ARM64 Linux Workstation
jasoneckert.github.io
jasoneckert.github.io
Crazy fast hardware, great high refresh screen, insane battery life, fantastic touchpad, gestures and keyboard.
There is the potential that Windows games could run on it with some combination of x86 translation and Proton.
Using MacOS on it feels like I have a ferrari with square wheels.
Want to play games? Not unless the developers use Apple graphics APIs (not happening for new titles and never happening for old titles).
Want to run containerized workloads? Enjoy a cumbersome, slow, virtualized experience.
Want to use FUSE? Not on your work computer locked to high-sec mode as you cannot install kernel extensions (where is our user space FS Apple?).
Want to write a program that targets MacOS? Expect a cumbersome CI/CD experience because Apple expects you to manually compile distributables.
I could go on but as someone who has used MacOS for years and generally appreciates it, Apple really doesn't care much for developers. Other than its POSIX shell, MacOS doesn't have much going for it.
At least with my Intel MBP I could dual boot Windows so I could carry one laptop and switch between work and play. Now I have to carry around two computers when I travel for extended periods if I want to game.
Fuse is infuriating on MacOS - why is it not included by default??
Why would it be "included by default"?
FUSE is nowhere near that.
(I'm sure linux is in theory just as power efficient as MacOS or Windows, but distros are just usually not very concerned or capable of tuning it well enough.)
I used to fiddle forever but this gets like 80% of the wins. Things like "do we reduce power state of sata links" used to be extremely conservatively set, for fear of really old hardware from the beginning of sata era that behaved badly, but was an obvious &bhige win for 99.999999% of folk. Linux has finally started turning a bunch of these baseline expected tuning on by default, across the past few years (rather than powertop doing it), so the out of box experience is finally much more reasonable.
It's been like this forever but people love throwing shade. I had a Transmeta Crusoe laptop (p1120) amd yes, at first battery life was worde. But I did low hanging fruit optimizations, and Linux got better, and soon I had like an hour more runtime on Linux.
Mac famously has a trashburger IO subsystem, so not having that boat anchor hanging off the side should probably let the system hurry-up-and-idle better, saving power.
Ideally there would also be a way to omit certain device or subsystem tunings from auto-tune as well.
Personally I think it'd be fun to mess around with more advanced schemes, where we dynamically alter powersaving behaviors based on user behavior. What we have now seems somewhat unresponsive. It'd be fun to dive into.
Not 100% the same, but the Asahi members reported something like 8 hours on a M1 Macbook, so that's better than most/all x86 laptops with Linux
VMs and games (crossover) also bring my battery life down to 4-6 hours.
My old intel MBP would get around the same battery life when doing the same workloads (games under bootcamp Windows), it would get worse battery life sitting idle or for optimised workloads (like video playback).
Mixed workloads, I get maybe 2-3 hours more with my M1 laptop. That's not nothing, but it's not the crazy 18 hours battery life in the marketing material
The question is, what's the battery life when you're doing kernel compiles or GPGPU.
And not to beat the already long dead horse any more, but toss in some electron apps running in the background, I probably average somewhere around ~7 hours or so. I'm not convinced the 10+ hour lifetime is possible if you've got stuff like Discord/Slack/VS Code open.
But in terms of when I am doing truly evil things to it, I am surprised it lasts as long as it does, be it max CPU compiling or all of this morning when I was toying around with stable diffusion, it gets around ~4 hours or so.
Which of course should be expected. My M1 probably gets about 18-20 hours when I am just web browsing. If I am compiling Xcode projects, half that. Messing around in C in Emacs, probably 14-16 hours battery life.
It is makes no sense to compare an $1k/$2k M1 Macbook with random laptops. Those laptops exist because people want to run MS Word or Excel for $400. That's the feature.
Various System76 laptops, Thinkpads (among many other laptops recommended by Linux users) give you battery life comparable to macOS on the M1.
that is a lie. system76 and thinkpads are nowhere close to giving you a full day of battery life on Linux.
And I'm no Apple fanboy, the only Apple device I've ever used has been an ipad 5 years ago and my M1 macbook.
Apple’s numbers are equally unrealistic. They rate my m1 air for 15 hours, but in practice it gets to around 8 hours.
Of course if its a day where I'm compiling often and have several tasks running its going to be lower, but thats not the usecase they advertise
Maybe Asahi Linux will improve things, since they only target a very small number of hardware configurations.
Also presumably if Apple wants this to happen, they as a single vendor can provide a single definitive answer on what they are doing for each configuration. Eventually...
In the x86 world, there is Intel, AMD and like 50 different manufacturers each with a particular HW implementation/BIOS customization, leading to IntelAMDHardware_Vendor_customizations^50 permutations that'd need to be validated.
Never has there been any effort taken within Linux to apply a generalstic ‘small speaker EQ’ to anything with detected internal speakers.
Similarly, the Linux kernel by default is optimized for server style workloads (throughput) instead of smoothness. It would be so easy to check for an internal battery and if true apply a few kernel parameters so your laptop stays smooth under load.
Linux as a desktop (well, laptop) OS is terrible not because it is incapable of being great at it, but because people don’t seem to care for the death-by-a-thousand-cuts issues.
The real trouble is that you get some wireless chip which isn't popular enough for anybody to reverse engineer it but the manufacturer didn't provide any documentation, so the driver for it sucks or doesn't exist.
There is plenty of well-supported hardware so the solution is, don't buy the bad one. But some poor sucker who already did and now they want to run Linux on it may have a bad time.
Just clearing some FUD if people consider Linux bad for everyday use, that's mostly shit if you run Wayland and like sharing your screen (Jitsi or obs+virtualcam works well too).
Edit: remember Android runs on the Linux kernel-ish
This used to be different when I first installed Asahi, but the GPU driver and other improvements have made battery life something I don't really worry about anymore.
One thing which bothers me a lot as it makes the laptop hardly useable for me at night: display brightness cannot be adjusted, it is either off or 100%. Some user claim this can be accomplished by installing the asahi-edge kernel, which does not even boot for me.
And this also bothers me lot: why are things checked in/distributed which do not work at all in Asahi Arch?!?! If you install e.g. a dev kernel which does not boot because the NVME driver is broken and you do not have a fallback kernel you are doomed. You cannot mount the partition in macOS to fix this manually.
Asahi is still in Alpha. Expect things to be a bit rough.
While I prefer the feel of Linux, macOS is more than sufficient for almost any development I do (which also involves a lot of container/VM development and I’ve never felt this was slow).
It's also impossible to work with anything KVM related on macOS, which would require a vm inside a vm and is not supported on any M1 or M2 hypervisor.
