Fedora Asahi Remix is now working on Apple M3 | Hacker News Reader

Fedora Asahi Remix is now working on Apple M3

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593 pointstodsacerdoti230 comments

I would just like to point out that Michael Reeves (the poster, no relation to youtuber) is a high schooler who has also found numerous high impact vulnerabilities in Apple software. Immensely talented.

How many peaked with our curiosity and exploration software engineering as teenagers and subsequently got ground down by 9to5 corporate soul drain T_T

Poverty (of youth or otherwise) is also a pretty powerful motivation to “tinker.” I spent a lot of time with OSX86, and ended up getting proficient enough (multiple all-nighters trying to get it to boot and get the right kexts loaded early on) to run semi-stable Tiger thru Lion on random PCs and my girlfriend’s Vaio Laptop. Then, one day I could afford a MacBook and basically stopped being as curious about that. Decade or so later, ProxMox allowed me to run Capitan thru Mojave virtually, while more recently it makes more sense (and less legal dubiousness) to just buy macs as/if I need them. Overall, I’m still pretty curious, but not curious enough to risk a “hacky” solution when I can mitigate it for relatively low $

I agree: Curiosity is not enough, you also need the time to explore it without easier dopamine rewards to distract you. It's quite ironic how having money can end up hurting you here as you can afford whatever entertainment you want.

I probably wouldn't be an engineer now if it weren't for poverty. I was in my twenties living with my mom, working part time for an educational center and though I enjoyed the work and found it fulfilling, it wasn't anything that could sustain me long term.

Then my mom goes, you can live with me for another year, after that you're on your own.

Asked my dad, a software engineer, if he could teach me how to do what he does. He recommended a boot camp and I learned enough to get an entry level role, and still here I am, ten years later.

I 100% agree. My parents were both disabled. A malpractice lawsuit left us with a little windfall. My parents saw where the future was going and bought me my first computer. Being poor made it so I had a lot of free time as a little kid, so I learned that machine inside and out. I made my own games. I troubleshooted any hardware problem, learning as I went. After getting the internet, things took off from there.

It's not business critical to answer your curiosity now. File it as a ticket, put it on a backlog and move on.

If you have brilliant mind, but you were born poor / working class, then sure you'll be crushed by 9 to 5 inevitably, where your talents will be ruthlessly "harvested" for the benefits of shareholders until you burn out and get thrown out like a used rag.

If you have talents, use them to achieve financial freedom and then do what you want. Sometimes it is through 9 to 5 unfortunately. Never make a mistake of "climbing corporate ladder". Earn money, invest, don't try to leave beyond your means.

You might have great salary, but don't get tempted by renting a nice pad or getting a nice car. It's a trap to keep you enslaved in 9 to 5 forever.

Yep this. Avoid lifestyle creep (when you get raises). Invest your money (e.g. world passive mutual fund, or VT ETF). Don't sell investments when the market crashes, just ride it out (assuming you bought diversified fund). Don't stock pick, it's largely gambling and 99% of people can't beat the market doing it. If you must stock pick, do at most, 5% of your investments. Avoid actively managed/high fee mutual funds/ETFs. Research clearly shows, long term they do worse then the market. (And if there is an active fund that does end up beating the market long term, you have no way of knowing which fund that would be ahead of time)

The Millionaire Next Door is a great book, and gives a good perspective on money.

If anyone here is interested, Google the FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early). Even just doing the first 2 letters, Financial Independence, would be huge, and give you way more flexibility.

When/if you retire early, keep doing things to keep your mind and body active. Most people who retire stop doing the things that kept them healthy, and there body deteriorates quickly (with xyz illnesses).

The sad true is that, for many, work forces them to do the basics to keep your body running ok.

But what's the point of it being long-term? I want fuck-off money right now. What's the point of having a bit of money when I'm old, can barely leave the house and everyone and everything I cared about is long gone?

Why do I want to have a million in the bank by age 70 if I'm going to kill myself by age 30-35?

How old are you ? I used to espouse similar view but now that I am past 40, I regret not starting investing in my 20 and see myself living well into my 80's.

That punk-ish no future mentality usually dampen past 30-35!

This is true. On the other hand, I've found myself lately starting to wane a little bit the other way. Let me explain. I'm doing ok, because I got involvednin the FIRE movement early and invested early. Now about to be 40, and having a couple kids, I've realized that so long as I have no debt and good security (enough to see my kids into adulthood) then what is the money for??? To be clear, I haven't started spending my retirement money yet, but I already know I'm never going to quit working. So.... I don't know, you know?

I wonder if you'll view things differently again once you start deteriorating mentally and physically. Fact is that the median person does not live well into their 80s and many of those that do will be severely limited in what they can do during those final years.

> "if I'm going to kill myself by age 30-35?"

Maybe you will. But probably whatever stopped you from doing it today and made you push it away for years will feel the same tomorrow, the same next year and at age 30 and 35, saying "if I'm going to kill myself by 40-45" and then "by 50-55".

Not always and not everyone, people do suicide, but consider there's 37 million people in poverty in the USA, 18 million with cancer, and a lot more with shit lives in various ways - chronic diseases, disabilities, lost loves, hopeless futures, victims of horrors - and out of that vast amount of misery the USA has "only" 50,000 suicides annually. Much less than I might guess from the numbers. Bodies are 4 billion years of survival machines and they don't quit easily and that includes mental trickery as well as physical resilience[1].

I thought I would commit suicide as a teen. I planned it and tried in my teens and twenties. I thought I would force it in my thirties. Did "it get better"? No not really, mildly worse in several ways. Is the world better for me staying around? No, not really. Did I discover a hope for a brighter future? Maybe[2] but not a strong one. Maybe I'm discovering a bit more selfishness and less obligation to do what other people demand.

The years are going by faster now and "the rest of my life" doesn't seem so long. Interesting ideas are still interesting, books are still readable, work is still available, death is coming whether we hurry it or fight it.

> "What's the point of having a bit of money when I'm old, can barely leave the house"

Pay for your healthcare so you can still leave the house, or pay for home help if you can't.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q1dgn_C0AU - TED talk - The surprising science of happiness | Prof. Dan Gilbert, 2004

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Take out your retirement early. Live on it for 5 years and then back to the grind for 5. Live your best life and die with zero not a million.

In that 5 years your industry would have left you behind :( unfortunately. Unless you do the type of job that allows this style of living but afaik, it's not tech.

I don't know. I just had a break for approx 3 years with very limited access to the internet. Absolutely nothing has changed. AI is now useful, but it doesn't operate differently than before.

Did you successfully get a job? That's the only metric that matters.

That was great advice for the '00s and '10s but is absolutely insane advice in 2026.

My very good colleague who was absolutely brilliant statistician shared his wisdom: Max the now, min the future.

He focused on the present but hated work, it was utterly boring to him, even if objectively the work benefited humanity. One day he quit and never came back. He spent his time learning to dance salsa. He was in his mid to late twenties.

