It's getting a bit old, so it would be nice to replace it with a new MacBook Pro in not too long. But honestly, losing Linux support would be pretty devastating.
Docker and virtualization just isn't the same. There's lots of interesting stuff you can do with your hardware in Linux, there's for example Linux-specific software which puts the WiFi card in promiscuous mode and does useful stuff with that. That sort of software doesn't work virtualized. And I have all sorts of issues with loopback devices in Docker in macOS; 'losetup --partscan' doesn't seem to work at all, even in a privileged container. For these sorts of things, having a genuine bare-metal Linux install I can reboot into is invaluable.
I wish things had turned out otherwise, and we didn't have to choose between buying a Mac without Linux support and buying a 3-5 year old Mac with Linux support. And I expect that as time goes on, Asahi will just fall further and further behind.
I'm not really sure what to do. Maybe this MacBook Pro was just a one-off, and I have to go back to buying Windows laptops and putting Linux on them. But they just aren't as nice.
> I have a 2021 MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro. It's getting a bit old, so it would be nice to replace it
Why though? My 2021 M1 still feels more beefy than pretty much any other laptop on the market. I have a M1, and an M4 for work and I barely feel any difference between the 2, they’re pretty much top notch. Sure, the M4 pro is more future proof, I can imagine myself still using my M1 in 2030 and my M4 in 2035. But I honestly don’t see the point in replacing an M1 with an M4 today.
Just my opinion though, I’m sure you have your own reasons for wanting to upgrade (I would guess RAM), but manage your expectations: the M1 is still an amazing machine.
Don't get me wrong, it still is an excellent machine. But the prospect of over double the multi-core performance and 1.5x the single-core performance, hopefully equating to close to half the compile times, is tempting. Wildly better GPU performance would also be useful now and then. I
“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” M5 is roughly twice the speed of M1 now. It's a no brainer other than money. 4 years of wear and tear and battery cycles is also not nothing.
On macOS you can use OrbStack [1] for a much better experience working with Docker on Mac, as well as quickly spinning up headless Linux VMs (WSL on Mac kind of thing). The free tier will probably be rug-pulled someday, but I've been using it for a couple of years and it makes my life a lot easier when I'm on macOS.
All of these things are running Linux under virtualization and faking it to the Mac user and they naturally have all the same limitations as running a VM. They are effectively like WSL.
P.S. I believe that specific company did some level of rug-pull early on already and started charging people who already relied on it for free because they left Docker which started charging earlier, so I would be vary of relying on them.
Indeed, I misunderstood "Docker and virtualization isn't the same" as "Docker and virtualization on Mac is not as good as on Linux". Now I understand you meant "Docker and virtualizating Linux isn't the same as bare metal Linux".
You can in principle use USB passthrough to do that on a USB WiFi card to do that, I believe, but sucks to carry around a USB dongle especially since macs seem to barely have USB ports...
My daily driver is a 2014 Thinkpad. The only mod compared to stock is that I maxed out the ram. It's been an absolutely amazing machine, especially given that it cost all of $200 second hand (W540). I find it really hard justifying buying hardware that doesn't allow me to do anything that I couldn't do before. Up to 2003 or so I was always chasing the latest and the greatest but now I find that I can do everything I need on this old beast.
I got a new laptop recently and while I didnt need more speed or memory, the fact that it uses less than half the energy as my previous laptop (and correspondingly lasts more than twice as long on battery) is extremely nice.
As an aside - I was under the impression x86 chips were still way behind Apple in battery life, but this doesnt seem to be the case. My new computer has a generation or two old Intel CPU (Meteor Lake) and I am getting 12+ hours out of a ~50Wh battery.
I had an M2 air running asahi that I loved and had similar worries. I ended up buying a maxed out refurbished M2 which I expect will last me a few more years.
> I wish things had turned out otherwise, and we didn't have to choose between buying a Mac without Linux support and buying a 3-5 year old Mac with Linux support. And I expect that as time goes on, Asahi will just fall further and further behind.
IMO your expectation is correct. Such is the fate of all reverse engineering projects, or more generally, all heroism-based projects. Heroism is not sustainable. A sustainable business model is sustainable.
>I'm not really sure what to do. Maybe this MacBook Pro was just a one-off, and I have to go back to buying Windows laptops and putting Linux on them. But they just aren't as nice.
