Spoiler: We have Vulkan 1.4 working, all of M4 and most of M5 working, are making significant progress towards full suspend to ram (no version of Asahi supports this) and this will all be shipped to users very soon!
Gravity Linux and Asahi Linux are two independent projects working towards the shared goal of a strong, open OS ecosystem on Apple Silicon devices. Gravity Linux was initially forked from Asahi Linux over differences in policy, namely regarding LLM use. We have tremendous respect for the Asahi Linux project and emphasize our shared goal of running Linux on Apple Silicon.
Hasn't been shipped yet, integration is being done now, we're shipping a new installer, from scratch graphics driver, and new kernel so there's a lot of moving parts we want to get right.
If I could run linux on apple hardware without compromise, my life would meaningfully be improved.
It's not well understood how important it is that humans feel in control of their environment. I feel like it's a fundamental to human happiness. Software that takes that away contributes to the general malaise and hopelessness that many are feeling today. It's just water to them at this point. They don't even see it. But it's the primary means of interaction.
Making that a true option to millions of people could do a lot of good for the world.
I wholeheartedly agree. If I think about it, I must have thought "god I wish this ran Linux" at least once every single time I opened my MacBook - likely for the last several years.
I have run Asahi and while I love the project, it's not ready for that type of use.
Recently, I got a new MacBook and repurposed my old M1 MacBook Pro for local inference. The unbelievable number of compromises and hacks you need to do to run daemonized always-on software on MacOS was another reminder.
> I feel like it's a fundamental to human happiness. Software that takes that away contributes to the general malaise and hopelessness that many are feeling today.
I would like to see a full-featured Linux on Apple hardware too, but I think over 99% of people don't feel anywhere near this strongly. Do you feel this strongly about being able to replace the engine in your car with one you made yourself? I don't, and I think most people view computers the same way.
Any plans for supporting M3 Ultra? I understand it's a small percentage of the Apple Silicon Macs out there, but I'd love running Linux on my Mac Studio?
I just did a search for gravity linux from the search at the bottom of the HN page. HN is a fickle place as it seems you get more traction by hijacking Asahi posts that when you make your own posts.
Cool, I'm glad someone is taking a more aggressive and LLM friendly approach to doing Linux on Mac. Too bad there's no M3 since that's what I have :P
Not sure if it would be useful for you, but I did get an M3 GPU driver kinda working (it boots KDE, runs Quake and GLXGears, etc) but isn't quite usable yet. But feel free to yank the code if it's helpful: https://github.com/SuperDisk/asahi-plus-slop
> Cool, I'm glad someone is taking a more aggressive and LLM friendly approach to doing Linux on Mac
Same. I've been waiting 6 years to run no-compromises Linux on my MacBook. At this point, I don't care if someone uses LLM decompiled firmware ported to Linux.
> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon.
Is this referring to Omarchy? Anyone have context? TBH I'm surprised their work was ever MIT-licensed instead of GPL.
The whole reason why people are trying to replace them is because they have stubbornly refused to use AI, which has directly impeded progress in getting M3/M4/M5/M6 working. It's fine of course for them to continue pursuing their hobby of doing everything manually, and honestly it is insanely impressive.
But most people just want stuff to work, so it's odd to complain about it when others do manage to get it to work using AI to build on top of their prior permissively-licensed work.
Wanting stuff to work is a valid reason to not use AI for more sophisticated development projects. Having a computer that kernel panics once every three days is useless to me, even if it works for you.
Omarchy has gotten somewhat of a reputation for getting a lot of sponsorship money from commercial actors. If by monetize you mean "Get people to pay us" omarchy are definitely monetizing. Not much different to Asahi themselves of course, but is it right/moral to fork another active projects code and use it in order to gain your own patrons? I don't hold the answers. But no they aren't selling anything.
edit: worth noting this example, where DigitalOcean started cutting OSS support only to pledge millions of dollars to Omarchy. No wonder people consider the project a leech to the OSS community, but also consider correlation != causation: https://itsfoss.com/news/digitalocean-open-source-credits-en...
> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.
They are mad that vibecoders are building on top of their work, making real progress, then re-releasing it as "look it works" while containing a bunch of their work. Which is sort of fair but I don't get how that works in practice because in reality anyone can read the code which is open source and do whatever they want. Licensing won't stop them.
I really don't get why people even start with permissive licenses if they have people they don't like to use their software or if they're just going to go "not like that" at the first real use.
It seems like many times it's open source but "just to look".
Because permissive licensing, and free software in general, rightfully comes with a certain cachet, and it turns out some people want the benefits of that reputation, but don’t actually believe in the freedom “to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose.” Hence the treadmill from permissive licensing to copyleft, and then later from copyleft to “source available”…
“But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.”
The only blocking point for me before I would use Asahi Linux is the support of the USB-C displays. I was considering and reconsidering to install Asahi so many times, but I just cannot give up the ability to plug an external display into my MacBook Air.
I am just surprised that other features like support of the newer CPUs still get a higher priority than this one. I am not complaining or anything, I am not even related to the project in any way, so not in the right place to ask for anything, but I really am surprised that this seems to not to bother most of the users?
