Works here, here's the text for anyone who can't access it:
> Turns out APFS has an undocumented "VolBootable" flag that we were never setting since, well, it is undocumented, and the boot picker never cared about it (it read it and printed it's state to system log, just did not take any action). Anyway, fix PR-ed to asahi-installer, old installs will have an installer option to set the flag. But still, probably hold off on installing macos betas :P.
It seems like this is a bug, apple went through the trouble to allow something like asahi to be possible in the first place. I doubt they're purposely trying to break it.
Apple designed a bootloader for Apple Silicon Macs that allows you to run an unsigned OS without degrading security when you boot into MacOS. This wasn't an accident.
M series macs are weird tho, yes the bootloader allows it but absolutely no documentation on the hardware, drivers etc. Can't help but to think the goal of this wasn't to actually allow third-party OSes, but for development purposes(and ye they could hide the feature behind apple account with paid dev license) or anti-anti-trust measures à-la Google with Firefox: in front of a jury of normal people they can simply say "look there's these nerds making Asahi" the same way "look we're not a monopoly Firefox has .2% market share".
And if Apple were going to change their mind and try to block linux, they would intentionally modify the bootloader to remove that functionality, not break the boot picker.
Reminds me of when the Xbox 360 came out, Microsoft had to buy a bunch of Macs because Macs had PowerPC processors, so it was kind of a no-brainer to get the darn thing going quickly enough. Ultimately Windows was the standard way to build Xbox games but it is kind of funny to think, one day someone at Apple saw an order for easily several dozens of Macs from Microsoft, and wondered if hell froze over.
I have fond memories in the early 2000s of getting the first MacBook Pro's with Intel Core i7's and the first thing we did at my company was build and install gentoo.
IDecices should absolutely be treated as laptops and desktops which allow another OS to run on the device. This why I have not bought an Apple device for years.
EU is the only governing body that would push owning the device you _buy_. Unfortunately their seem more geared moving to a surveillance state at the moment with chat control.
They're different for now, but it's frog-boiling. Apple has been steadily adding more and more hoops to the process for Macs, and eventually they are going to end up as locked down as iPhones.
The boot flag was undocumented, like most features of Apple devices that are required knowledge for being able to port another operating system to them.
Because of this lack of documentation, every release of a new version of Apple hardware or software may require the restarting of the reverse engineering work, like in this case, just to keep working the alternative operating system.
Such bugs have happened and been reported before. Asahi exercises "raw boot" facilities that just don't get all that much attention in any other context.
If the happy path disappears, the not-so-happy path will be taken to allow for booting custom kernels, one that will likely rely on turning the some or a lot of the RE energy towards breaking the Secure Enclave, the bootloader, and so on. Apple practically laid the red carpet out to avoid people trying to crack the parts of the hardware/software chain-of-trust they would really rather not have cracked. A similar strategy helped keep the Xbox One un-pwned for over a decade (running homebrew was allowed in a specific mode). It is doubtful Apple's legal department isn't aware of the value of the current software strategy.
No, if their lawyers want it gone, Apple will just update the bootloader to reject local signing keys.
The actual problem was that Apple has an undocumented APFS key for if a volume is bootable, which Asahi wasn't setting and Apple wasn't checking, but now they do, so they do.
The comments there are absolutely insane lol, especially now that we know it's a bug.
I did not realize that some people were still so anti-Apple. I'm of course not saying that there's not a small element of truth in many of the comments, but talk about some straw man arguments.
It was not a bug, it was just another undocumented Apple feature.
However, when a company sells a device, as opposed to providing it for lease, I do not believe that it has the right to not document any feature of the device that is relevant for its usage, like it should also not have the right to impose any constraints on how the owner should use what has been bought.
Obviously, the owner of any kind of things may not use them to perform illegal acts, but that is a constraint imposed by the valid laws, not by the seller of the things.
Today, far too many companies claim to sell things, but they also attempt to control what the owner may do with them. I avoid to buy such things, but my choices are limited by those who buy them, allowing these policies to be beneficial for the sellers.
