I would just like to point out that Michael Reeves (the poster, no relation to youtuber) is a high schooler who has also found numerous high impact vulnerabilities in Apple software. Immensely talented.
Poverty (of youth or otherwise) is also a pretty powerful motivation to “tinker.” I spent a lot of time with OSX86, and ended up getting proficient enough (multiple all-nighters trying to get it to boot and get the right kexts loaded early on) to run semi-stable Tiger thru Lion on random PCs and my girlfriend’s Vaio Laptop. Then, one day I could afford a MacBook and basically stopped being as curious about that. Decade or so later, ProxMox allowed me to run Capitan thru Mojave virtually, while more recently it makes more sense (and less legal dubiousness) to just buy macs as/if I need them. Overall, I’m still pretty curious, but not curious enough to risk a “hacky” solution when I can mitigate it for relatively low $
If you have brilliant mind, but you were born poor / working class, then sure you'll be crushed by 9 to 5 inevitably, where your talents will be ruthlessly "harvested" for the benefits of shareholders until you burn out and get thrown out like a used rag.
If you have talents, use them to achieve financial freedom and then do what you want. Sometimes it is through 9 to 5 unfortunately. Never make a mistake of "climbing corporate ladder". Earn money, invest, don't try to leave beyond your means.
You might have great salary, but don't get tempted by renting a nice pad or getting a nice car. It's a trap to keep you enslaved in 9 to 5 forever.
I remember being a teenager and intentionally dialing down my ambitions, because it was socially uncomfortable to have people's perceptions of me be tied to the things I excelled in.
Figured I had my whole life to have a job, so didn't really wanna do a startup or anything like that. Watched all the Macworld et. al. keynotes and knew all the specs of all the devices, until I got tired of being pigeonholed as "the computer kid."
Very, very few people came anywhere near this level of focus and execution at the same age.
People like this are truly extraordinary. You could give a lot of engineers infinite financial runway and no corporate job ever and they’d still never reach this level of performance.
I was born with heart defects and pre ACA had to be a wage slave to get health insurance.
The moment ACA happened I started several successful businesses.
Honestly we already should have contribution/impact based merit threshold UBI with a much lower barrier than research grants or even just time limited UBI systems for youth and adults that meet a contribution threshold.
VC allocation is too biased towards group think, profit motivation, predatory contracts and hold on to top many class and cultural artifacts.
Yes of course it would be difficult to implement but difficult isn't impossible and gradiated rollouts can help catch unintended side effects. We need to push more money into the hands of the intrinsically motivated. Society already is catering to the whims of consumers and feed zombies.
Me. Got countless old servers as a teenager and self hosted as much as possible. Now I have enough money for new servers (well, besides memory...) but not enough time and energy.
If I get a nickel every time a high schooler with a decorated history of hardware tinkering goes on to work on Linux for Apple Silicon, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird they all happens to gravitate to Apple.
It's genuinely nice hardware, and everyone's gotta have a hobby. But it's not all of them. Geohot did some hardware stuff and hasn't (afaik) been working on Asahi. Linus was 21 when Linux was first released. Of course, Apple silicon ARM laptops didn't exist in the wild then, so we can let both of those pass.
Not to downplay his efforts, but back in the 8 and 16 bit home computer days, kids were coding Z80, 6052, 8080, 68000 Assembly aged 10 - 12 years old onwards.
Having been one of those kids, I kind of expect a high schooler to be able to have such skills, when deeply interested into a specific subject.
Asahi is one of the projects I support monetarily cause I really hope that one day I can run linux natively on my M4 max with GPU acceleration. They did an amazing job with M1 and M2 - great to see they are still pushing forward after the departure of Alyssa Rosenzweig, who did a lot of the work on the GPU support for those.
It is worth noting the distinction between display acceleration and compute support here. While the desktop rendering is impressive, for local AI or LLM inference the Linux stack on M-series is still significantly behind Metal/MPS on macOS. I tried to switch my local dev environment over recently but without a mature compute stack it is hard to justify leaving macOS if you need to run models locally.
While the M series hardware is impressive and the Asahi project is doing miracles, I myself don't want to support Apple in any way, including buying any of their hardware.
They are also doing a lot of generic work that benefits the ARM platform as a whole. And since Snapdragon X is a fucking mess on Linux, these Apple Silicon devices are actually some of the best cheap hardware you can buy with excellent performance.
Does anyone know if M3 support is likely to lead to M4 or M5 support in relatively short order? AIUI M3 took a long time because it was a substantial departure from M1/M2, especially in the GPU architecture, but I don't know if M4 or M5 made similar leaps.
The main reason M3 took a long time isn't related to m3 itself, but rather that the asahi project took on a ton of tech debt to get M1/M2 working. M3 wasn't too difficult, but before taking on the additional tech debt, the Asahi team focused on getting all of their changes upstreamed to the linux kernel.