Why would you think that? They're working hard on upstreaming all patches ATM, adding new hardware support will be much easier afterwards.
How is that not helpful? A group of volunteers working in their spare time to do something incredibly difficult clearly aren't working fast enough for this person. The logical thing to do would be to jump in and help.
If you read the rest of the posts above the one I'm replying to I think it's pretty clear this wasn't a serious question. It was asked ironically as in "the rest of the work doesn't matter, they're taking too long to get M5 support out"
I'm saying it's an open project and if people want to bitch they're going too slow they are welcome to contribute.
If you read the rest of the posts above the one I'm replying to I think it's pretty clear this wasn't a serious question. It was asked ironically as in "the rest of the work doesn't matter, they're taking too long to get M5 support out"
I'm saying it's an open project and if people want to bitch they're going too slow they are welcome to contribute.
Alternatively, you can buy a laptop from an OEM that doesn't play keep-away with the Linux upstream using their drivers.
I write lots of Linux software but I have no intention to explicitly support Asahi or Macs whatsoever. Apple's greed is not something I will support with my money or my time, if Apple wants to court the Linux community then they can do it the same way Intel, AMD and Nvidia get along with us. Making your fans reverse-engineer devicetree drivers is just insulting.
Mac hardware is and will be a second-rate Linux experience, which is a shame because Apple could be competing with Nvidia for market share if they simply gave a shit.
It's really pretty incredible - that people are putting up with Apple's "keep-away" is evidence of just how unbelievably far ahead they are in hardware.
And do you think it makes sense to argue that someone who says “macOS sucks big time” but likes their hardware has an “unhealthy emotional attachment to Apple”? If anything, it seems to show a pragmatic relationship (that whatever you like/need from each).
If someone likes their partner's body, but despises their personality and the way they treat them, I would call that an unhealthy emotional attachment, not a pragmatic relationship.
It's almost never pragmatic to assume that your own suffering will necessarily yield a better outcome. Maybe your smoking hot partner eventually becomes a better person, but is it worth investing 10 years of mental anguish for the chance of getting there? A real pragmatist starts dating again, which forces their partner to stop taking themselves for granted. If Apple wasn't a literal monopoly, their customers could be holding them over a barrel and forcing their software products to compete naturally.
macOS sucks because their customers have an unhealthy emotional attachment to Apple. Americans forfeit their opportunity to regulate Apple into real competition, and now we are paying the price with top-down app censorship, UI disaster updates and bugfixes that add more bugs than fixes.
> If someone likes their partner's body, but despises their personality and the way they treat them
Then they have to take the whole package or nothing at all. You can’t swap your partner’s brain. But you can change your OS on your computer. These things are not comparable.
> macOS sucks because their customers have an unhealthy emotional attachment to Apple.
No, macOS (currently) sucks because Apple is doing a bad job. Their customers’ relationship to the company is orthogonal to the OS’ quality.
I don't think that the people who want to buy a Mac to run Asahi Linux have (an unhealthy) emotional attachment to Apple, they wouldn't run Linux on a MacBook otherwise.
(I love macOS, though I also have a ThinkPad with NixOS.)
I recently spent around $6k in a new 14in MacBook Pro with 128gb unified ram and 4tb HD. To replace my old Linux running 2012 MacBook pro.
I searched throughly for something as close to that MBP hw conf but with Linux compatibility. There's just no hardware equivalent to what the Macbookpro, including the build quality.
So I de idea to go for the MBP and install vmware + Linux. It's an amazing piece of hardware.
It's just amusing to me that Linux users since the beginning of time have been working hard on ensuring the maintainers of their software get upset at them and quit working on their software.
Over decades of seeing this, it is entertaining that people never change. There will be a great beauty to the vim v emacs wars in 5723 CE between the people of Gliese 251b and Gliese 251c.
To be clear, I would not ordinarily ask these kinds of questions. I understand that things take time. That's why I'm resigned to the idea that Asahi will never again be roughly up to date with the latest Apple hardware. I only asked this question because hanikesn seems to think that Asahi will magically suddenly be up to date once they've upstreamed everything.
