Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19
asahilinux.org
asahilinux.org
Do the M4 and M5 GPUs also change a lot from the M3? I hope it's not too much work to get those going once M3 is usable.
I doubt it. For one, the SSDs have limited lifespans, and are soldered on the mainboard. They'll be fine enough for the planned life of the laptop, but eventually secondary market laptops will start seeing waves of failures, at which point people learn that purchasing one is a gamble.
The entire Apple silicon lineup is designed for limited lifespan.
SSD can be resoldered and that service is actually becoming popular and inexpensive. It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered. This will become a totally normal thing in a few years from now.
That's simply a lie. No other laptop have soldered SSD. An increasing number do have soldered RAM.
> That's simply a lie. No other laptop have soldered SSD. An increasing number do have soldered RAM.
That's simply a lie. Pretty much all laptops using eMMC or eUFS for storage are soldered directly to the mainboard. These are often budget devices and many are things like x86-based tablets or chromebooks but there are models that are very much laptops. I do concede I am unaware of any non-apple laptops with directly soldered NVMe storage, but your claim that no other laptop have soldered SSD is patently false.
As you acknowledge. When you look at actual competitors to Apple, you're forced to acknowledge that yup, no other manufacturer solders storage.
But yes, with due pedantry, the statement that "no other laptop has a soldered SSD" is technically wrong.
You could get into additional debates on whether eMMC and eUFS would map to most people's understanding of "SSD", but...
On chip means literally on top of the silicon, like how AMD X3D cpus mount the SRAM chip. On modern Apple devices the ram is mounted on the organic package substrate. The difference is significant, and it's shitty that Apple outright lied about it.
"On chip" definitely does not have much if any history of referring specifically to stacked dies with TSVs, because that has been a very niche packaging technique until recently, and "on chip" is a much more broadly used term.
My first SSDs were from Intel and I have completely worn them out by writing their specified maximum writable amount of data, in a couple of years or so.
After that, I have been careful to always buy only SSDs with the maximum amount of writable data that exist on the market. I have not worn out others yet, but those that have been used for many years show in their SMART counters that a large fraction of the permissible amount of written data has been reached and not much has remained until their end of life.
I typically write many tens of GB per day.
I do wear out SSDs but they're on servers I run with different use patterns.
I think repairability is important, but I don't think it will stop those laptops from being popular.
A single bad key or trace and any Apple laptop is basically toast. $800+ to have Apple replace the top cover.
Maybe an independent shop can do it cheaper, I don't know.
Me, at Genius Bar, expecting you know, maybe $300 with parts and labor?
"Here's a quote, sir, we're looking at $850+tax, perhaps we should talk about getting you into a new Mac today?"
No. The laptop was primarily connected to AC anyway and only 18 months old, if that. Sorry, Apple.
The biggest issue I have with it is macOS Tahoe. Guess I really should be checking out Asahi on it!
You mean perfectly normal for every other laptop.
It’s all a matter of perspective
Where?! I just cheeked the used market in Austria and 2020 M1s go for at least 350 for the 8GB RAM models and 450 for the 16GB model. Your 230 for the 16gb one fells more like a rare exception but not them norm everywhere.
Here is another one from today, just messeged them. 230€ rose gold one, and that's without any bargaining offer https://files.catbox.moe/exbrfc.jpg
The ones that I saw similarly low to yours are obvious scams from scam profiles all repeating the same message in the ad.
So maybe the ones you saw are scams as well. Otherwise hungary seems to be a lucky exception for some odd reason. Maybe because people have less disposable income, IDK?
Anyway, I wouldn't spend 400 Euros on a used mac with no warranty. The point of buying an old ThinkPad for cheap was that if something broke on it you could easily swap that part yourself for cheap because it was easily repairable and the used market was flooded with spare parts. But if your used macbook dies out of warranty, then you're shit out of luck, you can't fix anything, it's 400 Euros wasted.
I bought one already so I know it's not a scam. Scams usually communicate badly and they don't want to meet you in a public space (like a McDonald's with free wifi)
Obviously ymmv
>Anyway, I wouldn't spend 400 Euros on a used mac with no warranty.
This I agree with. I still prefer Thinkpads too but these M1s are also pretty good in almost every sense except for repairability
Basically starting with M4 you have a choice between starting with Apple's page table monitor already running in their guarded mode extension, or all apple extensions disabled on the CPU cores.
