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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty insane that OpenGL 2.1 is even functional on a GPU this strange, but remember; this is still an unfinished, hacky implementation (the author's own concession). Plus, you're going to be stuck on x11 until any serious GPU drivers get written, which in many people's opinion is just as bad as no hardware acceleration at all. No MacOS-like trackpad gestures either, you'll be waiting for Wayland support to get that too. It'll definitely be a boon for web browsing though, so I won't deny that. What I'm really curious about is older WINE titles with Box86, if you could get DOS titles like Diablo 2 running smoothly, it could probably replace my Switch as a portable emulation machine...

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> pretty insane that OpenGL 2.1 is even functional on a GPU this strange,

Well... you were one of the most vocal critics saying it wouldn't happen anytime soon.

> unfinished, hacky implementation (the author's own concession)

Still more stable than Intel's official Arc drivers, so who defines "hacky"? ;)

> Plus, you're going to be stuck on x11 until any serious GPU drivers get written

Only because it is running on macOS, which supports X11 but not Wayland. On Linux, Wayland or X11 will both work, no problem.

> No MacOS-like trackpad gestures either, you'll be waiting for Wayland support to get that too

Again, Wayland will work on Day 1, it's just a limitation of running the driver on macOS until the kernel support is ready. When it is on Linux, Wayland will be a full-go.

> Well... you were one of the most vocal critics saying it wouldn't happen anytime soon.

Yep. Been beating that drum since 2020, looks history proved me right on this one.

> Still more stable than Intel's official Arc drivers, so who defines "hacky"? ;)

Apparently not me, I had no idea that the M1 supported Vulkan and DirectX 12.

I'm a bit confused as to why X11/wayland would be a huge issue here? The Mesa docs do say X11-only, but they're referring to running the driver on macOS (hence the XQuartz reference), where Wayland basically doesn't exist.

Ah, looks like I definitely missed that.

In any case, I don't think Asahi/M1 has proper KWin or Mutter support yet. It's still going to take a while before you get a truly smooth desktop Linux experience on those devices, but some hardware acceleration is definitely better than none!

I mean the signs were clear for basically one and a half years now. It was never a question of if. But a question of when. There were just so many voices that didn't know what they were talking about. Comparing it to nouveau for example.

> if you could get DOS titles like Diablo 2

Did you mean some other title? Even diablo 1 was a Windows game.

Why would you need Wayland for trackpad gestures?

You technicay don't, but the implementations on X are kinda terrible and can't do 1:1

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