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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

"Unlike the vendor’s non-conformant 4.1 drivers, our open source Linux drivers are conformant to the latest OpenGL versions, finally promising broad compatibility with modern OpenGL workloads, like Blender, Ryujinx, and Citra."

Looks like apple silicon are currently the best hardware for running linux and linux is the best OS for apple silicon machines.

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> Looks like apple silicon are currently the best hardware for running linux and linux is the best OS for apple silicon machines

Blender has Metal support for Apple Silicon macs. The Metal API is better architected (largely due to being more modern and being developed with benefit of hindsight) so all things equal I'd pick the Metal version on Mac.

In case you missed it in the article, the M1 GPU does not natively support OpenGL 4.6. They had to emulate certain features. The blog post goes into some of the performance compromises that were necessary to make the full OpenGL emulation work properly. Absolutely a good compromise if you're on Linux and need to run a modern OpenGL app, but if your only goal is to run Blender as well as possible then you'd want to stick to macOS.

Ryujinx is a Nintendo Switch emulator. They added support for Apple Silicon Macs a couple years ago and have been improving since then: https://blog.ryujinx.org/the-impossible-port-macos/

Linux on Apple hardware has come a long way due to some incredible feats of engineering, but it's far from perfect. Calling it the "best OS for Apple Silicon" is a huuuuge reach.

It's great if you need to run Linux for day to day operations, though.

Right, Blender Cycles for example can run on Metal, but neither on OpenGL or Vulkan. So while it's nice to have a working OpenGL, it depends if your workflow requires OpenGL apps.

I would be very surprised, if Blender Cycles ever ran on top of OpenGL or Vulkan other than using OpenGL or Vulkan as a loader for compute shaders.

That's why it is running as CUDA/OptiX/HIP/oneAPI on Windows and Linux.

I would love for my employer to support that config at work. We have quite lovely Linux dev laptops, but the battery life of the M1/M2 machines in the IT shop is definitely enticing, and Asahi Linux gets closer to MacOS in that regard than you might think given the relative maturity and optimization.

It definitely isn’t ready for use as a daily driver. There are lots of bits missing (see below for an example) and power management isn’t great compared to macOS.

How so? I'm daily driving it as my only machine since November.sure there are missing features but none that are really essential for most people.

You and I have very different work environments for you to be able to claim that microphones aren't essential for most people.

I use a headset anyway. Build in microphones are really shitty so they are frowned upon at my job. (Although Apples has one of the best).

Strange the article doesn't use the word "Apple" once, and instead awkwardly uses "the vendor" to refer to Apple.

It's inline with how the linux/floss community refers to hardware vendors in general, even if Apple is a unique case in many circumstances.

Didn't CentOS use "the vendor" instead of RHEL like this too?

> Looks like apple silicon are currently the best hardware for running linux

I wonder if this effort to run Linux on apple silicon will continue if snapdragon X laptops become mainstream.

I think it will. One of the main issues with desktop linux is still broad hardware support. Random crap like fingerprint readers or Wi-Fi cards still don't work on certain machines. By having a very constrained set of hardware options, it makes it a lot easier to support. The snapdragon devices are also starting way behind.. both the Surface X and Lenovo X13S snapdragon devices exist today but Linux support isn't close to Asahi.

> the Surface X and Lenovo X13S snapdragon devices exist today but Linux support isn't close to Asahi.

Is that necessarily true? When the X13S Snapdragon released I seem to remember it shipping with first-party Linux drivers for almost everything. Same goes for the Surface X actually.

Now, both of those devices definitely don't get the same attention Macs do, but they did ship day-and-date with decent Linux support. For example, the Adreno GPU that Qualcomm uses has upstream Mesa support for Vulkan and OpenGL. In many senses, Asahi isn't close to the vendor support those devices recieved.

> When the X13S Snapdragon released I seem to remember it shipping with first-party Linux drivers for almost everything

Nope. 2 years on there's still no webcam support for this device [1], though it is in a lot better place than it was on launch (not being able to boot at all on mainline).

The Surface Pro X still seems to be a long way off [2].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/17tw6ag/anyo...

[2]: https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x/issues/7

...and you came to that conclusion because of OpenGL 4.6 - something that several other platforms enjoyed under GNU/Linux with FLOSS drivers for more than half a decade now?

And Sodium! (For minecraft)

Still waiting for some hardware support and hardware video decoding.

Hardware video decoding is well on the way: https://github.com/eiln/avd

apparently a lot of hardware is still not properly supported, like speakers, microphones and energy saving

Here’s the list of very detailed support status: speakers are generally supported but microphones are not. They have a driver for some energy savings but it has some rough edges.

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support

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