Comment by pbasista | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbasista | Hacker News Reader

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> How is Asahi these days?

Much less active than it used to be when it was run by Hector Martin. The core development is a lot slower. Although the graphics stack, for instance, has reached a very mature state recently.

> Is it ready as a daily driver?

It depends. Only M1 and M2 devices are reasonably well-supported. There is no support for power-efficient sleep, Display Port, Thunderbolt, video decoding or encoding, touch ID. The speakers overheat and turn off momentarily when playing loud for a longer period of time. The audio stack in general had to be built from ground up and it seems to me like there are bits and pieces still missing or configured sub-optimally.

> Is it getting support from Apple?

Not that I am aware of.

> are they (Apple) hostile to it?

Not to my knowledge.

> Are there missing features?

Plenty, as described above. There has been some work done recently on Thunderbolt / Display Port. Quite a few other features are listed as WIP on their feature support page.

> Can I run KDE on it?

Of course. KDE Plasma on Fedora is Asahi Linux's "flagship" desktop environment.

Good and fair comment. Just adding some nuance:

> There is no support for power-efficient sleep

"power-efficient sleep" refers to discharging 1-2% battery over night rather than 10-20%. I.e. there's room for improvement, but the device can still be used without worrying much about battery life regardless (especially given how far a full charge gets you even without sleep).

> Display Port, Thunderbolt

Big item indeed, but it's actively worked on and getting there (as you mentioned).

> video decoding or encoding

Hurts battery performance, but otherwise I never noticed any other effect. YMMV for 4K content.

> touch ID

Annoying indeed, and no one has worked on this AFAIK.

> The speakers overheat and turn off momentarily when playing loud for a longer period of time. The audio stack in general had to be built from ground up and it seems to me like there are bits and pieces still missing or configured sub-optimally.

Sad to hear since I thought the audio heat model was robust enough to handle all supported devices. On my M1 Air I've never seen anything like this, but perhaps devices with more powerful speakers are more prone to it?

> On my M1 Air I've never seen anything like this

My experience is also based on a M1 Macbook Air. I have repeatedly experienced sudden muting of the speakers for a second or two while playing conversations on a high volume.

I only assume it is caused by thermal management of the speakers but I did not actually verify it.

Perhaps check if there are any log files in /var/lib/speakersafetyd/blackbox. The fdr files in particular contain human-readable error reasons. If there are no log files, it's probably something else.

Am I misrepresenting the situation or did the whole project seemingly fall apart over an argument between Hector and Linus Torvalds in the mailing list about getting some driver merged?

I would consider that to be a misinterpretation. The whole project did not fall apart because Hector Martin left. But as with any project where the leaders depart, it definitely got slower.

The argument was originally about merging some Rust code into some parts of the Linux kernel if I remember correctly. It did not involve Linus Torvalds directly. Rather, the respective maintainers of those specific parts were unwilling to merge some Rust code, mostly because they did not know Rust well and they did not want to acquire the responsibility to maintain such code.

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