I believe the blocker here is that USBC display support requires getting full Thunderbolt support working. Apple built their own Thunderbolt chips, which diverge from the Intel hardware that everyone else has used & that the Linux kernel drivers are written against enough to make support much harder than you'd expect.
IIRC Asahi has finally acquired Thunderbolt support but that support still doesn't have the pieces needed for external displays.
I am always looking at this "Device Support" page [1] and it's still red there. I even have a calendar reminder to check it out every once in a while, but if it's not being updated I might drop my calendar reminder then :)
Sometimes this can be because the people working on one aspect of the project are not the same as the people working on another, or the same number of people, and also maybe supporting later chips is less problematic than supporting external displays. The project as a whole doesn’t just work on one problem at a time in priority order.
> It may surprise some to learn that WINE was originally made available under the MIT licence. The 90s and 2000s were a very different time in the Free Software ecosystem, and permissively licenced projects were viewed by tech companies as free real estate to pilfer and exploit. WINE was not immune to this, and many monetised proprietary forks of WINE were marketed and sold by various bad actors. The WINE development team grew increasingly concerned that these proprietary forks, while well within their rights to exist, would eventually cause so much fragmentation in the ecosystem that WINE itself would become unviable. In 2002, WINE was relicenced under the LGPL to prevent further proprietary forks from being created, and to encourage direct upstream contribution.
> When Asahi Linux was first started, it was with the intent that we develop a Free Software ecosystem for the Apple Silicon platform. To facilitate and encourage the particiation of our friends at the BSDs and other Free Software operating systems, we endeavoured to licence as much of our code as possible under the permissive MIT licence.
> Unfortunately, this is no longer viable. The malicious practices of the 90s and 2000s have reared their ugly heads once again, this time driven in large part by both the insatiable appetite of frontier AI labs for high-quality training data, and militant animosity toward the Free Software community.
> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.
> As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Hear, hear! Perfect clarity of thought. I love these people!
> Unfortunately, this is no longer viable. The malicious practices of the 90s and 2000s have reared their ugly heads once again, this time driven in large part by both the insatiable appetite of frontier AI labs for high-quality training data, and militant animosity toward the Free Software community.
It makes no sense to me why you'd adopt MIT in the first place for its permissiveness, and then be surprised that people you don't like are using your code. It's like being a free speech supporter and being surprised that people say things you find abhorrent. That's the point. If you only support speech you agree with, you don't believe in free speech, and if you only support code being developed by people you agree with, then you don't believe in free software.
>It makes no sense to me why you'd adopt MIT in the first place for its permissiveness, and then be surprised that people you don't like are using your code
It makes no sense to me that this makes no sense to you. The Asahi Linux project kicked off in December 2020. About 2 years before the first ChatGPT (Nov 2022). It had a lot of ideals including working with the BSDs at the time, and so they surveyed the landscape and considered the downsides at the time vs the upsides and decided a BSD approach was the right tradeoff. Now, 6 years later, the landscape has changed pretty radically, so they've decided that the downsides have gone up and any value they're getting from the BSDs is not high enough, so they're changing course. This is not hard to follow.
>It's like being a free speech supporter and being surprised that people say things you find abhorrent
No, it's nothing like this at all. Though utterly tortured, convoluted and wrong analogies to free speech are common from people who don't understand it.
>If you only support speech you agree with, you don't believe in free speech, and if you only support code being developed by people you agree with, then you don't believe in free software.
It is apparent that you are overloading "support". Free speech is about opposing the use of violence (direct or indirect) to decide debates as a near-universal default. That's it. Social and economic consequences unbacked by violence are not opposed to free speech, they ARE free speech themselves. If I think your opinion is wrong and stupid, I may "defend to death your right to say it" but then not invite you over to dinner, donate you any money/time/resources to get your message out further, etc etc. That is my own personal free speech in response to yours. And you can criticize that in turn and not invite me and so on and so forth. Free speech preserves this unending dynamic.
By the same token, believing in "free software" is easily overloaded, and claiming that using the GPL means someone doesn't believe in free software like you just did is one of the most absurd and also ancient, tired bad faith attacks that's been around for decades. It diminishes you to make it.
> In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.
Attribution is the one and only condition of the MIT license, aside from the disclaimer of warranty, so I don't see how it "explicitly allows" publishing without attribution.
I'm glad that Asahi is switching from a cuck license to a reasonable copyleft license. Even though the circumstances that made this necessary are, of course, unfortunate.
To the people downvoting this comment: I get it, it's a vulgar choice of words. But the fact of the matter is, if somebody else is getting paid based on your work, and you aren't being compensated your fair share, that's extractive and abusive.
Choosing GPL and similar licenses is the only way you can publish open source software without running this risk. As professional programmers, we must insist that people either pay us for our work or act as a equal collaborators.
And yes, there's a reckoning coming for AI companies who trained their models on GPL software.
> And yes, there's a reckoning coming for AI companies who trained their models on GPL software.
What would that look like in your opinion? Hard to fathom that the people with all the money and power could get into trouble over a licensing dispute.
> But the fact of the matter is, if somebody else is getting paid based on your work, and you aren't being compensated your fair share, that's extractive and abusive.
