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Comment by kamranjon | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

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