MacBooks are not designed to boot any OS other than macOS. Just because someone hacks one such that they get custom code running that doesn't mean all of that now becomes in scope for what is relevant for usage. Someone had to go above and beyond to hack the device to get another OS to run.
I mean, do you expect a blender to come with instructions on how to replace the engine?
> I do not believe that it has the right to not document any feature of the device that is relevant for its usage.
This is an extremely broad requirement to place on any and all manufacturers. I agree companies shouldn't intentionally restrict what you can do with your stuff, but on the other hand, if you're trying to rebuild your lawn mower into a motorbike, you can't really be mad that the company didn't provide you with a specification the exact dimensions of the exhaust, can you?
People were screwed so many times by so many companies, they have been taught the hard way to behave like that: either make a lot of noise and hate in the first stage, or just agree that some functionality has been removed to milk more money etc.
Apple transformed handheld computing into walled garden, brainwashed installation into "sideloading". Apple software update made Apple laptops to fail booting Linux.
"Concerned people are insane anti-Apple without any solid arguments, lol"
Not how I'm intending to come off as. I am more specifically mentioning the comments that say stuff like "Apple laptops are overpriced pieces of junk" but without thinking of those whose workflows would be impacted very negatively by moving to more open platforms (not because of the platform, but I mean because of hardware)
It's like they are looking at a specific application, finding that Macs are bad at it, and declaring it crap in every way, which isn't true.
That's true, if you want a Linux laptop. However, no ThinkPad at this moment can come close to the horsepower + battery life in a modern Mac. Not saying Apple is excused because of that, just an observation.
I am not (purposefully) granting them the benefit of the doubt.
In my comment I simply noted that the comments there are extremely anti-Apple yet without any solid arguments behind them, and I also noted that the whole thing is just because of an APFS flag which could be fixed from Asahi's side. The main reason I made the comment is because I am shocked at how poorly backed the arguments are.
As for Apple not helping the Linux team, why would they, or any major OEM? Apple is perfectly happy with https://github.com/apple/container
I have said it for a while, Microsoft's business strategy was probably the best thing that ever happened to Free/Open software. They were ones pushing for more open systems so that they could sell DOS and Windows to other vendors. yes, it left the door open for others but they also figured they could push their software far harder than others could.
I agree with the ARM/RISCV stance that we should be cautious with what we ask. I have seen some RiscV providers in China are starting to push for a BIOS compatible boot system which is great to see, but there is no guarantee that it will be adopted or it will last for long.
Other than this situation, what other landmines are there? I have an M1 with Asahi Arch Linux that I've been using as my primary laptop for the last 8 months, its my favorite laptop by far out of the 5ish I have.
Pretty much all ARM platforms are. Even ARM devices designed from the ground up to be Linux devices are full of issues, like the MNT Pocket Reform's lack of HW suspend. The tight interop between vendor and implementation is a huge anti-pattern for software freedom, and the standardization initiatives like ARM SR are nowhere to be seen. It's probably the most problematic part of ARM being the future of personal computing, yet another impending manifestation of enshittification.
Those are currently suffering from high power draw because they have to keep the cores awake for memory speeds. Lackluster performance as well, but thats the problem with the majority of the ARM ecosystem ever since apple started crafting SoCs.
You do actually get UEFI on a few of these, though personally I've always fared better with U-Boot. (Sooner or later, I always run into something that is a simple edit in the device tree or uEnv, but UEFI doesn't expose.)
i run linux on both in arch and fedora versions with zero problems, by using the hypervisor framework of macos and wsl2 (wrapper for hyperv). do you need a more direct than hypervisor access to some hardware?
To add on. If I remember correctly, its been awhile keeping track of it, they recommend you do because macOS is how you will get firmware updates as there are not any or many mechanisms to update firmware on Apple Silicon devices from Linux.
> I don't believe that Apple has ever acknowledged the project at all, let alone promote it. Apple is neutral towards their work as far as I can tell.
How do you draw that conclusion based on their public indifference? If they acknowledged it and promoted, you could assume they are pro Asahi. But them not acknowledging it doesn't imply they aren't anti Asahi.