Of course he was an extreme case. But his zen is important to take and balance together with future planning.

I think you can do both, aim for fuck off money but put aside a little bit for the future.

Edit: if youre wondering what happend to him - he's studying electrical engineering because I suspect he's aiming to not be behind a desk.

70 is the new 30 didn't you get the memo?

> Yep this. Avoid lifestyle creep (when you get raises). Invest your money

This is great advice anyway, even if you were born poor/working class. With the added proviso that you should be paying down your debt, highest interest rate first, since that will have far higher returns than your average investment. Also make sure that you have enough liquid cash set aside that you'll be able to deal quickly and completely with any issues that might come up; this makes a significant difference to your ability to live and work stress-free.

> Invest your money (e.g. world passive mutual fund, or VT ETF).

i despise stock markets, investments etc., so i just kind of have accepted that i'll probably never grow my money passively. from time to time i stumble across advice like yours, talking about ETFs, and feel a bit left out again.

money just sits in my bank account with close to 0% interest. i know that ETFs would slowly generate more money, but i also know that my money would then be invested in a ton of companies i absolutely don't want to be a part of, even when considering that my sums would be a drop in an ocean.

There are ETFs that specifically exclude companies with lots of negative externalities (no Exxon, etc.). The term to look for is "socially responsible".

E.g. https://www.ubs.com/uk/en/assetmanagement/funds/etf/lu062945...

a bit ironic to recommend a "socially responsible" ETF, managed by the one and only UBS.

but you're right, i forgot that my socially responsible bank claims to have socially responsible ETFs. i just hope that they are actually socially responsible, and not "socially responsible".

lots of things claim to be socially, ecologically or otherwise responsible, but that's exactly my issue. they're claims, most of the time just [insert color]washing.

Adding my voice of concurrence, I would say 'Comrade' but people take it the wrong way.

I remember being a teenager and intentionally dialing down my ambitions, because it was socially uncomfortable to have people's perceptions of me be tied to the things I excelled in.

Figured I had my whole life to have a job, so didn't really wanna do a startup or anything like that. Watched all the Macworld et. al. keynotes and knew all the specs of all the devices, until I got tired of being pigeonholed as "the computer kid."

This is an urgently dark pattern to avoid for parents, but I feel helpless as my own development was heckuv random

Not sure I follow, you were afraid of being a "nerd" and dialed your ambitions to try to be "cooler"?

"because it was socially uncomfortable to have people's perceptions of me be tied to the things I excelled in."

I think usually it's the other way around, or I'm not understanding this correctly. I was best at math in my class from grades 5 through 12 but never felt "awkward" because of it, rather I felt proud. Which is also wrong but I digress

I interpreted it as "my parents/peers love me for who I am and not for being a really basketball player". Might be projecting tho.

Very, very few people came anywhere near this level of focus and execution at the same age.

People like this are truly extraordinary. You could give a lot of engineers infinite financial runway and no corporate job ever and they’d still never reach this level of performance.

Some people really are next level.

not true

Many people have this potential but it doesn't necessarily materialize or evolves. That's fine, that's okay. We'll always have Paris. The trick is to be fulfilled, not renowned.

I was born with heart defects and pre ACA had to be a wage slave to get health insurance.

The moment ACA happened I started several successful businesses.

Honestly we already should have contribution/impact based merit threshold UBI with a much lower barrier than research grants or even just time limited UBI systems for youth and adults that meet a contribution threshold.

VC allocation is too biased towards group think, profit motivation, predatory contracts and hold on to top many class and cultural artifacts.

Yes of course it would be difficult to implement but difficult isn't impossible and gradiated rollouts can help catch unintended side effects. We need to push more money into the hands of the intrinsically motivated. Society already is catering to the whims of consumers and feed zombies.

Or you could have universal healthcare. Which everyone else seems to manage and would untie a lot of people from specific jobs.

I can't think of any credible reason not to have universal healthcare at this point.

Maybe 20 years ago but there is too much empirical data across multiple countries and environments now.

Assuming our cost for care drops commiserate to what's been seen in other countries we could use the saving to increase merit scholarships for the contributing young as a introductory form of UBI.

Doctors are the primary and most numerous beneficiary of the American status quo. And have you seen the houses they live in? In 99% of America, doctors live in the nicest biggest houses there are in town. What's more, doctors are politically and socially untouchable. Even saying what I've said will probably have people itching to respond that doctors earned their huge salaries, that medical bankruptcies are completely unrelated, that doctors actually have little political power, that some doctoring organization has released some feel-good vague statements about fixing the system (but nonetheless not actually financially backed the candidates that might fix it), etc. How doctors are actually the victims and it's all the insurance companies, even though doctors have way more political and social sway than insurance corps. How doctors are the victims of the executive leadership of hospitals, even though those executives are usually MDs as well..

How can the problem be fixed if we don't even talk about it? How do you even negotiate with, "Yeah but you're going to need a doctor some day, so you better not be critical of them in any regard." ?

> I can't think of any credible reason not to have universal healthcare at this point.

When you grab em by their Amygdala, the naked monkeys will do what you want. Even to their own detriment.

As soon as they are in fight-or-flight-mode, (most) people cannot be reasoned with.

Sad but true

> When you grab em by their Amygdala, the naked monkeys will do what you want. Even to their own detriment.

Even to their own death (and the death of friends/family):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40697553-dying-of-whiten...

Strictly from a realpolitik standpoint, universal healthcare like the systems found in Europe is unlikely to happen because too much of the American economy is tied up in healthcare and healthcare services. People trying to improve the system here in the US would be better served by looking for a fix that's uniquely American (ACA, all-payer rates, public option, etc.), rather than trying to tear out what we have and replace it with universal healthcare.

Mandatory disclaimer that I don't like our health insurance or healthcare prices any more than anybody else does, and in a perfect world I'd love to have universal healthcare instead.

Plenty of european systems involve private insurance fyi. It’s not all single payer

It sounds like a great idea, then a government shut down happens.

> It sounds like a great idea, then a government shut down happens.

How about fixing the government so it can’t be shut down because a few hundred politicians can’t agree on the next budget?

Neither party is interested in amending the Constitution, which would be necessary, and even if they were, the country is so deeply divided that it would likely be unsuccessful except maybe to knock a few inalienable rights off the list.

> How about fixing the government so it can’t be shut down because a few hundred politicians can’t agree on the next budget?

"Thanks I'm cured" material. You're not the first person to think of that, and the fact that it hasn't been done yet probably means it can't be done very easily.

> It sounds like a great idea, then a government shut down happens.

Single payer / universal healthcare ≠ doctors/nurses are government employees (necessarily).

You go to your local health care provider, show your card, and received treatment. The single payer (government) then gets billed and money is transferred to the providers account.

If the government is shutdown, there could be a delay in payment in outstanding bills, but that does not mean health care providers shutdown. Medicare ran during the last shutdown:

* https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/government-shutdo...

* Telehealth was: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/medicare-patients-go-wit...

Social Security cheques went out too:

* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-security-government-shut...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_federal_gov...