There's stuff like iTunes opening every time I connected BT headphones, and regular attempts to nag me into using Safari. Then there's a boat load of issues I found workarounds for: The window manager with its fullscreen mode and lack of tiling (Spectacle makes that bearable), the unique modifier keys that don't work well out of the box with readline shortcuts in the terminal and such, the often still manual process of installing and updating apps (maybe I could have used Brew or MacPorts more heavily), the inability to debug and fix any OS problems, and a literal hundred small things I can't even remember from the top of my head.
These things are all individually so small that I didn't event think about it, but when I realised the sheer quantity, I felt like I was in a codependent relationship with my main tool. Apple doesn't seem to care even remotely about users like me, and that's perfectly within their rights. The logical thing for me was to use something else.
> There's stuff like iTunes opening every time I connected BT headphones, and regular attempts to nag me into using Safari.
I don't know if these are legacy concerns, but this has not happened to me ever in the past 3 years.
> The window manager with its fullscreen mode and lack of tiling (Spectacle makes that bearable)
Yabai solves this very well.
> the often still manual process of installing and updating apps (maybe I could have used Brew or MacPorts more heavily)
I recommend Nix and Homebrew.
> the inability to debug and fix any OS problems,
How often do you run into this? I just don't really. I remember in my earlier days I did a bit because of some pinned package versions prevalent in macOS but when I switched to using Nix this went away, so I haven't run into any OS issues since... I think Catalina.
> Apple doesn't seem to care even remotely about users like me, and that's perfectly within their rights. The logical thing for me was to use something else.
That's totally fair. I love my MacBook, but I also have not run into the same struggles. I think my experience has been the complete opposite - once I configured it properly, it not only "just works", but I've yet to find a laptop that connects other aspects so seamlessly (AirPods, FaceTime, iMessage, Notes are all killer features in my day-to-day). Additionally, since switching to the M1, I have yet to find a laptop comparable in battery life (speed is generally matched when considering prices).
That said, if your workflow is to run everything containerized already, then running macOS as the base layer works just fine.
Some would consider this a feature. Unfortunately it does have launchd, essentially the model from whence systemd sprung... so joy for those folks would likely be short lived.
It is not an OS that is made for power users. The UX is for non-technical people mostly, with vague errors that try (and usually succeed) to hide any details from you, making many things thoroughly undebuggable. When something doesn't work, best case scenario is "try turning it off and on again" (e.g. if iPad screen extending doesn't work and there is absolutely no information anywhere on why, what prerequisite you're failing. The button just isn't there and that's it, deal with it. I had to restart both devices for it to work; another fun one is "a USB device is consuming too much power and has been shut down, replug it" without saying which device and without any way to detect which device (they all still worked)).
Also the lacking facilities around basic stuff for developer productivity like window management and containers.
This isn't true, though? Just use yabai.
For example, I've run into a couple of occasions where I've needed to build some third-party thing that happens to also need something like QEMU, but the build scripts only run on Linux. Annoying, but whatever, setup a Linux VM/"container" and good to go, right? ... except there is no nested virtualization support on the M1 macs.
Outside of those sort of issues and other ARM-specific problems, while it doesn't usually impact my workflow too much, I wish I had more control over the system. I wish, for example, it could boot off of something other than APFS, etc. I don't want to have to deal with Time Machine when I've already got snapshots everywhere else, etc.
Everything is relatively minor, but there is always some new thing that makes me annoyed every week or two.
FYI, MacFUSE has a user-space library (`libfuse`). The kernel extension also works fine on macOS 13 if you can persuade your IT department to allow it.
Unfortunately, MacBooks are limited to being in "restricted" security mode which disallows kernel extensions from being loaded.
We are not allowed to use "Permissive" security mode
This is why I couldn't justify continuing spending money on Apple (computer) hardware, I don't want to feel like a second-rate citizen on the platform I spend most of my time on. I used and loved MacBooks for a long time, but eventually I got tired of fighting against the one I'm giving money to for hardware, and had to switch away.
I'm gonna be honest and say that recent M2 laptops from Apple almost got me to buy one yet again, after a couple of years of hiatus from Apple laptops, but my wife reasonably reminded me about how much I bitched about various things last time I used their laptops for work. Ended up with another Carbon X1, and everything works as expected, battery works OK and so on.
But a side of me would love a laptop, but I need the maker to actually want to support me, not make it feel like sometimes they work against me.
Take a look at the Framework - a friend got it and is very happy with it.
I did battery life tests running the same Linux distro natively vs in a VM on MacOS. What I found surprised me: battery life was better with the VM than native, so I stayed with the VM.
When a VM is used, driver issues are effectively absent as Apple drivers handle most devices. (USB devices can be passed through to the VM.) The touch pads are properly calibrated and gestures work. Things like external displays just work. GPU access is not the same as from native Linux but the basic OpenGL support in VMWare Fusion was good enough for what I wanted to do. (That's not true any more though.)
Historically I've been more of a Linux user (and developer) on other laptops but it became interesting to get to know the MacOS world as well while still using Linux for dev work.
Just to be clear, is that an arm64 linux? Because emulating x86-64-linux still seems to be not very good.
Since TFA says "everything works" atm, including GPU, Bluetooth, Audio, USB, etc, what's stopping you from doing it now?
I asked and they said currently they don't permit it
Native GPU support with support for Vulkan APIs and some games running would also go a long way towards making the switch as I'm permitted to dual boot MacOS and Asahi - allowing me to once again use one device for "work and play".
Right now I dual boot Asahi and it's "work and experiment"
All things that should be fixed soon.
curl https://alx.sh | sh
to install asahi linux Dual boot on m1 or m2 MacBook apple silicon
so seems safe to me
*Thinkpad 560X! It was worse than a machine 17 years younger. I'm not sure which version the 560X had.
For clarification --- the trackpoint broke, right? Not the whole damn keyboard?
Glad you found something that works for you.
I also had it configured to move significantly faster on strong input, and slow down with gentle input.
Id be impressed if the speed at which you can select text accurately is higher on the trackpad than a mouse. I have seen lots of developers at work on their macbooks do the standard select text->copy->paste, and everyone is way slower at this then people who use mouse.
Maybe its my FPS gaming days that make me better at this, but then again, nobody really plays FPS seriously using trackpads
What seems missing from all this is the notion of gestures. The two finger scroll, single finger pointer move, pinch/zoom, etc - the trackpad is flexible in ways a trackpoint thing just can't be.
"I have seen lots of developers at work on their macbooks do the standard select text->copy->paste, and everyone is way slower at this then people who use mouse."
Not really sure what you're getting at. Selecting with a... trackpoint can be faster than using a mouse? Maybe, for some people. I'm constantly surprised by mouse-using/GUI people who always do so much more with a mouse than you need to. But I'm not sure that takes away any argument from the mac trackpad.
