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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.)
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
It's not business critical to answer your curiosity now. File it as a ticket, put it on a backlog and move on.
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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Just take the top ticket, thanks.
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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But how much wealthier are you?
It stings how much I relate to this.
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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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.
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.
They used to go work on homebrew for nintendo consoles instead. Times change.
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.
My personal conspiracy theory is that they're actually the same person, perhaps with some time traveling hijinks?
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.
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
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.)
> 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)
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.
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.
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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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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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.
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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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.
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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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!
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.
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.
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 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.
still m1 family is the only one that fully(not acutally) supported apple silicon by asahi? I have m1 pro macbook pro btw
Does this include the newer M3 ultra? Huge news if true!
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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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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Is there a way to make a clean Asahi Linux installation?
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
Do the M-series have better wifi support than the last Intel range?
Promising progress, I'm excited to try it when they get more things working on M3 Pro
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.
oh awesome! I had assumed they were just targeting M1/M2 for the time being
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.
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.
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]"
That's great. The only reason I haven't got it on my M1 Air yet.
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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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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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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