Lots of stuff can potentially be automated, and so continue to run.

It's possible for some of that to continue, but we really don't know what would happen if we directly connect payrolls and finances of the healthcare industry to the federal government in the US. It's a fair question how such a big connection would suffer when the government is punitively closed in a faustian bargain as part of a political struggle, as seems to be common recently.

There might be a few top-down emergency provisions to ensure checks go out to keep the system from toppling, but I wouldn't work if my pay is frozen and neither would my plumber, electrician, lawyer, etc. The last few shutdowns have run over a month - that can easily exceed the cash reserves of most businesses (that would be providers) and large businesses would shutter or have layoffs before burning that much cash.

We can't be so confident in how a $5T/year system would react if its primary cash flow valve is turned off, is all. Handwaving away the scope and complexity doesn't help anything.

Just because the fed exists doesn’t mean the entire economy shuts down with the government.

It depends on how it’s structured.

Other places can only afford universal healthcare to begin with because their healthcare sector is not nearly as corrupt or shackled by a huge amount of government regulation that was only put in place here for self-serving reasons. It's not about the model of provision, it's about whether the sector itself is sustainable. U.S. healthcare is doomed by its vast spiraling costs even after controlling for its supposedly higher quality.

>Other places can only afford universal healthcare to begin with because their healthcare sector is not nearly as corrupt or shackled by a huge amount of government regulation that was only put in place here for self-serving reasons.

coughs in Ukrainian

> healthcare sector is not nearly as corrupt or shackled by a huge amount of government regulation

Healthcare is not corrupt. Insurance companies are corrupt.

And regulation is lacking in Health Insurance and enforcement is lacking in healthcare. (So many doctors that have committed malpractice just switch hospitals.

> U.S. healthcare is doomed by its vast spiraling costs even after controlling for its supposedly higher quality.

Healthcare costs are high because of insurance companies and private equity, not doctors and hospitals.

So please stop with these right wing baby bird food regurgitation.

> Healthcare is not corrupt. Insurance companies are corrupt.

There’s a crazy amount of corruption in the healthcare space. Some of the medical fraud busts that come out every year have staggeringly large sums attached. In some areas there are still schemes that openly recruit poor people to use their information to bill for medical care that is not actually necessary or provided. It’s wild.

> Healthcare costs are high because of insurance companies and private equity, not doctors and hospitals.

Sorry, the world isn’t so simple that you can pick your villains (insurance companies and private equity) and declare everyone else to be free from blame. There’s a lot of bad behavior in these systems at every level. Yes, including some doctors.

If we removed insurance overhead entirely, your healthcare costs wouldn’t change more than a few percent. It’s amazing that everyone united against insurance companies as the cause of high healthcare costs when they barely take a few percent of the overall spend.

> Healthcare costs are high because of insurance companies and private equity, not doctors and hospitals.

It is actually the opposite.

UnitedHealth, one of the 'worst' insurers in terms of denials, has a profit margin of ~5% [0]. It is mainly the providers that overcharge, under the guise of "the less and lower we bill, the less and lower insurance pays us".

Insurance only works if there is at least as much going into the pot as is going out. What do you think would happen if insurances weren't denial hawks?

Get angry at your doctor for overcharging you whilst using insurance companies as the heel.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UNH/unitedhealth-g...

The reason UnitedHealth has such a low profit margin is that their profit margin is capped by the ACA's Medical Loss Ratio provision. They fraudulently get diagnoses for their insured patients to upcode and incur more charges to Medicare Advantage that they can collect their profit from. Any doctor could have told you this has been going on for years. https://www.google.com/search?q=UnitedHealthmedicare+advanta...

If the government were the insurer, it would not have the same incentives to commit this fraud.

As a person who moved to US from Europe recently I can say that prices charged by US healthcare providers are ridiculous - all overpriced 10-20x compared to my home country.

> Healthcare is not corrupt. Insurance companies are corrupt.

¿Por qué no los dos? Guess what, it's a lot more likely that insurance companies will go corrupt if what they interact with - healthcare - is corrupt.

> private equity, not doctors and hospitals.

Guess what is limiting private equity's ability to compete amongst themselves in expanding the effective provision of healthcare and driving costs lower for the ultimate stakeholders i.e. patients? That's right: doctors, hospitals (including those that are nominally not-for-profit, but where the profits just turn into salary for those who can control that flow of money) and government regulation throughout the sector.

> Or you could have universal healthcare.

No, they could not have, based on the voting records of the previous 30 years of the federal US Congress. Even what they have passed only by the skin on their teeth.

The only federal wealth redistribution policy in the US in my lifetime of almost 4 decades only had a 6 month window of passing in 2009. And half the population still hates it, and has worked and succeeded at gutting major parts of it.

Even better you can have both like a lot of countries in Europe. The access to public healthcare also keeps the premium down. Extensive cover for a family of four is less than 200 in Spain a month out of pocket.

Actually in Spain Social Security is 30 to 40% of what you earn. From the remainder 60% it is up to 50% in IRPF taxes, so you could pay 70% of what you earn.

The trick is that Franco hid the social security tax in the company side so normal people don't see it, but it is there.

Over that there is IBI for your house, there is IVA on anything you buy, and there are central bank inflation taxing anything you own in absolute terms.

Oh don't get me started on the taxes. Just the solidarity tax they added from the younger generation to the pensioners makes my blood boil. How about cutting the top pensions and returning some of the money to the bottom of pile instead. The tax regime is also destroying small independent businesses.

But we have at least the option of additional private coverage and it is not crazy expensive like in the US.

Europe always overcharging and underdelivering.

I am forever thankful for the Socialism that allowed me to get a degree for $3k, though.

The downside is of course over-enrollment but at least the bartenders didn't come out $50k into debt. I hear it is different now.

Abortion is currently too divisive in the US to get a national health care system going. One side will absolutely refuse to include it and the other will absolutely require it. If one side brute forces it there will be immense backlash.

Along similar lines it isn't clear that having the federal government controlling healthcare at a more fundamental level is a good idea. Many (most?) would shudder at the thought of this administration controlling healthcare.

What surprises me - even after decades of wondering about this - is how rare the intrinsically motivated people are.

Do you think it's nature that people are born without it, or nurture that everyone has it and it's squashed by early upbringing, conformity, rules, and "don't do that", schooling, punishments, rushed and disinterested parents?

(I think it's a thing that introducing money changes intrinsic motivation into money-driven motivation and can ruin it. And that might also happen for children for other rewards - praise, sweets, dessert, etc.)

Just take the top ticket, thanks.

Me. Got countless old servers as a teenager and self hosted as much as possible. Now I have enough money for new servers (well, besides memory...) but not enough time and energy.

It stings how much I relate to this.

All aboard the soul tra…erhm…drain!

But how much wealthier are you?

How many went ChaosKlub and found themselves on the run?

Why not start your own software company?

I made big money in my 20s, I can retire. Now I just play and gamble on my company to go from ~2M to 100M.

