Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.3
asahilinux.org
asahilinux.org
This is a wonderful thing to read. I've been a proud financial backer of Asahi since the first announcement of their Patreon account (now OpenCollective). I've only installed and booted it once on an M1 MacBook Air to kick the tires. I liked what I saw. It worked well enough to validate the work being done. I then reinstalled MacOS so that my partner had dedicated modern laptop. I also doubled my donation.
> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.
> As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Oh man, I just doubled my donation again. I'm now at 4x my original donation based on reading this because hell yeah. Congrats to the team doing this stellar work. Now that my partner has a MacBook Neo, I'm gonna wipe that MacBook Air and test out the latest release. I'm so happy folks are doing this.
I support Asahi due to ideological conviction and self-interest (in case I ever want to have an alternative on Apple hardware) rather than because I want to replace MacOS. But who knows. If Apple's rent-seeking behavior with the App Store grows and further disrupts my opinion of them, maybe I'll end up on Asahi full time.
I am just surprised that other features like support of the newer CPUs still get a higher priority than this one. I am not complaining or anything, I am not even related to the project in any way, so not in the right place to ask for anything, but I really am surprised that this seems to not to bother most of the users?
My Dell external monitor (+builtin usb/ethernet hub) connected via usb-c thunderbolt started working right away.
My problem is I can't use my 2nd external monitor. :)
Also no luks fde support which is a big deal, basically I can't take it anywhere.
I am always looking at this "Device Support" page [1] and it's still red there. I even have a calendar reminder to check it out every once in a while, but if it's not being updated I might drop my calendar reminder then :)
You can get an "unecrypted boot, encrypted root" setup though.
https://davidalger.com/posts/fedora-asahi-remix-on-apple-sil...
Did you consider that? I am personally using that and feeling pretty good about it, but maybe I am missing something?
IIRC Asahi has finally acquired Thunderbolt support but that support still doesn't have the pieces needed for external displays.
Is this referring to Omarchy? Anyone have context? TBH I'm surprised their work was ever MIT-licensed instead of GPL.
Very interesting choice of words, but again, all their work including all issues and docs are LLM-generated.
> Omarchy on... > Apple M1/M2 chips# > Asahi Alarm is a version of Arch for Apple M1/M2 computers built on top of Asahi Linux. You can get Omarchy running on top of that with some effort. See the user-driven guide.
Source: https://omarchy.org/manual/omarchy-on/
> [...] You finished what Asahi started, and you’re already pushing on to M4, M5, and M6. Thank you!
Source: https://omarchy.org/news/2026/11/marcelo-alcantara-and-birk-...
edit: worth noting this example, where DigitalOcean started cutting OSS support only to pledge millions of dollars to Omarchy. No wonder people consider the project a leech to the OSS community, but also consider correlation != causation: https://itsfoss.com/news/digitalocean-open-source-credits-en...
At the same time it was mostly to small OSS projects that dont have formal non-profits so no tax exemption benefits to DigitalOcean.
I mean, I get the poisoning the well of open source thing that some companies do. I didn't think Omarchy was trying to do that.
With how good LLMs are at reverse engineering, I've been looking forward to being able to ditch MacOS and still have decent hardware soonish.
Taking back the ownership of our devices to run our software is the positive future LLMs are giving us. We need only to take action.
It seems like many times it's open source but "just to look".
“But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.”
—Theo de Raadt (2001)
That's opposite because copyleft is ultimately about user freedom not developers freedom.
GPL wont help Asahi team for a bit.
Yeah, the whole idea of GPL is to restrict developers from doing certain things, because it would be harmful to users
I agree it was a poor choice of license and that GPL helps build a better community, I'm glad they mad ethe license choice
> In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin.
Permissive licences require attribution. It's okay to complain when people publish your permissively-licenced work without attribution, and hence without honouring the licence.
> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.
But most people just want stuff to work, so it's odd to complain about it when others do manage to get it to work using AI to build on top of their prior permissively-licensed work.
Do the massive amount of vulnerabilities not make you think twice?
At this point, I trust human code less than llm code. Design and architecture of the code still greatly benefit from a good human touch, but I'm not sure how long that will remain true.
I believe that there may be valid reasons to refuse anything that was touched by an AI, but that's not about security. It's more about the non-technical problems coming from AI (centralising power, increasing inequalities, carbon footprint, ...).