Would I be correct in thinking that once M3 is up and running, M4 (and M5?) - the basics at least - should be relatively easy due to architectural similarities? In the same way that M2 was relatively easy because it was quite similar to the M1?
lenovo p1 and x1 are pretty nice. lunar lake machines are posting macintarm style benchmarks for battery life for light tasks. the screens are matte by default. you can upgrade ram and disk rather than discard (all the framework hype has been the thinkpad standard of upgradability for over a decade). the keyboards are fantastic. they have a pointer stick.
no unified cpu/gpu memory, but you can get nvidia gpus and work with cuda rather than mlx.
The eternal optimism of the techie mind. I saw this coming when Asahi was launched.
What they did was impressive but nobody is superhuman and inherently Apple is all about control. Linux will always be - at best - a third rate citizen.
Get any of the modern laptops with good battery life, install linux + Elementary OS without any hacks or workarounds (or better yet, i3wm which is the best window manager for laptops), and never look back.
Or do what I do, which is buy $200 dells/thinkpads of ebay, and for anything requiring CPU, just ssh into your home server.
Personally I went a step further and use a lapdock with a samsung phone - acts like a laptop with Termux, and I can do pretty much everything with good battery life, because lapdock battery also charges the phone.
I used to be in this camp until I tried and bought an M1 Macbook as my daily driver. I thought I was going to be Thinkpad/XPS w/ Linux until I die. I don't love MacOS but POSIX is mostly good enough for me and the hardware is so good that I'm willing to look past the shortfalls.
Seriously I would love to switch back to a full-time Linux distro but I'm more interested in getting work done and having a stable & performant platform. Loosing a day of productivity fixing drivers and patching kernels gets old. The M-series laptops have been the perfect balance for me so far.
That’s just not true. Every coworker I know who use Linux[1] have occasional issues with webcams, mics, Slack notifications, whatever. It’s all fixable and this kind of inconvenience can be worth it when balanced with the perceived advantages, but saying driver issues are a thing of the past is just a lie.
[1]: I’ve seen these issues on Dell (XPS 13), Thinkpads, and HP laptops
I've been using Linux for 25 years and I think its been nearly that long since I had kernel issues that required patching the kernel (if ever). Maybe back in the 2.5 days?
The only drivers that I've had memorable issues with over the years are printer drivers, but those have nothing to do with the kernel. And printers are pretty cursed on every platform.
Well you should tell that to Dell because I have coworkers with a range of their models that are constantly fighting with webcams, audio, bluetooth, wifi, and Nvidia driver updates.
If they're new models, the webcam issue is not Dell specific, but an Intel / ipu6 thing. It should be integrated into most systems by now though, even as an out of tree module. The rest should just work, especially on xps machines. Without specifying the models/issues, it's hard to take it as more than an anecdote.
They have a line they sell with linux pre installed. Those always work fine. It takes so e work to figure out which old ones on ebay were in that situation.
I'm not really sure what you mean? I've been in fast and crazy startups now years, all the time ton of work to do. Never having issues with Linux, the CachyOS and Fedora spins I run just keep on chugging day to day.
I used to have the same one, with Asahi. There were some problems which were never fixed (battery drain in sleep mode, no working Thunderbolt ...).
Now job will give me a brand new one (I guess M4 or M5), I don't know how I'll do to run Linux on this. Either it'll be a VM or I'll use my own thinkpad. So sad.
The battery drain in sleep mode is why Linux is relegated to a dual-boot option for use when necessary for me, rather than my daily driver. Battery drain when in use or idle seems perfectly acceptable, but I can't use a laptop which discharges itself overnight while the lid is closed. I'm sad that Asahi never implemented a proper sleep mode.
I don't think suspend to disk is properly supported in Asahi. I remember looking into it a couple of years ago and found that it wasn't a solution, and a quick Google search now indicates that it's still not implemented.
Suspend-to-disk (or rather, suspend-then-hibernate) is notoriously unreliable on Linux. Hell, its occasionally unreliable on Windows and OEMs taper their firmware to Microsoft's spec and quirks.
I think buying a year old laptop helps give time for the quirks to get worked out in the kernel.
I was able to follow a fairly standard NixOS config with lvm and encrypted swap. I've never had any issues after hibernating a couple times a day for 3 years.
I don't know what the fuck is going on with laptop hardware. That stuff seems to barely work, despite the chips and stuff being off the shelf. Most windows laptops cannot handle sleep correctly either.
