It’s been a long while since we updated the blog! Truth be told, we wanted to write a couple more progress reports, but there was always “one more thing”… So, instead, we decided to take the plunge and publish the first public alpha release of the Asahi Linux reference distribution!
We’re really excited to finally take this step and start bringing Linux on Apple Silicon to everyone. This is only the beginning, and things will move even more quickly going forward!
This is an absolutely stunning effort and achievement by the Asahi team, but as a mere user, this whole thing does not exactly instill me with the confidence needed to buy Apple hardware to run Linux on it. There’s no denying M1 hardware is amazing, but the idea of being entirely at the mercy of whatever Apple decides to do with the firmware and boot process seems like a terrible place to be in. That being said, few people will care about that possible issue, and for them, this is great news.
It also trickles down to other projects:
It has taken a while, but I’m pleased to announce that OpenBSD/arm64 works well enough on Apple M1 systems for some wider testing. A major milestone was reached with the release of the Asahi Linux installer.
Both Asahi and OpenBSD are available on all M1 Macs, except the Studio, since it’s too new. Also, quite a few things do not work yet, such as GPU acceleration, sleep, webcams, Thunderbolt, Bluetooth, video acceleration, and a bunch more.
Nice but it feels all a bit pointless, in my experience Apple hardware requires MacOS, and it has very little if nothing to do with the hardware but the attitude of the end user.
In 3 to 5 years when all the Apple apparatchiks are throwing away their antique M1 Macs then Asahi will service a market. I suppose the point edge of this wedge is last years or last months M1!
cpcf,
I tend to agree. However you’d be surprised at just how popular macs are in linux specific venues like linux user clubs (at least when apple’s x86 PCs were highly compatible). I even worked with a company that opted to run all their linux environments on apple hardware. I did find it funny, but for a predominantly apple shop that needs linux workstations I guess it seemed right to the boss.
People will want to do it, but drivers for M1 will probably be incomplete for a long time. Such is the woe of supporting proprietary hardware.
This is my use case. When the Mac users at my company see the latest shiny thing and somehow convince their managers that they need it, the hand me downs (usually less than two years old) are repurposed with Linux and service the IT folks and developers till the next round.
Under-phil,
It always seems weird, but somehow many companies put executives/marketing/sales/front office staff higher on the computer upgrade totem pole than developers who would actually benefit from it more. It seems like some of those groups get priority based on status rather than actual need. I guess it’s to leave a better impression on guests who see the front office, we’re considered less important in the backrooms, haha.
@Under-phil and @Alfman
This is exactly how I manage and subjugate my networks. The new shiny Macs go to the Managers and Marketing, because they, their immediate staff and the clients know how they work and can support each other. They are the bling like the Estate Agent’s Ferrari. These will eventually be handed down to the sales and advertising teams, maybe one or two will get a Linux for an application specific purpose and be handed over to developers or an engineer.
The new PC go to the executives, some to engineers and design teams, some of the aged machines become clerical, some get Linux for specific end user cases.
Now this seems to be an unfortunate situation, surely the Devs and Engineers need the new hardware, they need to latest and greatest. And that is true, but you’ll never get approval for that so you buy the CEO or MD and associated cronies a new gadget every year and hand them down!
What you end up with is a Corporate Executive carrying a gadget that can host a Google node but instead gets used to read The Times, however you know this time next year it goes to someone deserving!
cpcf,
Haha, I definitely recognize that scenario. It’s easy to laugh about it now, but in truth It reminds me of years of software development on computers that weren’t fit for purpose. This was especially painful after visual studio upgrades, which managed to become slower every generation without a hardware upgrade.
As I say in the other article, I never got the point of running Linux on M1… Linux on M1 Macs doesn’t even have GPU acceleration, so whatever efficiency gains you are (allegedly) getting over x86 you are losing them due to the need to draw pixels one-by-one using the CPU.
Intel Macs make for good Linux boxes because the open drivers guarantee hardware support (at least for the essential things), so buying Intel Macs and paying Mac prices and using them as Linux boxes kind of makes sense.
But paying Mac prices for an M1 Mac and running Linux on them with worse hardware support than a PC? It seems so bizarre to me. You might as well try to flash Android on an iPhone.
