Hacker News Reader

Comment by extr | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I think people were overly optimistic given the initial progress. The Asahi team has done incredible work to be sure with just getting it running and the GPU driver. But there is a long tail of things to fix to make it truly usable as a daily driver.

For me personally, I thought the project was awesome, installed it, booted it, and realized the trackpad felt really janky. I start playing with the acceleration settings and then caught myself and remembered that not having to deal with that exact thing was why I bought a Mac to begin with.

View on HN

One major problem is in the fact that Hector/Asahi has very little experience with distribution maintenance, and is mainly suited to the role of reverse engineering the M1 chip and implementing the driver. It would be far better if he put all of his focus into the M1 driver itself and let others handle the surrounding distro variants. In fact this recently came up when he misconfigured GRUB during updates and soft-locked Macs until they ran a list of sudo commands to fix the error.

That's the whole point of their new partnership with Fedora

That didn't help as the parent mentioned as Fedora Asahi Remix shipped a bug that caused people's grub config to be overwritten with one that didn't work preventing the machine from booting. There was no way to remotely fix users and a solution took days to come out for people to manually fix it by typing in commands to the bootloader.

To their credit, this is a more challenging than your standard Linux distro. Lots of software just has a bunch of subtle bugs on arm which don't exist on x86_64. Other software has a bunch of subtle bugs on 16k page sizes. Those problems aren't ones you'll face as a distro maintainer for some x86_64 Linux distro. Then there's the issue that Arch Linux ARM is itself not always super competently managed, so it's not a solid foundation to build on top of.

I think it'll be very good for them to leave all the distro responsibilities to Fedora and focus on the hardware specific stuff. But I don't think they'll stop facing weird issues related to not being part of the 4k page size x86_64 monoculture.

But was the grub issue caused by the 16k page size?

Ok, but the page size is something they chose themselves?

My understanding is that the chosen page size is optimal for the M-series integrated memory.

It doesn't really matter all that much for userspace; the page size really is a choice. It can improve performance in some cases and regress them in a handful of others. That said, the pain of having to deal with apps that need updates is entirely on Asahi by their own volition.

I wonder, wouldn’t a NixOS Asahi fork make sense? It has proper, fail-safe updates (you can select the previous version in the boot menu) and reproducible package builds even for very finicky configs.

The only actual problematic update I'm aware of was the one where grub broke, and if grub breaks, being able to select the previous system state from grub doesn't really help.

It should be noted GRUB itself didn’t break at all. Hector used a bad config which broke things, and the fix was to replace that config with a new one. GRUB did exactly what it was told to do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com