If I get a nickel every time a high schooler with a decorated history of hardware tinkering goes on to work on Linux for Apple Silicon, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird they all happens to gravitate to Apple.

It's genuinely nice hardware, and everyone's gotta have a hobby. But it's not all of them. Geohot did some hardware stuff and hasn't (afaik) been working on Asahi. Linus was 21 when Linux was first released. Of course, Apple silicon ARM laptops didn't exist in the wild then, so we can let both of those pass.

They used to go work on homebrew for nintendo consoles instead. Times change.

>Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird they all happens to gravitate to Apple.

People get satisfaction from solving challenging problems.

Not to downplay his efforts, but back in the 8 and 16 bit home computer days, kids were coding Z80, 6052, 8080, 68000 Assembly aged 10 - 12 years old onwards.

Having been one of those kids, I kind of expect a high schooler to be able to have such skills, when deeply interested into a specific subject.

Have you ever found a vulnerability in modern macOS?

I have found a machine code generation issue in Borland Turbo Pascal 5.5, with a letter from them acknowledging my finding, does it count?

I also participated in demoscene coding activities, using 68000 Assembly on the Amiga.

Since we are reaching for credentials, instead the point I was making.

My personal conspiracy theory is that they're actually the same person, perhaps with some time traveling hijinks?

Asahi is one of the projects I support monetarily cause I really hope that one day I can run linux natively on my M4 max with GPU acceleration. They did an amazing job with M1 and M2 - great to see they are still pushing forward after the departure of Alyssa Rosenzweig, who did a lot of the work on the GPU support for those.

Edit: Here is their donation page if you're interested in chipping in as well: https://opencollective.com/asahilinux

It is worth noting the distinction between display acceleration and compute support here. While the desktop rendering is impressive, for local AI or LLM inference the Linux stack on M-series is still significantly behind Metal/MPS on macOS. I tried to switch my local dev environment over recently but without a mature compute stack it is hard to justify leaving macOS if you need to run models locally.

of course, that's only relevant if you do intend to run models locally. which, up to very recently, would have been roughly 0% of mac users.

While the M series hardware is impressive and the Asahi project is doing miracles, I myself don't want to support Apple in any way, including buying any of their hardware.

They are also doing a lot of generic work that benefits the ARM platform as a whole. And since Snapdragon X is a fucking mess on Linux, these Apple Silicon devices are actually some of the best cheap hardware you can buy with excellent performance.

You can always get it second hand

While that does support them less, it still drives up the value of their hardware and thus the amount of money others are willing to give Apple for it.

Saving a computer from a landfill is not driving up apple’s margins.

Relevant 39C3 talk from three weeks ago:

Porting Linux to Apple Silicon

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3OAiOfCcYFM

This talk in particular explains the challenges with M4 and M5 chips, but also a lot more.

Does anyone know if M3 support is likely to lead to M4 or M5 support in relatively short order? AIUI M3 took a long time because it was a substantial departure from M1/M2, especially in the GPU architecture, but I don't know if M4 or M5 made similar leaps.

The main reason M3 took a long time isn't related to m3 itself, but rather that the asahi project took on a ton of tech debt to get M1/M2 working. M3 wasn't too difficult, but before taking on the additional tech debt, the Asahi team focused on getting all of their changes upstreamed to the linux kernel.

The main developer was also the target of a harassment campaign from a place that has pushed other targets to straight up suicide. That took almost all of their energy for the last year and they ended up quitting.

   > The main developer was also the target of a harassment campaign from a place that has pushed other targets to straight up suicide.

Is this the Torvalds/Hector dispute that comes on the Google AI summary, or was this a three-letter agency type of harassment faced by Aaron Swartz?

Neither actually... It was an anti trans/kiwi farms brigade...

The Torvalds dispute probably came about in part because of defensive behavior triggered this brigade but was really unrelated.

Anti-trans hate.

Trans hate.

GP definitely meant the same thing, i.e. 'hate [that is] anti-transsexualism' to your 'hate [against] transsexualism'.

FYI, transsexual is an outdated term, with transgender being generally preferred instead :)

AFAIK they also were focusing on upstream the changes into the kernel [0], because the amount of downstream patches they were maintaining were making the work harder and harder.

[0] https://asahilinux.org/2025/10/progress-report-6-17/

Prognosis is then that work for m4/m5 should be relatively straight line now that refactoring is done?

M4 is apparently even harder because of some new hardware-level page table protections.

Source from Asahi contributor: https://social.treehouse.systems/@sven/114278224116678776

Memory Integrity Enforcement, perhaps?

https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...

It's "Secure Page Table Monitor". https://support.apple.com/en-il/guide/security/sec8b776536b/.... The kernel requires it so they need to emulate SPTM.

This is not exactly correct. They wouldn’t need to emulate SPTM, since SPTM is already running. And to be very correct, SPTM is a “process” running in a separate privilege level to the regular privilege levels found on arm processors. The reason it’s a pain is because pre M4 the bootloader gave you complete control over the CPU, including the Apple-exclusive extensions like GLx, the special privilege levels e.g. SPTM is running at. Since M4 the bootloader handles that, so asahi team has to either cope with being dropped after GL is already initialized and locked down, or running in a mode with all of Apple extensions disabled. So it’s not a problem for running Linux, but it’s a problem for running macOS with a thin abstraction layer to intercept talking with devices like the GPU, which made reverse engineering for them significantly easier.

Afaik this isn’t quite correct either. From what I could gather from the CCC talk and forum posts:

The Apple specific instructions to talk to the SPTM are only usable in the GL2 privilege level, not EL2 where you end up after booting non-Apple code.

The problem is the macOS kernel uses these custom instructions to manage its own page table mappings, and when being virtualized in EL2 it just crashes since these instructions are now invalid.

The solution is indeed to emulate the SPTM interface and instructions just enough for macOS to not crash, that way it can be virtualized for reverse engineering. The emulated SPTM could just pass through the mappings, ignoring all of the security checks the real one would normally do.

I was able to find quite a bit of existing SPTM analysis online (I believe from iOS security research) so this issue isn’t insurmountable by any means.

Knowing how it works does not mean it can be emulated perfectly.

From our knowing how it works [0] it’s just a mechanism for the kernel to give up some privileges and add extra security checks when modifying page tables. Sounds easy to emulate to me: just don’t do the checks and modify the page tables directly. Do you have some reason to believe it can’t be emulated?

If for some reason it’s difficult, the relevant kernel code could also be hooked or patched.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09272

Thanks!

The M5 reportedly has a newer generation GPU compared to the M3/M4. For one thing, the GPU-side Neural Accelerators are obviously new to the M5 series. Other stuff is harder to know for sure until it gets looked into from a technical POV.

It’s not like neural accelerators on non-Apple consumer hardware get much use on Linux, either, so that does not sound like much of a dealbreaker.