The main developer was also the target of a harassment campaign from a place that has pushed other targets to straight up suicide. That took almost all of their energy for the last year and they ended up quitting.
AFAIK they also were focusing on upstream the changes into the kernel [0], because the amount of downstream patches they were maintaining were making the work harder and harder.
The M5 reportedly has a newer generation GPU compared to the M3/M4. For one thing, the GPU-side Neural Accelerators are obviously new to the M5 series. Other stuff is harder to know for sure until it gets looked into from a technical POV.
I'm a lifelong Mac user who now has a KDE device courtesy of SteamOS. What are the best options for porting Mac default keybindings over to KDE?
I'm using SteamOS and Nix/Home Manager, so I have a preference for something that I can easily use in that environment (e.g. nothing that needs me to unlock the system partition or run as another user).
I tried asking Gemini to find where KDE stores its default keybindings, and came up short.
You can try to remap KDE keybindings but it won't affect Gnome applications, games, etc.
Personally, I found the most reliable thing to be a keyboard-level swap of Ctrl and the Cmd key. That way, whenever you're asked for Ctrl, which is all the time, you can always safely hit Cmd with no need for extra configuration. You can then remap various things in KDE Shortcuts to be more Mac like, like Cmd+Q, Cmd+Tab, Cmd+`, etc. (The only thing lacking is the Ctrl v. Cmd separation in a terminal, so I manually remapped all the Ctrl sequences in my terminal emulator to Win sequences, which matches my hardware Ctrl key. So, like on a Mac, Cmd+C works to copy, Ctrl+C is the escape code.)
This works for a Mac keyboard. For a Windows keyboard, you'd have to shuffle Alt -> Ctrl, Win -> Alt, and Ctrl -> Win. There are settings for this in xkb. (KDE surfaces these in its Keyboard settings panel.)
Keyboard layouts/shortcuts are a huge pain point with Linux. xkb is geriatric, and acts as such. Compose keys are flaky and inconsistent across applications. Virtually all Linux software is going to default to some idiosyncratic take on Windows shortcuts, often without much by way of customisability. (And those Windows shortcuts weren't very good to begin with.)
That works until you get into a terminal and want to copy/paste/send signals without having to remember special keybinds that only apply when you're in the terminal.
X should have never copied the IBM/MS binds. What a tragic mistake
Given that you're already using Home Manager: Make sure to also take a look at plasma-manager! [1]
It extends HM's declarative config to KDE/Plasma's config files, which are harder to manage since they also contain volatile state like window geometry. For discovery, there is also a `plasma-manager` executable that prints out most (all?) active settings. In particular the keybindings are included in there.
(This doesn't directly answer your question, but maybe is informative regardless and/or helpful for finding related options)
I've got Mac-centric keybindings working in Plasma and Chrome now. I already had them for Ghostty - I need to port those over to use the new lib. Same for Sublime.
KDE has a setting to switch the cmd & command keys so that e.g. command+c copies instead of ctrl+c. This works in all KDE apps (it will not work if you install any Gnome/GTK app, though). I forgot the setting but its something in advanced and used to be called Emacs key binds, but now I think it just refers to the keys.
Anyways, beyond that, have a look at Kinto which tries to do everything in one box, but it is an additional software you have to run:
Thanks. I've also seen a derivative called Toshy. They both appear to be surprisingly invasive.
I want something like Sublime Text's keybindings, where I can just iterate over all of KDE's system defaults and ask Gemini to convert them to their Mac equivalents. Can deal with individual applications separately, but since basically the only things I use are Chrome, Ghostty, Sublime, and the KDE shell, it seems like it ought to be pretty straightforward.
> What are the best options for porting Mac default keybindings over to KDE?
My recommendation is to get used to the KDE keybindings, and individual applications' keybindings. You'll never be able to fully replicate the macOS keybinding experience, so better get used to it. (Same when people use macOS, I recommend to get used to their keybindings and not try to replicate Linux/Windows)
Is there a reason why it's so hard to support newer M chips after supporting an older one? Like so much harder than supporting a new generation Intel or AMD chip doesn't seem too hard in comparison.
Because Intel/AMD regularly contribute kernel changes to maintain support for their own hardware, whereas Apple keeps making undocumented changes that Asahi has to reverse engineer.
I don't think that's it, as we usually don't even have to update the kernel: when I get a new PC, my old software still boots and runs. The answer has to also provide some analogous note that, unlike new x86 hardware having an interest in still being able to run old versions of Windows, new Apple hardware (maybe... one must presume for the story to be consistent) must not really care about being able to boot old copies of macOS.
1) Intel and AMD help to implement support in Linux before their chips even ship. Actually a sanitized version of the Intel graphics ISA bspec is actually available to the OSS community too.
Apple on the other hand provides no support. The one nice thing they did do is allow their bootloader to boot non-apple signed OSes. They do not do this on iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, Watches, or homepods btw.