There's a reason no Omarchy patch of any kind has made it to the kernel list yet. I did personally look into some of their code and it is certified, hacked-togeter slop.
AI-friendly: you can use the LLMs however you wish, but you must thoroughly understand every part of submitted code.
Slop-friendly: understanding anything is optional.
Some would say yes unfortunately.
As an open source maintainer, when someone opens a PR, I don't know who they are. But I don't really care. I care about the PR: is it a "good" PR (there are multiple dimensions: is it understandable, does it add maintainable code, was it tested, etc) or not?
I think "AI-friendly" says "I don't care if it's written with an AI or not: I want good quality PRs".
I would think that "slop-friendly" is the kind of projects where the maintainers don't read the code. Maybe they try the feature (maybe not even?). I think the Omarchy guy was explaining somewhere that he does not read the code anymore, he just lets his AI write Rust. This is slop-friendly IMO.
If you are not AI-friendly, it means that you refuse to accept a good PR even if you cannot tell that an AI was involved. The mere fact that an AI was involved disqualifies the PR.
Everyone understands that LLM is a mean to an end, but it's clear that Omarchy got two confused and it's showing.
* Author posts patch with a manageable number of lines so maintainer doesn't gets burned out reviewing it.
* Tries to outline on the body what the patch is about and his rationale for the design decisions on the code.
* Promptly answers any maintaners questions about the line changes.
* Discloses which AI model he used to assist on the patch and how was it used.
AI slop patch:
* Submits patch with huge lines of code without explanation.
* The body is written in a self-patronizing tone with superfluous formatting that helps nothing but annoys who is looking for the actual substance of patch
* When questioned by maintainer about some line changes either goes radio silent or reply with the usual AI tone of marketin salesman.
* rarely if ever discloses AI usage.
Spoiler: We have Vulkan 1.4 working, all of M4 and most of M5 working, are making significant progress towards full suspend to ram (no version of Asahi supports this) and this will all be shipped to users very soon!
We also have vrr!
Not sure if it would be useful for you, but I did get an M3 GPU driver kinda working (it boots KDE, runs Quake and GLXGears, etc) but isn't quite usable yet. But feel free to yank the code if it's helpful: https://github.com/SuperDisk/asahi-plus-slop
I'd be very interested in seeing the parent post's project get M3/M3 Pro support; have it working in my system with a patchset on top of Asahi but suspend is leaving a lot to be desired. Unlike Omarchy, the parent post's diff would also be much more reviewable due to it's more limited scope.
Asahi at least guarantees the quality of their stuff because they upstream everything, sooner or later. Gravity apparently also intends to be upstream-first.
Same. I've been waiting 6 years to run no-compromises Linux on my MacBook. At this point, I don't care if someone uses LLM decompiled firmware ported to Linux.
If I could run linux on apple hardware without compromise, my life would meaningfully be improved.
It's not well understood how important it is that humans feel in control of their environment. I feel like it's a fundamental to human happiness. Software that takes that away contributes to the general malaise and hopelessness that many are feeling today. It's just water to them at this point. They don't even see it. But it's the primary means of interaction.
Making that a true option to millions of people could do a lot of good for the world.
It's important work.
I would like to see a full-featured Linux on Apple hardware too, but I think over 99% of people don't feel anywhere near this strongly. Do you feel this strongly about being able to replace the engine in your car with one you made yourself? I don't, and I think most people view computers the same way.
I am not one of those people, as I do not do cars, but I would hazard a guess that most car people over a certain age do in fact feel very strongly about what modern cars have become. The ones who grew up without knowing what ownership feels like less so, which reflects the exact same dynamic with younger generations who are growing up without ever knowing what it feels like to own the hardware they use.
I like the creature comforts on a long journey. I would have given my right arm for satnav when I was driving for work.
I’m much the same when it comes to technology. A phone that doesn’t break is much more valuable to me than a repairable device that fails.
So, yeah, yes, definitely. I wouldn't be working with computers on a daily basis if I had to use Windows.
I'm not gonna overly generalize this though. I don't think it'll be the same for most people but I tend to not care about what most people do 99% of the time anyways.
I have run Asahi and while I love the project, it's not ready for that type of use.