Pretty sure they're saying that mouse accuracy trumps trackpad for cut/paste operations.
> What seems missing from all this is the notion of gestures. The two finger scroll, single finger pointer move, pinch/zoom, etc - the trackpad is flexible in ways a trackpoint thing just can't be.
Yeah, these are great. You can get the best of both worlds on a Magic Mouse, though.
Personally I do alright with a trackpad, but I also lean heavily on the keyboard regardless of auxiliary input devices. In particular, I don't do pointer-heavy workloads like e.g. image editing.
Swipe left, swipe right, terminal, editor, browser, etc.
Swipe up, see all open windows.
Before long I am using a single laptop monitor about as effectively as a multi monitor desktop setup.
In general though, companies tend to issue laptops. So even if you have a desktop setup with multi monitors, keyboard, mouse (which I do and use daily), it will be backed by a laptop on a dock.
Personally, I like being able to work out and about. I work from cafes, planes, poolsides, my couch, my bed. That style of work limits your hardware choices
This is an interesting topic. I found a surprising amount of games available that run on my new MBA just fine.
I'm not sure this is true anymore. I download source and run "make" and the Xcode compilers all do their thing and entitlements are applied and so on. I haven't tried to do any store submissions or anything but it all seems like Apple are aware that CI systems are a thing, now
I don't believe it. My M2 Max maxes at around 40W. x86 just isn't that power efficient. You can idle with only one/few economy core turned on running at the lowest power state for longer battery life but x86 is simply very hungry when running high loads and it can't be magically improved. The arch is just obsolete and legacy.
I have been using x86 laptops in the past (terrible clickpad and speakers like a cheap handheld radio from '90 but whatever, I ignored the overpriced Intel Macs). But M2 is something which I couldn't ignore anymore, bought and I am very happy. They are awesome (unless you buy lowest spec 8GB RAM version)! My only complaint is the soldered SSD and apple pricing on SSD. Having a slot there would make so much sense...
It exists already - https://threedots.ovh/blog/2022/06/quick-look-at-user-mode-f... - it is just that Apple hasn’t made the API public, and (AFAIK) won’t give you the entitlements necessary to use it. But, both are issues Apple could fix relatively easily - if they wanted to - and here’s to hoping the fix is coming soon
However, there is an alternative that works right now - have your user-space filesystem process act as an NFS or SMB server, and mount that. From what I’ve heard - https://lists.nfs-ganesha.org/archives/list/devel@lists.nfs-... - macOS even supports mounting NFS filesystems over Unix domain sockets, which has performance and security advantages over IP loopback
20 years ago, Apple cared about macOS as a Unix, they were interested in putting in features that developers and sysadmins wanted, like this.
Sadly, today's Apple has a rather different attitude towards that sort of thing
Worked without problems for sshfs when I tested it briefly.
A UNIX descendent of NextSTEP tooling, versus the distribution of the month in GNU/Linux world, preaching they will get the desktop this year, for 20 plus years, and the road for gaming relies on pretending to be Windows.
Treat macOS as Mac OS, not as a Linux distribution.
A proper set of UI frameworks, not stuck in pre-history C and C++ workloads or even worse Electron, a 3D graphics API that doesn't require one to become a graphics driver programmer to draw a triangle, proper attention to UI/UX,...
"They said a Unix weenie was code for software engineers who hated what we were doing to Unix (the operating system we licensed)—putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers. They heckled Steve about his efforts to destroy it. His nightmare would be to speak to a crowd of them."
https://web.archive.org/web/20180628214613/https://www.cake....
WSL 2 is a Hyper V VM for running Linux distributions, while WSL emulated Linux syscalls.
Surely some of that salary can be used to make OEMs selling Linux hardware happy, instead of buying Apple and then complaining macOS isn't yet another Linux distribution.
If you want WSL like experience on Mac, VMWare is happy to provide it to you.
It is like complaining using Playstation SDK isn't fit to target Nintendo Switch, go figure!
The comparison to the console world is apt as it mirrors Apple's attempts to lock their platform down, much like the console ecosystem. Thankfully the bootloader is unlocked and it's unlikely that's going to change.
Remember that the MacBook pro is a device marketed at professionals looking to do the work of their profession on their laptops. By "professional", it appears that Apple means "multimedia editors". If you are a software engineer, you are no longer the target audience for the MBP lineup.
Professional Developer !== Doing stuff on Linux distributions.
Want Linux? Buy Linux.
Oh, and Macs have a hide and minimise feature, wow! Just a cluster fuck entirely. Gazillion different ways of installing applications and then managing all those updates separately (a lot like Windows in that regard). These are all issues I face on a regular basis, haven't even dived into developer experience.
Why do you expect alt+tab to perform identically to the Windows version such?e
> window tiling is trash
How's the built-in window tiling on Windows?
> applications need to be "quit"
...okay? yes?
> but some apps quit when their last window is closed, weird
Within Apple's own programs, you see this behavior? Or are you speaking of third-party apps that may be disrespecting the established paradigm?
> Oh, and Macs have a hide and minimise feature, wow! Just a cluster fuck entirely.
Yes, and I love the hide feature.
Seriously, there's plenty to complain about in Mac land these days. There's a definite trajectory and I don't at all like where it's headed. But all of your complaints (other than possibly the one regarding iTunes), essentially boil down to "this isn't Windows". That's fine, go use what you want. What's baffling is when you call something garbage, because it doesn't match your preferences especially when it matches those of others.
If you are a software engineer developing for Linux.
Seriously. I don't get the sentiment here, at all. It's like buying a (insert non-microsoft platform here) computer and complaining it sucks to develop Windows apps on it.
???
If only. It was not my choice to make, it was my employer’s.
On my desktop with 32GB RAM I rarely get above 12GB with a ridiculous amount of applications.
Indeed macOS is the weakest part when working on Apple Silicon.
Sure it’s quite pretty but it stumbles over itself with terrible quality of life features. macOS looks modern but feels around ten years behind other desktops now.
Apple love to talk about how professionals and power users can get so much work done with the amazing Apple Silicon but ignore the fact window management is garbage. The UI still frequently stutters/judders when just resizing a window. There is no true virtual desktop management. Etc.
I do love macOS but Windows and Linux desktop environments are evolving much faster with excellent quality of life and productivity improvements that macOS badly needs but Apple ignore or worse over engineer other “solutions” such as Stage Manager.
Honestly who at Apple signed off on Stage Manager before basic window snapping?!
Does nobody at Apple have an ultrawide monitor? macOS is painful to work with on anything not 16:9 (or :10).