If they actually wanted that project to succeed and bring more diversity to Mac dev ecosystem, they'd help the project outright. Meanwhile they continue to exploit Linux for their dev purposes while still locking you into the macOS. This is their clear strategy, i.e. to make you continue to use macOS even when you prefer Linux as dev platform, just based on what they showed during WWDC. They aren't neutral.
On the other hand I doubt that's intentional.
Even as an avid Apple critic I want to mention that people I trust and are more involved with Asahi, always pointed out that Asahi received the occasional little help from Apple devs where possible (surely, not with official documentation, or confidential infos).
So, I would wait until things had time to calm down and not get too invested with Apple bashing.
I’m sorry but some of the comments are out of touch. Apple devices do not have any intent of supporting separate OSes . Asahi supports M1 to M2. I can see this as a PSA to not install a beta but I am confused who would install both Akashi and macOS 27 beta at the same time when you could run the beta in a VM for development ? Others have said that this has been a fix that will happen soon.
There is clear intent, albeit not as good as the Boot Camp days. One doesn't just accidentally the Boot Policy subsystem to enable doing so every step of the way as it is. It has even been remarked as much by an Apple dev:
> Looks like Apple changed the requirements for Mach-O kernel files in 12.1, breaking our existing installation process... and they also added a raw image mode that will never break again and doesn't require Mach-Os. And people said they wouldn't help. This is intended for us.
A consumer shouldn't be restricted from installing their own OS on a device that they bought, be it a smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, or server.
A company the size of Apple should also be required to release proper documentation that enables the porting of operating systems to these kinds of devices.
The reverse engineering work that the Asahi team did is remarkable but so much of it is ultimately busy work that didn't need to be done if we regulated the consumer electronics market appropriately.
If you believe this, the fight should be against PlayStation and Xbox.
They’re 100% commodity hardware and fully locked down from any user freedom. Weirdly everyone focuses on Apple with all their might instead of gaming consoles.
Because gaming consoles are for a very specific purpose (and sold as such – the ruling against Sony for blocking Linux on the PS3 only happened because they advertised Linux compatibility) and Macs are general purpose computers
There was a brief period of time where you could buy your car like this. You'd purchase a rolling chassis from one manufacturer, and commission a coachbuilder to put a body on top. Many premium brands such as Bugatti, Rolls-Royce and Jaguar (Swallow) started in this fashion.
Today, outside of a few niche areas such as motorsport and commercial uses such as buses and coaches, nobody buys a vehicle this way. If you walked into your local Ford or Toyota and asked for a rolling chassis they would look at you as if you were insane, and rightly so. Integrating the development of the chassis and body into a single unit (both philosophically and literally [0]) has given us cars which are lighter, faster, more efficient, more featureful and safer by every measure.
We had our coachbuilding period in personal computing and it's all but over[1]. Nobody asks for the hardware and operating system to be sold separately for their washing machine, their TV, their microwave oven, PlayStation or Tesla EV. And yet for some reason some still cling to the idea that tablets and smartphones are personal computers rather than recognising them for the appliances they are.
As Steve Jobs allegedly said, design is not how something looks, design is how something works. How a feature works on a highly evolved device like an iPhone is a function of tightly coupled and carefully designed hardware and software.
Having this design process take place in different teams inside different companies, selling in different commercial models would not lead to a better outcome, it would be worse, much worse. The staggering commercial success of both iPhone and iPad is all the proof you need.
If hobbyists want to hobby, more power to them! But it's not something any government needs to regulate into existence.
No one said otherwise. Apple tightly coupling macOS is not mutually exclusive with Apple publishing specs for allowing to support other OS on that hardware.
That might be reasonable for a general purpose computer if we were talking about something like a Parallel Inference Machine running KL1 software on a KL0 kernel. But I think conflating Apple's products with that level of foundational engineering is highly disingenuous. They're not exactly trundling into the dark woods of exotic hardware and reinventing the bridge between human and computer. It's an ARM computer running a Unix clone. Apple's engineers aren't mapping every codepath and counting every micro-op, Darwin contains extensive amounts of third-party code.