In fact, the current state of M3 support is about where M1 support was when we released the first Arch
Linux ARM based beta; keyboard, touchpad, WiFi, NVMe and USB3 are all working, albeit with some local
patches to m1n1 and the Asahi kernel (yet to make their way into a pull request) required. So that
must mean we will have a release ready soon, right?Edit: this was what I was remembering: https://x.com/XenoKovah/status/1339914714055368704
Such a monumentally Sisyphean waste of effort in behalf of the Asahi devs in my opinion.
If you care about personal computing or Linux, don’t buy a Mac.
They're a fantastic hardware company. But my admittedly very limited experience with Apple software, from iPad to their streaming service website, has been miserable. The UX doesn't work for me, the software just doesn't do what I want. Understandable, Apple very much designs their software to work for a particular workflow they come up with, if you like that workflow it's great, for someone like me it's miserable. But I would gladly buy their hardware if I could freely run an OS of my own choosing.
The assumption that this is a triangulated and well researched strategy doesn't match my experience in "real-job" world. I mean, maybe Apple is different because of their history, but I am not convinced anyone listens to anyone that articulates any math ideas beyond Algebra outside of some niche specialties because they don't understand it. And it's not that I'm some math god - I mean, that's what I studied, but there are people SO much more knowledgeable and capable, and they seem to get ignored too.
Like, I'm sure the guy who runs an insurance company listens to the actuaries about relative risk, but mostly, what I've just seen is someone makes a decision, and then finds post hoc ergo proctor hoc rationales for why this was a good decision down the line when they have to account for their choices.
For instance, it took my like a year at my old job, but I finally got most of the KPIs we were using to set strategy cancelled. The data we were using to generate those KPIs? Well in a few cases, after you seasonally differenced the data was no different than white noise. No autocorrelation whatsoever. In ALL the cases the autocorrelation was weak and it was all evaporated after a month or 2. You could MAYBE fit an MA model to it, but that seemed dodgy to me. And like, I'm not a major expert - I took 1 time series class in gradschool, and frankly, time series is kind of hard. But management had ZERO idea of what I was talking about when I was like, "hey, I don't think these numbers actually mean anything at all? Did anyone run an ACF?"
Then each month someone higher up the chain would say, "why is this number low?" And then they go out and search through the reams of data they had to come up with an answer that plausibly explained things. Was the number particularly "low?" No, it was within expected statistical noise thresholds, you are probably going to have at least have 1 number out of whack every 20 cycles or so... You still had to spend an hour in a meeting coming up with reasons for why it was low that went beyond "ummm, well, this is kind of random, and we'd expect to see this sort of thing ever couple years once or twice, we won't know if it's a trend for a few more months."
Anyway, this is a long anecdote to explain why I have no confidence that most companies do any sort of actual introspection. CEO creates targets and underlings build models that show how they're meeting or not meeting those targets. Now, hilariously, with Apple in particular I might be wrong, because in Tim Cook's defense, I'm pretty sure his education is in Industrial Engineering? So if any CEO is thinking about that stuff, it's him. Still, I am totally and completely unimpressed with the C-Suite sort of thinkers.
They're not dumb - like I've never really had a straight up dumbass manager outside of shitty lower jobs or small-mom-and-pop businesses? But I have seldom met any company that actually cared about the numbers - most say they do, but most just use those numbers to justify decisions they've already made.
Am I just unlucky? I'm I the witch in church here?
The environment is why I quit my job and started working for myself in January. I hated it. And not to sound like an arrogant ass because there were a LOT of way smarter people than me at $PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER, but having to have meetings to set our meetings, having to explain things that aren't statistically meaningful to people who don't understand stats anyway, and getting code reviews (when I could get them scheduled) from dudes who hadn't touched a keyboard in 5 years was... soul sucking? I'm not doing that anymore. Or ever again.
I mean, maybe it's because I had a more hands-on blue-collar adjacent job before I got into tech? Maybe it's because I'm a fool and couldn't play the game of "pretend to work and look busy. But - and I know this might be kind of messed up - I really like not having to explain things in a series of emails to people other than the customers. I really like not having to answer to anyone but my self and my customers. If I want to do something, well, I just do it now? That's a nice place to be. Riskier for sure, but I think the prior environment would have killed me, so maybe not.
Also, I have time to do shit that's interesting? Who would have guessed how much more time I'd have in the day when I didn't have 4.5 hours of meetings per day? Hell, I'm taking 2 classes at the university for fun (weird right?!) - I never could have done that before because I would have had to make a slide deck for Thursdays All-Hands or whatever and couldn't have missed the SUPER IMPORTANT MEETING that Jake has on the schedule that he'll show up for unprepared or just not show up to.
Nah, the hell with that. I'm never going back.