The matrix/tensor math units added to GPUs do see widespread use, both for running LLMs and for the ML-based upscaling used by most video games these days (eg. NVIDIA DLSS). The NPUs that are separate from the GPU and designed more with efficiency in mind rather than raw performance are a different thing, and that's what's still looking for a killer app in spite of all the marketing effort.

Related but not:

I'm a lifelong Mac user who now has a KDE device courtesy of SteamOS. What are the best options for porting Mac default keybindings over to KDE?

I'm using SteamOS and Nix/Home Manager, so I have a preference for something that I can easily use in that environment (e.g. nothing that needs me to unlock the system partition or run as another user).

I tried asking Gemini to find where KDE stores its default keybindings, and came up short.

You can try to remap KDE keybindings but it won't affect Gnome applications, games, etc.

Personally, I found the most reliable thing to be a keyboard-level swap of Ctrl and the Cmd key. That way, whenever you're asked for Ctrl, which is all the time, you can always safely hit Cmd with no need for extra configuration. You can then remap various things in KDE Shortcuts to be more Mac like, like Cmd+Q, Cmd+Tab, Cmd+`, etc. (The only thing lacking is the Ctrl v. Cmd separation in a terminal, so I manually remapped all the Ctrl sequences in my terminal emulator to Win sequences, which matches my hardware Ctrl key. So, like on a Mac, Cmd+C works to copy, Ctrl+C is the escape code.)

This works for a Mac keyboard. For a Windows keyboard, you'd have to shuffle Alt -> Ctrl, Win -> Alt, and Ctrl -> Win. There are settings for this in xkb. (KDE surfaces these in its Keyboard settings panel.)

Keyboard layouts/shortcuts are a huge pain point with Linux. xkb is geriatric, and acts as such. Compose keys are flaky and inconsistent across applications. Virtually all Linux software is going to default to some idiosyncratic take on Windows shortcuts, often without much by way of customisability. (And those Windows shortcuts weren't very good to begin with.)

That works until you get into a terminal and want to copy/paste/send signals without having to remember special keybinds that only apply when you're in the terminal.

X should have never copied the IBM/MS binds. What a tragic mistake

> That works until you get into a terminal and want to copy/paste/send signals without having to remember special keybinds that only apply when you're in the terminal.

I don't really understand what you mean by this. When a GUI app wants Ctrl, I hit Cmd. In a terminal emulator, I hit Ctrl for control sequences and Cmd for system shortcuts like copy and paste. This reflects how things work on a Mac. There's nothing special to remember.

> X should have never copied the IBM/MS binds. What a tragic mistake

Agreed!

Given that you're already using Home Manager: Make sure to also take a look at plasma-manager! [1]

It extends HM's declarative config to KDE/Plasma's config files, which are harder to manage since they also contain volatile state like window geometry. For discovery, there is also a `plasma-manager` executable that prints out most (all?) active settings. In particular the keybindings are included in there.

(This doesn't directly answer your question, but maybe is informative regardless and/or helpful for finding related options)

[1] https://github.com/nix-community/plasma-manager

Checking out Plasma Manager was on my to-do list. Finally pushed me over the edge:

https://github.com/appsforartists/device-config/blob/master/...

I've got Mac-centric keybindings working in Plasma and Chrome now. I already had them for Ghostty - I need to port those over to use the new lib. Same for Sublime.

KDE has a setting to switch the cmd & command keys so that e.g. command+c copies instead of ctrl+c. This works in all KDE apps (it will not work if you install any Gnome/GTK app, though). I forgot the setting but its something in advanced and used to be called Emacs key binds, but now I think it just refers to the keys.

Anyways, beyond that, have a look at Kinto which tries to do everything in one box, but it is an additional software you have to run:

https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto

Thanks. I've also seen a derivative called Toshy. They both appear to be surprisingly invasive.

I want something like Sublime Text's keybindings, where I can just iterate over all of KDE's system defaults and ask Gemini to convert them to their Mac equivalents. Can deal with individual applications separately, but since basically the only things I use are Chrome, Ghostty, Sublime, and the KDE shell, it seems like it ought to be pretty straightforward.

> What are the best options for porting Mac default keybindings over to KDE?

My recommendation is to get used to the KDE keybindings, and individual applications' keybindings. You'll never be able to fully replicate the macOS keybinding experience, so better get used to it. (Same when people use macOS, I recommend to get used to their keybindings and not try to replicate Linux/Windows)

There's a folder where KDE stores your user's settings. Shortcuts are in their own file...

For me it's `/home/$USER_NAME/.config/kglobalshortcutsrc`

Interesting! That might be the file I was looking for.

I see 260 lines (some of which are whitespace). I wonder if that's all of the default keybindings, or if there are more hiding somewhere.

they are the global. you can also see them from Settings (the UI to it)

Toshy on GitHub. I can’t live without it.

Is there a reason why it's so hard to support newer M chips after supporting an older one? Like so much harder than supporting a new generation Intel or AMD chip doesn't seem too hard in comparison.

Because Intel/AMD regularly contribute kernel changes to maintain support for their own hardware, whereas Apple keeps making undocumented changes that Asahi has to reverse engineer.

I don't think that's it, as we usually don't even have to update the kernel: when I get a new PC, my old software still boots and runs. The answer has to also provide some analogous note that, unlike new x86 hardware having an interest in still being able to run old versions of Windows, new Apple hardware (maybe... one must presume for the story to be consistent) must not really care about being able to boot old copies of macOS.

> unlike new x86 hardware having an interest in still being able to run old versions of Windows

The "secret sauce" is... we're not speaking about "x86" systems, at least as long as UEFI doesn't enter the game. In fact what we're talking about is "IBM PC-compatible x86" and its BIOS that provides ultra-low-level interfaces for input and output (including a very very basic USB stack). These can then be used to continuously load higher level systems.

Basically what you start with in the BIOS land is the boot sector, you got barely enough code capacity that you have input from the disk and text console output. That you can use to load a second stage bootloader (e.g. GRUB, NTLDR) which now has better knowledge of filesystems, maybe even enough of the driver to bring the GPU up with the basic VESA interface. And that then loads the actual operating system which brings up the rest of the system - proper GPU, a full featured USB stack, you name it. And layered in between that is ACPI for dynamic hardware discovery.

UEFI based systems can skip a lot of the slow early code used to boot in BIOS - it hands over directly to the OS itself in the best case, or to a high-level bootloader such as the modern Windows bootloader that can do all sorts of magic.

In contrast, the ARM world sucks hardcore - there are no standards for board bringup and boundaries, there is only DeviceTree which replaces a very small part of the wonder/hellscape that is ACPI. And that is something even Apple couldn't get rid of. Hell, you can't even be sure it's the CPU that brings everything up - there are weird systems like Broadcom's VideoCore architecture that underpins the Raspberry Pi, where the video chip part of the SoC handles bringing up the ARM CPU.

Basically, x86 has a ton of legacy and warts but for that, backwards compatibility and to a degree even forwards compatibility is a thing. ARM in contrast... it's like if you let a bunch of drugged up monkeys loose.