No Universal Machine, as a component or the whole product, which prevents owner modification through DMCA-styled digital locking mechanisms, must be allowed to be sold on the open market. Such contravenes the rights of ordinary citizens. It is disgusting to me that we have allowed this state of affairs through our collective and individual inaction. America's founding fathers (terrorists by today's definitions) tarred and feathered for much less!
The EU is not some kind of god that will make others do your bidding if you pray enough to them. You've been misguided into following a false religion.
For every niche thing you wish that Apple or other third parties do only for your own enjoyment, there are hundreds of millions of other people who want different niche things. Buy the products that suit your needs and wants, and companies have incentive to make them. And if no company wants to provide a feature or function that you know a huge portion of people will want, then you have a golden opportunity to start a business providing this.
> For every niche thing you wish that Apple or other third parties do only for your own enjoyment, there are hundreds of millions of other people who want different niche things.
We're talking Apple publishing specs for their hardware. That's not some "niche, particular, random" feature each persons asks for. We're all asking the same thing. Same thing that IBM did and what made the PC and IT industry as we know it.
> You've been misguided into following a false religion.
You're being misguided by your patronizing attitude.
Honestly this shouldn't be limited to traditional computing devices. Why do I need some hacker to reverse engineer my robot vacuum and then fully disassemble it just to install custom firmware to it? Should be a basic requirement of right to repair so all this smart crap doesn't wind up in a landfill when a company goes out of business or decides to arbitrarily drop support for it.
I can see the argument when it comes to locked-down mobile devices, but macOS is a general-purpose operating system with no restrictions on software sources that can't be easily disabled. Nearly every program available for Linux (excepting OS-specific stuff like desktop environments) is available for macOS, commercial and free, and there's plenty more that's macOS-only. Asahi is cool, but it's mostly used by enthusiasts - there's very little practical use for it as a macOS alternative. I think that you'd have a hard time convincing regulators that this cause really matters.
In any case, though, Apple agrees with you, and they explicitly built support for non-macOS OSes into the bootloader. This is a bug in the first developer beta of a new release.
Apparently fixed already, or will be fixed soon. https://social.treehouse.systems/@chaos_princess/11672546441...
So it was unintentional behavior in a beta release? Yeah that definitely does feel like something we should be getting up in arms about
404
Works here, here's the text for anyone who can't access it:
> Turns out APFS has an undocumented "VolBootable" flag that we were never setting since, well, it is undocumented, and the boot picker never cared about it (it read it and printed it's state to system log, just did not take any action). Anyway, fix PR-ed to asahi-installer, old installs will have an installer option to set the flag. But still, probably hold off on installing macos betas :P.
It seems like this is a bug, apple went through the trouble to allow something like asahi to be possible in the first place. I doubt they're purposely trying to break it.
Apple designed a bootloader for Apple Silicon Macs that allows you to run an unsigned OS without degrading security when you boot into MacOS. This wasn't an accident.
Macs have always allowed you to run another OS.
iDevices have always had a locked bootloader.
People shouldn't confuse the two.
M series macs are weird tho, yes the bootloader allows it but absolutely no documentation on the hardware, drivers etc. Can't help but to think the goal of this wasn't to actually allow third-party OSes, but for development purposes(and ye they could hide the feature behind apple account with paid dev license) or anti-anti-trust measures à-la Google with Firefox: in front of a jury of normal people they can simply say "look there's these nerds making Asahi" the same way "look we're not a monopoly Firefox has .2% market share".
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And if Apple were going to change their mind and try to block linux, they would intentionally modify the bootloader to remove that functionality, not break the boot picker.
Reminds me of when the Xbox 360 came out, Microsoft had to buy a bunch of Macs because Macs had PowerPC processors, so it was kind of a no-brainer to get the darn thing going quickly enough. Ultimately Windows was the standard way to build Xbox games but it is kind of funny to think, one day someone at Apple saw an order for easily several dozens of Macs from Microsoft, and wondered if hell froze over.