Recently, I got a new MacBook and repurposed my old M1 MacBook Pro for local inference. The unbelievable number of compromises and hacks you need to do to run daemonized always-on software on MacOS was another reminder.
Would love for Asahi or similar projects to be fully usable but it also doesn't seem very likely. Apple is arguably not hostile to other OSes on MacBooks, they're designed to freely boot non-Apple operating systems, but by not publishing any hardware manuals Apple ensures that an Asahi-style project is always going to be well behind, likely years behind, in hardware support.
Gravity Linux vs Asahi Linux
Gravity Linux and Asahi Linux are two independent projects working towards the shared goal of a strong, open OS ecosystem on Apple Silicon devices. Gravity Linux was initially forked from Asahi Linux over differences in policy, namely regarding LLM use. We have tremendous respect for the Asahi Linux project and emphasize our shared goal of running Linux on Apple Silicon.
A shame that the community is split like this but happy to see progress regardless.
This is confusing - your website shows M4 as Wip (i.e. pre-alpha) and only M4 mini as alpha. M5 is not listed at all.
Wip is described as "Bring-up in progress. Not usable yet." So is it "not usable" or "all of M4 (...) working"?
Does it though?
So, "it's better because our code exists, and their code doesn't" isn't the brag you think it is. Yes, a quick thrown together utility is better than having to manually do something. But that's not the same for an OS, or god forbid, a filesystem.
Especially since the only reason your code exists in the first place is that they did the hard work and your project forked.
Enshittification comes for everybody.
I must have missed that; could you share a link to the Linux kernel that's tested and certified as functional on M4 hardware?
It's the operating system, mate. People don't just use operating systems to take screenshots and then post on social media.
> it's better than Asahi code, because our code exists, and their code doesn't
This is an especially horrific comment if you are really related to the project and this also adds to the perspective on why Asahi team might have wanted to have no nothing to do with this project and related people and their thought process. Anyway, good luck.
Unless your meaning is that you already have work-in-progress code that you are working on to make much better whereas they have not even started, I don't see how your point makes sense.
But even then it debatable whether making bad code good is better than creating good code from the start.
> This release is intended for developers.
RE always ran a risk of everything you mentioned.
If this project had been started before the AI craze by some RE amateur you probably wouldn't be this dismissive.
Even good code is a liability. Admittedly "horrific" code is a 10x or 50x liability. Sometimes you accept that kind of technical debt because "it's really important" — e.g. the company will go bankrupt, or whatever.
(Historically, btw, this is why proprietary corporate code is often so much worse than even fairly incompetent open-source code. Because it's just not really that important to ship horrific slop when nobody's income depends on it.)
The idea that shipping "horrific" code now is somehow better than not shipping it until it is fit for human consumption works in some narrow business life-cycle scenarios, but not in any kind of user-facing scenario, and certainly absolutely fucking not any kind of user-facing OS implementation scenario... (T_T)
Otherwise one can also say Asahi is compiler-generated slop compared to hand written assembler code.
Some of us still care.
Or not feeling good for the intellectual theft involved in the training of AI to begin with?
Or not caring for the de-skilling of of human brains who are delegating coding to AI, and increasingly even the architectural and decision part?
Or the training material being AI degradation that awaits most code being written by AI?
Or the baragge of slop PRs that overwhelms my favorite FOSS projects?
Or deeping of big AI dependency, in times of climate and economic crisis that it worsens, but that it also risks not having the luxury of it forever?
Or the ease with which any stupid direction can be followed via AI, and the resulting always changing projects, already a problem with short attention span project leads even for big projects like Gnome?
Or the lack of deeper understanding to control all this in future generations of programmers reduced to "AI operators"?
The rest is all just why you don't love AI generally.
(Not saying you're wrong; just that you expanded the topic substantially.)
Well, none of those stop to matter or get a free pass just because it's Asahi Linux & Gravity Linux.
Especially since I wasn't just answering for Asahi Linux & Gravity Linux. I was answering the question I quoted in general:
"Who cares [if AI is used on a project] if it gives you the features with good-enough performance?"