My money is that the iPad team are steering a lot of these decisions as part of a broader strategy to converge their desktop and mobile platforms.
Or UX testing. I gave it a try for a week. Gave up. It’s one of those few features that is not intuitive at all.
And it was supposed to help with productivity. Epic fail.
I believe the reason they don't bring window snapping and better overall window management to macOS is because it is something Windows and every Linux DE does and has done for years so they will be seen as copying and being "late".
One of the good things about the changes in Windows 11 is the new snap assistant that pops out at the top of the screen when you move a window. It's simple and clear how to use it and makes sense visible only when appropriate.
Windows, Gnome, KDE, etc. have all these things for years. Perhaps even over a decade by now?
Microsoft even go one further with Fancy Zones in their PowerToys pack which is fantastic on very large/wide monitors.
I wish Apple would add the functionality of apps like Rectangle/Magnet/Fancy Zones with some additional options such as layouts. That would be far more useful than whatever they were trying to achieve with Stage Manager on macOS.
But Stage Manager is what I actually wanted all along: let me group windows together, and then when I switch to one of them, bring the others along. For my typical workday I have my "slack, mail, mastodon" stage, a stage with a couple of browser windows, a stage with VScode and a couple of terminal windows, a stage with Obsidian and Omnifocus, and then ad-hoc stages as I need them. I add a terminal window to stages as I need.
I end up with the same benefits of two-dimensional TotalSpaces spaces, without having to care about the spaces' relative positions anymore! When I cmd-tab to VScode, I get my VScode "stuff", and when I cmd-tab to slack or mail, I get that "stuff", and so on. I wish I could make the transition faster, but with "Reduce Motion" turned on to skip the animation, it's not so bad.
All I can say is that I'm flabbergasted by this statement. Expose was lightyears ahead of Windows window management at the time (10.4!), and it took Microsoft until Windows 10 to include it in Windows (same for virtual desktop functionality).
> no true virtual desktop management
Not sure what you consider "true" virtual desktops; OS X 10.5 had classic workspaces with Spaces; Mission control later localized workspaces to monitors. Both approaches have their pros and cons.
What exactly is it that has Windows 10 years ahead of MacOS in window management?
> before basic window snapping
I can snap two windows side by side in a fullscreen split (the most common use case for snapping). I would certainly call that "basic window snapping".
> Does nobody at Apple have an ultrawide monitor? macOS is painful to work with on anything not 16:9 (or :10).
I don't know. They don't sell any, right? Apple designs their user experience for their own hardware. It's just table stakes with them.
tl;dr -- these are your opinions. They differ from those of others. That's how Apple can ignore the fact that their window management is "garbage" --- they likely don't see it that way.
Resident Evil Village, Baldur's Gate 3.
> and never happening for old titles
World of Warcraft.
Probably they care more about iOS since iPhone is their money maker. They might release iOS on MacBooks, too.
LOL. There was a time when mac/macos was the premium choice for a development environment, but I think that time has gone. Apple spent too much focus on iOS.
Is it just hardware that helps extend battery life or is it the combination of hardware and software? One advantage for Apple is that they are both the hardware and software designer hence they can optimise both to take advantage of each other.
They’re faster and cheaper and more compatible and better software support.
I can understand people who want a Mac laptop, but seems weird to choose a slower, more expensive, less mainstream machine for desktop.
How can this possibly be true when Asahi Linux is still in alpha?
A quick trip to the project page shows lots of hardware features that are still not supported. [1]
It’s not a knock against Asahi Linux - it’s amazing what they have accomplished with a small team. It just seems so misleading for the author to claim that everything works perfectly.
Thunderbolt, DP Alt Mode, Video Decoder/Encoder, SEP, Neural Engine, internal Speaker
Thunderbolt seems like the main missing feature. It's easy to see how someone could live a fulfilling life without running into the lack of any of those features. E.g. is there even anything on the Linux desktop that could take advantage of the Neural Engine or Secure Enclave?
I don't think battery life is their concern.
Granted, that might as well be never.
> To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: “No.”
> Everything works… and works perfectly.
That is impressive and really hard to believe! I guess I'll have to find an M1 mac Mini to try myself!
It's not like PC world of mix and match everything.
I do wish apple did a native apple port, but the community is making good progress on that front.
You mean in reverse engineering hardware?
Marcan, Asahi Lina, and related folks have been working on improving 3d accelerations. It's good enough for desktop use and some gaming so far, games like tuxracer, video playback, minecraft, etc. First the driver was in user space in python, then in the kernel with rust, and recent improvements have increased parallelism (from Lina) and removing Mailboxes (from Marcan).
OpenGL and Vulkan compliance has been increasing. Last I heard OpenGL was at 99-100% (almost all tests passing) and Vulkan wasn't as good, but improving. I believe Alyssa Rosen is doing much of that work.
Last published update I've seen is: https://asahilinux.org/2022/12/gpu-drivers-now-in-asahi-linu...
There are some posts on Twitter and/or Mastodon, and regular updates on YouTube from "Asahi Lina" and Marcan, often by Live stream and Patreon.
Oh, and Neal Gompa is working on getting the GPU working with Fedora. One problem is most ARM linux distros default to 4k pages. But the GPU (which shares memory with the CPU) requires 16k pages. Seems like a performance win (less TLB thrashing), with a marginal increase in memory use.
Many of the penetration testing tools are not mainstream and they include pre-build x86_64 binaries, or are configured just to not compile with ARM, for reason unknown. And there is no time to figure out what is wrong.
I know this might be a niche scenario, but still...
I used QEMU through Podman machine in the end, but the performance is terrible. Even on MacOS side QEMU does not support Rosetta 2. Docker for Desktop supports and gives significant boost, but I don’t want to use it.
Is Rosetta 2 that much faster than QEMU's own translation? Why?
Oh yes. Based on the benchmarks I've seen it's a good 30-40% faster on compute workloads. I assume that the pre-transpilation of the binaries is advantageous relative to having to virtualize the CPU.
† actually not measured, but compared to the order of magnitude on the other side it's about that, eyeballed against the same code on aarch64.
Among other things, Rosetta 2 is able to use the CPU's special TSO memory ordering mode, which I think QEMU's TCG cannot use so has to use barrier instructions instead (MTTCG), or run all the virtualised CPU threads on a single host core (obviously slower for parallel workloads).
I love the battery life and the keyboard is much better than the old one. It feels snappy running native code but I just know it's going to cause me more issues than it's worth.
Wasn’t the M2 Pro released like a month ago?
Am I that old that a few weeks now counts as once upon a time?
But yeah, it was like week after the release I took that laptop to CTF.
I'm just saying.