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If they allowed something similar on iphones, I'd switch to an iPhone the day an alternate os worked well enough for daily use.
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I have fond memories in the early 2000s of getting the first MacBook Pro's with Intel Core i7's and the first thing we did at my company was build and install gentoo.
People forgot already about Bootcamp
IDecices should absolutely be treated as laptops and desktops which allow another OS to run on the device. This why I have not bought an Apple device for years.
EU is the only governing body that would push owning the device you _buy_. Unfortunately their seem more geared moving to a surveillance state at the moment with chat control.
They're different for now, but it's frog-boiling. Apple has been steadily adding more and more hoops to the process for Macs, and eventually they are going to end up as locked down as iPhones.
You get clicks for "Apple bad", not for "there was this boot flag and once we figured that out problem solved".
The boot flag was undocumented, like most features of Apple devices that are required knowledge for being able to port another operating system to them.
Because of this lack of documentation, every release of a new version of Apple hardware or software may require the restarting of the reverse engineering work, like in this case, just to keep working the alternative operating system.
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It's Apple's bootloader. They were the ones that chose to use iBoot and not implement UEFI-style booting like prior Macs.
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Such bugs have happened and been reported before. Asahi exercises "raw boot" facilities that just don't get all that much attention in any other context.
(removed)
If the happy path disappears, the not-so-happy path will be taken to allow for booting custom kernels, one that will likely rely on turning the some or a lot of the RE energy towards breaking the Secure Enclave, the bootloader, and so on. Apple practically laid the red carpet out to avoid people trying to crack the parts of the hardware/software chain-of-trust they would really rather not have cracked. A similar strategy helped keep the Xbox One un-pwned for over a decade (running homebrew was allowed in a specific mode). It is doubtful Apple's legal department isn't aware of the value of the current software strategy.
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No, if their lawyers want it gone, Apple will just update the bootloader to reject local signing keys.
The actual problem was that Apple has an undocumented APFS key for if a volume is bootable, which Asahi wasn't setting and Apple wasn't checking, but now they do, so they do.
>apple went through the trouble to allow something like asahi to be possible in the first place
if going through trouble means "doing less shit to lock their systems down", then yes.
Apple ultimately dgaf about linux.
The comments there are absolutely insane lol, especially now that we know it's a bug.
I did not realize that some people were still so anti-Apple. I'm of course not saying that there's not a small element of truth in many of the comments, but talk about some straw man arguments.
It was not a bug, it was just another undocumented Apple feature.
However, when a company sells a device, as opposed to providing it for lease, I do not believe that it has the right to not document any feature of the device that is relevant for its usage, like it should also not have the right to impose any constraints on how the owner should use what has been bought.
Obviously, the owner of any kind of things may not use them to perform illegal acts, but that is a constraint imposed by the valid laws, not by the seller of the things.
Today, far too many companies claim to sell things, but they also attempt to control what the owner may do with them. I avoid to buy such things, but my choices are limited by those who buy them, allowing these policies to be beneficial for the sellers.
MacBooks are not designed to boot any OS other than macOS. Just because someone hacks one such that they get custom code running that doesn't mean all of that now becomes in scope for what is relevant for usage. Someone had to go above and beyond to hack the device to get another OS to run.
I mean, do you expect a blender to come with instructions on how to replace the engine?
> I do not believe that it has the right to not document any feature of the device that is relevant for its usage.
This is an extremely broad requirement to place on any and all manufacturers. I agree companies shouldn't intentionally restrict what you can do with your stuff, but on the other hand, if you're trying to rebuild your lawn mower into a motorbike, you can't really be mad that the company didn't provide you with a specification the exact dimensions of the exhaust, can you?
This is defence mechanism I guess.
People were screwed so many times by so many companies, they have been taught the hard way to behave like that: either make a lot of noise and hate in the first stage, or just agree that some functionality has been removed to milk more money etc.
Apple transformed handheld computing into walled garden, brainwashed installation into "sideloading". Apple software update made Apple laptops to fail booting Linux.