> In contrast, the ARM world sucks hardcore - there are no standards for board bringup and boundaries

There are standards for ARM, and they are called UEFI, ACPI, and SMBIOS. ARM the company is now pushing hard for their adoption in non-embedded aarch64 world - see ARM SBBR, SBSA, and PC-BSA specs.

> There are standards for ARM, and they are called UEFI, ACPI, and SMBIOS.

The most popular ARM dev and production board - the Raspberry Pi - doesn't speak a single one of these on its own, so do many of the various clones/alternatives, and many phones don't either, it's LK/aboot, Samsung and MTK have their proprietary bootloaders, and at least in the early days I've come across u-boot as well (edit: MTK's second-stage seems to be an u-boot fork). And Apple of course has been doing their own stuff with iBoot ever since the iPhone/iPod Touch that is now used across the board (replacing EFI which was used in the Intel era), and obviously there was a custom bootloader on the legacy iPods but my days hacking these are long since gone.

I haven't had the misfortune of having to deal with ARM Windows machines, maybe the situation looks better there but that's Qualcomm crap and I'm not touching that.

TIL Raspberry Pi doesn't support UEFI - I once read RPi 4 and 5 do, but apparently that was just a community project. https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/02/18/raspberry-pi-4-uefia...

Regarding phones, Google is trying to push UEFI adoption with their EFI bootloader, but that's still some time away. Recent talk: https://lpc.events/event/19/contributions/2257/

Regarding Windows/PC ARM devices, I think the best experience would be on System76 Thelio (with Ampere CPU), but that's quite a pricy machine.

I don't really care what Apple does on this regard, they were always doing things differently. IIRC, even Macs that supported EFI, only supported EFI 1.1, not 2.0, no?

> I don't really care what Apple does on this regard, they were always doing things differently. IIRC, even Macs that supported EFI, only supported EFI 1.1, not 2.0, no?

Yup, but as long as you got an original Apple GPU that's enough to just stick a Windows or Linux USB stick and you can install straight from the stick. "Normal" PCI GPUs have to be reflashed with a GOP blob [1] so that Apple's EFI implementation can work with it.

Personally, I just went and installed OpenCore once and that's it.

[1] https://github.com/acidanthera/OpenCorePkg/tree/master/Stagi...

Yes but these standards are clearly far from enough to run Linux on M chips otherwise the support wouldn't lag so far behind.

They should have pushed for it years ago, ARM's devicetree clutter and bootloader "diversity" has been a curse on the end user. At this point it's too late, and doubtful that they even have the influence to make OEMs adopt it.

This is because Intel and AMD can develop support for your new hardware and add it to the kernel and userland drivers before the hardware releases. They new hardware GPU hardware revisions are definitely not backwards compatible and always need at least some changes. CPUs are a different story due to x86 being x86.

No: this is obviously incorrect, as even dead operating systems that will never experience a new version or have any driver support work well enough on newer Intel hardware. This is due to some combination of extremely long-lived standards and epic forwards compatibility in the design of the BIOS layer. For a better answer, read mschuster91's response.

Old versions of macOS will not support new Apple hardware, yes. This is because they don't know about the updated hardware yet!

Which again, is obviously the wrong answer, as that same argument could try to be applied to Windows and would fall immediately: Windows 95 knows nothing of my new hardware, and yet, by and large, works fine. There is something unique about macOS and Apple that causes their hardware to actively not bother to maintain any form of backwards compatibility with the software that runs on it (which is not to be unexpected from Apple, but still), and that must be present in the answer to this question (which is done really well by mschuster91).

Yes, I agree with their comment. But the reason is of course that Apple doesn’t care and they also don’t want to leak their upcoming plans.

I've definitely ran older kernels of Linux on new Intel/AMD CPUs where the kernel release vastly pre-date the CPU release.

I've found that doing this on laptops is often more problematic, the OS itself will usually boot fine, but you might have issues with drivers for supporting hardware like the GPU, audio, etc.

1) Intel and AMD help to implement support in Linux before their chips even ship. Actually a sanitized version of the Intel graphics ISA bspec is actually available to the OSS community too.

Apple on the other hand provides no support. The one nice thing they did do is allow their bootloader to boot non-apple signed OSes. They do not do this on iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, Watches, or homepods btw.

2) The GPU ISA changes drastically and often. Its not entirely uncommon for the entire instruction set to change entirely within one generation. Every change to the ISA would require an entire round of new reverse engineering (I suspect, ive never reversed).

I do wonder why Apple chooses not to lock down the Mac to just Mac OS like all their other hardware? I'm sure the sales from people who intend to run something other than MacOS look like a floating-point error on the scales Apple operates.

You replied to your own question. Locking down the system for 3 users worldwide and making sure it stays locked is not worth the effort.

Just not publishing the specs is enough to delay so much the effort that those machines are out of warranty and have depreciated so much by the time they are supported that they aren't competitors to the mac ecosystem anymore.

Locking down would be pretty trivial. Require code signing of bootloader. They already do this on all their other platforms.

I don't think it is possible to have a locked down development machine. You have to be able to run arbitrary code on a development machine so they can never lock it down like iOS is.

There are plenty of other ways they can be less open and hackable than Linux but it can never get to the point of the iPhone.

That’s a reasonable take. The never part seems strong though.

If I may offer a slight consideration? “arbitrary code vs arbitrary signed code”.

What’s realistically stopping Apple from requiring all code and processes be signed? Including on device dev code with a trust chain going back to Apple and TPU / Secure Enclave enforcement

Nothing.

That's confusing "will boot anything" with "will run any userspace software".

The guy that did the boot loader work made it work that way on purpose:

https://x.com/XenoKovah/status/1339914714055368704?s=20

Didn't know that, very cool of him!

They don't because it's a floating-point error now. But with the continued enshitification of MacOS, it likely won't be in the future, and they just may lock it down. But being so hostile to the hacking community would do more harm than good, so I doubt that they would do so even if Linux use on Macs grew to >1%.

They hired a guy who cared about it

M1/M2 were pretty similar.

M3 had gigantic GPU changes.

M4 had some security stuff added, and M5 much more so. Not sure how/if those can be disabled. Others can be explain why this matters better than I can.

They change the arch and add new features all the time. In M4 they added new kernel protections which now they need to somehow emulate.

Note, SW rendering. Still great to have that.

> Yes [SW rendering], should have clarified in the original post sorry! Hopefully GPU to come soon, still investigating that. I believed they changed the ISA so we have to modify our compiler, and I love compilers, so it should be fun! :)

source: https://bsky.app/profile/integralpilot.bsky.social/post/3mde...

If anyone else wants the closest thing to a MBP running Linux without waiting for Asahi to fully work, I can highly recommend the HP ZBook G1A.

* It has an all-aluminium chassis that feels a lot like a MBP.

* Hardware all works - fingerprint reader, webcam, suspend etc etc. Takes a bit of work, but all works in the end. Helps that HP ships them with Ubuntu as official option.