2) The GPU ISA changes drastically and often. Its not entirely uncommon for the entire instruction set to change entirely within one generation. Every change to the ISA would require an entire round of new reverse engineering (I suspect, ive never reversed).
I do wonder why Apple chooses not to lock down the Mac to just Mac OS like all their other hardware? I'm sure the sales from people who intend to run something other than MacOS look like a floating-point error on the scales Apple operates.
M4 had some security stuff added, and M5 much more so. Not sure how/if those can be disabled. Others can be explain why this matters better than I can.
> Yes [SW rendering], should have clarified in the original post sorry! Hopefully GPU to come soon, still investigating that. I believed they changed the ISA so we have to modify our compiler, and I love compilers, so it should be fun! :)
If anyone else wants the closest thing to a MBP running Linux without waiting for Asahi to fully work, I can highly recommend the HP ZBook G1A.
* It has an all-aluminium chassis that feels a lot like a MBP.
* Hardware all works - fingerprint reader, webcam, suspend etc etc. Takes a bit of work, but all works in the end. Helps that HP ships them with Ubuntu as official option.
* Strix Halo chipset, which is basically AMD's attempt at an Apple Silicon type design. Single big chip, with unified LPDDR5X-8000 RAM (up to 128GB!) shared between CPU and GPU (which is surprisingly strong as well, 40 CU!). This thing is a beast for local LLMs!
Only downside really is the battery life. I haven't played around with it too much, I think there's a bit more room with custom tuned profiles, but rn I get like maybe 6 hours on a good day?
I also have an Apple M4 MacBook Pro from Work and an HP ZBook G1a for my personal. I used to have an Asahi MacBook but switched over with the lack of M3/M4 support. Some extra compare/contrast:
- The build quality of each are excellent. The touchpad on the G1a is probably the closest to a MacBook touchpad I've seen and it even manages to boast an OLED screen. On the other hand, the G1a is only available as a 14" option.
- Strix Halo will still leave you wishing it were Apple Silicon in pretty much every case except "I need to run a x86 native app/VM". It's certainly the best alternative, but you definitely trade away to go to it. You can load large LLMs (I have the 128 GB version for non-AI reasons) but they only run ~3x faster than a laptop without a GPU would because 256 GB/s still ends up being a big bandwidth limit. If you do actually do this regularly, then prepare to hear the fans and look for your power adapter as it does get quite hot doing so.
- Speaking of power adapter... you need either a 100 W or 140 W charger + USB C to be able to charge the G1a while you use it. If you want to use a lower wattage adapter you need to power off, or it seems to draw 0 W out of spite.
- It's massively refreshing to have a normal UEFI bootup process, and as long as you have a current kernel the hardware support is indeed pretty great on the G1a. Between the two, the G1a has better supported than the M1 w/ Asahi - as one would expect for a corporation officially supporting Linux vs a fan project.
If I were to do it all again, I'd say I might have either just gotten an M2 Pro for Asahi or an M4 w/ macOS and a Linux VM as needed. Part of going for an x86 laptop was to be able to dual boot into games with strict DRM, but after trying multiple versions of AMD graphics driver for the 8060s it was more a frustration in random stutters and I ended up not gaming on it as much as I have on other laptops anyways. Bazzite does work great though, just not with all of the different DRMs or games.
I understand where you are coming from, I think the major hurdle was getting it boot and fixing M3 specific things. Now that it is working, they can port over their driver very easily (they might just work or need a small tweak)
While it's awesome that it runs there doesn't seem to be GPU support yet as the screenshot reports the llvmpipe software renderer. From what I understand there are significant difference between the M2 and M3 GPUs so this unlikely to be implemented soon. Unless it turns out this original analysis turns out to be wrong.
Personally I don't consider it "working" as a laptop on an Apple M3 unless you actually have GPU support. Software rending just sucks, even with a SoC as powerful as the Apple M3.
Nice! Good to hear that progress is still being made, I know it was on pause for a bit as developers rotated out and there was an effort to get things upstreamed.
I've been running Asahi Fedora GNOME on a Mac mini M1 for some while now (using it right now in fact) with almost zero complaints. A really solid and usable setup. I could see myself buying a used MacBook Air M3 down the road once this work is all finished up, which is very exciting. The prices are already pretty reasonable, even for a 16GB RAM model!
Au contraire - which Asahi-supported machines hold a candle to AMD and Intel's Linux support?
I can't recommend Macs to other Linux users in good faith unless they're already stuck with the hardware and loathe macOS. If you need an ARM laptop that supports Linux, you should probably wait for Nvidia to release theirs.
Can anyone point me to a good report of the current working status and known drawbacks of Asahi on Apple Silicon? Would there ever be a reason to run it on a Mac Mini or Apple desktop device? Or at that point would you just get a Linux box?