As opposed to what hardware, then? Because this is pretty much how most other drivers became a thing in the first place. Linux has come a long way and due to it "winning the cloud" many hardware vendors started properly supporting it, but this was absolutely not the case for the longest times.
As for alternatives, there are many.
The efficiency of arm chips was never arm, really, it was the manufacturing node and SOC design. Well, Intel and AMD can make SOCs, and they do.
Also, there is the question who in general makes Laptops as nice as a MB Air? Who makes a fan less laptop of roughly comparable power?
As for nice laptops, I think Asus and Lenovo makes some nice ones. I don't believe any are fanless, but most are quiet - Lunar Lake gen 3 is an SOC with a base TDP of 25 watts, and it can even go down to 15 watts. These CPUs are slightly faster in multi-core performance than M4, and they use similar wattage. I believe the Asus zenbook duo gets better battery life by a wide margin because of the 99 watt-hour battery. They still fall a little short of M5 in performance, but it's very close.
As for servers, it's a good point. But I think currently most servers are still using x86 CPUs, so it might not be relevant for a while.
For the computer: the Air is a great laptop. I am very happy it doesn't have a fan, so it can never get a clogged fan and it works great. Currently, I am running Linux on it via VMWare, so I get the best of two worlds. And Linux really flies on it. Once it is no longer supported by macOS, I am certainly going to go native Linux. As it is an M2, that probably would work already today.
There are also older NVIDIA Orin SBCs with Cortex-A78, but those are severely overpriced, so they are not worthwhile, unless you really want to use them in an automotive project.
For software development, the Arm-designed cores have the advantage of excellent documentation, unlike the proprietary cores designed by Apple and Qualcomm, which are almost undocumented. Good documentation simplifies software debugging and tuning.
Unfortunately there are no cheap solutions for developing on the latest ARM ISA variants (except for a Chinese Armv9.2-A CPU, which has some quirks and is available in mini-ITX and smaller formats). For the latest ISA, you should develop software on a smartphone, e.g. on one of the Motorola smartphones that have DisplayPort for connecting an external monitor and a desktop mode for Android.
You have much better Linux support for an older Snapdragon from 2021 (with quadruple Cortex-A78 cores) which has been rebranded as "Dragonwing QCM6490" and which is sold by Qualcomm for use in embedded computers. Thus Qualcomm promises at least 10 years of support for it.
There are a few cheap single-board computers with it, e.g. Particle Tachyon 5G and Radxa Dragon Q6A.
Unfortunately, "cheap" means something very different today than last summer, due to the huge increase in the price of DRAM. Nevertheless, the SBCs with soldered LPDDR memory have been affected less by the price increase than the computers for which you have to buy SODIMM or DIMM memory modules, which may cost now more than a mini-PC in which you would want to install them.
The most serious problem that I had was about 10 years ago in a Lenovo laptop with NVIDIA Optimus (i.e. where the NVIDIA GPU does not have direct video outputs, but it must pass through the Intel GPU). At that time, I spent a couple of days until succeeding to make NVIDIA Optimus work OK in Linux. With the Intel GPU, Linux worked fine since the beginning. This happened because at that time the Linux NVIDIA driver did not support Optimus, so you had to install a separate program to be able to select which GPU shall be used by an application. I do not know if any laptops with Optimus still exist today.
Except for that case, I never encountered any hardware compatibility problem that could not be solved in minutes or a few hours of most. For contrast, with Windows I have seen many problems that could not be solved in weeks, even with the assistance of IT support personnel from multiple continents, because nobody, not even the "professionals", had any idea about what Windows is really doing and what may be wrong.
It is true that some of the laptops that I have used had a few features that I have never used, so I do not know if they worked in Linux. For instance I have never used a fingerprint reader or a NFC reader.
Just why?
And then beyond that, there is simply no laptop manufacturer that meets the quality of Apple's hardware design. I like Macs for their hardware, the software is a compromise. A linux macbook would be my ideal laptop.
Yes, marketplace
Maybe so, but 15-20 year old laptops are definitely starting to show their age.
An M2 MacBook Pro, on the other hand, is only 4 years old, has a fairly OK keyboard, and is still in striking distance of current high-end ultrabooks when it comes to performance.
Granted, this is running GNU/Linux rather than Windows. If you're running Windows then yeah, they show their age.
There's this saying, all progress is done by unreasonable people, because reasonable people just accept things are the way they are
I don't know what I'll do if and when my X230 stops being sufficient. If I could buy an Apple motherboard in an X200 chassis I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Congrats, but I think you may be in a small minority when it comes to developers shopping for laptops.