GPL doesn't prevent that at all. That's not why Asahi made that change. It's about contributing back to the project, not the money they want to see.
honest question - how hard it is to use LLM and tools like REA to reverse engineer MacOS to figure out how its hardware works in terms of getting linux support on such hardware?
I thought it is already a solved problem? with large enough numbers of agents running in parallel reverse engineering, implementing kernel modules, testing in vm etc, the whole pipeline seems to be complete.
Yes, read that blog entry to understand how different that hardware is from any other Linux-supported ARM stuff to see how much deep understanding you need to actually bring that support upstream to Linux or Mesa. Some(most?) stuff requires fundamental changes and no LLM is going to design and write it in an uostreamable way.
Debugging is not an issue, Asahi seems to have it figured out, especially with the virtualization. It's the design that takes time.
Meanwhile Omarchy, for example, just brute-forces everything, with ugly patches that work today but cannot be upstreamed as such, so they'll break tomorrow with new kernel release. I really expect them to start struggling a lot going forward with maintaining the support they claim. Regressions may actually kill their effort.
They prohibit RE of the binaries. What Asahi doing is observing macOS as a black box with input and outputs, and translating observed behavior back to Linux.
This thread is full of folks saying, "Asahi can't keep up with Omarchy," when Omarchy Mac's own readme[0] states that it is, "Asahi Alarm + Omarchy." That's like bragging that someone sitting on Lebron's shoulders can dunk a higher rim than he can.
But at the end of the day, like in your example, you have "Lebron" vs "Someone sitting on top of LeBron's shoulders" facing off against each other. Who are you putting your money on, to get the higher dunk?
Ah yeah, a .dmg installer that asks for sudo permissions is much safer /s
Why do people get hung op on this so much? You can just read the script before running it. Of course you won’t though, just like you don’t read the source of the .dmg installer.
>As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only.
This made me laugh. For context: some people used LLMs to import code to get Omarchy to work on macs. So, these people are switching licenses so that they could stop competitor distros from being compatible.
So, before, Asahi people were happy with Linux working on macs; now they want THEIR linux working on macs (they are not changing to GPL out of the goodness of their hearts or that they believe in everything being open, remember, they are only doing it so that Omarchy, or similar, can't copy their work without having to be GPL themselves).
Meanwhile Omarchy is MIT; which means Omarchy is allowing Asahi (and everyone else) to copy their work, with the actual intent of getting Linux everywhere.
This really leaves a bad taste in my mouth too. It's unfortunately inline with their absurd AI policy. Instead of working for the good of the users they literally are trying to halt progress. It's pretty clear the omarchy people will run circles around asahi very soon. Asahi people think this too and are trying to limit them as much as they can with license changes.
I still don't understand the motivation for Asahi and other similar efforts. My impression is that Apple fully supports Linux virtualization on Apple Silicon. Why isn't that sufficient? Just asking.
From the perspective if the people working on it, I imagine it's immensely satisfying when they successfully reverse engineer something and get it working. It's not on the same scale or of the same complexity, but I feel that satisfaction when I finally understand something I've been trying to reverse engineer in a retro game.
From a user's perspective, I can only speak for myself, but I'm grateful for the Asahi Linux project's work. I have less than zero interest in ever running macOS again. It's user-hostile, constraining, and not a good experience. I prefer Debian with Plasma 6. But Apple makes high quality hardware, and they are one of the few choices for a fast ARM laptop with excellent battery life. I avoided getting one for a long time until Asahi got to a point where it ran pretty well on the M1 and M2 with relatively few caveats. Then I bought an M1 Air second-hand, and have used it exclusively with Linux ever since. I'm very happy with it. My only complaint is that I have to waste a big chunk of disk space to keep a macOS install on a separate partition that I can never remove and occasionally need to boot into to get firmware updates since I can't get them through fwupdmgr like I can on most of my other systems.
Some people might want to get all the apple software off the apple hardware. For example the dossier that macOS builds on users and their family behind the scenes; currently on the front page of this website.[0]
Unfortunately it appears that Asahi has promised not allow doing that[1] but perhaps it will enable someone else to make it possible.
Same as why so many people run Linux natively on their x86 machines. It's just part of the preferred setup because it's nicer in so many ways and there's no annoying proprietary host os in the way.
Imagine deliberately buying a $2000+ computer that doesn't work with and is actively hostile towards your OS of choice, then embarking on a multi-year bitch-fest to shoehorn the OS onto it.
I struggle to wrap my mind around it. It's like buying an EV so you can convert it to work on gasoline.
- MacBooks are still among the nicest if not the nicest laptops hardware-wise, so some people like to run Linux on it.
- People have older Macs that they like to repurpose. E.g., we still have an M1 Mini that was used by our daughter before she got handed down a MacBook from my wife. It's now collecting dust, but I might install Linux to use it as a headless server.
> - MacBooks are still among the nicest if not the nicest laptops hardware-wise, so some people like to run Linux on it.
By the time said macbook is fully supported, it is in sorry state. Judging by what I found when looking for second hand laptops, macbooks don't age well.
