Asahi Linux To Users: Please Stop Using X.Org

[eagleoneraptor]

I tried giving Wayland a try last week on Ubuntu 22.04, and everything worked fine except Beyond All Reason, which crashes after a minute or so. This is on a hybrid laptop with nVidia.
I guess Wayland itself is mature now. The problem is that apps are still behind in terms of adoption.

I'm gonna try with my Fedora 38 and Intel and see how it goes, though I don't game on Linux, I use a desktop with Windows for that, maybe that's the reason my 5 years daily driving Wayland was relatively good.

Also, I wouldn't recommend a Wayland user to use an LTS, the Wayland ecosystem is improving quickly to the point it's counterproductive to use LTS, you want the latest version of drivers, kernel, compositors and toolkits.

[mdedetrich]

I used to be a Wayland critic, and I still think Wayland has its share of issues (but so does X).

Yet I've been exclusively using Wayland for several years now with no significant issues, on several machines. I wonder why there even is a discussion?

Probably because not everyone has the same usecase you do

[Quackdoc]

Probably because not everyone has the same usecase you do

works for me so it works for thee is a very common sentiment in linux ecosystem now sadly

[Eirikr1848]

I like the general idea of Wayland, and so keep trying KDE under it every month-or-two in the hope of switching, but it still won't do fundamental things like render window decorations/widgets reliably for me. Though I am running on a Radeon 260 GPU which is a bit on the old side and I wouldn't be surprised when I one day upgrade to more contemporary hardware, my experience might suddenly be better. And on Asahi, of course, their target GPU is another story again, so for their platform Wayland might be rainbows and lollipops (or at least basically functional) already.

Which distro are you on? I’ve used these kernel flags on arch. And then depending on the setup, have had luck with using amdgpu instead of radeon, getting me Vulkan support and codec-on-Vulkan.

radeon.si_support=0 radeon.cik_support=0 amdgpu.si_support=1 amdgpu.cik_support=1

———-

Regarding this post though? No reason why they were so… aggressive holy moly.

[eagleoneraptor]

works for me so it works for thee is a very common sentiment in linux ecosystem now sadly

Yeah, I feel that when people say X.org works fine for them and I can't have the freaking screen and cursor to stop flickering and tearing. With no mention Electron apps processing other apps input events, making these scroll like crazy when I don't want.

[qarium]

Apple’s chips are MUCH more power efficient than the AMD and especially intel counterparts. AMD’s newest Ryzen Mobile 7000s series might finally come close or outpace the nearly one year old chips at the same power efficiency. The 4 nanometer structure made the most difference until now but there is no denying that Apple’s chip design is excellent.
https://www.computerbase.de/2023-05/...5-bis-30-watt/

if people talk about power efficiency on amd side they most of the time talk about the X3D cpus.
a AMD ryzen 7800X3D is in fact very power efficient

these 4nm ryzen mobile 7000 cpus are not as good in this field than the X3D CPUs...

it looks like if you go from 5nm to 4nm this helps less than the bigger cache of the X3D cpus.

the apple M2 CPUs have no competition inj the mobile sector because you can not buy X3D cpus on a laptop right now.

maybe in the future AMD sells X3D CPUs for notebooks/laptops.

[Quackdoc]

Yeah, I feel that when people say X.org works fine for them and I can't have the freaking screen and cursor to stop flickering and tearing. With no mention Electron apps processing other apps input events, making these scroll like crazy when I don't want.

I'm firmly stuck in between so I understand both points, but the idea that one will work fine for another person without knowing is annoying, I personally use sway on my desktop so wayland, KDE wayland on my tablet, and x11 kde on my laptop. turns out wayland works like crap on laptop, but on my tablet X11 is pretty much unusable due to touch.

[eagleoneraptor]

I'm firmly stuck in between so I understand both points, but the idea that one will work fine for another person without knowing is annoying, I personally use sway on my desktop so wayland, KDE wayland on my tablet, and x11 kde on my laptop. turns out wayland works like crap on laptop, but on my tablet X11 is pretty much unusable due to touch.

