happen when people will directly contribute to the Linux kernel with LLM patches though for these devices, I guess they will have to live with it.
Asahi is patches on top of the linux kernel. If you independently get your drivers in to the kernel which does allow LLMs, the drivers will end up on Asahi too.
Sure, but a human could read the code and look for ideas/parts and write the actual code better than an AI can. Omarchy is 99% hype, but the fact that its working on osx is telling me that it is indeed a goal you can accomplish. I rather not have my OS be a slopfest, so thats why asahi is way better than omarchy ever can be.
I didn't know about their LLM stance, but I feel like Asahi are shooting themselves in the foot. Giving up the advantage to toxic teams like Omarchy is strategically wrong. They could use llms for reverse engineering and drafting and as you said still rewrite the final versyof the code.
Its basically useless gui thing. Nothing i cant have in another distro. What im intested in is the osx port. Apple hardware is unbeatable, but the OS has been going downhill since jobs passes. This is why true linux on mac is my dream setup. Asahi is the closest thing so far.
apple hw is unbeatable indeed. but the os was always for normies, a walled garden.
regarding 'the useless gui': it was what actually was missing in in the linux world.
i used kde before, which is fine, but it is too bloated and kwin_wayland is unusually heavy on the machine: it maters, especially for mobile devices like laptops.
of course if you use macos and apple hw, you don't care about it , since the stance. i don't run (yet) omarchy on my servers. but there are a ton of other, especially developer / ai friendly, defaults that would make one tinker for days with other distros. as i said i had my own "dot files", but a community built distro with the right defaults is much better energy management than everyone on their own.
https://gravitylinux.org
Spoiler: We have Vulkan 1.4 working, all of M4 and most of M5 working, are making significant progress towards full suspend to ram (no version of Asahi supports this) and this will all be shipped to users very soon!
If I could run linux on apple hardware without compromise, my life would meaningfully be improved.
It's not well understood how important it is that humans feel in control of their environment. I feel like it's a fundamental to human happiness. Software that takes that away contributes to the general malaise and hopelessness that many are feeling today. It's just water to them at this point. They don't even see it. But it's the primary means of interaction.
Making that a true option to millions of people could do a lot of good for the world.
It's important work.
I would like to see a full-featured Linux on Apple hardware too, but I think over 99% of people don't feel anywhere near this strongly. Do you feel this strongly about being able to replace the engine in your car with one you made yourself? I don't, and I think most people view computers the same way.
I am not one of those people, as I do not do cars, but I would hazard a guess that most car people over a certain age do in fact feel very strongly about what modern cars have become. The ones who grew up without knowing what ownership feels like less so, which reflects the exact same dynamic with younger generations who are growing up without ever knowing what it feels like to own the hardware they use.
We also have vrr!
Not sure if it would be useful for you, but I did get an M3 GPU driver kinda working (it boots KDE, runs Quake and GLXGears, etc) but isn't quite usable yet. But feel free to yank the code if it's helpful: https://github.com/SuperDisk/asahi-plus-slop
Is this referring to Omarchy? Anyone have context? TBH I'm surprised their work was ever MIT-licensed instead of GPL.
edit: worth noting this example, where DigitalOcean started cutting OSS support only to pledge millions of dollars to Omarchy. No wonder people consider the project a leech to the OSS community, but also consider correlation != causation: https://itsfoss.com/news/digitalocean-open-source-credits-en...
At the same time it was mostly to small OSS projects that dont have formal non-profits so no tax exemption benefits to DigitalOcean.
I mean, I get the poisoning the well of open source thing that some companies do. I didn't think Omarchy was trying to do that.
With how good LLMs are at reverse engineering, I've been looking forward to being able to ditch MacOS and still have decent hardware soonish.
Taking back the ownership of our devices to run our software is the positive future LLMs are giving us. We need only to take action.
> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.
It seems like many times it's open source but "just to look".
I agree it was a poor choice of license and that GPL helps build a better community, I'm glad they mad ethe license choice
“But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.”
—Theo de Raadt (2001)
That's opposite because copyleft is ultimately about user freedom not developers freedom.
GPL wont help Asahi team for a bit.
Yeah, the whole idea of GPL is to restrict developers from doing certain things, because it would be harmful to users
I struggle to wrap my mind around it. It's like buying an EV so you can convert it to work on gasoline.
- MacBooks are still among the nicest if not the nicest laptops hardware-wise, so some people like to run Linux on it.
- People have older Macs that they like to repurpose. E.g., we still have an M1 Mini that was used by our daughter before she got handed down a MacBook from my wife. It's now collecting dust, but I might install Linux to use it as a headless server.
Also, this is Hacker News.
Yes, daft people.
There are plenty of very nice PC laptops out there that are built and TESTED with explicit Linux support in mind, out of the box.
I know this because I own a Red Hat Certified laptop.
With a Mac you can count on it never working 100% as well as it could, and will receive NO support. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple voided the hardware warranty, claiming it overheated or something and Linux was to blame.
You are paying Apple hand over fist for a subpar experience and to screw you over.
Repurposing old OOP hardware is one thing and there are plenty of those projects about. Use at your own risk.
But deliberately buying incompatible hardware? Retardation.
You're also not looking at the whole picture, at the time of Asahis creation it was both the Linux on Mac project but ALSO one of the most mature Linux on arm projects; surely you wouldn't say that is daft too?
Well, you made it half way through the comment before running out of real points and deciding to make up imaginary ones to support your point. That's not nothing!
That's how Linux has been for PCs also for most of its lifetime. Only in the recent 5-10 years things have kind of improved, slightly.
Macbook hardware is superb. I understand why people are interested in replacing the (in some parts) lackluster operating system Apple forces into it.
Dino fuel generator hooked up to Tesla EV: https://youtube.com/shorts/46bRaGP4uqM
In the PR’s that were merged in that kernel I also see they are actively working towards m4 and m5 as well. Must be hard for Asahi to keep up this way.
Not sure what will happen when people will directly contribute to the Linux kernel with LLM patches though for these devices, I guess they will have to live with it.
regarding 'the useless gui': it was what actually was missing in in the linux world.
i used kde before, which is fine, but it is too bloated and kwin_wayland is unusually heavy on the machine: it maters, especially for mobile devices like laptops.
of course if you use macos and apple hw, you don't care about it , since the stance. i don't run (yet) omarchy on my servers. but there are a ton of other, especially developer / ai friendly, defaults that would make one tinker for days with other distros. as i said i had my own "dot files", but a community built distro with the right defaults is much better energy management than everyone on their own.
If you're comparing Omarchy to KDE, I don't think you understand what either actually is. You can use Hyprland/Quickshell in other systems.
> but a community built distro
Omarchy is also not a community built distro.