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Comment by abnry | Hacker News Reader

How viable is Asani Linux these days? MacBook hardware looks amazing.

No support for M3 or M4 powered machines currently.

> All Apple Silicon Macs are in scope, as well as future generations as development time permits. We currently have support for most machines of the M1 and M2 generations.[^1][^2]

[^1]: https://asahilinux.org/about/

[^2]: https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support

btw, there is a recent interview with an Asani dev focusing on GPUs, worth a listen for those interested in linux on apple silicon. The reverse engineering effort required to pin down the GPU hardware was one of the main topics.

https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2024/10/15/linux-apple-...

For many years I treated Windows or macOS as a hypervisor - if you love Linux but want the Mac hardware, instant sleep & wake, etc, putting a full screen VM in Parallels or similar is imo better than running Linux in terms of productivity, although it falls short on “freedom”.

I do the same thing, but there are two big caveats:

1. Nested virtualization doesn't work in most virtualization software, so if your workflow involves running stuff in VMs it is not going to work from within another VM. The exception is apparently now the beta version of UTM with the Apple Virtualization backend, but that's highly experimental.

2. Trackpad scrolling is emulated as discrete mouse wheel clicks, which is really annoying for anyone used to the smooth scrolling on macOS. So what I do is use macOS for most browsing and other non-technical stuff but do all my coding in the Linux VM.

Nested virtualization needs at least an M3

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/vzg...

This is the sad situation on my M2 MacBook Pro :(

  $ swift repl
  Welcome to Apple Swift version 6.0.2 (swiftlang-6.0.2.1.2 clang-1600.0.26.4).
  Type :help for assistance.
    1> import Virtualization
    2> VZGenericPlatformConfiguration.isNestedVirtualizationSupported
  $R0: Bool = false

Have anyone tried it recently, specifically the trackpad? I tried the Fedora variant a few months ago on my M1 Macbook and it was horrible to use the trackpad, it felt totally foreign and wrong.

I feel you, but Apple's trackpad prowess is not an easy thing to copy. It's one of those things I never expect anyone else to be able to replicate the level of deep integration between the hardware and software.

It's 2024, and I still see most Windows users carrying a mouse to use with their laptop.

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