Comment by xrd
17 hours ago
I'm not sure I understand the target user for Asahi.
Is this someone that only wants to run Linux and wants to use their GPU on Linux? Seems like this is not the case, yet.
Or, is this for someone that wants to dual boot and use Linux sometimes, and then reboot into MacOS when they want to use the GPU?
I don't think it makes much sense to expect such a cohesive/specific philosophy from an open source project like this.
The goal is "Linux on Mac". In a commercial product, specific details of what gets built usually stem from a more detailed vision that can be articulated as one. In open source projects those details are determined by what individual contributors are motivated to work on.
That doesn't means a cohesive vision can't emerge, there might be one for Asahi actually. But I think the default position is that it's kinda just a mob of people doing what they each feel like doing.
I don't think it matters that Asashi is a generation or three behind, because the moment you really need it is when Apple stops updating the OS for your hardware.
When M1 drops out of support I bet Asashi for the M1 machines will be pretty polished.
Another thing is, the M1 and later hardware is still years later some of the best arm64 hardware youre going to find. Combine that with the really affordable prices you can find on the used market and Linux arm64 on this kind of great hardware at a low price is quite appealing.
Asahi on previous M-series chips supports the GPU, they just don't support it on M3 yet (they have to reverse-engineer the GPU to write the driver)
More info: https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html
Oh, so an M2 will support GPU usage? Can you run CoreML and unsloth models in the same way you would use them on regular MacOS? Are there benefits to using Linux/Asahi for running models on Apple hardware?
You wouldnt be using coreml since thats apples software, but likely vulkan versions of llama.cpp or pytorch or what have you. How well that works at the moment i dont know
To my understanding the M1 and M2 have very functional GPU drivers. I don't know about the other specifics you asked
It‘s going to be a godsend for people with M1 macs when Apple or App vendors decide to drop support for them.
The hardware is super capable and will make a great fileserver, TV box or HomeAssistant instance once I‘m done using it as daily driver.
Similarly, because of distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, I can keep using a 15y old Samsung notebook with a modern firefox, whereas Windows 8 already broke Samsung‘s display brightness driver and thermal management, and 10&11 are entirely unusable.
I have an M2 Macbook Air that i sometimes boot into Asahi to play Steam games that doesn't work natively on mac. It works unreasonably well given that there is something like five different translation layers to make it work!
I have an M2 Macbook Air that I love, it's the best machine to read news from and access other machines over SSH, I only use macOS to use rekordbox, 99% of the time I'm booting into AsahiLinux
Huh, I thought Asahi would still be too unpolished on M2 to play games reliably. Could you elaborate on your setup a little? What kind of games do you play? What is performance like? Is it really better than Crossover for example?
Steam is incredible on Linux. I'm amazed my kids can play so many games using proton on Ubuntu.
So, if there are five translation layers, why not run a Linux VM using UTM and play there? Is there a technical reason that does not work?
It’s cooler to run Linux on bare metal
They are envious towards Apple Silicon and think Apple owes them something once again take the ball by the horns and build an Arm processor with a fork of Linux running on it. If three former engineers from Apple can start a company called Nuvia it can be done.
> I'm not sure I understand the target user for Asahi.
If you want to run bare metal Linux on Apple's hardware (instead of running it in a virtual machine) you are the target audience.
I think it is more the technical challenge of doing it that drives development than any target users.
Are you talking about using a thunderbolt dock and GPU? I doubt that's a use case high in the developers minds. I'm curious though, I wonder if the open source NVIDIA driver can be built for it.
Why does it have to be for anyone other than the people involved in it?
(Though I’m sure people outside the project get value from it as well, like OpenBSD using Asahi bootloader)
I bought a Mac mini M4 simply because it was very cheap and the M4 chip offers great performance. It is currently mounted on the back of my TV and serves as a media station.
It runs macOS, but I have no particular interest in the operating system, nor do I own any other Apple hardware. (So no synergies.) It is alright (and better than Win11) but the preinstalled software does not even properly update without an Apple account. As soon as I can switch over to Linux, I will. ... I would just wait for all the ports to work.
Same same. I love Mac, and macOS, but as a server, macOS is terrible, and bloated, and a pain to run docker/podman.
Me too, M4 and keen to run Linux, partly because every damn system update bloats the system by 20GB but no memorably useful novel feature actually emerges and partly because it's long term stable. That said, at this stage in my career I appreciate a working system that doesn't require umpteen kernel recompiles!
Target user is someone that wants to use Linux on good hardware. Apple hardware has some of the best perf-per-single-thread-perf-per-watt there is. Also, apple desktops are really compact and easy to keep out of the way while having really good performance too.
My current linux PC cuda machine is the latest Intel Ultra 9 mini PC from minisforum, and it still isnt quite as fast as a years old M1/M2. The only thing it has that the mac doesnt is cuda egpu support.
Honestly I wouldn't waste any of my time trying to run a worse OS than MacOS in a hardware that wasn't completely supported by the sw
As much as I like Linux this kind of tinkering is only for people with more time and less expectations about the experience
If I need Linux I can always go for UTM or something similar
Sounds like you haven't used Asahi. I found the kde remix to be pretty nice to use. Literally the only thing that I found frustrating was:
1) for the longest time, but no longer, Google did not ship an official chrome linux arm64 package. Chromium Browser also has not included google sync for years now. But now, google chrome does ship for arm64 linux so its all good.
2) usb-c video still doesn't work, so not ideal for a laptop without hdmi that you'd want to dock
Otherwise, it works really well.
Good to know, but even in a well rounded Linux it seems you hit several mini-annoyances every day
Case in point, any form of package management. Or then you have Flatpack, with its own list of issues