Personally, I had to upgrade from a late-model i9 MacBook Pro to this M2 MacBook Pro, because the npm + docker setup at work was taking upwards of 20 minutes for a production build...
People who edit video or make music and other such tasks are totally normal too, and there are hundreds of millions of them
I recommend Mac's to the people in my life because when they have a problem they can take the machine to the Apple Store in the mall. Or if they want to understand iPhoto or Pages better, they can go to the Apple Store and take a class. They like Apple laptops because they look nice, they feel great, sound amazing (for a laptop) and have excellent battery life.
Like you, I have a ThinkPad (a P-something) and, frankly, it kind of sucks. It's all plasticy, it flexes, battery life is a joke, the trackpad is meh, and the fans are almost always running. I do like the keyboard though (I'm a fan of backspace).
I love my Thinkpads, I really do but they are bulky, loud and the battery doesn't last very long. They are not an option for many people.
1. Asahi Linux's battery life is like 2/3 as long as on macOS
2. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon is just about as thin and nice as a Mac but it also costs just as much.
3. Apple is still leading in single core CPU speeds but x86 has caught up or surpassed M devices in both multicore and graphics. And even last gen x86 can beat the 3-generations-old M2 that is the latest one supported by Asahi Linux.
This reasoning is essentially just as true for any other laptop maker Dell, Lenovo, Asus, Framework, HP etc might also decide to bomb linux support at any time.
^ This
Also, the security teams at Apple must be watching Asahi closely from an exploit-perspective. They are basically holes that must be patched.
> Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon Macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices. That means that, unlike iOS devices, Apple does not intend to lock down what OS you can use on Macs (though they probably won’t help with the development).
I so want to run my os on ipad and save it from the ewaste bin.
Since Apple has moved onto arm, they don't need to lock it down, at least yet, because Windows is a no-go on arm, and it's slowly becoming AI slop anyway. There's only Linux but then if they locked the bootloader down they would distance themselves from the competition. And people do write drivers for macs.
Meanwhile jailbreaking iOS or iPadOS has more use than doing anything you want on macOS. For example removing ads on Spotify, YT or running cracked apps or ebooks. Yes, you can do the same on macs, but you do not keep a Mac in your pocket.
However if iPads and MacBooks become one thing, I'm pretty sure they're still be more restrictions.
Earlier you said this:
>iPads are cheaper than MacBooks and more popular. They'd rather prefer if you bought another one instead of using it indefinitely
How does that work? People are still buying new MacBooks instead of using them indefinitely.
On Android that's definitely the case (more people do so to increase the lifespan than to hack apps), but the desktop market progresses slower than mobile in terms of software. I was running my Xiaomi Mi 6 for 7 years thanks to LineageOS, and it would've been longer if I hadn't dropped it the second time (the screen cracked, battery was 60% and repair wasn't worth it). Now I'm running Nothing Phone 2 am switching to LineageOS once the support goes out. Now try to do the same with Samsung. You can't. The bootloader is locked down since OneUI 8.0 and you can't do a thing about it, gotta buy a new one after security updates are gone.
Phones are very cheap now (can get more expensive soon tho). For $200 you can get a very decent Android (Snapdragon 7s gen2, 8GB RAM, 256GB storage + other very nice stuff such as OIS, 144Hz etc.), buy a wireless display or cast to TV and use it as a workstation (obviously you need a wireless keyboard and a mouse). Office work? Web coding? Sure. Did that myself.
Since we are focusing on MacBooks now...
> People are still buying new MacBooks instead of using them indefinitely.
I'm not hearing anyone with M1 or above switching to a new Mac yearly. People who switched to M-series were using their MacBooks for years.
It seems Apple is happy with having Linux as an unofficial alternative on Macs.
> How did installing windows increase the lifespan of a MacBook?
Via Windows Updates? And Windows software doesn't usually require you to upgrade to the newest version possible (however many games started to require W11)? Try to install new Xcode on an older version of macOS, good luck.
The happy path on the Mac was provided so the talent capable of booting Linux on it could take the happy path that hides all of the stuff Apple would rather not have a bunch of reverse engineers sniffing around.
Apple is launching the M5. It seems like the future is going to be a world of closed systems and custom silicon, with any free software lagging far behind.
Now you have to walk around with a USB hub, for a subpar battery life.
But eventually it wears you down. It's nearly impossible to keep up in the long-term. Normal product evolution, the sheer size of the behemoth and sometimes even malice on their part to thwart the little guy make it really tough to stay current.
Think of Wine vis-a-vis Windows. They will never catch up.
So depending on what you want to run, not only did Wine catch up bit also surpassed.
