Comment by ADevWithAnIdea
10 hours ago
Shameless plug for my own project:
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.
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.
I know it goes completely against Apple's business model, but I'd love to be an Apple customer if I could buy their hardware and use it with software of my own choice. Holding an iPhone or a MacBook feels great, they're all easily among the best consumer electronics ever as far as the physical part goes. But Apple's software is completely different from how I want to use my devices so I just don't end up considering them when buying.
Would love for Asahi or similar projects to be fully usable but it also doesn't seem very likely. Apple is arguably not hostile to other OSes on MacBooks, they're designed to freely boot non-Apple operating systems, but by not publishing any hardware manuals Apple ensures that an Asahi-style project is always going to be well behind, likely years behind, in hardware support.
> 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.
> Do you feel this strongly about being able to replace the engine in your car with one you made yourself?
I am not one of those people, as I do not do cars, but I would hazard a guess that most car people over a certain age do in fact feel very strongly about what modern cars have become. The ones who grew up without knowing what ownership feels like less so, which reflects the exact same dynamic with younger generations who are growing up without ever knowing what it feels like to own the hardware they use.
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Considering how easy it was to replace engines of most cars before the integration of electronics I'd say it used to be quite common. Just as most hardware vendors used to ship full specs for their components up until the 80s or even 90s.
So, yeah, yes, definitely. I wouldn't be working with computers on a daily basis if I had to use Windows.
I'm not gonna overly generalize this though. I don't think it'll be the same for most people but I tend to not care about what most people do 99% of the time anyways.
If it was as cheap and easy to install a new engine as it is for an OS, I imagine swapping engines would be even more popular than new OSs. (And I think far fewer would clamor to replace their OS if it cost $x,xxx for each OS swap and took many hours of manual labor - I.e. I think whether someone wants something can be heavily influenced by whether it is ~free vs cost $x,xxx, etc.)
I am looking forward to swapping the engine in my MX5, if I ever manage to kill it.
> 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.
Are you saying "vibe-coded slop" because of the quality of the end result? Who cares if it gives you the features with good-enough performance?
Otherwise one can also say Asahi is compiler-generated slop compared to hand written assembler code.
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Just remember that for however bad our code is (and I have no issues saying that most of our linux driver code is absolutely horrific, for now) it's better than Asahi code, because our code exists, and their code doesn't.
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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
Are you upstreaming your changes?
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.
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?
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.
Omarchy has no chance upstreaming any of their work, the code is abysmal.
Asahi at least guarantees the quality of their stuff because they upstream everything, sooner or later. Gravity apparently also intends to be upstream-first.
Omarchy is not something I'm comfortable trusting long term, and comes with a lot of cruft.
I'd be very interested in seeing the parent post's project get M3/M3 Pro support; have it working in my system with a patchset on top of Asahi but suspend is leaving a lot to be desired. Unlike Omarchy, the parent post's diff would also be much more reviewable due to it's more limited scope.
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?