"Concerned people are insane anti-Apple without any solid arguments, lol"
Not how I'm intending to come off as. I am more specifically mentioning the comments that say stuff like "Apple laptops are overpriced pieces of junk" but without thinking of those whose workflows would be impacted very negatively by moving to more open platforms (not because of the platform, but I mean because of hardware)
It's like they are looking at a specific application, finding that Macs are bad at it, and declaring it crap in every way, which isn't true.
Maybe because you can just buy a nice ThinkPad, slap any distro on and be done with it. Without all this hassle.
That's true, if you want a Linux laptop. However, no ThinkPad at this moment can come close to the horsepower + battery life in a modern Mac. Not saying Apple is excused because of that, just an observation.
I did not realize all the tech companies had completely changed their behaviors to be granted the benefit of the doubt.
Sure they don't do EVERYTHING we think they do, but they do so much, and so much more we DON'T know about...
Anyway, Apple could help the Linux team in months to close huge amounts of functionality gaps but ... they don't.
I am not (purposefully) granting them the benefit of the doubt.
In my comment I simply noted that the comments there are extremely anti-Apple yet without any solid arguments behind them, and I also noted that the whole thing is just because of an APFS flag which could be fixed from Asahi's side. The main reason I made the comment is because I am shocked at how poorly backed the arguments are.
As for Apple not helping the Linux team, why would they, or any major OEM? Apple is perfectly happy with https://github.com/apple/container
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Sadly both main ARM platforms (Apple silicon and Qualcomm) are a mine field for Linux
Most computers have been like that, FOSS got lucky that IBM failed to secure the PC for themselves, thus the PC clones.
When folks say Intel and AMD are done, and we should all be on ARM, or RISC-V, beware of what to wish for.
Yes there are device trees now, however someone has to keep them up to date, and that is only part of what makes a motherboard.
I have said it for a while, Microsoft's business strategy was probably the best thing that ever happened to Free/Open software. They were ones pushing for more open systems so that they could sell DOS and Windows to other vendors. yes, it left the door open for others but they also figured they could push their software far harder than others could.
I agree with the ARM/RISCV stance that we should be cautious with what we ask. I have seen some RiscV providers in China are starting to push for a BIOS compatible boot system which is great to see, but there is no guarantee that it will be adopted or it will last for long.
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Yeah the mainstream alternatives to x86 are all super locked down
Other than this situation, what other landmines are there? I have an M1 with Asahi Arch Linux that I've been using as my primary laptop for the last 8 months, its my favorite laptop by far out of the 5ish I have.
does suspend and other hw fully works on it? however it is an old gen computer
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Only M1 and M2 (and Pro versions).
Pretty much all ARM platforms are. Even ARM devices designed from the ground up to be Linux devices are full of issues, like the MNT Pocket Reform's lack of HW suspend. The tight interop between vendor and implementation is a huge anti-pattern for software freedom, and the standardization initiatives like ARM SR are nowhere to be seen. It's probably the most problematic part of ARM being the future of personal computing, yet another impending manifestation of enshittification.
what about the ones from CIX like the orangepi or their framework mainboard? (though I agree, I miss UEFI for all its faults)
Those are currently suffering from high power draw because they have to keep the cores awake for memory speeds. Lackluster performance as well, but thats the problem with the majority of the ARM ecosystem ever since apple started crafting SoCs.
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You do actually get UEFI on a few of these, though personally I've always fared better with U-Boot. (Sooner or later, I always run into something that is a simple edit in the device tree or uEnv, but UEFI doesn't expose.)
i hope, but i dubt that will be mass produced.. so no economy of scale
i run linux on both in arch and fedora versions with zero problems, by using the hypervisor framework of macos and wsl2 (wrapper for hyperv). do you need a more direct than hypervisor access to some hardware?
A lot of us would prefer MS/Apple to never be within touching range of our hardware.
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Guys its a beta, did we forget what those were? Save the assumptions of ill intent until it hit at least hits production
Source: https://social.treehouse.systems/@AsahiLinux/116719749555082...
Do you need to keep a MacOs installation when you install Asahi?
I believe it's not strictly necessary, but the project recommends that you do.