All the Lenvo laptops I've bought for personal use and the HPs my work gets have fully functional sleep under windows. The Lenovos also sleeps just fine under Linux. Wonder if its really specific brands that don't put the effort into their HW or drivers support for sleep?
My Lenovo would just randomly kill its battery even when it was supposed to be full suspend-to-disk - under Windows.
Setting the BIOS option to "Linux-compatible sleep mode" fixed this, but it took me FOREVER to figure this out and I'm reasonably certain I first heard about this fix in a comment here.
The existence of a BIOS option called "Linux-compatible sleep mode" is a dead giveaway that the default behavior is enshittified sleep that wakes up your system periodically so it can check your email, phone home to Microsoft, and maybe fail to go back to sleep.
Having such an obvious name like that is a gift, because otherwise you have to start decoding Intel Marketing names for their features to figure out which are actually anti-features.
If UEFI Secure Boot is enabled, Fedora kernels detect this and lockdown. And hibernation is then disabled. The reason is lack of an autheticated hibernation image. This work has had several proposals but still isn't implemented.
I'm not sure of the status on other distro kernels but allowing it would be a significant bypass of Secure Boot's purpose.
This exact thing is irrelevant to Asahi; the reason they don't support suspend-to-disk is that their drivers don't support full reconfiguration. This is a difficult task, as is "true suspend," because Macs have tons and tons of peripheral SoCs running firmware with their own SRAM, so resuming from suspend or hibernate creates a delta between the firmware state and the system state. (and, before the usual Apple trolls show up, this is true on x86 lately too, but on x86 the driver and platform interface is more standardized to support these kind of state changes without as much OS support).
Needing a way to securely verify the hibernate image is ALSO a problem, and one of the reasons Asahi haven't focused on suspend-to-disk, but it's not the first-order issue.
You can always set the system up to boot in insecure mode via shim, even if UEFI Secure Boot is active. It requires an explicit configuration step with physical presence, but it's doable.
Macs allow the device owner to install an OS that isn't signed at all, without having it degrade the security of the system when you do boot into MacOS.
Fine, but can it be disabled? If secure boot is interfering with another function of the computer, the owner might decide they prefer hibernation over secure boot.
I think what you're missing is that "secure boot" isn't a system-wide on/off thing on a Mac, it's a per-OS thing. And UEFI Secure Boot specifically is something that only exists on a Mac to the extent that Asahi shoehorns it into a system that doesn't natively do anything UEFI-related. It would be very surprising if Asahi Linux didn't still provide a way to skip their UEFI Secure Boot code paths and just plain boot.
When I'm at my desk at my office I use my Linux desktop. My use case for my laptop is to use when I'm out and about, commuting on the train or bus, visiting people, or just relaxing on the couch.
I do that too. But it's like 5% of my computer usage time. And maybe 10% of that fracrion I don't have access to power outlet. My point is that it's just a tiny fraction - for me anyway.
I have a desktop, but I could imagine a life with only a laptop. Sure, maybe 99% of my usage would be at one desk, but if I need that other 1%, I need a laptop. It's the desktop that's an optional nice-to-have. And not everyone can afford or wants to have two computers which are powerful enough to do what they need.
In reality, far more than 1% of my computer use happens away from the desk where my desktop is located. I'm guessing I'm not alone in that.
You still only need 1 powerful computer. Networks are so fast these days and we have stuff like Tailscale it’s pretty easy to use the laptop as a dumb terminal and do all your work still on the fast computer.
Completely depends on what you're doing. If you're working on GUI software for example, you need to run that on your local machine. This is much easier if you're compiling and running the software on the same machine.
Then there are non-development tasks, like 3D modelling or video editing.
Remote desktop is a kind of solution, but it's extremely sub par. Latency is not good unless you're on the same LAN in my experience.
Powerful desktop at home + Tailscale + super light old Thinkpad with amazing battery life has been working really well for me whenever I need to be out and about. As long as remote development works for you I think this is the way.
Yes a MacBook Air as remote terminal back to the beefy PC at the mothership is ideal usually even for for GUI remote desktop unless internet is already unbearable and/or pay-per-GB.
It's not going to support WiFi promiscuous mode but maybe pick up a Pi Zero 2W or similar if that's a requirement.