Builtin speaker support is still a work in progress. It works if you know what you are doing and are not afraid to damage your speakers if you make a mistake. There's been progress on this though, so I expect this to be resolved sooner than later.
There's no builtin speakers in the author's mac studio though, so I'll give them a pass for this one.
Bluetooth and wifi both work, but their drivers are still buggy. I see a lot of errors in dmseg from these drivers and occasionally things stop working and require a reboot to fix.
GPU acceleration works, but there is still a lot of work to do on that driver.
External displays over the thunderbolt ports don't work yet.
Other things that don't work on the laptops: webcam, touch-id / Secure Enclave, some miscellaneous software.
Don't get me wrong, I've been able to daily drive linux only on my m2 air since August. I love the hardware and the current state of Asahi meets my needs. And its been steadily improving over the course of time. But its far from "work[ing] perfectly" yet.
curl https://alx.sh | sh
to install asahi linux Dual boot on m1 or m2 MacBook apple silicon
It sounds like if you're developing services hosted in a cloud, Asahi Linux is a great fit for a desktop Mac.
Some of their more powerful routers have a bunch of ARM cores (no video out, though) and I think I've seen people using OpenWRT there.
For a while they were using Annapurna Labs CPUs, and I've seen that in some high end Netgear wireless routers from 2017, and I see people selling those with OpenWRT on eBay. I don't know their performance, but I'd like to try that instead for a mini server instead of an expensive and virtually inexistent RPi.
There goes a list of routers with Annapurna Labs processors, I'll see tomorrow if I find around some OpenWRT builds for them.
https://www.semianalysis.com/p/amazon-graviton-3-uses-chiple...
Considering modern AWS hardware relies heavily on Nitro, their dedicated chips offloading networking and storage, it's unlikely Graviton CPUs would easily work outside of AWS' environment.
Don't all Macs come with a built-in speaker? I.e. the one that plays the start-up chime, and plays "system sounds" like emptying the trash.
On Mac notebooks and AIOs, this is one-and-the-same as the obvious external speaker array used as the default output device; but on desktop Macs (like the Mac Mini — don't know about the Mac Studio), it's a separate little speaker hidden somewhere inside the chassis. (It's like the old concept of a "PC speaker", but this one is hooked up to a DAC and routable as a regular audio device, rather than only being able to play tones from a PIT.)
Not having to deal with an entire custom laptop (i.e. getting a lot of standard peripherals for "free" after only getting USB to work) also helps a whole lot, and note the article specifically talks about a desktop mac.
And that’s Apple’s chip from 2 years ago!
Core for core this is a dog.
Neoverse N1 is hardly a dog. It’s a decent enough core in a server processor that has 80 of them.
Altra is not intended to compete core for core with any laptop/desktop/workstation processor.
Buying mac hardware for a linux workstation is madness.
But yes, if by workstation you mean shiny then sure!
Ampere Altra on Windows: ca. 800 (1C) ca. 12800 (80C) https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/20639458
Ampere Altra on Linux: ca. 900 (1C) ca. 44000 (80C) https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ampere-altra-max-80-ccore-...
Apparently the key to getting performance out of the Ampere Altra is … to just not use Windows? And have a very parallel workload. Yes, a single Altra core is half as fast as a single M1 Ultra core. But it really depends on your use case and other factors (e.g. power efficiency) which one is preferable.
I’d like to understand what the issue here is. Sounds counterintuitive to me.
I initially chose a limit of "500m" for all of them except coredns (which seemed to be fine), but there were still some occasional issues with the metrics-server and traefik, so I increased those to "750m" and that solved those issues, but it caused coredns to CrashLoopBackOff. After setting a "500m" limit on coredns, everything ran smoothly.
So, essentially, I set a "500m" on all of the pods in the kube-system namespace except for traefik and metrics-server (they got "750m"), and of course I didn't need to set limits on the helm-install-* pods.
I didn't modify the default memory limits at all.
Seriously? Would a $6000+ x64 workstation be noticeably slower?
Mostly its a question of latency I would imagine.
My machine:
Archlinux “Zen” (lower latency kernel).
Threadripper 3970x
256G DDR4 2666MHz
3x4TiB NVMe (PCIe Gen3) in RAID0
Radeon VII GFX card (more than enough for 2D render of terminals).
that might be the problem
low latency kernels aren't of any help unless you're running realtime (or near-realtime) workloads. not only that, in order to guarantee high priority tasks they will hurt regular process performances.
for desktop usage running a "low latency" kernel is probably a bad idea (no wonder "low latency" kernel config are not the default choice).
The lower latency kernels are great for desktops (and the default for desktop distros typically). They sacrifice raw power for lower latency.
So my compiles take a bit longer as the kernel will switch tasks more often, but keypresses will be captured with reduced latency from my perspective.
I have tested this, the stock arch kernel has considerable more latency on inputs.
CONFIG_HZ_100 # Typical for server workloads
CONFIG_HZ_250 # For servers that need to switch tasks more often (think: overprovisioned cloud providers)
CONFIG_HZ_300 # For Media servers/workstations, typically
CONFIG_HZ_1000 # For desktops, typicall.
Why does it recommend this? Because the higher the polling rate the quicker it will see inputs from human interface devices like mice and keyboards and respond to them.
A higher tickrate here will mean more interrupts (meaning lower throughput but a lower latency to interrupts). If you're talking about process latency of non-interrupted processes then a lower value is prefered because you don't really want your program to wait around for more CPU time while linux polls all of its buffers and tries to schedule other tasks.
You can easily see what is configured by asking the kernel for its configuration param: `zcat /proc/config.gz | grep -E '^CONFIG_HZ'`
We know the performance characteristics of various x86 cores, however there are simply a lot of them, so most precompiled x86 code is generically targeted but likely has suboptimal parts on different architectures. You can, of course, -mtune= with gcc, but you'd basically need to rebuild your distribution. Or in other words, the ideal would be to compare someone running Gentoo vs macOS.
So, that was the gist of the talk and I more or less accept the conclusions. Now for my own view, I think what makes ARM processors interesting is their efficiency wrt power consumption. I would love a non-Apple ARM laptop if only because intel cores are much less efficient in terms of power they require.
Certainly not worth recompiling things all the time in my opinion, even with a beefy machine like mine.
OP is running Arch though, which is probably built with gcc/clang targeting generic ARMv8(.0?).
They basically agreed with what you said. ARM isn't some magical compute/watt wand that Apple waved; it's their incredibly tight software and hardware integration that allowed them optimize.
Lastly, threadripper has a NUMA architecture, which is not very user application friendly. Frankly, they are very bad personal computers in general, only worth if you need that much memory or PCI lines, which doesn't seem to be your case.