To add on. If I remember correctly, its been awhile keeping track of it, they recommend you do because macOS is how you will get firmware updates as there are not any or many mechanisms to update firmware on Apple Silicon devices from Linux.
It’s a beta… Apple is very pro Asahi
> Apple is very pro Asahi
I don't believe that Apple has ever acknowledged the project at all, let alone promote it. Apple is neutral towards their work as far as I can tell.
> I don't believe that Apple has ever acknowledged the project at all, let alone promote it. Apple is neutral towards their work as far as I can tell.
How do you draw that conclusion based on their public indifference? If they acknowledged it and promoted, you could assume they are pro Asahi. But them not acknowledging it doesn't imply they aren't anti Asahi.
If they actually wanted that project to succeed and bring more diversity to Mac dev ecosystem, they'd help the project outright. Meanwhile they continue to exploit Linux for their dev purposes while still locking you into the macOS. This is their clear strategy, i.e. to make you continue to use macOS even when you prefer Linux as dev platform, just based on what they showed during WWDC. They aren't neutral.
Beers not allowed
[dead]
macOS 27 Golden Cage /s
On the other hand I doubt that's intentional. Even as an avid Apple critic I want to mention that people I trust and are more involved with Asahi, always pointed out that Asahi received the occasional little help from Apple devs where possible (surely, not with official documentation, or confidential infos).
So, I would wait until things had time to calm down and not get too invested with Apple bashing.
I’m sorry but some of the comments are out of touch. Apple devices do not have any intent of supporting separate OSes . Asahi supports M1 to M2. I can see this as a PSA to not install a beta but I am confused who would install both Akashi and macOS 27 beta at the same time when you could run the beta in a VM for development ? Others have said that this has been a fix that will happen soon.
There is clear intent, albeit not as good as the Boot Camp days. One doesn't just accidentally the Boot Policy subsystem to enable doing so every step of the way as it is. It has even been remarked as much by an Apple dev:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578 and an archive of the tweet's content below:
> Looks like Apple changed the requirements for Mach-O kernel files in 12.1, breaking our existing installation process... and they also added a raw image mode that will never break again and doesn't require Mach-Os. And people said they wouldn't help. This is intended for us.
I wish the EU would regulate this kind of stuff.
A consumer shouldn't be restricted from installing their own OS on a device that they bought, be it a smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, or server.
A company the size of Apple should also be required to release proper documentation that enables the porting of operating systems to these kinds of devices.
The reverse engineering work that the Asahi team did is remarkable but so much of it is ultimately busy work that didn't need to be done if we regulated the consumer electronics market appropriately.
If you believe this, the fight should be against PlayStation and Xbox.
They’re 100% commodity hardware and fully locked down from any user freedom. Weirdly everyone focuses on Apple with all their might instead of gaming consoles.
Because gaming consoles are for a very specific purpose (and sold as such – the ruling against Sony for blocking Linux on the PS3 only happened because they advertised Linux compatibility) and Macs are general purpose computers
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> Weirdly everyone focuses on Apple
Lifetime Xboxes sold: ~200 Million
Lifetime iPhones sold: 3 Billion
Why is it weird?
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They are actually not commodity hardware. The PlayStation and Xbox CPU/GPU is custom built for the console. Try finding a CPU that can use GDDR RAM!
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There was a brief period of time where you could buy your car like this. You'd purchase a rolling chassis from one manufacturer, and commission a coachbuilder to put a body on top. Many premium brands such as Bugatti, Rolls-Royce and Jaguar (Swallow) started in this fashion.
Today, outside of a few niche areas such as motorsport and commercial uses such as buses and coaches, nobody buys a vehicle this way. If you walked into your local Ford or Toyota and asked for a rolling chassis they would look at you as if you were insane, and rightly so. Integrating the development of the chassis and body into a single unit (both philosophically and literally [0]) has given us cars which are lighter, faster, more efficient, more featureful and safer by every measure.
