Comment by margana
10 months ago
The goal of Asahi Linux is to create a Linux distribution that is compatible with Apple devices. Using Rust is not a goal of the project, it's just something they decided to use due to personal preference, and is making the process of upstreaming anything much harder. If anything, it works against them in achieving their goal. Abandoning Rust is a possibility, abandoning Linux is not.
> Abandoning Rust is a possibility, abandoning Linux is not.
The Asahi developers have repeatedly and publicly asserted that were it not for Rust they would not have been able to achieve the level of quality required for the project, at the speed they did, with as small of a team as they have. From the article:
> Rust is the entire reason our GPU driver was able to succeed in the time it did.
is there any particular reason it couldn't have been done in C? I'm having a little trouble believing these claims
Rust is just a better and more productive language than C (I guess this is a subjective statement, but obviously they would think so and I would agree with them).
Nobody ever claimed that it's impossible to write these drivers in C -- C is "Rust-complete" in the sense that you could in theory write a compiler that translates any Rust program to C.
They're just claiming that Rust allowed them to write much higher-quality code, much faster, which seems plausible.
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I think neither is a possibilty: there is zero appetite for rewrite what they've written in rust in C, I think the most likely result of it not being upstreamed is it becomes a long-lived fork.
The author addressed that in the article.
Its sad that they chose Apple, instead of like investing time into the upcoming ARM laptops to make the Linux more optimized on them. That talent should not be wasted on tech jewelry.
The MBP is the best laptop hardware that exists on the market, by far. Why wouldn't someone who prefers Linux over macOS want to run Linux on it?
The existence of other ARM laptops is irrelevant; the reason MBPs are so good has little to do with ARM. Yes x86 makes the processor frontend more complicated but this doesn't make a big enough difference to come close to accounting for how much better the MBP is than its competitors. I would guess the biggest factors are Apple's ability to buy the entire run of TSMC's best process node, and the fact that they have a high level of competence at designing CPU cores and other hardware. The instruction set the core uses is just not that important in comparison.
>The MBP is the best laptop hardware that exists on the market, by far.
Really?
What is so great about a locked down hardware, locked down software machine, that phones home to Apple all the time?
The only reason to get Macs is if you have a niche case of needing long battery life (most people don't, even if they say they do), but this is where the other ARM laptops are gonna also be good, without all the proprietary crap.
I expect you are rage-baiting, but just in case you are not...
Even if you consider the hardware "tech jewelry", isn't it strictly better to have a way to run Linux on it instead of sending it to landfill? Seems silly to exclude a particular set of hardware from consideration for arbitrary reasons?
Not rage bating. Im legitimately suprised by how many tech people hype up the MBP for no reason what so ever. If the laptops were half the price, they would be worth it from a tech perspective considering what you get.
>isn't it strictly better to have a way to run Linux on it
In a perfect world, Apple would open source the firmware, which would let people just compile the linux driver for it. While Asahi project is cool in terms of figuring stuff out, ultimately its a lost cause because Apple will never be on board.