But it's about twice the price of a 16-core AMD 7955 which has about 150% the performance both per core and overall. The M1 certainly might win on power, though.
Using a machine of this class is mind blowing, that author isn't wrong about that. But there's still about a 3x price/performance gap. I love ARM and I can't wait for this to get more mainstream, but it's not quite here yet if you are cost conscious.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+9+7950X&i... https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M1+Ultra+20+C...
Umm how would it ever be not legal? Even if Apple doesn't formally allow it, you're free too so with your own hardware whatever you want.
Wait, what? This sounds like a pretty egregious design flaw on Apple's part.
A pure software analogy (because that’s what I know better) would be something like: race a bunch of speculative variant algorithms in parallel, knowing that you’re “wasting” compute time, where the probability of speculation being more optimal than hand tuning is high and pathological cases have a “safe” straightforward deoptimization.
Resulting in exceptional audio performance. The Asahi Linux devs have already reverse engineered and implemented this safety system but there is a risk they have made a mistake or it doesn’t get enabled due to a bug.
Overall tip for anyone using Linux and having issues with audio... USB Audio is magical and works wonder. I never bother with the computer's in-board sound: it's USB Audio immediately through a DAC. Works fine. Apple sells $10 USB-C-to-3.5mmjack DAC which are basically a tiny cable (for anyone lamenting it's "too bulky" to have a full-on DAC next to their laptop).
For desktops: problem doesn't even register. Just bypass the audio components on your motherboard and use a proper DAC.
As an added bonus computers are particularly electrically noisy and a DAC is a great way to do away with all that the noise.
So my advice: just use a DAC with Linux. Plug it in. Marvel at "dmesg" showing "USB Audio" and enjoy quality sound.
Ah darn yup! If there's one thing I'd expect from these is to not be noisy! FWIW I'm using a CambridgeAudio DAC and, well, CambridgeAudio is supposed to be a good brand when it comes to audio stuff (amp is CambridgeAudio too).
I have had the black and am currently on the Red, I noticed the difference so I think it's worth it. Have not tried the cobalt.
[0] - https://www.audioquest.com/dacs/dragonfly/dragonfly-cobalt
It looks like these start at $250? I'd expect them to work well. I'm more wary of this pricepoint:
> Apple sells $10 USB-C-to-3.5mmjack DAC
I've gotten a lot less EM noise with builtin soundcards than cheap USB DACs, but YMMV.
These numbers are several years old now, but Apple USB-C DACs do perform very well overall regardless of price point: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r....
Price inflated, like the price of nearly everything. I paid mine 150 EUR back in the days (still not cheap but not either the 4 digits high-end audiophile stuff).
The thing is: you want thing to work fine from Linux's side and in my experience USB Audio on Linux just works.
I'm sure there are other brands/models at reasonable price points.
Linux 2023: Sleep support doesn’t work quite yet, but it’s being worked on right now
What if I just want to buy a thing. And then later also be able to sell it maybe.
Is it though?
The article list an m1 ultra with 128gb of ram, so 6000 or so. Not sure what the target market for this is, but the intersection of "4000 does not cut it" and "I don't need high performance computing, clusters, multiple GPUs, no ECC,no more ram than that" to me seems almost empty.
These are close to 2k for CPU alone AFAIK.
I must admit though I am biased as I am yet to find a fault or reason for an upgrade in my original M1 machine, and I had dual xeon workstation prior to that.
Power draw for one; it applies to desktop PCs as well. Electricity isn't always cheap.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-Gen-...
Also just throwing out there that the X1 weighs about 500g less than a MacBook pro and a powerbank is about 500g.
That said, if you are fine with weight and battery life is important, 2015 was the year to be:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/9623/the-lenovo-thinkpad-t450...
How nice of Apple. #snarc
Memory bandwidth (peak, not stream)
Ryzen 7950x = 84GB/sec # 128 bit wide ddr5-5200
M1 = 66GB/sec # 128 bit wide ddr5-4800
M2 = 100GB/sec # 128 bit wide ddr5-6400
M1/M2 Pro = 200GB/sec # 256 bit wide
M1/M2 Max = 400GB/sec # 512 bit wide
M1 Ultra = 800GB/sec # 1024 bit wide, m2 ultra not out
Sadly AMD is reserved the improved memory system for the XboxX and PS5. Both AMD and Intel limit laptops and normal desktops (except for the expensive HEDT segment like the Threadripper) to 128 wide memory.
(32GB dual rank sticks * 4 -- there are no 64GB DDR5 sticks yet. Some reports of system instability with all four DDR5 slots populated, too, even when running at DDR4 speeds, it seems the motherboard manufacturers aren't QAing it.)
Just look at the premium AMD and Intel charge for 256 bit wide memory, let alone 1024 bit wide. Xeon servers have 512 bit wide memory, AMD Epycs in the newest gen have 768. Apple's unique in having a 1024 bit wide memory interface, at least among commodity hardware.
By controlling components/configs, they (Apple) doesn't have to field angry tech support calls and go down rabbit holes as to why a random RAM manufacturer's DIMMs don't work with my machine.
Apple also does this with thunderbolt products, which have a very strict certification process so that user in theory should have a user experience where the products "just work."
But that’s only for the cheap computers (a market Apple doesn’t serve). Most machines in the $800+ range offer excellent value and reliability (except Dell).
> By controlling components/configs, they (Apple) doesn't have to field angry tech support calls and go down rabbit holes as to why a random RAM manufacturer's DIMMs don't work with my machine.
I think you severely overestimate the number of people who install aftermarket parts into their computers. Furthermore, Apple offsetting the cost of tech support by overcharging customers for hardware is really shitty. Maybe if you’re a shareholder then that’s a positive statement, but this thread about pricing is obviously from a consumer perspective.
ALSO, it’s ignoring the fact that Apple’s answer to any tech support question is “buy a new one”. So whatever they’re doing with that extra money, it’s not going into tech support.
Why should I pay 10x RAM prices? Because nobody else can sell RAM for Apple’s latest computers, and nobody else can compete directly with those computers yet, and Apple is taking full advantage of that.
If a competitor starts offering comparable hardware, they’ll be able to significantly undercut Apple simply by offering RAM (and storage) at reasonable prices. Until then, Apple will be emptying wallets.
Seems like Intel and AMD are heading towards an 8 channel standard and the cheaper chips will enable only 4 of those channels.
"AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D Linux Performance"
https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen9-7950x3d-linux
"From the nearly 400 benchmarks, when taking the geo mean the 7950X3D was at 97% the performance of the Ryzen 9 7950X while on average being at 60% the power consumption rate. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D in these non-gaming workloads was 11% faster than the Intel Core i9 13900K and at around 60% the power."