For the same reason people tend to buy much larger cars than they really need.
They could own a much more economical car, and have enough money left in the pocket to rent a van when they go on big trips, get delivered or rent a trailer the few times a year they need to carry large stuff.
Personally I like having a laptop because I use my computers in different rooms depending on the use case and occasionally on travel.
For my case, and probably the case of many such people, that's closer to 90%. The 10%, however, is a big deal. When you need to take it somewhere, you need to take it somewhere, and a device you can use in that 10% of the time is better than a device you can't use in that 10% of the time, regardless of how superior the latter is in the happy path cases.
I would go nuts if I was confined to working from one spot. Versatility and mobility are too important to give up. And there’s no tradeoff with apple silicon.
I made this determination myself recently, and switched back to a Mac Mini after about a decade of docked laptop use. I use my 13" iPad w/keyboard and 5G when I want to be mobile.
I bought a m4 mac mini but even if 95% of my usage would have only been at my desk, that 5% actually makes me regret not going at least paying about $400 more for a macbook air so I can take it to the bedroom or to a coffee shop.
Thankfully my worklaptop is an m4 mb pro, so I have flexibility with that.
And indeed with virtual backgrounds in I do probably 3 meetings a week in my car so I can do quick errands without skipping a meeting here or there.
How Linux-like can you make a Mac act without changing OS now? It's been a few years since I used a Mac regularly, but even back then you could go a fair way towards making it seem nice enough to use.
You can mostly do that, but: forget about system wide debugging, desktop shell changes, easy security sandboxes, being able to just run new AI software (they're often assuming cuda or CPU), building obscure software without patching makefiles. And the get the general feeling of "whatever I want to change, I'm fighting against the system".
My advice is if you’re truly a Linux user first, give up the idea that Mac hardware is the only best/acceptable hardware. Break the cycle and don’t just buy Apple because their hardware is 10% better than competitors.
The market really isn’t limited to “buying a windows laptop and putting Linux onto it” anymore.
Lots of OEMs support Linux as a first-class citizen.
For me personally I’m enjoying my Framework laptop a lot. Is it the same kind of hardware polish as a Mac? No, of course not. But owning a Framework is like owning an Apple in the sense that the community has fully integrated Framework systems into the ecosystem.
One command installs Framework fan profiles into Bazzite Linux. One command inside Linux updates UEFI and device firmware, try doing that with Windows!
Is the battery like half as good as a MacBook Pro? Yeah. It sucks a little bit. But also, owning/carrying around a $50 portable battery isn’t such a bad thing, and the weight difference is a wash since the 13” Framework is lighter than the 14” MacBook Pro.
And on the plus side, I paid a less than MacBook Air money for a system with 2TB of storage and 32GB of RAM (DIY previous AMD generation model), fully upgradable, fully repairable, with customizable I/O.
A new battery is DIY, $60, not $250 with a wait for service. Replacing a broken screen is DIY $200, not $700 and a visit to the Apple service depot.
One day, I’m sure framework will be selling an ARM mainboard with similar battery life compared to a Mac, and when that day comes I don’t even have to buy a whole new system to get one.
And on top of all that, it’s still a nice laptop that feels premium even though it’s assembled DIY. I’d say the keyboard is better than a Mac keyboard (though the trackpad isn’t).
But also, there are other OEMs where running Linux is a joy and a breeze, along with being fully supported and even sold preinstalled. System76, Lenovo, Dell, and HP all have Linux-supported configurations.
I don't think any other competitor makes hardware of a similar class in terms of quality.
Framework is great, but it doesn't even come close in terms of quality. Specs are one thing, how the product looks, feels, attention to detail, and most importantly: long term viability! even if you take away everything else, macbooks are though. I've used a couple for over a decade with no hardware repair (except when I broke a screen). Most mac users have similar experiences, so it's not survivor's bias.
If all you care about is specs or open hardware, obviously Apple hardware is not for you.
I don't want framework or system76 to move to ARM, a lot of people like me still _need_ x86 hardware.
Thinkpad X1 is very solid and sexy hardware imo, tastes may vary
But my favorite machine of late is a tiny ultra portable with a Ryzen AI 9 chip with 64Gb RAM, it's an x86 that's competitive with the new ARM stuff on power efficiency
What does it matter if hardware still works in 10 years if you can't upgrade software anymore, nor can you replace it with something you have control over (like Linux)?