For me the definition of actively hostile would require a locked down device that needs an exploit/jailbreak to install and a cat&mouse patch/exploit cycle - but it seems that Apple intentionally designed this to be allowed - what is giving you the “actively hostile” impression?
I used Windows and Linux all my life, but got my first MacBook Air M this year. There is literally zero competition to it. It's an incredibly powerful and cheap yet fanless device. Also, it has uniform memory, which is awesome.
I wish I could install windows or linux on it because MacOS kind of sucks, but the device itself is amazing and reason enough to switch away from PCs.
> but the device itself is amazing and reason enough
By continuing to reward Apple, they lose any incentive to improve macOS and it will continue to get objectively worse because people keep giving them money. Why would they fix things if you keep buying it?
I’ve just build the kernel from Omarchy on my fedora asahi remix and got thunderbolt and Touch ID working. You do need to patch m1n1 with their changes as well. But I’ve been able to finally ditch an extra usb hub and hdmi cable.
In the PR’s that were merged in that kernel I also see they are actively working towards m4 and m5 as well. Must be hard for Asahi to keep up this way.
It's hard because they write things with intention to upstream it. Omarchy patches simply cannot be, because they go absolutely against the established way of doing things. No one consciously designs anything in their code, it's all LLM output.
I personally vetted that TouchID code you mentioned and it's an absolute hellhole, with everything done in-kernel and no userspace separation what so. That code is also a security nightmare.
Not sure what will happen when people will directly contribute to the Linux kernel with LLM patches though for these devices, I guess they will have to live with it.
Asahi is patches on top of the linux kernel. If you independently get your drivers in to the kernel which does allow LLMs, the drivers will end up on Asahi too.
Sure, but a human could read the code and look for ideas/parts and write the actual code better than an AI can. Omarchy is 99% hype, but the fact that its working on osx is telling me that it is indeed a goal you can accomplish. I rather not have my OS be a slopfest, so thats why asahi is way better than omarchy ever can be.
Its basically useless gui thing. Nothing i cant have in another distro. What im intested in is the osx port. Apple hardware is unbeatable, but the OS has been going downhill since jobs passes. This is why true linux on mac is my dream setup. Asahi is the closest thing so far.
Shameless plug for my own project:
https://gravitylinux.org
Spoiler: We have Vulkan 1.4 working, all of M4 and most of M5 working, are making significant progress towards full suspend to ram (no version of Asahi supports this) and this will all be shipped to users very soon!
From the FAQ:
Gravity Linux vs Asahi Linux
Gravity Linux and Asahi Linux are two independent projects working towards the shared goal of a strong, open OS ecosystem on Apple Silicon devices. Gravity Linux was initially forked from Asahi Linux over differences in policy, namely regarding LLM use. We have tremendous respect for the Asahi Linux project and emphasize our shared goal of running Linux on Apple Silicon.
> all of M4 and most of M5 working
This is confusing - your website shows M4 as Wip (i.e. pre-alpha) and only M4 mini as alpha. M5 is not listed at all.
Wip is described as "Bring-up in progress. Not usable yet." So is it "not usable" or "all of M4 (...) working"?
Hasn't been shipped yet, integration is being done now, we're shipping a new installer, from scratch graphics driver, and new kernel so there's a lot of moving parts we want to get right.
It's vibe-coded slop. Probably the reason why the Asahi team wanted to exclude these contributions in the first place.
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Sounds extremely exciting!
If I could run linux on apple hardware without compromise, my life would meaningfully be improved.
It's not well understood how important it is that humans feel in control of their environment. I feel like it's a fundamental to human happiness. Software that takes that away contributes to the general malaise and hopelessness that many are feeling today. It's just water to them at this point. They don't even see it. But it's the primary means of interaction.
Making that a true option to millions of people could do a lot of good for the world.
It's important work.
I wholeheartedly agree. If I think about it, I must have thought "god I wish this ran Linux" at least once every single time I opened my MacBook - likely for the last several years.
I have run Asahi and while I love the project, it's not ready for that type of use.
Recently, I got a new MacBook and repurposed my old M1 MacBook Pro for local inference. The unbelievable number of compromises and hacks you need to do to run daemonized always-on software on MacOS was another reminder.
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> I feel like it's a fundamental to human happiness. Software that takes that away contributes to the general malaise and hopelessness that many are feeling today.
I would like to see a full-featured Linux on Apple hardware too, but I think over 99% of people don't feel anywhere near this strongly. Do you feel this strongly about being able to replace the engine in your car with one you made yourself? I don't, and I think most people view computers the same way.
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Does all of M4 include full GPU support on those chips? And what about the Apple Neural Engine stuff?
A shame that the community is split like this but happy to see progress regardless.
Sometimes it can be good to have two teams work independently towards a common goal. I'm sure they'll learn a lot from each other.
Vulkan 1.4 on the GPU, D3D12, full AAA gaming support
Any plans for supporting M3 Ultra? I understand it's a small percentage of the Apple Silicon Macs out there, but I'd love running Linux on my Mac Studio?
I just did a search for gravity linux from the search at the bottom of the HN page. HN is a fickle place as it seems you get more traction by hijacking Asahi posts that when you make your own posts.
Are you upstreaming your changes?