There are a few significant reasons worth considering when getting down to the level of OS and hardware drivers. Long term maintainability is one. But another big one is that such software is capable of physically and permanently destroying the hardware it's operating on, with the textbook example for Macs being the speakers found in Macbooks. The only way to get the kind of performance they offer out of that physically light/thin package is to give them the power to destroy themselves if run at full force continuously but then run it from software so that they aren't run at full force continuously, but rather take advantage of the headroom that offers for very brief audio spikes whose overall integrated power still falls below safe limits. This all needs to be done from software since response of real world analog isn't instant. That enables much more range then if they were hardware capped at the maximum level they could run constantly, but it also means that if they're driven wrong, poof. The drivers have to never go to certain bad states, purely from software.
LLMs can't offer those kinds of guarantees, they don't really "know" how things work and then produce something deterministic off of that. It's even worse if, as-is the case with this sort of vibecoding effort, the LLM operator is in fact depending on the LLM for that part because they don't know how it really works either (vs someone who is just using it for boiler plate and knows exactly where the critical paths are).
Obviously everyone is welcome to roll the dice with their own hardware as they wish, and it may be ok. Or if using really old hardware one might just not care. And not all hardware is as sensitive as modern notebooks of course. Just be aware the analog world can be messy and you might not actually have the guardrails to screw up that you're used to in a higher level software environment.
>Otherwise one can also say Asahi is compiler-generated slop compared to hand written assembler code.
No, one cannot say that. Or at least not without looking really stupid.
https://github.com/GravityLinux/linux https://github.com/niklassheth/mesa-wip
but as a shipped product you are currently right. That'll change when we ship.
How, exactly? AFAIK, Asahi officially supports just as many Macs as Omarchy does. The vast majority of Apple Silicon support in Omarchy comes from upstream Linux changes merged by Asahi, not any of the Omarchy devs.
The only feature I'm aware of Omarchy adding is the fingerprint reader driver, which is in such a poor state that it could never be merged upstream. Which, if that's the standard of quality Omarchy is holding themselves to, they're the ones getting left in the dust.
> When Asahi Linux was first started, it was with the intent that we develop a Free Software ecosystem for the Apple Silicon platform. To facilitate and encourage the particiation of our friends at the BSDs and other Free Software operating systems, we endeavoured to licence as much of our code as possible under the permissive MIT licence.
> Unfortunately, this is no longer viable. The malicious practices of the 90s and 2000s have reared their ugly heads once again, this time driven in large part by both the insatiable appetite of frontier AI labs for high-quality training data, and militant animosity toward the Free Software community.
> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.
> As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Hear, hear! Perfect clarity of thought. I love these people!
Attribution is the one and only condition of the MIT license, aside from the disclaimer of warranty, so I don't see how it "explicitly allows" publishing without attribution.
It makes no sense to me why you'd adopt MIT in the first place for its permissiveness, and then be surprised that people you don't like are using your code. It's like being a free speech supporter and being surprised that people say things you find abhorrent. That's the point. If you only support speech you agree with, you don't believe in free speech, and if you only support code being developed by people you agree with, then you don't believe in free software.
It makes no sense to me that this makes no sense to you. The Asahi Linux project kicked off in December 2020. About 2 years before the first ChatGPT (Nov 2022). It had a lot of ideals including working with the BSDs at the time, and so they surveyed the landscape and considered the downsides at the time vs the upsides and decided a BSD approach was the right tradeoff. Now, 6 years later, the landscape has changed pretty radically, so they've decided that the downsides have gone up and any value they're getting from the BSDs is not high enough, so they're changing course. This is not hard to follow.
>It's like being a free speech supporter and being surprised that people say things you find abhorrent
No, it's nothing like this at all. Though utterly tortured, convoluted and wrong analogies to free speech are common from people who don't understand it.
>If you only support speech you agree with, you don't believe in free speech, and if you only support code being developed by people you agree with, then you don't believe in free software.
It is apparent that you are overloading "support". Free speech is about opposing the use of violence (direct or indirect) to decide debates as a near-universal default. That's it. Social and economic consequences unbacked by violence are not opposed to free speech, they ARE free speech themselves. If I think your opinion is wrong and stupid, I may "defend to death your right to say it" but then not invite you over to dinner, donate you any money/time/resources to get your message out further, etc etc. That is my own personal free speech in response to yours. And you can criticize that in turn and not invite me and so on and so forth. Free speech preserves this unending dynamic.