As I also pointed out in the other article, do you really expect full GPU driver support on the first alpha release on new-to-everyone hardware? I get the feeling you’re one of those who complains that there were no day-one open source drivers for new GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. The hardware has to get into the hands of the open source devs before there can be any driver development and testing, and this being a completely new architecture means starting from scratch. There’s a ton of progress that’s been made behind the scenes and GPU and sound drivers are coming soon. This stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and you of all people I’d think would be smart enough to get that.
Thing is, we’ve been promised fully-functioning open-source drivers for Nvidia GPUs 10 years ago by the community, and we are still waiting.
“But Nvidia did this and that!” Well, Apple can do the exact same this and that, and there is nothing stopping them from doing it because M1 Macs officially only support MacOS.
This is what I don’t understand: buying an expensive computer on the pinky-promise the open-source community will eventually be able to patch together support for it and the non-promise by Apple that they won’t sabotage the effort (like Nvidia did). And in the meantime you are stuck running a laptop that renders the screen pixel-by-pixel with the CPU like a computer with an Trident SVGA adapter.
Why not buy an Intel Mac (while they are still available boxed) or a System 76 computer?
Keep in mind I consider Desktop Linux as an anti-Windows insurance I hope I won’t have to cash (aren’t all Windows users lately?) so I am trying to figure out if there is something I am missing here…
You’re making a couple of false assumptions. One, that my M1 mini is the only computer I own. You should know better, given where we’re discussing this. I also have a Linux laptop, a Windows laptop, a “retro” laptop for older OSes like BeOS, an OpenBSD workstation (my main device), a Slackware Linux workstation, and a media server with Windows. That’s not counting touch devices and Raspberry Pi boards. Given all of that, yeah I can spare my Mac for helping the Asahi team debug their project.
The second is that Apple is going to be hostile towards the project. That’s a fair assumption to make when you have no evidence either way, but Hector Martin has already stated that not only is Apple not being hostile or even indifferent towards the project, they are actually releasing patches in macOS to make it easier on the Asahi team. Most recently, they published a fix in Monterey 12.3 for a race condition that was preventing the team from getting their installer to work (hence the requirement for 12.3 to run the installer). Apple is showing interest and offering assistance with the project, and I find that promising.
Simply put, I may not understand why someone would jump out of a perfectly good airplane, but I’m not going to shit all over skydivers for enjoying their hobby. Just let people have their fun, it’s not hurting you.
Morgan,
Can you provide a link? It could just be a case of apple fixing their own bug and helping the project was just a coincidence? Anyways I am not aware of apple putting out a statement one way or another.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I think it’s safe to assume that apple’s actions will be primarily be driven by greed. It’s not clear to me how the linux community buying mac hardware and using their own resources would actually hurt apple. As long as apple’s making a profit, then there probably isn’t much motivation to block linux.
Still, it is discomforting to me that both of the duopoly companies are in a strong position to deny linux installations if they wanted to via updates and boot key revocation.
I have warned in the past that the hard-on some Linux folks have for ARM computers legitimises the whole “bootloader” mess that ARM platforms are typically associated with (including the whole deal with locked bootloaders). The PC and its OS agnostic-ness is the exception to the rule which says that hardware is typically made to run the software the vendor wants it to run (and anything else either needs some work to run or is locked out).
Apple has a history of throwing the open-source community a bone to gain mindshare and geek kudos and then locking things down. Like how they used to ship a buildable, bootable CLI-driven OS (Darwin) but then slowly replaced things with closed-source components and the source code became non-buildable.
So, you are buying hardware based on a pinky-promise from a company that has been known to do bait-abd-switch tricks and in the meantime you have an expensive laptop with the equivalent of a Trident SVGA adapter for a graphics chip.
I still can’t understand the motivation behind Ashahi Linux. They might as well create a project to run Android on the latest iPhone. My guess is that Macs are a status symbol among Linux people and they are there for the brand.
kurkosdr,
This is a legitimate concern and one that I share. However this is also true of almost all proprietary hardware. If no one puts in the work supporting new hardware, then linux’s existing drivers would eventually become obsolete.