Cool, I'm glad someone is taking a more aggressive and LLM friendly approach to doing Linux on Mac. Too bad there's no M3 since that's what I have :P
Not sure if it would be useful for you, but I did get an M3 GPU driver kinda working (it boots KDE, runs Quake and GLXGears, etc) but isn't quite usable yet. But feel free to yank the code if it's helpful: https://github.com/SuperDisk/asahi-plus-slop
> Cool, I'm glad someone is taking a more aggressive and LLM friendly approach to doing Linux on Mac
Same. I've been waiting 6 years to run no-compromises Linux on my MacBook. At this point, I don't care if someone uses LLM decompiled firmware ported to Linux.
Omarchy works on M3 with GPU acceleration.
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What about ProMotion/120hz and HDR? Last I checked Asahi didn’t really make full use of the Macbook Display. But very interesting!
Works! The code is public at https://github.com/GravityLinux/linux
We also have vrr!
As coincidence would have it, I checked your website just yesterday and M4 Max was listed as unsupported. Has that changed in the past 24 hours?
> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon.
Is this referring to Omarchy? Anyone have context? TBH I'm surprised their work was ever MIT-licensed instead of GPL.
The whole reason why people are trying to replace them is because they have stubbornly refused to use AI, which has directly impeded progress in getting M3/M4/M5/M6 working. It's fine of course for them to continue pursuing their hobby of doing everything manually, and honestly it is insanely impressive.
But most people just want stuff to work, so it's odd to complain about it when others do manage to get it to work using AI to build on top of their prior permissively-licensed work.
Wanting stuff to work is a valid reason to not use AI for more sophisticated development projects. Having a computer that kernel panics once every three days is useless to me, even if it works for you.
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Its the monetizing part that makes me think its not Omarchy - they have no monetizing things.
They're referring to Omarchy, it's very clear on their IRC
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Omarchy has gotten somewhat of a reputation for getting a lot of sponsorship money from commercial actors. If by monetize you mean "Get people to pay us" omarchy are definitely monetizing. Not much different to Asahi themselves of course, but is it right/moral to fork another active projects code and use it in order to gain your own patrons? I don't hold the answers. But no they aren't selling anything.
edit: worth noting this example, where DigitalOcean started cutting OSS support only to pledge millions of dollars to Omarchy. No wonder people consider the project a leech to the OSS community, but also consider correlation != causation: https://itsfoss.com/news/digitalocean-open-source-credits-en...
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They do have large entities donating to them
Is Omarchy trying to monetize Linux?
I mean, I get the poisoning the well of open source thing that some companies do. I didn't think Omarchy was trying to do that.
With how good LLMs are at reverse engineering, I've been looking forward to being able to ditch MacOS and still have decent hardware soonish.
Taking back the ownership of our devices to run our software is the positive future LLMs are giving us. We need only to take action.
The same LLMs you have to rent from the very richest people on earth? I would be careful to call that freedom
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I don't get this complain. MIT does not forbid commercial use. So what's the fuss about?
From TFA:
> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.
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They are mad that vibecoders are building on top of their work, making real progress, then re-releasing it as "look it works" while containing a bunch of their work. Which is sort of fair but I don't get how that works in practice because in reality anyone can read the code which is open source and do whatever they want. Licensing won't stop them.
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I really don't get why people even start with permissive licenses if they have people they don't like to use their software or if they're just going to go "not like that" at the first real use.
It seems like many times it's open source but "just to look".
They explain that they expected that MIT licensed code would encourage contributions from BSD OSes
I agree it was a poor choice of license and that GPL helps build a better community, I'm glad they mad ethe license choice
Because permissive licensing, and free software in general, rightfully comes with a certain cachet, and it turns out some people want the benefits of that reputation, but don’t actually believe in the freedom “to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose.” Hence the treadmill from permissive licensing to copyleft, and then later from copyleft to “source available”…
“But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.”
—Theo de Raadt (2001)
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The only blocking point for me before I would use Asahi Linux is the support of the USB-C displays. I was considering and reconsidering to install Asahi so many times, but I just cannot give up the ability to plug an external display into my MacBook Air.
I am just surprised that other features like support of the newer CPUs still get a higher priority than this one. I am not complaining or anything, I am not even related to the project in any way, so not in the right place to ask for anything, but I really am surprised that this seems to not to bother most of the users?
I believe the blocker here is that USBC display support requires getting full Thunderbolt support working. Apple built their own Thunderbolt chips, which diverge from the Intel hardware that everyone else has used & that the Linux kernel drivers are written against enough to make support much harder than you'd expect.
IIRC Asahi has finally acquired Thunderbolt support but that support still doesn't have the pieces needed for external displays.
This works, tried last night in my M1, you need to install the fairydust kernel and reboot. https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/lacamar/fairydust-ke...
My Dell external monitor (+builtin usb/ethernet hub) connected via usb-c thunderbolt started working right away.
My problem is I can't use my 2nd external monitor. :)
Also no luks fde support which is a big deal, basically I can't take it anywhere.
> no luks fde support
You can get an "unecrypted boot, encrypted root" setup though.
https://davidalger.com/posts/fedora-asahi-remix-on-apple-sil...