Yeah, quite a different experience. I've been daily driving Wayland for 5 years in my ThinkPad (maybe an occasional switch to X.org for a moment on specific issues). I can't say I didn't have issues, but today I have far less than 5 years ago.

I try, as a software developer, to understand the guts of X and Wayland, and a bit of the history of X and for sure we need a switch from the ground up, we had to do it at some point, it's better we started a decade ago and not now.

[Venemo]

It's an opinion written as if claiming fact, however

No disrespect to you, but I happen to agree with them on this one.

and the tone is distinctly dismissive and condescending of those that will inevitably disagree. There are ways to ask people to do things. The way this letter is written as if it's a preacher with his back to the congregation because some are giving him dirty looks of disagreement so he's preaching to his self-righteous choir with smiles all over their faces. So the letter writer shouldn't be surprised the letter has the opposite effect intended on a general audience: go away, your opinion doesn't change the real and immediate facts we have to deal with right now.

I didn't get this impression from the letter. I fully respect their position for Asahi Linux, they are a small team and they have to be clear on what they want to work on and what they don't.

As a side note, despite so many people in this topic voicing their preference towards Xorg, I haven't seen anyone here volunteering for the task of maintaining Xorg or developing it further. So it is very unreasonable to expect Asahi to do so.

[qarium]

I'm not so optimistic. TBH current non-Apple high performance quality non-X86 notebooks situation is pretty shit, unfortunately. Furthermore, I do not see this changing any time soon.
Let's start with ARM based stuff. Aside from fucking internet browsing oriented garbage tier machines like Chromebooks and alike the only machine in my mind worth considering is ThinkPad X13s, but Linux support for it, well, let's say I would think twice before purchasing it for Linux. Let's leave it here. This year we may get a few machines based on SD 8 cx gen 3, but a) it's already kind of a little bit dated (X1/A78) b) there won't be a good Linux support around the launch date (if at all) and c) most likely they will cost a lot (or quality will be poor). More general problem is a high performance ARM based SoC market for PC itself. Effectively there is none. Qualcomm is basically the only vendor who does something there, but the whole SnapDragon software stack which comes with it, how to put this politely, is not the most elegant one let's say (and I work with SD SoCs for embedded systems, so I get to taste it). Most stuff is old kernel out-of tree (and quite poorly maintained (and coded) I may add), while at the same time most of the good stuff is proprietary-only anyway. So yeah, ARM is cool and all, but when you throw near 2 grands for a ARM laptop which may have broken/disabled power management for a half of the blocks or be fundamentally unstable my enthusiasm regarding these is not rising.
As for RISC-V, there is no high performance core at all. Ascalon from Tenstorrent seems to be the first one made in a near future and the consumer market most likely won't see it, unless they going to license IP AND somebody will use it for a consumer-oriented SoC AND someone will make a decent device with it. Considering the fact RISC-V ecosystem is still pretty young, Windows won't support it and aarch64 is essentially de-facto industry standard for power efficient high performance platforms, I don't see a lot hope there.
I think that Apple Macbook Air M1/M2 with asahi is (and will continue to be for some time) the best option for people who want decent high performance non-X86 laptop with Linux. A tragedy in some sense, but it is how it is
In my opinion, the only feasible way (at least short-term) to get a open source/open philosophy friendly non-X86 laptop is to establish a crowd-funding for a ARM or RISC-V based motherboard for a Framework laptop and somehow push it (through some sort of a partnership deal) as an option for a motherboard in the Framework's marketplace. Perhaps also with a Windows support (implies ARM though), because otherwise it would fail economically I suppose

outside of apple there is exactly 1 product: https://german.alibaba.com/product-d...546769041.html

its the Rockchip 3388s chip. compared to apple it is cheap. performance is not as good but still good in the ARM world