I’ve managed to get NixOS running on an 8gb MacBook air which tools a bit of tweaks but asahi installer sets everything up where you can boot and install from NixOS
Considering how far behind they are of new releases of hardware I'd imagine the most appealing use case is going to be trying to squeeze some more life out of outdated hardware that struggles running the latest Apple software. But that's kind of the sweet spot for a Linux desktop anyway, isn't it?
Does an M3 struggle to run the latest Apple software? I'm running an M2 Pro as my daily driver, and I doubt this thing will need replacing this side of ~5 years
This is awesome, but we'll still need to hear the full support status. Which subsystems are covered by existing development, which need new drivers. Can't wait for the update on https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
I would never buy a Mac, but what's the issue with supporting Mx processors?
Are they a generic ARM platform or something highly proprietary with ISA extensions and the like?
And if Apple is pulling a Nintendo here why is this project allowed to exist in the first place? It's not like they are getting hit with an anti-trust any time soon.
The problem are really not the CPU cores itself. It's a generic arm core in terms of ISA with just a tiny bit of proprietary extensions. The problem are all the peripherals. GPU, NPU, Display, USB, Wifi, HID, sound etc etc. These all require custom drivers and reverse engineering.
Problem is, there's no such thing as a generic ARM platform. The devil is in too many details even if there was something common between some core designs.
Runs pretty smoothly with iwd. I get occasional disconnects (one every few hours) that may equally be down to my local wifi (other devices have issues with it too). iwd instantly papers over them, so it doesn't impact me either way.
Anecdata: In macOS, M1 Air wifi signal quality was worse than any other laptop or phone I had in the same room. Apple has historically had bad RF designs for a very long time.
I would just like to point out that Michael Reeves (the poster, no relation to youtuber) is a high schooler who has also found numerous high impact vulnerabilities in Apple software. Immensely talented.
How many peaked with our curiosity and exploration software engineering as teenagers and subsequently got ground down by 9to5 corporate soul drain T_T
Poverty (of youth or otherwise) is also a pretty powerful motivation to “tinker.” I spent a lot of time with OSX86, and ended up getting proficient enough (multiple all-nighters trying to get it to boot and get the right kexts loaded early on) to run semi-stable Tiger thru Lion on random PCs and my girlfriend’s Vaio Laptop. Then, one day I could afford a MacBook and basically stopped being as curious about that. Decade or so later, ProxMox allowed me to run Capitan thru Mojave virtually, while more recently it makes more sense (and less legal dubiousness) to just buy macs as/if I need them. Overall, I’m still pretty curious, but not curious enough to risk a “hacky” solution when I can mitigate it for relatively low $
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It's not business critical to answer your curiosity now. File it as a ticket, put it on a backlog and move on.
If you have brilliant mind, but you were born poor / working class, then sure you'll be crushed by 9 to 5 inevitably, where your talents will be ruthlessly "harvested" for the benefits of shareholders until you burn out and get thrown out like a used rag.
If you have talents, use them to achieve financial freedom and then do what you want. Sometimes it is through 9 to 5 unfortunately. Never make a mistake of "climbing corporate ladder". Earn money, invest, don't try to leave beyond your means.
You might have great salary, but don't get tempted by renting a nice pad or getting a nice car. It's a trap to keep you enslaved in 9 to 5 forever.
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I remember being a teenager and intentionally dialing down my ambitions, because it was socially uncomfortable to have people's perceptions of me be tied to the things I excelled in.
Figured I had my whole life to have a job, so didn't really wanna do a startup or anything like that. Watched all the Macworld et. al. keynotes and knew all the specs of all the devices, until I got tired of being pigeonholed as "the computer kid."
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Very, very few people came anywhere near this level of focus and execution at the same age.
People like this are truly extraordinary. You could give a lot of engineers infinite financial runway and no corporate job ever and they’d still never reach this level of performance.
Some people really are next level.
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I was born with heart defects and pre ACA had to be a wage slave to get health insurance.
The moment ACA happened I started several successful businesses.
Honestly we already should have contribution/impact based merit threshold UBI with a much lower barrier than research grants or even just time limited UBI systems for youth and adults that meet a contribution threshold.
VC allocation is too biased towards group think, profit motivation, predatory contracts and hold on to top many class and cultural artifacts.
Yes of course it would be difficult to implement but difficult isn't impossible and gradiated rollouts can help catch unintended side effects. We need to push more money into the hands of the intrinsically motivated. Society already is catering to the whims of consumers and feed zombies.
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Just take the top ticket, thanks.
Me. Got countless old servers as a teenager and self hosted as much as possible. Now I have enough money for new servers (well, besides memory...) but not enough time and energy.
It stings how much I relate to this.
All aboard the soul tra…erhm…drain!
But how much wealthier are you?
How many went ChaosKlub and found themselves on the run?
Why not start your own software company?