Did you consider that? I am personally using that and feeling pretty good about it, but maybe I am missing something?
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Huh. Thank you for the info!
I am always looking at this "Device Support" page [1] and it's still red there. I even have a calendar reminder to check it out every once in a while, but if it's not being updated I might drop my calendar reminder then :)
[1] https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
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Sometimes this can be because the people working on one aspect of the project are not the same as the people working on another, or the same number of people, and also maybe supporting later chips is less problematic than supporting external displays. The project as a whole doesn’t just work on one problem at a time in priority order.
This is very cool. I have a project that built on Asahi[1], and the better the hardware support, the wider the audience.
[1] https://github.com/hnarayanan/hello-guix
Nice. One thing I like about Asahi is that they're relatively anti-LLM.
> It may surprise some to learn that WINE was originally made available under the MIT licence. The 90s and 2000s were a very different time in the Free Software ecosystem, and permissively licenced projects were viewed by tech companies as free real estate to pilfer and exploit. WINE was not immune to this, and many monetised proprietary forks of WINE were marketed and sold by various bad actors. The WINE development team grew increasingly concerned that these proprietary forks, while well within their rights to exist, would eventually cause so much fragmentation in the ecosystem that WINE itself would become unviable. In 2002, WINE was relicenced under the LGPL to prevent further proprietary forks from being created, and to encourage direct upstream contribution.
> When Asahi Linux was first started, it was with the intent that we develop a Free Software ecosystem for the Apple Silicon platform. To facilitate and encourage the particiation of our friends at the BSDs and other Free Software operating systems, we endeavoured to licence as much of our code as possible under the permissive MIT licence.
> Unfortunately, this is no longer viable. The malicious practices of the 90s and 2000s have reared their ugly heads once again, this time driven in large part by both the insatiable appetite of frontier AI labs for high-quality training data, and militant animosity toward the Free Software community.
> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.
> As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Hear, hear! Perfect clarity of thought. I love these people!
> Unfortunately, this is no longer viable. The malicious practices of the 90s and 2000s have reared their ugly heads once again, this time driven in large part by both the insatiable appetite of frontier AI labs for high-quality training data, and militant animosity toward the Free Software community.
It makes no sense to me why you'd adopt MIT in the first place for its permissiveness, and then be surprised that people you don't like are using your code. It's like being a free speech supporter and being surprised that people say things you find abhorrent. That's the point. If you only support speech you agree with, you don't believe in free speech, and if you only support code being developed by people you agree with, then you don't believe in free software.
>It makes no sense to me why you'd adopt MIT in the first place for its permissiveness, and then be surprised that people you don't like are using your code
It makes no sense to me that this makes no sense to you. The Asahi Linux project kicked off in December 2020. About 2 years before the first ChatGPT (Nov 2022). It had a lot of ideals including working with the BSDs at the time, and so they surveyed the landscape and considered the downsides at the time vs the upsides and decided a BSD approach was the right tradeoff. Now, 6 years later, the landscape has changed pretty radically, so they've decided that the downsides have gone up and any value they're getting from the BSDs is not high enough, so they're changing course. This is not hard to follow.
>It's like being a free speech supporter and being surprised that people say things you find abhorrent
No, it's nothing like this at all. Though utterly tortured, convoluted and wrong analogies to free speech are common from people who don't understand it.
>If you only support speech you agree with, you don't believe in free speech, and if you only support code being developed by people you agree with, then you don't believe in free software.
It is apparent that you are overloading "support". Free speech is about opposing the use of violence (direct or indirect) to decide debates as a near-universal default. That's it. Social and economic consequences unbacked by violence are not opposed to free speech, they ARE free speech themselves. If I think your opinion is wrong and stupid, I may "defend to death your right to say it" but then not invite you over to dinner, donate you any money/time/resources to get your message out further, etc etc. That is my own personal free speech in response to yours. And you can criticize that in turn and not invite me and so on and so forth. Free speech preserves this unending dynamic.
By the same token, believing in "free software" is easily overloaded, and claiming that using the GPL means someone doesn't believe in free software like you just did is one of the most absurd and also ancient, tired bad faith attacks that's been around for decades. It diminishes you to make it.
> In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.
Attribution is the one and only condition of the MIT license, aside from the disclaimer of warranty, so I don't see how it "explicitly allows" publishing without attribution.
I'm glad that Asahi is switching from a cuck license to a reasonable copyleft license. Even though the circumstances that made this necessary are, of course, unfortunate.
To the people downvoting this comment: I get it, it's a vulgar choice of words. But the fact of the matter is, if somebody else is getting paid based on your work, and you aren't being compensated your fair share, that's extractive and abusive.
Choosing GPL and similar licenses is the only way you can publish open source software without running this risk. As professional programmers, we must insist that people either pay us for our work or act as a equal collaborators.
And yes, there's a reckoning coming for AI companies who trained their models on GPL software.
> And yes, there's a reckoning coming for AI companies who trained their models on GPL software.
What would that look like in your opinion? Hard to fathom that the people with all the money and power could get into trouble over a licensing dispute.
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> But the fact of the matter is, if somebody else is getting paid based on your work, and you aren't being compensated your fair share, that's extractive and abusive.