* Strix Halo chipset, which is basically AMD's attempt at an Apple Silicon type design. Single big chip, with unified LPDDR5X-8000 RAM (up to 128GB!) shared between CPU and GPU (which is surprisingly strong as well, 40 CU!). This thing is a beast for local LLMs!

Only downside really is the battery life. I haven't played around with it too much, I think there's a bit more room with custom tuned profiles, but rn I get like maybe 6 hours on a good day?

I also have an Apple M4 MacBook Pro from Work and an HP ZBook G1a for my personal. I used to have an Asahi MacBook but switched over with the lack of M3/M4 support. Some extra compare/contrast:

- The build quality of each are excellent. The touchpad on the G1a is probably the closest to a MacBook touchpad I've seen and it even manages to boast an OLED screen. On the other hand, the G1a is only available as a 14" option.

- Strix Halo will still leave you wishing it were Apple Silicon in pretty much every case except "I need to run a x86 native app/VM". It's certainly the best alternative, but you definitely trade away to go to it. You can load large LLMs (I have the 128 GB version for non-AI reasons) but they only run ~3x faster than a laptop without a GPU would because 256 GB/s still ends up being a big bandwidth limit. If you do actually do this regularly, then prepare to hear the fans and look for your power adapter as it does get quite hot doing so.

- Speaking of power adapter... you need either a 100 W or 140 W charger + USB C to be able to charge the G1a while you use it. If you want to use a lower wattage adapter you need to power off, or it seems to draw 0 W out of spite.

- It's massively refreshing to have a normal UEFI bootup process, and as long as you have a current kernel the hardware support is indeed pretty great on the G1a. Between the two, the G1a has better supported than the M1 w/ Asahi - as one would expect for a corporation officially supporting Linux vs a fan project.

If I were to do it all again, I'd say I might have either just gotten an M2 Pro for Asahi or an M4 w/ macOS and a Linux VM as needed. Part of going for an x86 laptop was to be able to dual boot into games with strict DRM, but after trying multiple versions of AMD graphics driver for the 8060s it was more a frustration in random stutters and I ended up not gaming on it as much as I have on other laptops anyways. Bazzite does work great though, just not with all of the different DRMs or games.

According to Asahi's own documentation, they're far from done from the M3. So I guess "now working" is probably a bit misleading...

https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/#tab...

I understand where you are coming from, I think the major hurdle was getting it boot and fixing M3 specific things. Now that it is working, they can port over their driver very easily (they might just work or need a small tweak)

Thank you for the clarification!

I'm not sure that this list is updated; this is breaking news, and documenting stuff takes longer than that.

True. Nevertheless, the fact that it even boots, after many years of it not working at all, is huge news.

> after many years of it not working at all

And by "many", we of course mean "2", because the M3 was only released 2 years ago.

Wow, you're absolutely right. Not sure why it felt like longer to me.

Can't wait M1 to not be supported by Apple anymore to snack up some of that awesome hardware for cheap and run linux on it.

You'll probably be waiting a long time. But already you can get used M1 Airs for about 1/3 what I paid for mine new.

This is super cool and a big achievement, although it's worth noting that this is with llvmpipe graphics (i.e. CPU not GPU).

Although, I was daily-driving Asahi on an M1 Pro before GPU support was here and it was very usable.

Is there any kind of multi-boot support if someone wants to mainly run macOS but checkout Linux on M-chips 'part time'?

Yes, in fact deleting the MacOS install is not a supported way to run the system.

https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/faq/#can-i-dual-boot-asa...

Yes, it installs into a separate partition and you choose whether to boot into macOS or Linux.

While it's awesome that it runs there doesn't seem to be GPU support yet as the screenshot reports the llvmpipe software renderer. From what I understand there are significant difference between the M2 and M3 GPUs so this unlikely to be implemented soon. Unless it turns out this original analysis turns out to be wrong.

Personally I don't consider it "working" as a laptop on an Apple M3 unless you actually have GPU support. Software rending just sucks, even with a SoC as powerful as the Apple M3.

Nice! Good to hear that progress is still being made, I know it was on pause for a bit as developers rotated out and there was an effort to get things upstreamed.

This is great news. If Apple ever get around to releasing actually pro M5 MBPs I'm buying one and turning this M1 MBP into a linux laptop.

I've been running Asahi Fedora GNOME on a Mac mini M1 for some while now (using it right now in fact) with almost zero complaints. A really solid and usable setup. I could see myself buying a used MacBook Air M3 down the road once this work is all finished up, which is very exciting. The prices are already pretty reasonable, even for a 16GB RAM model!

Apple made lower than 16GB M3 models? Man, can't wait till the cheapest model is at least 128GB.

Yeah, M4 was the generation when the minimum got bumped up to 16GB.

Really cool, though if I was looking for a Linux laptop today, I’d be watching the Intel Panther Lake products rolling out.

The top SKU has a similar performance and efficiency profile to the base M5 processor along with faster graphics performance.

Review embargos for the top SKU just dropped today.

You can't really be that naive, can you

Au contraire - which Asahi-supported machines hold a candle to AMD and Intel's Linux support?

I can't recommend Macs to other Linux users in good faith unless they're already stuck with the hardware and loathe macOS. If you need an ARM laptop that supports Linux, you should probably wait for Nvidia to release theirs.

it's this part: "The top SKU has a similar performance and efficiency profile to the base M5 processor along with faster graphics performance." that is naive, this has been the standard lie told by intel as long as Apple silicon has existed, "Ignore everything we've ever done or promised before, our NEXT gen will be as fast and power efficient as apple! We promise this time!". It has never been true, and honestly I don't think it CAN be true when they have to give over a full third of their transistor budget just to decoding the abomination that is x86_64.

Proper testing and benchmarks don’t lie. I’m not sure why you think this is an impossible feat.

https://youtu.be/Xjkzb-j6nKI

12:00 mark, you can see panther lake performs better in Cyberpunk 2077 than the M5 with less power draw.

6:25, Panther Lake is barely behind the M5 chip at Cinebench. Just a slightly lower score at the same wattage.

And don’t forget, the M5 is years away from supporting Linux fully. We are just talking about the M3 getting decent support.

If you’re the kind of person that wants a thin and light laptop for productivity and also wants to fire up some light games here and there, it’s hard to argue that an M5 MacBook Air is the right system for you. Even with recent strides in game compatibility, macOS is a terrible gaming platform that really can’t hold a candle to Windows or Linux x86, and Panther Lake graphics smokes the M5.

Obviously a Mac with macOS is a better choice for things like video editing.

It's believable. AMD's x86 APUs were basically neck-and-neck with the M1 in performance, and when you normalize for production processes AMD was actually more efficient under load: https://www.notebookcheck.net/M1-vs-R7-4800U_12937_11681.247...

x86 is the minority of the issue compared to securing cutting-edge nodes and optimizing for big.LITTLE. And once you factor in all of the dark ops on Apple Silicon (NPU, anyone?), they've basically butt up against the same wall of wasting transistors on specialized hardware that is obsolete within 3 years of release. Minus the ability to cleanly integrate it with compiler tech for efficiency gains, a-la SSE/AVX.