I made big money in my 20s, I can retire. Now I just play and gamble on my company to go from ~2M to 100M.
If I get a nickel every time a high schooler with a decorated history of hardware tinkering goes on to work on Linux for Apple Silicon, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird they all happens to gravitate to Apple.
It's genuinely nice hardware, and everyone's gotta have a hobby. But it's not all of them. Geohot did some hardware stuff and hasn't (afaik) been working on Asahi. Linus was 21 when Linux was first released. Of course, Apple silicon ARM laptops didn't exist in the wild then, so we can let both of those pass.
They used to go work on homebrew for nintendo consoles instead. Times change.
>Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird they all happens to gravitate to Apple.
People get satisfaction from solving challenging problems.
Not to downplay his efforts, but back in the 8 and 16 bit home computer days, kids were coding Z80, 6052, 8080, 68000 Assembly aged 10 - 12 years old onwards.
Having been one of those kids, I kind of expect a high schooler to be able to have such skills, when deeply interested into a specific subject.
Have you ever found a vulnerability in modern macOS?
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My personal conspiracy theory is that they're actually the same person, perhaps with some time traveling hijinks?
[flagged]
And Lina is problematic why exactly?
I'm curious.. what social network is the right one according to you?
X has nazis and pedos. Truth Social has trumpism and thus stupidity. Facebook is .. for old people?
What network is the right one according to your world view?
Asahi is one of the projects I support monetarily cause I really hope that one day I can run linux natively on my M4 max with GPU acceleration. They did an amazing job with M1 and M2 - great to see they are still pushing forward after the departure of Alyssa Rosenzweig, who did a lot of the work on the GPU support for those.
Edit: Here is their donation page if you're interested in chipping in as well: https://opencollective.com/asahilinux
It is worth noting the distinction between display acceleration and compute support here. While the desktop rendering is impressive, for local AI or LLM inference the Linux stack on M-series is still significantly behind Metal/MPS on macOS. I tried to switch my local dev environment over recently but without a mature compute stack it is hard to justify leaving macOS if you need to run models locally.
of course, that's only relevant if you do intend to run models locally. which, up to very recently, would have been roughly 0% of mac users.
While the M series hardware is impressive and the Asahi project is doing miracles, I myself don't want to support Apple in any way, including buying any of their hardware.
They are also doing a lot of generic work that benefits the ARM platform as a whole. And since Snapdragon X is a fucking mess on Linux, these Apple Silicon devices are actually some of the best cheap hardware you can buy with excellent performance.
You can always get it second hand
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Relevant 39C3 talk from three weeks ago:
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3OAiOfCcYFM
This talk in particular explains the challenges with M4 and M5 chips, but also a lot more.
Does anyone know if M3 support is likely to lead to M4 or M5 support in relatively short order? AIUI M3 took a long time because it was a substantial departure from M1/M2, especially in the GPU architecture, but I don't know if M4 or M5 made similar leaps.
The main reason M3 took a long time isn't related to m3 itself, but rather that the asahi project took on a ton of tech debt to get M1/M2 working. M3 wasn't too difficult, but before taking on the additional tech debt, the Asahi team focused on getting all of their changes upstreamed to the linux kernel.
The main developer was also the target of a harassment campaign from a place that has pushed other targets to straight up suicide. That took almost all of their energy for the last year and they ended up quitting.
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AFAIK they also were focusing on upstream the changes into the kernel [0], because the amount of downstream patches they were maintaining were making the work harder and harder.
[0] https://asahilinux.org/2025/10/progress-report-6-17/
Prognosis is then that work for m4/m5 should be relatively straight line now that refactoring is done?
M4 is apparently even harder because of some new hardware-level page table protections.
Source from Asahi contributor: https://social.treehouse.systems/@sven/114278224116678776
Memory Integrity Enforcement, perhaps?
https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...
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The M5 reportedly has a newer generation GPU compared to the M3/M4. For one thing, the GPU-side Neural Accelerators are obviously new to the M5 series. Other stuff is harder to know for sure until it gets looked into from a technical POV.
It’s not like neural accelerators on non-Apple consumer hardware get much use on Linux, either, so that does not sound like much of a dealbreaker.
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Related but not:
I'm a lifelong Mac user who now has a KDE device courtesy of SteamOS. What are the best options for porting Mac default keybindings over to KDE?
I'm using SteamOS and Nix/Home Manager, so I have a preference for something that I can easily use in that environment (e.g. nothing that needs me to unlock the system partition or run as another user).
I tried asking Gemini to find where KDE stores its default keybindings, and came up short.
You can try to remap KDE keybindings but it won't affect Gnome applications, games, etc.