GPL doesn't prevent that at all. That's not why Asahi made that change. It's about contributing back to the project, not the money they want to see.
honest question - how hard it is to use LLM and tools like REA to reverse engineer MacOS to figure out how its hardware works in terms of getting linux support on such hardware?
I thought it is already a solved problem? with large enough numbers of agents running in parallel reverse engineering, implementing kernel modules, testing in vm etc, the whole pipeline seems to be complete.
Did I miss something here?
Yes, read that blog entry to understand how different that hardware is from any other Linux-supported ARM stuff to see how much deep understanding you need to actually bring that support upstream to Linux or Mesa. Some(most?) stuff requires fundamental changes and no LLM is going to design and write it in an uostreamable way.
Debugging is not an issue, Asahi seems to have it figured out, especially with the virtualization. It's the design that takes time.
Meanwhile Omarchy, for example, just brute-forces everything, with ugly patches that work today but cannot be upstreamed as such, so they'll break tomorrow with new kernel release. I really expect them to start struggling a lot going forward with maintaining the support they claim. Regressions may actually kill their effort.
They prohibit RE of the binaries. What Asahi doing is observing macOS as a black box with input and outputs, and translating observed behavior back to Linux.
This thread is full of folks saying, "Asahi can't keep up with Omarchy," when Omarchy Mac's own readme[0] states that it is, "Asahi Alarm + Omarchy." That's like bragging that someone sitting on Lebron's shoulders can dunk a higher rim than he can.
[0]https://github.com/omacom/omarchy-mac
But at the end of the day, like in your example, you have "Lebron" vs "Someone sitting on top of LeBron's shoulders" facing off against each other. Who are you putting your money on, to get the higher dunk?
The person who can still dunk if the the other one sits down
They're supposedly vibecoding support for hardware Asahi doesn't yet.
https://omarchy.org/news/2026/09/introducing-omarchy-m/
https://github.com/omacom/omarchy/graphs/contributors?select...
Intereting top two contributors.
Y'all should just let asahi cook. I trust them more to make actual working stable OS than meat proxies.
I do it. I just found it hard to use it without the touch id. Hope that changes.
By the way how safe that OS and data in it are? Or even that partition is safeguarded by the safeties offered by Apple on a silicon mac?
Yeah I don't trust anyone's judgement whose installation process is:
> Install from MacOS
> `curl https://alx.sh | sh`
https://asahilinux.org/
Of course not. Everyone knows you've got to do
for it to work. Duh.
Ah yeah, a .dmg installer that asks for sudo permissions is much safer /s
Why do people get hung op on this so much? You can just read the script before running it. Of course you won’t though, just like you don’t read the source of the .dmg installer.
>As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only.
This made me laugh. For context: some people used LLMs to import code to get Omarchy to work on macs. So, these people are switching licenses so that they could stop competitor distros from being compatible.
So, before, Asahi people were happy with Linux working on macs; now they want THEIR linux working on macs (they are not changing to GPL out of the goodness of their hearts or that they believe in everything being open, remember, they are only doing it so that Omarchy, or similar, can't copy their work without having to be GPL themselves).
Meanwhile Omarchy is MIT; which means Omarchy is allowing Asahi (and everyone else) to copy their work, with the actual intent of getting Linux everywhere.
GPL protects against someone taking your code, adding proprietary extensions, and closing off access to the source code.
True, but knowing why they went GPL, it is hilarious. They had MIT and they were mad about another MIT-licensed project using their work.
This really leaves a bad taste in my mouth too. It's unfortunately inline with their absurd AI policy. Instead of working for the good of the users they literally are trying to halt progress. It's pretty clear the omarchy people will run circles around asahi very soon. Asahi people think this too and are trying to limit them as much as they can with license changes.
Why doesn't the Asahi team just design their own silicon? With AI it is easier than ever. And no this is not a joke.
How to get it fabbed? That's even easier as there are lots of companies with $$$ who'd like to commoditize Apple.
How would designing a new chip commoditize Apple?
Why doesn't Apple just contribute to Asahi?
That would be missing the point entirely though?
Asahi Linux is a project to provide an option to people who have for one reason or another got themselves an Apple Silicon Mac.
Building their own silicon would serve an entirely different goal.
I still don't understand the motivation for Asahi and other similar efforts. My impression is that Apple fully supports Linux virtualization on Apple Silicon. Why isn't that sufficient? Just asking.
From the perspective if the people working on it, I imagine it's immensely satisfying when they successfully reverse engineer something and get it working. It's not on the same scale or of the same complexity, but I feel that satisfaction when I finally understand something I've been trying to reverse engineer in a retro game.
From a user's perspective, I can only speak for myself, but I'm grateful for the Asahi Linux project's work. I have less than zero interest in ever running macOS again. It's user-hostile, constraining, and not a good experience. I prefer Debian with Plasma 6. But Apple makes high quality hardware, and they are one of the few choices for a fast ARM laptop with excellent battery life. I avoided getting one for a long time until Asahi got to a point where it ran pretty well on the M1 and M2 with relatively few caveats. Then I bought an M1 Air second-hand, and have used it exclusively with Linux ever since. I'm very happy with it. My only complaint is that I have to waste a big chunk of disk space to keep a macOS install on a separate partition that I can never remove and occasionally need to boot into to get firmware updates since I can't get them through fwupdmgr like I can on most of my other systems.