I still have a fully functioning iPhone 4s somewhere. I could still use it as a daily driver hardware-wise, but it is sadly deprecated (32-bit), so - no software support anymore.
That's the thing. Even when you consider the hardware benefits. Let's say they're 10% better (I feel but happy to be corrected, that feels understated).
There isn't a single machine out there that's even moderately close in terms of build quality. Either at the dollar cost for an entry series MacBook Pro or Air with 36GB (38?) memory.
I don't think there's an OEM Linux or Windows laptop with Linux as a first class citizen laptop out there even moderately close for value, performance and build quality.
Shit I'm not sure if there's even one out there if you spent considerably more than on a MacBook. MacBook Pro's are pretty good value now.
From personal experience, laptops that cost $30000+ (yes, USD) still come nowhere close to even a macbook air in terms of build quality. They have much better specs, but if you run Windows on it, the effects are much less pronounced. I have moved from a new Dell to a macbook with half the cpu and ram and for me t least it "feels" like the macbook is twice as fast and as responsive. I don't know if it is just better architecture or fine tuned software, but that's my experience.
Apple used the whole "economy of scale" effect to invest in specialized tooling/machining that would be too costly to recover the ROI for other OEMs. Keep in mind that consumer laptop makers to the most part don't make a profit (or have a low profit margin - last i checked at least) on laptops and printers. No one else has made the economics of using quality material, top of the line design, and specialized machining/tooling work like Apple.
I think for generic OEMs that may hold , however for manufactures like Huawei with their matebookX line the build quality is pretty much on-par while the components and options being offthe shelf standard means it should be easier to upgrade/support and port Linux to than MacBooks.Also the price is pretty much competititve for the kit that one gets.
The blocking isseu would be getting one as the whole US attack on the company means their kit is pretty much limited edition within China at the moment currently.Maybe in a year or two they should be available at previous volumes.
And then there’s battery life and sleep drain. Only a handful of competitors come close, and those have caveats like significantly reduced peak performance and the usual papercuts so common in the x86 laptop world.
It’s such a problem that if I were to switch away from Apple, I’d try to find a way to go desktop-exclusive and not use a laptop at all, because everything else on the market is so compromise-ridden as to not be worth the trouble. And I say this as the owner of an X series ThinkPad, which are among the better options in that world.
It’s as if most laptop manufacturers can’t be arsed to take their products seriously. So frustrating.
I can’t believe you’re gaslighting us all by claiming “long term viability” is better on a MacBook, a system with zero user-replaceable components, a glued-in battery, soldered-in memory, etc.
A MacBook loses software updates in 10 years. Sometimes less. You can install what amounts to reverse engineered Linux on one if you lose your macOS updates. You have a choice of basically one viable distro.
And this idea that no other competitor makes hardware in a similar class of quality is extremely outdated. I actually own both a modern MacBook and a Framework. This isn’t some HP shitbook from 2011. It’s all aluminum, like I said the keyboard is literally superior to Mac systems, and are we just going to gloss over 2016-2020 when Apple just shit the bed and made utter garbage? Are we going to gloss over how the current systems have a gigantic notch blocking the menu bar that’s somehow bigger than FaceID but only houses a middling webcam?
You admit you broke a screen on your MacBook. How much did that cost you to repair? How long did you wait without your system to repair it? Or did you just go off and buy a new one?
For some types of work, I carry around 3 power banks if I'm to do a full days work away from power. Max screen brightness + high CPU use of long compiles means I'm averaging 40 watts
Add on a starlink and you need a trolley to carry the weight of the power packs needed.
Sure. For your type of work, that's the only solution.
To clarify, I'm totally fine with powerbanks, especially that these days even the cheapo ones support a subset of PD to charge a laptop (sometimes even 12V is enough, my Thinkpad allows that, I've read somewhere that Framework can charge from even 5V). I'm just not fine with solving an objectively poorer battery management (compared to Macs) by just buying external battery and calling it a solution. It's a workaround at best.
Why not? My framework weighs 1 pound less than my MacBook Pro did and the spare battery weighs about one pound itself. Net backpack weight is the same.