Personally, I found the most reliable thing to be a keyboard-level swap of Ctrl and the Cmd key. That way, whenever you're asked for Ctrl, which is all the time, you can always safely hit Cmd with no need for extra configuration. You can then remap various things in KDE Shortcuts to be more Mac like, like Cmd+Q, Cmd+Tab, Cmd+`, etc. (The only thing lacking is the Ctrl v. Cmd separation in a terminal, so I manually remapped all the Ctrl sequences in my terminal emulator to Win sequences, which matches my hardware Ctrl key. So, like on a Mac, Cmd+C works to copy, Ctrl+C is the escape code.)
This works for a Mac keyboard. For a Windows keyboard, you'd have to shuffle Alt -> Ctrl, Win -> Alt, and Ctrl -> Win. There are settings for this in xkb. (KDE surfaces these in its Keyboard settings panel.)
Keyboard layouts/shortcuts are a huge pain point with Linux. xkb is geriatric, and acts as such. Compose keys are flaky and inconsistent across applications. Virtually all Linux software is going to default to some idiosyncratic take on Windows shortcuts, often without much by way of customisability. (And those Windows shortcuts weren't very good to begin with.)
That works until you get into a terminal and want to copy/paste/send signals without having to remember special keybinds that only apply when you're in the terminal.
X should have never copied the IBM/MS binds. What a tragic mistake
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Given that you're already using Home Manager: Make sure to also take a look at plasma-manager! [1]
It extends HM's declarative config to KDE/Plasma's config files, which are harder to manage since they also contain volatile state like window geometry. For discovery, there is also a `plasma-manager` executable that prints out most (all?) active settings. In particular the keybindings are included in there.
(This doesn't directly answer your question, but maybe is informative regardless and/or helpful for finding related options)
[1] https://github.com/nix-community/plasma-manager
Checking out Plasma Manager was on my to-do list. Finally pushed me over the edge:
https://github.com/appsforartists/device-config/blob/master/...
I've got Mac-centric keybindings working in Plasma and Chrome now. I already had them for Ghostty - I need to port those over to use the new lib. Same for Sublime.
KDE has a setting to switch the cmd & command keys so that e.g. command+c copies instead of ctrl+c. This works in all KDE apps (it will not work if you install any Gnome/GTK app, though). I forgot the setting but its something in advanced and used to be called Emacs key binds, but now I think it just refers to the keys.
Anyways, beyond that, have a look at Kinto which tries to do everything in one box, but it is an additional software you have to run:
https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto
Thanks. I've also seen a derivative called Toshy. They both appear to be surprisingly invasive.
I want something like Sublime Text's keybindings, where I can just iterate over all of KDE's system defaults and ask Gemini to convert them to their Mac equivalents. Can deal with individual applications separately, but since basically the only things I use are Chrome, Ghostty, Sublime, and the KDE shell, it seems like it ought to be pretty straightforward.
> What are the best options for porting Mac default keybindings over to KDE?
My recommendation is to get used to the KDE keybindings, and individual applications' keybindings. You'll never be able to fully replicate the macOS keybinding experience, so better get used to it. (Same when people use macOS, I recommend to get used to their keybindings and not try to replicate Linux/Windows)
There's a folder where KDE stores your user's settings. Shortcuts are in their own file...
For me it's `/home/$USER_NAME/.config/kglobalshortcutsrc`
Interesting! That might be the file I was looking for.
I see 260 lines (some of which are whitespace). I wonder if that's all of the default keybindings, or if there are more hiding somewhere.
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Toshy on GitHub. I can’t live without it.
[dead]
Is there a reason why it's so hard to support newer M chips after supporting an older one? Like so much harder than supporting a new generation Intel or AMD chip doesn't seem too hard in comparison.
Because Intel/AMD regularly contribute kernel changes to maintain support for their own hardware, whereas Apple keeps making undocumented changes that Asahi has to reverse engineer.
I don't think that's it, as we usually don't even have to update the kernel: when I get a new PC, my old software still boots and runs. The answer has to also provide some analogous note that, unlike new x86 hardware having an interest in still being able to run old versions of Windows, new Apple hardware (maybe... one must presume for the story to be consistent) must not really care about being able to boot old copies of macOS.
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I've definitely ran older kernels of Linux on new Intel/AMD CPUs where the kernel release vastly pre-date the CPU release.
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1) Intel and AMD help to implement support in Linux before their chips even ship. Actually a sanitized version of the Intel graphics ISA bspec is actually available to the OSS community too.
Apple on the other hand provides no support. The one nice thing they did do is allow their bootloader to boot non-apple signed OSes. They do not do this on iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, Watches, or homepods btw.
2) The GPU ISA changes drastically and often. Its not entirely uncommon for the entire instruction set to change entirely within one generation. Every change to the ISA would require an entire round of new reverse engineering (I suspect, ive never reversed).
I do wonder why Apple chooses not to lock down the Mac to just Mac OS like all their other hardware? I'm sure the sales from people who intend to run something other than MacOS look like a floating-point error on the scales Apple operates.
