Fedora Asahi Remix 39 Released For Apple Silicon Macs

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora Asahi Remix 39 Released For Apple Silicon Macs

The Asahi Linux crew has released Fedora Asahi Remix as their Fedora 39 derived Linux distribution optimized for Apple Silicon Macs...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-Asahi-Remix-39

[hyperchaotic]

This is a great milestone and it's impressive what the project have achieved and now they've gone above and beyond what was expected for speaker support. Congratulations!

What's also interesting from the Asahi project is that the (still unreleased) Apple Silicon Video Decoders now works for h264 and h265. There's still some conformance tests to do but it's getting there.

[Zshrc]

Regardless on how you feel about Apple or its hardware, this feat should not go ignored.
Group of individuals spent years polishing the Linux experience into something that really closely resembles a first-party OS.
There's still a lot to do, and they're still years from seeing everything make it into the mainline kernel, but for most people this is daily-drivable.
No longer will we need to burn our bits when we use Linux on our laps. Hope to see more ARM laptops make their way into the consumer market.
Bravo!

[dlq84]

Typo: Remox

[Jumbotron]

I absolutely applaud this effort by the Asahi team to bring Linux to the still newish Apple Silicon platform. I imagine it was a bit easier to bring Linux to Apple computers back in the day when Apple moved away from the PowerPC RISC platform they help co-develop with IBM and Motorola to the x86/64 platform, so the engineering of this distribution and so soon after the introduction of Apple Silicon is a thing of wonder to be quite honest. I have long held, even going back to the rumor days of Apple moving off Intel back to an in-house RISC platform, that the ARM ISA was the future of consumer computing and that the transition from X86/64 to ARM ISA would become apparent, if not dominant, for all platforms both Apple and Microsoft, by the end of 2030. I'm not talking about just mobile but desktop workstations as well.

That said, as someone who moved over to Linux on all my personal laptops and workstations about 15 years ago with Suse before moving over permanently to Ubuntu in 2016, being introduced to the GNOME desktop environment in Suse and continuing with Ubuntu to this day, I won't touch this distribution until they make a version with GNOME. As someone who has used computers starting with an IBM desktop predating the very first IBM PC, ( this model didn't even have a CPU as such but 5 to 7 discreet function chips that would later be integrated into what we now call a "CPU" and had an in-house IBM operating system called "TOS"...The Operating System ) and dealing with Microsoft from DOS 1.0 on to Windows 8 which caused me to ditch Windows for good and moved my experiment with Linux from one computer over to all of them, I have had enough or the Windows DE and anything which emulates it such as KDE. I have now added to my compute collection a brand new Apple Macbook Pro with the new Apple Silicon M3 Pro and that transition to the MacOS DE was made even easier because of my experience with the GNOME DE for the last 15 years. I have also had family members that I helped train in the usage of Linux on their own computers find the GNOME DE easier and more intuitive than KDE, much less whatever Windows DE they were using, either Windows 7, 8, or 10. Until Asahi makes a version with GNOME ( and of course a version that takes advantage of the M3 ) I will watch with anticipation from the wings.

On a side note, I was curious as to why the developers decided to call their distribution "ASAHI" as that word was attached to a camera company that made the very first 35mm film camera I ever bought in the late 1970's, that being Asahi Pentax, and the camera was the Pentax ME. Asahi in Japanese is a compound word comprising of the word "ASA" and "HI". ASA means "Dawning" or "Brightening" and HI means "Day" or "Sun". In other words....."Rising Sun".

[guglovich]

Ruined the macbook with two things at once.

[Jumbotron]

Ruined the macbook with two things at once.

To quote the esteemed philosopher from "The Big Lebowski"....

"Yeah...well...you know...that's just like your...uh...opinion, man."

[hyperchaotic]

On a side note, I was curious as to why the developers decided to call their distribution "ASAHI" as that word was attached to a camera company that made the very first 35mm film camera I ever bought in the late 1970's, that being Asahi Pentax, and the camera was the Pentax ME. Asahi in Japanese is a compound word comprising of the word "ASA" and "HI". ASA means "Dawning" or "Brightening" and HI means "Day" or "Sun". In other words....."Rising Sun".

The name Asahi is used by a number of companies, from beer to newspapers and a few cities. But giving that their lead developer and several others live in Japan and ARM on the desktop, starting with Apple, might be the beginning of a new era it is a very fitting name. One could hope that either ARM or RISC-V will succeed in this space. Intel will fight back though, which also benefits the consumer.

Anyway they've proven a lot of people wrong, one can go back a bit even on this forum and see people "giving them six months" (it's tempting to do that) but they've succeeded. They've also definitively proven that Rust is not only viable but have benefits for drivers with their AGx driver. But what's more: they've submitted fixes all over the place, from QT Javascript, to KDE, Pipewire and Firefox benefitting ARM and even in some cases rare bugs on other platforms - so benefiting Linux overall.

Getting Linux going on different hardware is part of the spirit of Linux.

[Jumbotron]

For any of you interested and with the skills to do so, there is a list on the Asahi site to "Alternative Distributions" that one can build Asahi into various existing distros. As of now there are 12 with Ubuntu being one. If interested in building a distribution other than the officially supported Fedora Remix, you can go here to pick a distro of your choice.

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/SW:Alternative-Distros

If you are interested in Ubuntu in particular the links are as follows.

https://github.com/UbuntuAsahi

https://github.com/UbuntuAsahi/ubuntu-asahi

[King InuYasha]

That said, as someone who moved over to Linux on all my personal laptops and workstations about 15 years ago with Suse before moving over permanently to Ubuntu in 2016, being introduced to the GNOME desktop environment in Suse and continuing with Ubuntu to this day, I won't touch this distribution until they make a version with GNOME..

Fedora Asahi Remix is available with either KDE Plasma or GNOME. It's right in the announcement.