Seems pretty obvious to me: the M1 is a pretty desirable CPU. Just because it isn’t ready yet doesn’t mean there won’t be demand when it is ready. A tiny team works on drivers and eventually they produce results that the community can use. This is the way that hardware support gets added in the FOSS world.
@Alfman:
This is the relevant thread on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1504318434573979649?cxt=HHwWgsDUnazptOApAAAA
@kurkosdr:
I don’t think you and I will ever come to a consensus on this, and that’s fine. I’m happy to continue hacking around with Asahi and OpenBSD on M1 for fun, because that’s my jam. You’re happy to continue bashing anyone who would dare run Linux on non-AMD64 hardware, and that’s your jam. I won’t keep repeating myself asking you to have an open mind and to stop bashing others for enjoying their hobbies just because you don’t understand them.
As a parting note, please check out this Twitter thread for some insight into the actual differences and challenges involved in porting Linux to a new platform. It may not change your narrow viewpoint, but it will give you some valid talking points instead of just blind speculation and hearsay.
https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1506022590867185664?s=20&t=BiPiOYiO-u88LKBDwFYucQ
Haha, you know me 🙂
I never understood this idea of running Desktop Linux on non-PC platforms when Desktop Linux supports the PC less badly than all those random ARM platforms, and whatever proprietary software for Desktop Linux exists out there is for x86-64 (see: Steam).
But if you are doing it as a hobby, I cannot judge.
So they released the first alpha build a few days After apple released the source code.
https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macOS/tree/macos-122
Nice from a technical point of view, no doubt, but surely that effort could have been applied to resolve some of the actual hardware Linux Needs to support rather than writing something they know they would never reach the levels of functionality and support
That could be applied to almost any open-source project.
Possiblly, but this is a poor duplication of an existing open source project with what appears to be little value add. While it was no doubt interesting for the devs, it doesn’t move the needle forward. If you want Linux M1 support you are better served porting the Darwin implementation to linux, or porting more Linux apps to Darwin via Mac Ports or similar project. At least that would provide end users a viable and usable system.
All in all it’s hardware. Being able to run Linux on it is a good thing. Kudos to people making it happen.
Absolutely. This project is a strange one because there are so many folks calling this out as wasted effort or ultimately fruitless. Not sure why, because they’ll laud something like Haiku which will likely see an even smaller install base.
Different rules for different projects, for some reason.
Because Haiku is something novel and a whole different OS while Asahi Linux is a Desktop Linux derivative that spends time trying to port Linux to a proprietary platform that offers no true advantage over a standard PC (as far as the Desktop Linux experience is concerned). Might as well try to port Linux to the iPhone. In plain English, it’s effort that could have been better spent elsewhere, like for example fixing those AMD GPU drivers in the kernel tree whose suspend functionality was broken recently.
I am not going to condemn the effort obviously, but I don’t see a reason to not call it a waste of time.
kurkosdr,
ARM computers and the M1 specifically use a lot less power than x86. Many of us have wanted a strong performance ARM laptop long before apple got involved with ARM and now it exists. I wish apple would sell the chips to other manufacturers because I don’t care for the apple brand, but regardless clearly there is demand.
I’m probably repeating what others have already stated. I suppose it’s always been there in the background, servers and such, but Apple have really done a great job bringing it to the desktop. However, I recently did some research into an update for my GP HPC and it’s going to be sometime it seems before I can consider ARM, and it’s not really ARMs fault as the issues are mostly drivers, although there are some good signs. We really need to see the supported hardware base broaden.
cpcf,
I would definitely like to see this as well.
I’ve tried out a few ARM SBCs and there’s a lot of nice hardware that’s very affordable too, but not being able to use the mainline kernel (because of drivers) is a common shortcoming. Some boards end up using the manufacturer provided *android* kernel. Boy does it suck being roped into android’s support problems when you’re not even using an android device. This is exactly why we need more open source drivers for ARM!
@kurkosdr
Fair point but still. It’s hardware. A concept that isn’t all that novel. That much is true. Beyond that if you are confronted with option A being able to run Linux on it and option B not being able to do that. For me option A is the preferred one. After all such hardware will be around for a decade or two. Who knows what use can it be to some. What i can say in general for hardware is that if Linux can run on it. Such hardware in general can prove to have much value.