We had our coachbuilding period in personal computing and it's all but over[1]. Nobody asks for the hardware and operating system to be sold separately for their washing machine, their TV, their microwave oven, PlayStation or Tesla EV. And yet for some reason some still cling to the idea that tablets and smartphones are personal computers rather than recognising them for the appliances they are.
As Steve Jobs allegedly said, design is not how something looks, design is how something works. How a feature works on a highly evolved device like an iPhone is a function of tightly coupled and carefully designed hardware and software.
Having this design process take place in different teams inside different companies, selling in different commercial models would not lead to a better outcome, it would be worse, much worse. The staggering commercial success of both iPhone and iPad is all the proof you need.
If hobbyists want to hobby, more power to them! But it's not something any government needs to regulate into existence.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_frame#Unibody
[1] Servers/Linux are the commercial vehicles in this analogy
I don't think it's unreasonable for a device manufacturer to tightly couple it to the software they design to run on it.
No one said otherwise. Apple tightly coupling macOS is not mutually exclusive with Apple publishing specs for allowing to support other OS on that hardware.
That might be reasonable for a general purpose computer if we were talking about something like a Parallel Inference Machine running KL1 software on a KL0 kernel. But I think conflating Apple's products with that level of foundational engineering is highly disingenuous. They're not exactly trundling into the dark woods of exotic hardware and reinventing the bridge between human and computer. It's an ARM computer running a Unix clone. Apple's engineers aren't mapping every codepath and counting every micro-op, Darwin contains extensive amounts of third-party code.
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No Universal Machine, as a component or the whole product, which prevents owner modification through DMCA-styled digital locking mechanisms, must be allowed to be sold on the open market. Such contravenes the rights of ordinary citizens. It is disgusting to me that we have allowed this state of affairs through our collective and individual inaction. America's founding fathers (terrorists by today's definitions) tarred and feathered for much less!
> A consumer shouldn't be restricted from installing their own OS on a device that they bought
That is not what the industry, that pays lobby money, wants. They want to be able to control what the user runs and extract profits.
The EU is not some kind of god that will make others do your bidding if you pray enough to them. You've been misguided into following a false religion.
For every niche thing you wish that Apple or other third parties do only for your own enjoyment, there are hundreds of millions of other people who want different niche things. Buy the products that suit your needs and wants, and companies have incentive to make them. And if no company wants to provide a feature or function that you know a huge portion of people will want, then you have a golden opportunity to start a business providing this.
> For every niche thing you wish that Apple or other third parties do only for your own enjoyment, there are hundreds of millions of other people who want different niche things.
We're talking Apple publishing specs for their hardware. That's not some "niche, particular, random" feature each persons asks for. We're all asking the same thing. Same thing that IBM did and what made the PC and IT industry as we know it.
> You've been misguided into following a false religion.
You're being misguided by your patronizing attitude.
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>I wish the EU would regulate this kind of stuff.
Regulate what exactly? Bugs? That's what this was...
Hardware documentation.
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Dude, you're talking about beta software. Get a fucking grip.
Honestly this shouldn't be limited to traditional computing devices. Why do I need some hacker to reverse engineer my robot vacuum and then fully disassemble it just to install custom firmware to it? Should be a basic requirement of right to repair so all this smart crap doesn't wind up in a landfill when a company goes out of business or decides to arbitrarily drop support for it.
The EU is probably going to want tight control over users like any other government body. Bring your own software runs counter to that.
I can see the argument when it comes to locked-down mobile devices, but macOS is a general-purpose operating system with no restrictions on software sources that can't be easily disabled. Nearly every program available for Linux (excepting OS-specific stuff like desktop environments) is available for macOS, commercial and free, and there's plenty more that's macOS-only. Asahi is cool, but it's mostly used by enthusiasts - there's very little practical use for it as a macOS alternative. I think that you'd have a hard time convincing regulators that this cause really matters.
In any case, though, Apple agrees with you, and they explicitly built support for non-macOS OSes into the bootloader. This is a bug in the first developer beta of a new release.
>I think that you'd have a hard time convincing regulators that this cause really matters.
"A foreign power could potentially deny access to the OS" sounds like a compelling argument.
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