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M1/M2 were pretty similar.
M3 had gigantic GPU changes.
M4 had some security stuff added, and M5 much more so. Not sure how/if those can be disabled. Others can be explain why this matters better than I can.
They change the arch and add new features all the time. In M4 they added new kernel protections which now they need to somehow emulate.
Note, SW rendering. Still great to have that.
> Yes [SW rendering], should have clarified in the original post sorry! Hopefully GPU to come soon, still investigating that. I believed they changed the ISA so we have to modify our compiler, and I love compilers, so it should be fun! :)
source: https://bsky.app/profile/integralpilot.bsky.social/post/3mde...
If anyone else wants the closest thing to a MBP running Linux without waiting for Asahi to fully work, I can highly recommend the HP ZBook G1A.
* It has an all-aluminium chassis that feels a lot like a MBP.
* Hardware all works - fingerprint reader, webcam, suspend etc etc. Takes a bit of work, but all works in the end. Helps that HP ships them with Ubuntu as official option.
* Strix Halo chipset, which is basically AMD's attempt at an Apple Silicon type design. Single big chip, with unified LPDDR5X-8000 RAM (up to 128GB!) shared between CPU and GPU (which is surprisingly strong as well, 40 CU!). This thing is a beast for local LLMs!
Only downside really is the battery life. I haven't played around with it too much, I think there's a bit more room with custom tuned profiles, but rn I get like maybe 6 hours on a good day?
I also have an Apple M4 MacBook Pro from Work and an HP ZBook G1a for my personal. I used to have an Asahi MacBook but switched over with the lack of M3/M4 support. Some extra compare/contrast:
- The build quality of each are excellent. The touchpad on the G1a is probably the closest to a MacBook touchpad I've seen and it even manages to boast an OLED screen. On the other hand, the G1a is only available as a 14" option.
- Strix Halo will still leave you wishing it were Apple Silicon in pretty much every case except "I need to run a x86 native app/VM". It's certainly the best alternative, but you definitely trade away to go to it. You can load large LLMs (I have the 128 GB version for non-AI reasons) but they only run ~3x faster than a laptop without a GPU would because 256 GB/s still ends up being a big bandwidth limit. If you do actually do this regularly, then prepare to hear the fans and look for your power adapter as it does get quite hot doing so.
- Speaking of power adapter... you need either a 100 W or 140 W charger + USB C to be able to charge the G1a while you use it. If you want to use a lower wattage adapter you need to power off, or it seems to draw 0 W out of spite.
- It's massively refreshing to have a normal UEFI bootup process, and as long as you have a current kernel the hardware support is indeed pretty great on the G1a. Between the two, the G1a has better supported than the M1 w/ Asahi - as one would expect for a corporation officially supporting Linux vs a fan project.
If I were to do it all again, I'd say I might have either just gotten an M2 Pro for Asahi or an M4 w/ macOS and a Linux VM as needed. Part of going for an x86 laptop was to be able to dual boot into games with strict DRM, but after trying multiple versions of AMD graphics driver for the 8060s it was more a frustration in random stutters and I ended up not gaming on it as much as I have on other laptops anyways. Bazzite does work great though, just not with all of the different DRMs or games.
According to Asahi's own documentation, they're far from done from the M3. So I guess "now working" is probably a bit misleading...
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/#tab...
I understand where you are coming from, I think the major hurdle was getting it boot and fixing M3 specific things. Now that it is working, they can port over their driver very easily (they might just work or need a small tweak)
Thank you for the clarification!
I'm not sure that this list is updated; this is breaking news, and documenting stuff takes longer than that.
True. Nevertheless, the fact that it even boots, after many years of it not working at all, is huge news.
> after many years of it not working at all
And by "many", we of course mean "2", because the M3 was only released 2 years ago.
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Can't wait M1 to not be supported by Apple anymore to snack up some of that awesome hardware for cheap and run linux on it.
You'll probably be waiting a long time. But already you can get used M1 Airs for about 1/3 what I paid for mine new.
This is super cool and a big achievement, although it's worth noting that this is with llvmpipe graphics (i.e. CPU not GPU).
Although, I was daily-driving Asahi on an M1 Pro before GPU support was here and it was very usable.
Is there any kind of multi-boot support if someone wants to mainly run macOS but checkout Linux on M-chips 'part time'?
Yes, in fact deleting the MacOS install is not a supported way to run the system.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/faq/#can-i-dual-boot-asa...
Yes, it installs into a separate partition and you choose whether to boot into macOS or Linux.
While it's awesome that it runs there doesn't seem to be GPU support yet as the screenshot reports the llvmpipe software renderer. From what I understand there are significant difference between the M2 and M3 GPUs so this unlikely to be implemented soon. Unless it turns out this original analysis turns out to be wrong.
Personally I don't consider it "working" as a laptop on an Apple M3 unless you actually have GPU support. Software rending just sucks, even with a SoC as powerful as the Apple M3.