+
"AMD Unveils Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 7900X3D, and Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Up to 128 MB of L3 Cache And 5.7 GHz Boost"
https://www.anandtech.com/show/18709/amd-unveils-ryzen-9-795...
I do understand that people want the Mac for the build quality of the laptop, not just for speed.
I find LG Gram laptops to be of higher build quality than Mac laptops. They may be pricier too depending on which LG Gram and which Mac you buy though.
Mac laptops feel and are incredibly brittle. They may look shiny and the screen may look gorgeous, but they're simply brittle.
People here and there like to make fun of "MILSPEC" but my MILSPEC LG Gram can sustain quite a beating. Meanwhile my M1 Mac is 1/5th the age of my LG Gram and the M1 Mac's screen is already broken.
Mac laptops are very good looking but they are not, to me, of great build quality. They're also heavier than my LG Gram.
Apple's MacBook Pro has very good build quality but that doesn't mean it isn't fragile. The screen and trackpad are glass for example so going to be far more brittle than most plastic options.
That isn't a build quality issue though, at least not to how I define build quality which is fit and finish and excellent quality assurance. I've had expensive Dell, Lenovo and HP laptops with "Premium" displays that arrive with stuck pixels. Hinges not properly aligned. Squeaky keyboards and trackpads. Speakers that pop, etc. That is poor build quality and crap QC.
The Mac's have near perfect build and QC but they sure are less durable than many other laptops.
https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/intel-core-i9-13900...
https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-16-inch-2023-...
(Admittedly the Mac Studio is slower, since it was released ~360 days ago - probably not the best time to buy one, but who knows when they'll update it.)
The author states the desire is to match the architecture of the servers they deploy software to, which seems reasonable - depending on the software, it can be very useful to be able to run/debug the same binaries locally.
As a long time Linux user and someone forced to use MacOS, my hands are itching to buy a 2nd M1/M2 mac and install Asahi linux on it. I've never felt such excitement since the days of Compiz.
At the moment building for aarch64 pretty much means embedded, Mac users on the team, or Graviton/other Arm servers.
Are we going to reach a point where there's a meaningful mix of architectures, but it doesn't point to the brand of device? Of course Apple will continue with only one thing, but that Lenovo might have options from Arm licensees as well as Intel/AMD?
Thanks though, seems promising. I've been interested in Asahi since I first saw it here, but I can't help wondering if long-term the better buy might not be a ThinkPad, Framework or whatever that only ever expected (Windows or) Linux. (The Framework has probably been enough to quash the draw of Mac hardware/build quality but Linux for me.)
I use it for dev so I don’t care. Don’t expect to train any models with it.
It’s very snappy for media consumption though, no issues at all there (if you stick to ARM native apps).
When I bought my Raspberry Pi several years back, I was able to comfortably develop using Emacs, gcc, and SBCL Common Lisp - the same software I use on my AMD desktop. Everything I needed "just worked"; compiling just wasn't very fast.
P.S: the 3440x1440 screenshot in TFA looks gorgeous on my system. Everything is using subpixel AA (terminals, code editor, browser, except for the URL, for whatever reason) but not the file manager. I wonder why that is.
It's documented: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787
Debian seemed to be a natural default but I'm leaning toward an Arch distro so would prepare me if I should switch to ARM down the road.
Plain debian is fine though - unless you have a recent laptop and need nvidia drivers. You can make it work, but it's fiddly and the Pop! guys already figured everything out for you. I use debian on an old HP deskside server as a workstation and it's been fantastic.
That said, I really wish someone other than Apple would release something like an ARM64 NUC, with good Linux compat. Even something on par with the SD Gen 2 should be plenty to run a desktop day to day.
There were recently a couple of new NUC-type devices based on the outgoing generation AMD mobile processors. I have the Minisforum UM690, based on the Ryzen 6900HX, and it's been working great as my new desktop computer. The iGPU is pretty good too. The Ryzen 6800U (U = efficient variant, 25 W TDP) is about the same as the M2 for performance and power consumption. The 6900HX in this device is the high power variant, default TDP is 45 W but you can lower it to 25 W in the BIOS which should make it about identical to a 6800U. The newer ones with the latest gen Ryzen chips should be much more efficient.
M1 Ultra doubles the bandwidth again to 800GB/sec, and fits in a small and quite desktop. What CPU+iGPU (or GPU) do you think is comparable to M1 Ultra and competes on performance and power?
I'm pretty sure the biggest intel/amd desktopn cpu is faster than a m1 pro/ultra, m2 pro/ultra but there is no amd64 processer with the same efficiency than the m1/m2 macs.
My 7 year old i7 laptop used 5 W idling with a few applications open and the screen at max brightness. I don't know what a modern non-Apple laptop uses when watching video, but 10 W seems about right.
The v2718 is an embedded Zen2 SoC with a Vega GPU that totals 10-25wCDP. Adding RAM and a main board to that might add 10w, give or take.
> heck watching prime video my total power is at ~10w total power.
Watching video is probably one of the most efficient tasks you can do these days, especially since most of it is offloaded to specialized decoders in the GPU (of which AMD, Apple, nvidia, Intel, etc all provide).
> trust me no matter which ryzen/intel processer you will never be as low as 10w total power.
They literally exist. There’s just no market for them. The sweet spot for PC users is around 15-25w for laptops. The loss in performance below that is generally something people are dissatisfied with.
... provided everything you and your team does is 100% on the web, otherwise if you're a normal dev shop building and consuming docker images then you'll chase innumerable reports of "well, on my machine I can't use docker.io/example/thingy:1.0 I had to use docker.io/eleeetz-safe-4-sure/thingy:0.33.05beta-arm64"
Thus, it would be better if the whole company were on the same CPU and since there's no longer any prayer of amd64 macOS ... we Linuxers have to capitulate
Slack works just fine from the browser on Asahi though.
The fetch-latest-widevine.sh[0] script says 'Architecture not supported'.
[0]: https://github.com/proprietary/chromium-widevine/blob/master...
Once you've built Electron (or downloaded their binaries), many of the builds fail because they download something that requires x86_64, and then you get to troubleshoot that.
Flathub doesn't have aarch64 builds of most of these apps either, so I'm assuming it is not just me having issues.
So much for cross platform. It is doable for the open source apps if you want to get your hands dirty though.
It did motivate me to look for non-Electron replacements (to Electron apps, not Slack and Spotify specifically), so I've got that going for me.
Sent from an RPi4 I use as an always on workstation.
https://box86.org/ | https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64
I haven't tried them myself, but I've read consistent testimony that the performance (and compatibility) is great.