TBH my asahi M2 macbook experience has been the best linux experience I have ever had. It's night and day compared to the XPS 13 I had before which was supposedly a well supported laptop for linux, you could even buy it with ubuntu.

The only real drawback is no thunderbolt, and till recently no DP, and no x86 support. But I don't use any x86 only apps enough for it to matter. No thunderbolt sucks though.

Having multiple hardware features broken isn’t anything close to my best Linux experience.

I’ve got a framework 13 and literally nothing is broken, device firmware updates happen automatically through Linux, literally more integrated with the hardware than a windows laptop.

One hardware feature really. Besides thunderbolt there really isn't anything that doesn't work. I happily give up thunderbolt over the significantly worse performance of the SoC and screen in the framework 13. Especially the screen is terrible. When I purchased my macbook the framework 13 was top of the list of alternatives. But I can't bear a bad screen. Note that I never use macos, I purchased the macbook with the goal of running linux on it. Macbook was simply one of the best supported devices.

Promising progress, I'm excited to try it when they get more things working on M3 Pro

Can anyone point me to a good report of the current working status and known drawbacks of Asahi on Apple Silicon? Would there ever be a reason to run it on a Mac Mini or Apple desktop device? Or at that point would you just get a Linux box?

https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support

I’ve managed to get NixOS running on an 8gb MacBook air which tools a bit of tweaks but asahi installer sets everything up where you can boot and install from NixOS

Could you expand/explain, you install Asahi first and then NixOS?

More or less- Due to the amount of unusual requirements for installing on Apple hardware (such as being kicked off from macOS, to name the tip of the iceberg) the Asahi installer gets used for most (all?) distros running on Apple Silicon. https://asahilinux.org/docs/alt/policy/#installation-procedu...

edit: The minimal UEFI part of the Asahi installer specifically sets up a “normal” environment that other distros (like Nix) can use, it doesn’t actually install a full distro like Asahi Fedora

Thanks! What has your experience been thus far?

Apple makes great hardware (even more so now with their own CPUs) but I've steered clear of it simply because I run Linux. Last I checked the GPU wasn't fully supported and there were also concerns of of efficiency, that power draw is generally higher than macOS, thus the same hardware on Linux doesn't have the same benefit as with macOS.

Asahi includes a shell script that you run from macOS before installation to properly partition the storage (it’s quite involved). I guess, GP ran the script and then just booted from Nix ISO and installed to the new partition.

> Or at that point would you just get a Linux box?

What exactly is a Linux box? If you're running Linux on an M3, is it not now a Linux box?

Considering how far behind they are of new releases of hardware I'd imagine the most appealing use case is going to be trying to squeeze some more life out of outdated hardware that struggles running the latest Apple software. But that's kind of the sweet spot for a Linux desktop anyway, isn't it?

Does an M3 struggle to run the latest Apple software? I'm running an M2 Pro as my daily driver, and I doubt this thing will need replacing this side of ~5 years

I've got a MacBook Air M2 and it's still zoom'n along fine. I did get 24GB RAM, which I'm sure helps... run Chrome :)

No. But that laptop could easily last ten+ years. If they're just starting to get it working now I doubt the experience is going to have all the kinks worked out for a while anyhow.

Same with my M1. I haven’t noticed anything struggling, even with tons of expensive apps running. Tahoe slowed it down to shit (and I’m not just talking about electron-gate), but Tahoe slowed everyone down to shit.

Local models are slowish, I guess, but that’s pretty niche and they’re still usable. Nothing else is even noticeably laggy at all compared to my partner’s M4.

It’s got 64GB so that helps.

Does this include the newer M3 ultra? Huge news if true!

This is awesome, but we'll still need to hear the full support status. Which subsystems are covered by existing development, which need new drivers. Can't wait for the update on https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support

I would never buy a Mac, but what's the issue with supporting Mx processors?

Are they a generic ARM platform or something highly proprietary with ISA extensions and the like?

And if Apple is pulling a Nintendo here why is this project allowed to exist in the first place? It's not like they are getting hit with an anti-trust any time soon.

The problem are really not the CPU cores itself. It's a generic arm core in terms of ISA with just a tiny bit of proprietary extensions. The problem are all the peripherals. GPU, NPU, Display, USB, Wifi, HID, sound etc etc. These all require custom drivers and reverse engineering.

Problem is, there's no such thing as a generic ARM platform. The devil is in too many details even if there was something common between some core designs.

Have they fixed the touchy trackpad issues? Super impressive work, and I want to want this, but...

I've been using it for over a year, if there are any trackpad issue now, I haven't noticed any

oh awesome! I had assumed they were just targeting M1/M2 for the time being

Do the M-series have better wifi support than the last Intel range?

Runs pretty smoothly with iwd. I get occasional disconnects (one every few hours) that may equally be down to my local wifi (other devices have issues with it too). iwd instantly papers over them, so it doesn't impact me either way.

Anecdata: In macOS, M1 Air wifi signal quality was worse than any other laptop or phone I had in the same room. Apple has historically had bad RF designs for a very long time.

Is there a way to make a clean Asahi Linux installation?

still m1 family is the only one that fully(not acutally) supported apple silicon by asahi? I have m1 pro macbook pro btw

Displayport alt mode? Thunderbolt?

At least for M1 they got it working. Seems to be in testing phase now. Promised to come soon.

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...

From that video "Our goal is to make this [dp-altmode] generally available to all people sometime early in the next year [2026]"

Is that display port over USB-C? That’s the main showstopper for me to use Asahi on my M1 Pro MBP.

Yes, the test branch works fine for me, should be officially supported soon.

That's cool!

That's great. The only reason I haven't got it on my M1 Air yet.

I wish it were possible to directly fund DP-alt mode support. It is the only thing remaining preventing me from adopting Asahi.

For me https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/tree/fairydust installed and worked without any tweeks. Don't think you can direct funding, but https://opencollective.com/asahilinux contributes to getting this fully officially supported.

No idea what the fairydust kernel is.

For more context, I gooled around and found this Phoronix article: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Asahi-Linux-EOY-2025-CCC

> On the display side, Asahi Linux developers have been working on the DisplayPort connectivity. For that there are now experimental DisplayPort patches for Asahi Linux via their "fairydust" tree.

That's great news!

and ProMotion, then its a serious contender

Dunno, I don’t care about ProMotion (I’ve got it and I don’t see it), but sleep and battery life are very important to me.

Are you sure you've actually used the higher refresh rate? It might not be enabled by default. I'd be surprised if you can't tell the difference comparing 60hz to 120hz back to back.

Well, I have an M1 Pro MBP so I'm pretty sure.

edit: ok, I've tried toggling ProMotion on and off, and I can see it. However, I still think the improvement is marginal.

I use an M1 Macbook Pro for work and an M2 Macbook Air for home, and I basically don’t see any major difference.

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