I wonder how much similar behavior influence other buying choices. I’ve been eyeing an upgrade from M1 for a while - so far punting on it, mostly because of Asahi.
It's much more difficult to keep current and support the full functionality of a much larger competitor's offering when you have to support everything. In my experience it was an all or nothing proposition. Either you emulated it 100% or you had nothing. I think Asahi is more in this realm maybe than Wine. It really needs to support all the hardware, 100%, or it's value is greatly diminished.
It didn't.
For Wine/Proton, the core demographic is essentially gamers, who tend to overlap heavily with engineering population later on, and thus core population for Microsoft to capture and retain. Once Steam removed that vendor lock-in, the corporate discussion became more flexible.
For Asahi (proud Asahi user for 4y now), the added value of „most powerful Linux/Arm64 laptop on the market” outweighs the few things that don’t work on Asahi (HDMI out is probably the only one that occasionally matters for me, but screencasting works well enough). Yes, there are gaps, but they are smaller than things from Linux that are missing on OSX or Windows for me.
And then there's the fact that it's still a dark ending if the best hardware out there — even if we all refuse to buy it because we're on a moral high ground — is a closed platform that we have to refuse to buy.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-...
It would be like going back to the days of early Linux and all the Windows-specific hardware we had to deal with, but extrapolated to the entire system. As impressive as all of their work is, it's not worth the IMO minor UX benefits of Apple's hardware.
Mainline Linux on ARM is solid these days; new x86 chips from Intel perform very well and are reasonably power efficient; and battery life of most professional laptops in Linux is quite good. For example, I get a good ~12 hours of work done on an X1 Carbon Gen 13 from a single charge. This may not be as impressive as Macbooks, and the packaging certainly isn't as sleek, but it's good enough for me. The tradeoff for a solid software experience, modulo the usual Linux shenanigans, is worth it to me.
At least PCs are open to a greater degree, despite Microsoft's attempts otherwise.
Above the display is an amber horizontal bar that changes in sync with the activity on the display and my first thought was, "Finally they found a use for the Mac Touch Bar!"
The Touch Bar has so many uses in Linux I can't wait for it to work.
If your design language is “flat as we can make it” how can you visualise a third dimension? You have to already know which things are 3D touch ready.
I blame the software refresh of Apple after the 5-series UI language was removed. Minimal mechanical design with rich complex software is a beautiful contrast that strengthens how both feel.
I was hoping it was a tease for a fully software defined haptic feedback based keyboard. There’s the obvious usefulness and coolness of that, and then the fact that you could make a laptop closer to the sealed clean-ability of a phone. Probably not quite submersible/waterproof due to ports and fans but able to survive a spill and be cleaned well.
Because all that crypto and tech money is trying to turn money into much more money, and Asahi isn't a great candidate for doing that
But I would gladly match my 1% of my monthly income to anyone here who can pledge the same 1% who makes over $500k a year. So that would be my $20/month vs their $416/month.
If that's true - I'd say MacBook air M2 is probably the new sweetspot - depending on how cheap you could get an M1.
My impression is that until now, MacBook air M1 was the sweetspot.
With the attention this project is getting, I'd be surprised if they can't get the equivalent of a small startup's seed round, just by crowdfunding. Do they have all the funding and resources they need or not? that's really my ultimate question. I know you can't just throw money at these things and make them happen faster sometimes.
That said, my question to those interested is why? I've been a daily user of both Ubuntu since 2005 and Mac since 2012. There are some edge case differences but for the most part they are so similar that I nearly always run the same code on both without modification. Clearly I'm missing something important but I'm curious what it is. Thanks in advance.
The notable missing features are external displays (an experimental kernel branch is publicly available though) and the fingerprint sensor. That's about it, though. Given the amount of polish combined with the hardware, it's arguably the most polished Linux laptop experience you'll get.
Apple is probably the most mainstream supplier of ARM computers at the moment, but Valve is likely to soon have the most mindshare amongst ARM-shippers who actively support Linux. I expect that will improve ARM support in the ecosystem, which should be good for Asahi also.
It’s clear Apple went out of their way to make Asahi possible in a secure way. I believe people on the Asahi project have said as much.
They have been watching talented folks waste their lives away reverse engineering hardware/software that they possess all the schematics of.
If they really wanted to help, all they had to do is send a single e-mail with a zip file.
The distortion field is unbelievable.
Consumers should be allowed to install whatever software they want on decides they own.
As a developer myself who uses Fedora Asahi Remix as my daily driver, I can also tell you that Linux runs 2x faster (often much more) for everything compared to macOS - on the same hardware! And that performance gain is also important for my work :-)