Nice! Good to hear that progress is still being made, I know it was on pause for a bit as developers rotated out and there was an effort to get things upstreamed.
This is great news. If Apple ever get around to releasing actually pro M5 MBPs I'm buying one and turning this M1 MBP into a linux laptop.
I've been running Asahi Fedora GNOME on a Mac mini M1 for some while now (using it right now in fact) with almost zero complaints. A really solid and usable setup. I could see myself buying a used MacBook Air M3 down the road once this work is all finished up, which is very exciting. The prices are already pretty reasonable, even for a 16GB RAM model!
Apple made lower than 16GB M3 models? Man, can't wait till the cheapest model is at least 128GB.
Yeah, M4 was the generation when the minimum got bumped up to 16GB.
Really cool, though if I was looking for a Linux laptop today, I’d be watching the Intel Panther Lake products rolling out.
The top SKU has a similar performance and efficiency profile to the base M5 processor along with faster graphics performance.
Review embargos for the top SKU just dropped today.
You can't really be that naive, can you
Au contraire - which Asahi-supported machines hold a candle to AMD and Intel's Linux support?
I can't recommend Macs to other Linux users in good faith unless they're already stuck with the hardware and loathe macOS. If you need an ARM laptop that supports Linux, you should probably wait for Nvidia to release theirs.
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Promising progress, I'm excited to try it when they get more things working on M3 Pro
Can anyone point me to a good report of the current working status and known drawbacks of Asahi on Apple Silicon? Would there ever be a reason to run it on a Mac Mini or Apple desktop device? Or at that point would you just get a Linux box?
https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
I’ve managed to get NixOS running on an 8gb MacBook air which tools a bit of tweaks but asahi installer sets everything up where you can boot and install from NixOS
Could you expand/explain, you install Asahi first and then NixOS?
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> Or at that point would you just get a Linux box?
What exactly is a Linux box? If you're running Linux on an M3, is it not now a Linux box?
Considering how far behind they are of new releases of hardware I'd imagine the most appealing use case is going to be trying to squeeze some more life out of outdated hardware that struggles running the latest Apple software. But that's kind of the sweet spot for a Linux desktop anyway, isn't it?
Does an M3 struggle to run the latest Apple software? I'm running an M2 Pro as my daily driver, and I doubt this thing will need replacing this side of ~5 years
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Does this include the newer M3 ultra? Huge news if true!
This is awesome, but we'll still need to hear the full support status. Which subsystems are covered by existing development, which need new drivers. Can't wait for the update on https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
I would never buy a Mac, but what's the issue with supporting Mx processors?
Are they a generic ARM platform or something highly proprietary with ISA extensions and the like?
And if Apple is pulling a Nintendo here why is this project allowed to exist in the first place? It's not like they are getting hit with an anti-trust any time soon.
The problem are really not the CPU cores itself. It's a generic arm core in terms of ISA with just a tiny bit of proprietary extensions. The problem are all the peripherals. GPU, NPU, Display, USB, Wifi, HID, sound etc etc. These all require custom drivers and reverse engineering.
Problem is, there's no such thing as a generic ARM platform. The devil is in too many details even if there was something common between some core designs.
Have they fixed the touchy trackpad issues? Super impressive work, and I want to want this, but...
I've been using it for over a year, if there are any trackpad issue now, I haven't noticed any
oh awesome! I had assumed they were just targeting M1/M2 for the time being
Do the M-series have better wifi support than the last Intel range?
Runs pretty smoothly with iwd. I get occasional disconnects (one every few hours) that may equally be down to my local wifi (other devices have issues with it too). iwd instantly papers over them, so it doesn't impact me either way.
Anecdata: In macOS, M1 Air wifi signal quality was worse than any other laptop or phone I had in the same room. Apple has historically had bad RF designs for a very long time.
Is there a way to make a clean Asahi Linux installation?
still m1 family is the only one that fully(not acutally) supported apple silicon by asahi? I have m1 pro macbook pro btw
Displayport alt mode? Thunderbolt?
At least for M1 they got it working. Seems to be in testing phase now. Promised to come soon.
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...
From that video "Our goal is to make this [dp-altmode] generally available to all people sometime early in the next year [2026]"
Is that display port over USB-C? That’s the main showstopper for me to use Asahi on my M1 Pro MBP.
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That's great. The only reason I haven't got it on my M1 Air yet.
I wish it were possible to directly fund DP-alt mode support. It is the only thing remaining preventing me from adopting Asahi.
For me https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/tree/fairydust installed and worked without any tweeks. Don't think you can direct funding, but https://opencollective.com/asahilinux contributes to getting this fully officially supported.
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and ProMotion, then its a serious contender
Dunno, I don’t care about ProMotion (I’ve got it and I don’t see it), but sleep and battery life are very important to me.
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