Some people might want to get all the apple software off the apple hardware. For example the dossier that macOS builds on users and their family behind the scenes; currently on the front page of this website.[0]
Unfortunately it appears that Asahi has promised not allow doing that[1] but perhaps it will enable someone else to make it possible.
[0] https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/#apples-unspok...
Why go outsite when we have VR? Yes, you answered this: it isn't sufficient.
Same as why so many people run Linux natively on their x86 machines. It's just part of the preferred setup because it's nicer in so many ways and there's no annoying proprietary host os in the way.
Motivation: OS/software freedom on Apple's hardware.
Because you have limited system resources with virtualization.
Because we want computers that work without macos
Imagine deliberately buying a $2000+ computer that doesn't work with and is actively hostile towards your OS of choice, then embarking on a multi-year bitch-fest to shoehorn the OS onto it.
I struggle to wrap my mind around it. It's like buying an EV so you can convert it to work on gasoline.
I don't.
- MacBooks are still among the nicest if not the nicest laptops hardware-wise, so some people like to run Linux on it.
- People have older Macs that they like to repurpose. E.g., we still have an M1 Mini that was used by our daughter before she got handed down a MacBook from my wife. It's now collecting dust, but I might install Linux to use it as a headless server.
Also, this is Hacker News.
> - MacBooks are still among the nicest if not the nicest laptops hardware-wise, so some people like to run Linux on it.
By the time said macbook is fully supported, it is in sorry state. Judging by what I found when looking for second hand laptops, macbooks don't age well.
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For me the definition of actively hostile would require a locked down device that needs an exploit/jailbreak to install and a cat&mouse patch/exploit cycle - but it seems that Apple intentionally designed this to be allowed - what is giving you the “actively hostile” impression?
I used Windows and Linux all my life, but got my first MacBook Air M this year. There is literally zero competition to it. It's an incredibly powerful and cheap yet fanless device. Also, it has uniform memory, which is awesome.
I wish I could install windows or linux on it because MacOS kind of sucks, but the device itself is amazing and reason enough to switch away from PCs.
> because MacOS kind of sucks
It didn't used to, but now does.
> but the device itself is amazing and reason enough
By continuing to reward Apple, they lose any incentive to improve macOS and it will continue to get objectively worse because people keep giving them money. Why would they fix things if you keep buying it?
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Apple hardware is so much better than the alternatives that people will dump thousands of hours into getting it to work with their preferred software
How do you think Linux gets to run on proprietary undocumented hardware generally?
>Imagine deliberately buying a $2000+ computer that doesn't work with and is actively hostile towards your OS of choice
That's how Linux has been for PCs also for most of its lifetime. Only in the recent 5-10 years things have kind of improved, slightly.
Macbook hardware is superb. I understand why people are interested in replacing the (in some parts) lackluster operating system Apple forces into it.
imagine being so obtuse you go around judging how other people choose to have fun and spend their own money and "pretend you don't get it".
Dino fuel generator hooked up to Tesla EV: https://youtube.com/shorts/46bRaGP4uqM
Could the projects bring in stuff from omarchy? Omarchy is a toy, but they did slop the osx thing, so maybe some ideas can be ported over?
I’ve just build the kernel from Omarchy on my fedora asahi remix and got thunderbolt and Touch ID working. You do need to patch m1n1 with their changes as well. But I’ve been able to finally ditch an extra usb hub and hdmi cable.
In the PR’s that were merged in that kernel I also see they are actively working towards m4 and m5 as well. Must be hard for Asahi to keep up this way.
It's hard because they write things with intention to upstream it. Omarchy patches simply cannot be, because they go absolutely against the established way of doing things. No one consciously designs anything in their code, it's all LLM output.
I personally vetted that TouchID code you mentioned and it's an absolute hellhole, with everything done in-kernel and no userspace separation what so. That code is also a security nightmare.
Asahi is against LLMs so they won't.
Not sure what will happen when people will directly contribute to the Linux kernel with LLM patches though for these devices, I guess they will have to live with it.
Asahi is patches on top of the linux kernel. If you independently get your drivers in to the kernel which does allow LLMs, the drivers will end up on Asahi too.
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Sure, but a human could read the code and look for ideas/parts and write the actual code better than an AI can. Omarchy is 99% hype, but the fact that its working on osx is telling me that it is indeed a goal you can accomplish. I rather not have my OS be a slopfest, so thats why asahi is way better than omarchy ever can be.
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How do you justify calling it a toy when it does certain quite fundamental things a lot better?
Because TWM ricing isn't new. Nor is shipping pre-riced distros, or using an Arch base.
sorry to put a dent in your fantasy world, but omarchy is awesome for day-to-day work, great upgrade on top of arch which is also awesome.
Its basically useless gui thing. Nothing i cant have in another distro. What im intested in is the osx port. Apple hardware is unbeatable, but the OS has been going downhill since jobs passes. This is why true linux on mac is my dream setup. Asahi is the closest thing so far.
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