Asahi Linux On The Apple M1: "Usable As A Basic Linux Desktop" Sans GPU Acceleration

[Michael_S]

Just to be clear, you feel that this forum should only be used by people that praise Linux? And every single post should be nothing but glowing enthusiasm for anything Linux?

So when Michael does an article that talks about the kernel regression that has resulted in a 50% performance hit, every comment in that thread should look like what?

If I logged in to a BMW discussion forum and spent all day posting variations on, "Every BMW M car sucks because it's not a Porsche", I would just be an asshole.

You hate Linux, you think it sucks, you think we're stupid for using it. We get it, congratulations.

Now go back to your Apple fanatic sites so we can return to shredding each other for choosing Wayland over Xorg, LLVM over GCC, Firefox over Chromium, System76 over Dell XPS 13, BSD over MIT, and Fedora over Arch Linux.

[Developer12]

That would be difficult to accomplish. Rosetta 2 was designed to work exclusively on macOS.
Through Darling and reverse-engineering it might be possible to pass some x86 code to the recompiler, but it would be too much work.

Writing an AOT/JIT recompiler for x86 -> Arm would be easier than reversing Rosetta 2 and getting it to run on Linux.

It's weird how lots of people in the free software community have this fixation on people taking software. Either they're worried about proprietary companies making use of (or even learning from!) their publicly posted code (gasp!) or they want companies to give up the source code for their successful products (so it can be "Free"!). You don't want their code. It's crap, or at the very least will never fit right. Write new, better code.

Coreboot learned this the hard way. It took several horrifying dumps of vendors' silicon init code. Eventually they learned that A) the code is always crap quality because it was written in secret and under a deadline and B) it never fits right because it's a sanitized chunk ripped from a proprietary BIOS with a completely different architecture. Now they know what they should have always asked for: clear documentation.

Someone argued earlier in the thread that Asahi should just rip off apple's GPU drivers and try to stuff them into Linux so they could be done faster. That's only going to make a fugly hack of a turd that's going to be hard to maintain in the future. You'll get one port and then it'll just die because nobody wants to do the maintenance.

Similarly, if you try to rip off Rosetta you're just going to spent a shitload of time building an ugly duct-tape tower that's going to perform like shit, constantly bug out, and be a nightmare to maintain.

One of the most important things Asahi has done this entire way is document absolutely everything they've come across. All the GPU internals for example are marked up in very pretty latex documents. They then use this documentation to produce clean, maintainable code that fits in appropriately with the rest of the Linux kernel and the Linux ecosystem. They're in this for the long haul and they're working to make everyone's lives, theirs and other's, much easier for it.

P.S.
I could go on at length about the fixation the free software community seems to have developed, but at the end of the day: It's just code people. Go write some more. The entire GNU system is a rewrite of Unix. Now that's been written it hasn't become some set of irreplaceable relics. Is this a lack of manpower, now that the war is won?

Then someone new comes along and starts re-implementing a better version (eg. the guys rewriting coreutils in rust) and there's lot's of followers in the github issues throwing accusations of rippling off GNU utils' style. I'm sorry, wtf was the point of open source again? Was it just to create a new category of proprietary code ownership? Maybe that's just it. Some fetishization of code ownership, with GPL code being code people can withhold from the other side in return.

Then of course some idiot decides to fork it for no other reason than to make it GPL. Not only did they manage to violate the MIT licence, but as one person pointed out, nothing from that fork will ever be sent back upstream to the original repo. It's legally impossible. The fork created under a different licence to "foster community contributions" will never contribute to the community.

Dunno if you noticed, but I'm quite a fan of MIT. Reading about the FSF's recent policy failures to advance free software does that to you.

[darcagn]

The reason it is laughable is because Apple is targeting professional content creators, specifically video with the M1 based systems.

Who cares what their "target" is?

I have a powerful Linux workstation these days and don't need a laptop for anything more than general purpose light tasks. So last fall I bought a MacBook Air M1 that cost me $999, it's very fast, compact, durable, completely passively cooled, no moving parts so 100% silent, and the battery life is amazing. $999 didn't break the bank and I love the hardware, but I'm ultimately looking to make a migration away from the macOS/iOS ecosystem in the long term, especially if better alternative phone options come to promise. I'd be delighted to put Linux on this laptop.

[Michael_S]

Dunno if you noticed, but I'm quite a fan of MIT. Reading about the FSF's recent policy failures to advance free software does that to you.

I'm a fan of the GPL and the FSF's goals, but not the FSF's strategy.

I agree with some of what you wrote. I agree that documentation is better than code. I agree that by the very definition of free software, people should be able to rewrite existing free software using other tools and wildly different or identical code styles. Attacking the Rust implementation of Unix core utilities for existing or copying some GNU coreutils conventions is absurd.

So, MIT license is free-as-in-freedom software, and that's great between end users and free software developers, and I use a lot of MIT license software. But corporate America uses MIT (and BSD, and Apache) license software as free-as-in-labor. You make something, they take it, and when it suits them they give back. For every dollar Google, Microsoft, Apple, or Facebook contributes to LLVM, Chromium, Puppet, Kubernetes, or CUPs they make 10k, and they spend another 1k writing code they don't release. (Yes, I fabricated those numbers. But considering that, say, Google makes 40 billion in profit per year then it's guaranteed their open source contributions are an insignificant fraction of the code they write and the value they get.)