Sadly I miss out on spotify connect and all of the social/playlist features. I'd love to use the web version, but firefox doesn't support drm on arm, and I can't seem to get webkitgtk to compile with EME support.
You should consider to submit a bug report to k8s project.
Sucker. For the same price, OP could have had TWO Mac Studios Max 10-core with 64GB RAM each, which together would absolutely spank the Mac Studio Ultra 20-core with 128GB RAM. Why are people falling for this!?
https://box86.org/2022/12/box64-on-asahi-with-experimental-g...
Sure compiling will take a bit longer than on that machine but I'm not doing that very often - nor do I occasionally run 48 core kubernetes microservices clusters, but to each their own.
Happy to hear about the HW support for Linux though.
Everything is instant for me on dwm on my AMD Thinkpad
*edit* ok a bit more than half. Chip shortage has scalpers sitting on threadrippers.
It would be interesting to see a 24 or 32 core Threadripper vs the Mac Studio. I didn't price out the full system but those CPUs are in the $1300-2800 range
Compact quiet low power unexpandable box vs large noisy power hungry expandable box. Pick your poison.
I'd also do more research if I'd plan to run Linux on an Apple box. Just because it's good for TFA's use case, it may not be good for yours.
I'm not a heavy gamer, but having some 3D is nice. I'd likely buy a 7900 (non-x) or 7800X3D if buying now, but not going to spend $800 and up for current gen GPUs, maybe get a 3060 or 3060 Ti. The Mac Studio is looking pretty promising, hopefully it's refreshed with the M2 CPUs RSN.
If you normalize to performance, building a comparable PC for things like compiling code can be about half the price. Intel and AMD’s latest top-end consumer CPUs are very, very fast and significantly cheaper.
> Is the power efficiency of Apple Silicon still a major advantage in a desktop system?
If you’re going for ultimate silence and/or you need the smallest machine possible, power efficiency matters.
If you’re spending 99% of your time in the code editor and web browser, your CPU is going to be mostly idle anyway and peak power usage basically doesn’t matter. A decently configured AMD or even Intel system with reasonable fan curves can be plenty quiet for the 1% of time that you’re at 100% CPU usage (hint: embrace the high temperatures and let it throttle, it’s fine).
ATX case $100
650W ATX PSU apparently these are the smallest now? $100
Z690 motherboard you can spend a lot here but say $250
Reputable DDR5 DIMMs: $70 per 16GB, $120 for 32GB, $220 for 64GB
Reputable 1TB SSD $100
Excellent and quiet air cooler: $100
CPU similar in single-thread perf to M2: $400
As if you were actually violating the law by running non-vendorOS on a vendor locked computer. What a ridiculous concept.
To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: “No.”
I'm hoping this is possible at some point on macOS.
I'm a Linux user, considering to get a M2 Mac Mini these days, and probably load Linux, even better and if possible, dual-boot as I do need MacOS to run some ios apps on emulator.
However, if you were concerned about power consumption than the M2 would win by a mile, but for me it wasn't a huge factor in a desktop machine.
for ML training or 3D graphics, I wonder how M1 and M2's NPU and GPU are supported under Linux, unless they're optimized and verified to be superior, I will grab a machine with RTX 3090Ti instead.
At the high end of performance, the M2 is just light years better than any other chip (other than the M1) in terms of performance per watt. But if that stops being a concern to you then I think most linux desktop users are better off just getting a "normal" intel machine, which also will have 100% driver support for everything, cost less, and probably be faster.
The specs say it supports 6K @60Hz over the Type-C ports and 4K for the HDMI port
So I am expecting everything from proper GPU acceleration, power management and sleep to the Touch ID keyboard to be 100% working perfectly fine, all guaranteed then?
In addition, it’s open source software. Not some corporate organization selling you a product. Nothing is guaranteed.
You're telling me that the Mac Studio has no "power management" or "sleep" functionality at all? Not even in macOS? Nor does it have a 'GPU' for GPU acceleration either. We both know that it isn't exclusive to laptops. Everyone knows Touch ID doesn't work, both the seperate keyboard and on Apple Silicon laptops (and Intel Macs) and you know it.
> I don’t think you can take their claim of it 100% working on their hardware and apply it to a completely different machine.
Yes I can, and I just did since Asahi Linux is aimed at specifically supporting all Apple Silicon machines. OPs machine included.
Just admit that the OP is getting carried away with the claim that "Everything works… and works perfectly" when we know that isn't true. A dose of skepticism is needed to cut through wild claims during bouts of hype and euphoria.
Even some have already questioned [0] the 'everything works' claim and are still waiting for sleep and power management support [1].
OP claimed that all of the hardware they tested (with an enumerated list of said hardware) worked as they expected. For you to take that as some guarantee that you should then have a perfect experience on a completely different (or even the exact same) piece of hardware is your issue. It’s an opinion/experience editorial, not a professional expert/authority on the subject.
Yet you decided to reply back and evaded answering my question. By doing that not only you indirectly admitted it, you already know that not 'everything' is working and anyone can check that for themselves.
> OP claimed that all of the hardware they tested (with an enumerated list of said hardware) worked as they expected. For you to take that as some guarantee that you should then have a perfect experience on a completely different (or even the exact same) piece of hardware is your issue.
It's Asahi Linux's problem to solve, not mine. Why would I bother to run something that has missing and less functionality than macOS and what part of the nonsensical claim of "Everything works… and works perfectly" don't you understand?
As I said before, the whole point of running Asahi Linux is to support all Apple Silicon machines which means both laptop and desktops. The hardware is not 'completely different' and we both know, and even those asking in the links in [0] and [1] also know that GPU acceleration, sleep and power management and also Touch ID is not exclusive to laptops nor is it properly working or even functional either.
Yet another one [2] questioned the "Everything works… and works perfectly" claim. It's almost as if it's better to be skeptical about someone hyping and claiming that 'everything works' about running alpha software these days...
Go do it, it’s a better use of your time and infinitely less annoying to the rest of society.
Says the one still replying here and cannot answer a basic question about the obvious falsehood being claimed by the OP.
Assuming you have read the links in my previous comment and in [0] and especially about feature support, you do already know that not everything is supported or even functioning properly? Yes or No?
> Go do it, it’s a better use of your time and infinitely less annoying to the rest of society.
Surely you can think of a better response that actually answers my question about proper Apple Silicon support rather than dodging again since you're having a difficult time giving a straight answer.
Calling it still earth overshoot day after partitioning might be not fully correct.
Check here for your country overshoot day https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/country-overshoot-days...
Might it be that you're just failing to measure reality objectively?
The pandemic and trade wars put a wrench in the gears of that plan, but I still think that would be way cooler than lugging around a 128GB laptop and using it for everything, a.k.a. single point of failure.