By the same token, believing in "free software" is easily overloaded, and claiming that using the GPL means someone doesn't believe in free software like you just did is one of the most absurd and also ancient, tired bad faith attacks that's been around for decades. It diminishes you to make it.
I don't believe that's it. Free speech in addition to being opposed to violence to silence individuals is also against censorship. If you want to publish a book of opinions society finds repulsive, you should not incur violence for saying so, but also you should not be prohibited from publishing your views.
Now of course there's a difference between you not inviting this person to dinner and the government prohibiting this person from publishing their speech, and I understand that. Even before ChatGPT, there still existed bad actors and especially with MIT licensed software, it was inevitable that people were going to take this very valuable code and use it in closed source projects.
Asahi has every right to examine this new landscape and make changes to their licensing as a result. But speaking personally, I release my software under an MIT license specifically because I don't care who uses it or how. I'm not criticizing Asahi so much as I'm pointing out to avoid the MIT license or other similar ones if you have any opinion whatsoever on how your code is going to be used in the future by your friends and enemies alike.
Asahi themselves cited WINE forks from the early 2000's as a case study in "bad actors" abusing permissive licenses. So AI really has nothing to do with this, they were well aware of the precedent in this area.
To me it's just another example of this weird hypocritical stance some free software people have. They love putting the code out there and letting it spread far and wide, but once someone _else_ starts making money building off it, "hey no fair!"
The only thing you ask with a permissive licence is attribution. Why would it not make sense to you that they want it honoured?
From a user's perspective, I can only speak for myself, but I'm grateful for the Asahi Linux project's work. I have less than zero interest in ever running macOS again. It's user-hostile, constraining, and not a good experience. I prefer Debian with Plasma 6. But Apple makes high quality hardware, and they are one of the few choices for a fast ARM laptop with excellent battery life. I avoided getting one for a long time until Asahi got to a point where it ran pretty well on the M1 and M2 with relatively few caveats. Then I bought an M1 Air second-hand, and have used it exclusively with Linux ever since. I'm very happy with it. My only complaint is that I have to waste a big chunk of disk space to keep a macOS install on a separate partition that I can never remove and occasionally need to boot into to get firmware updates since I can't get them through fwupdmgr like I can on most of my other systems.
Unfortunately it appears that Asahi has promised to not allow doing that[1] but perhaps it will enable someone else to make it possible.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50403097
[1] https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/#apples-unspok...
Intereting top two contributors.
curl | sh> `curl https://alx.sh | sh`
curl | sudo bash
Why do people get hung op on this so much? You can just read the script before running it. Of course you won’t though, just like you don’t read the source of the .dmg installer.
By the way how safe that OS and data in it are? Or even that partition is safeguarded by the safeties offered by Apple on a silicon mac?
I thought it is already a solved problem? with large enough numbers of agents running in parallel reverse engineering, implementing kernel modules, testing in vm etc, the whole pipeline seems to be complete.
Did I miss something here?
Debugging is not an issue, Asahi seems to have it figured out, especially with the virtualization. It's the design that takes time.
Meanwhile Omarchy, for example, just brute-forces everything, with ugly patches that work today but cannot be upstreamed as such, so they'll break tomorrow with new kernel release. I really expect them to start struggling a lot going forward with maintaining the support they claim. Regressions may actually kill their effort.
This made me laugh. For context: some people used LLMs to import code to get Omarchy to work on macs. So, these people are switching licenses so that they could stop competitor distros from being compatible.
So, before, Asahi people were happy with Linux working on macs; now they want THEIR linux working on macs (they are not changing to GPL out of the goodness of their hearts or that they believe in everything being open, remember, they are only doing it so that Omarchy, or similar, can't copy their work without having to be GPL themselves).
Meanwhile Omarchy is MIT; which means Omarchy is allowing Asahi (and everyone else) to copy their work, with the actual intent of getting Linux everywhere.
> with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon
which I hope everyone knows is completely dishonest. Nothing in Omarchy is about monetizing Linux; and monetizing Linux is and has been completely fine since its inception.
Asahi people just seem to be sour that someone else is joining the initiative but in a different project where AI use is encouraged to get to the same goal faster.
How to get it fabbed? That's even easier as there are lots of companies with $$$ who'd like to commoditize Apple.
Asahi Linux is a project to provide an option to people who have for one reason or another got themselves an Apple Silicon Mac.