This guarantees that free software will always lose in the broader market. When Apple spends more money on paperclips than it spends on free software, it's just not practical for free software to compete. That means user freedoms lose and DRM wins. It also means planned obsolescence wins. It means companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple each can spend more money bribing school officials and politicians to put their products in classrooms than the entire free software music spends in cash and time on software development.

Now in some dream world where free software users were only willing to use GPLv3 and AGPL, this would stop. But as long as most of us are happy to use MIT/BSD/Apache, the dominance of the big tech companies is guaranteed.

[akira128]

The reason it is laughable is because Apple is targeting professional content creators, specifically video with the M1 based systems.

If you go on YouTube and look at the reviews, the M1 laptops are capable of smoking Intel based systems Mac systems that cost 20 grand that have a custom 5 thousand dollar AMD gpu in them when used with Final Cut Pro, thanks to the hardware acceleration the M1 features.

In fact there is a new version of Resolve that has been optimized for the M1 that is 3x faster:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/med...se/20210819-02

Adobe Premiere is also optimized for M1:

https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/20...results-are-in

And you want to take a system designed for professional video creation, wipe out the optimized OS that it comes with and install a half-baked kludge that doesn't even hardware acceleration for it? And you don't see that as laughable?

To be clear, if you told me you were planning on buying and M1 system and installing any other OS on it, Windows, BSD, Android, Solaris, Haiku, UNIX, anything, I would say the same thing to you.

It's just insane, but hey it's not my money. Please post screenshots when you buy the system and after you molest it, I mean install Linux on it.

Dude, I said I planned to buy an M1 macbook air. I didn't say when. I would like to see accelerated graphics supported before pulling the trigger. I reason I use Linux is not because I'm some zealot who's on some sort of crusade, it's just better customization-wise. I have much more control over my environment and system as a whole. If you don't like the default macOS desktop, you're SOL. If Apple decides not to support a system any longer --well then you're forced to "upgrade" to new system. Once you've tasted freedom, it's hard to go back. Hardware is hardware (although Apple making that distinction less apparent), I should be able to install whatever I damn well please on hardware that I own. I don't get the whole Sheeple culture-thing. But hey, to each their own. Freedom is higher on my priority list then being able to run Adobe Premiere (which I would never run anyway).

[birdie]

This is such an asinine point of view. Nvidia provides binary drivers with day 1 support for new cards. They do this for Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. Arguing that they are more hostile to Linux compared to Apple which will never even release useful documentation to help the people trying to get Linux running on their hardware, let alone provide binary drivers, is frankly absurd.

Notice how after he said NVIDIA is more hostile than Apple, he never actually explained why which means it was not an argument, it was a feeling, the feeling of hatred which is so familiar for open source fans. They love hating - after all it's much easier than creating or helping.

[bzs0]

I do have one, and I might put Linux on it if and when it's been EOL'd and it's still functional at that point. Just not before then. I can put Linux on anything else, but I got a MBP for MacOS (and it's awesome battery life) like most people.

is dual booting not an option?

[Paradigm Shifter]

I like seeing successes like this. I may not have a use for this, but it always makes me smile to see someone managing to pull off something others sneer at as "impossible" or "pointless". Now for the toughest bit, though; getting GPU acceleration working.

Where I work, everyone uses a Mac. Well, OK, most of our analysis software requires Linux, but the Linux machines are not "daily drivers" - I'm the exception, because I spend about 70% of my "office" time in Linux and about 30% with Windows. If MS Office and Endnote came to Linux, I'd drop Windows in a second.

I'm curious about the M1 Macs and if I could get a decent one for what I consider reasonable, I'd see how well I got on with using it as a daily (office) driver. Interestingly, the Mac version of Office seems to have one feature that the Windows one does not - superior DPI control for Powerpoint slide exports.

I'm not liking what I'm seeing with Windows 11 (can't move the Taskbar to the sides?!) and Windows 10 with the pseudo-biannual updates really irritates me, largely because something always breaks, or moves, or is "improved" in some other way.

Although I do have one good reason to avoid thinking about buying a Mac - currently when one of the Mac users has a problem, they don't come to me for help!

[Developer12]

is dual booting not an option?

It is.

Some apple fans just decided to come here and proudly declare that they would rather run macOS on their apple hardware than linux. That's nice for them.

Lots of people on this linux forum would like to run linux, and don't have any use for macOS.

[Ladis]

This is such an asinine point of view. Nvidia provides binary drivers with day 1 support for new cards. They do this for Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. Arguing that they are more hostile to Linux compared to Apple which will never even release useful documentation to help the people trying to get Linux running on their hardware, let alone provide binary drivers, is frankly absurd.

It's all nice NVidia gives us the proprietary closed driver, but when I want an opensource one, I'm f*cked. Unlike NVidia, Apple officially opened the door to their hardware by allowing to boot other OSes and loading the firmware automatically. E.g. in the case of BSD, it took years for NVidia to add Vulkan - and the community couldn't add it themselves.