Building their own silicon would serve an entirely different goal.
Choosing GPL and similar licenses is the only way you can publish open source software without running this risk. As professional programmers, we must insist that people either pay us for our work or act as a equal collaborators.
And yes, there's a reckoning coming for AI companies who trained their models on GPL software.
What would that look like in your opinion? Hard to fathom that the people with all the money and power could get into trouble over a licensing dispute.
It's because of something called "Rule of Law"... Most free societies in the world have it.
If you find it difficult to fathom that rule of law applies to corporations, maybe it's time to start practicing fathoming it, or they will have won before the fight even started.
I mean, I hope you’re right…
So far the precedent and the law implies the open source licence won't matter for training and the result. And these decisions will now be brought up in the US in any new cases raised.
GPL doesn't prevent that at all. That's not why Asahi made that change. It's about contributing back to the project, not the money they want to see.
Developers have their own good reasons to stick with permissive licenses. Either because they are completely selfless, or they want to help users who want to kick-start their own business selling software. Just virtuous reasons.
Not sure what will happen when people will directly contribute to the Linux kernel with LLM patches though for these devices, I guess they will have to live with it.
I saw they managed to apply their no-llm policy on top of their upstream mesa driver but I'm not sure how long that will hold if the forks are getting too popular
Would really prefer they didn’t lose to DHH of all people tho
In the PR’s that were merged in that kernel I also see they are actively working towards m4 and m5 as well. Must be hard for Asahi to keep up this way.
I personally vetted that TouchID code you mentioned and it's an absolute hellhole, with everything done in-kernel and no userspace separation what so. That code is also a security nightmare.
regarding 'the useless gui': it was what actually was missing in in the linux world.
i used kde before, which is fine, but it is too bloated and kwin_wayland is unusually heavy on the machine: it maters, especially for mobile devices like laptops.
of course if you use macos and apple hw, you don't care about it , since the stance. i don't run (yet) omarchy on my servers. but there are a ton of other, especially developer / ai friendly, defaults that would make one tinker for days with other distros. as i said i had my own "dot files", but a community built distro with the right defaults is much better energy management than everyone on their own.
If you're comparing Omarchy to KDE, I don't think you understand what either actually is. You can use Hyprland/Quickshell in other systems.
> but a community built distro
Omarchy is also not a community built distro.
I struggle to wrap my mind around it. It's like buying an EV so you can convert it to work on gasoline.
- MacBooks are still among the nicest if not the nicest laptops hardware-wise, so some people like to run Linux on it.
- People have older Macs that they like to repurpose. E.g., we still have an M1 Mini that was used by our daughter before she got handed down a MacBook from my wife. It's now collecting dust, but I might install Linux to use it as a headless server.
Also, this is Hacker News.
By the time said macbook is fully supported, it is in sorry state. Judging by what I found when looking for second hand laptops, macbooks don't age well.
Are you dumpster diving for your MacBooks, perchance? I buy all of mine second hand, they are all still mint by the 5 year mark, and I have several at the 10 year mark that all I've had to replace is the battery.
That's how Linux has been for PCs also for most of its lifetime. Only in the recent 5-10 years things have kind of improved, slightly.
Macbook hardware is superb. I understand why people are interested in replacing the (in some parts) lackluster operating system Apple forces into it.
Dino fuel generator hooked up to Tesla EV: https://youtube.com/shorts/46bRaGP4uqM
I wish I could install windows or linux on it because MacOS kind of sucks, but the device itself is amazing and reason enough to switch away from PCs.
It didn't used to, but now does.
> but the device itself is amazing and reason enough
By continuing to reward Apple, they lose any incentive to improve macOS and it will continue to get objectively worse because people keep giving them money. Why would they fix things if you keep buying it?
Strange argument. Their hardware is without competition, that's the reason I use it and also warrants rewarding them with my money. Why should I reward Linux for (mostly) only working on hardware that sucks in comparison?
To go with your analogy, if I can buy an electric car and replace the engine in it with something that does what I want and gives me 95% of the usable features of the locked down engine that it ships with, why wouldn't I do that? Especially when the rest of the cars on the market are getting 100 miles to a charge when my Apple M2 is getting 300?
What about buying a really nice gasoline car and convert it to an EV?