If I am guilty of hand waving a spare battery aren’t MacBook die-hard guilty of handwaving away major downsides to the device like soldered-in storage? I saved something like $500 compared to Apple by buying my own 2TB of storage.
And let’s be honest, it’s rare to actually need MacBook Air levels of “sitting away from a power outlet” battery life. It’s definitely nice to have and I definitely wish my framework had that level of battery life but it’s a want not a need, and it’s not as important to me as having a system I can repair myself, having a system that runs Linux with first-class support, plays PC games easily, etc.
I will also say that the spare battery being in my backpack now has coincidentally come in handy countless times outside of the laptop.
And if you want better battery life than that there are other choices like Lenovo, you don’t even have to use a Framework to get a great Linux laptop.
I have a Framework 13 that I use as my personal laptop and a work-issued M3 MacBook Pro.
I love my Framework 13. I'm a long-time Mac user, but I increasingly found myself alienated by locked-down hardware and increasingly locked-down software, and so I ended up switching back to PCs. I greatly appreciate my Framework 13's user-serviceability. While I use Windows 11 + WSL (Microsoft Office is the main thing holding me back from using Linux exclusively, and yes, I was a regular LibreOffice user back in my student days when I couldn't afford a Microsoft Office license), it's great to have the option to go to Linux full-time on well-supported hardware.
With that said, my M3 MacBook Pro has absolutely amazing battery life. By comparison, my Framework 13 has rather abysmal battery life by 2025 standards. In fact, it feels reminiscent of my very first Apple laptop: a 2006 Core Duo MacBook, which got roughly five hours when brand new. Even putting my Framework 13 to sleep drains the battery after a few hours, while on my MacBook Pro, it barely sips from the battery.
I hope future releases of Framework laptops have better battery life; it makes a difference.
My beef with the Framework laptops is that their memory bandwidth is 5 to 8 times slower (depending on the generation, CPU, and RAM) than that of a $1,500 refurbished MacBook Pro M1 Max 64GB.
But then you have a 5 year old laptop that’s going to lose official Apple software support in 5 years and become a paperweight unless you install your choice of ONE Linux distro.
If you don’t specifically have a memory bandwidth-constrained workflow this doesn’t matter at all and having upgradable memory is still better for most people.
If Framework starts using CAMM modules or releases a Ryzen AI board with soldered RAM this difference is lessened/disappears.
fwiw the asahi kernel and patches are usable from other distros just fine; i've done it on nixos in the past and the linked blog post shows some stuff running on gentoo
even the things you mention in your post paint a picture of a difference that for a lot of usage patterns is much more significant than just the last 10%
> A new battery is DIY, $60, not $250 with a wait for service. Replacing a broken screen is DIY $200, not $700 and a visit to the Apple service depot.
This is a weird assertion to make, if you don't have the parts on hand and can't walk into a store to buy them same-day. A big part of the reason I _do_ buy Apple laptops (besides the fact I do like the OS, battery life and hardware) is that I can walk into an Apple Store in any major city I'm likely to be in and purchase a replacement immediately should disaster strike while I'm traveling.
But now you’re comparing buying a whole new computer to repairing one. It’s not like it’s hard to buy an x86 laptop at a Best Buy.
The fact of the matter is that sending a MacBook to depot and fixing it takes around a week including transit times to and from. Apple no longer does any computer repairs in store.
At $60 for a battery or $200 for a screen those parts are so cheap that I could just buy them to keep on hand and they’d still cost less than AppleCare.
Many parts like storage and RAM are standard where, yes, I can walk into a store and buy them and install them same day.
It is in fact very difficult to buy a professional grade computer of any kind from Best Buy, let alone something like a Thinkpad with reasonable specs. You might luck out and be in a city with a micro center, but you probably won’t.
If I’m on the road and my laptop breaks, I’m buying a new one post haste, and resolving the problem when I get home. It’s like 2-3 hours worth of billing time to do so vs screwing about trying to repair. Simply not worth the time.
Framework used to be an interesting option, but then they went ahead and made themselves a non-option by first very publicly financially supporting explicitly far-right software projects and then very publicly doubling down on that support in face of criticism.
if you're going to hold Framework to that standard, wouldn't you also agree that buying a Lenovo machine would be indirectly supporting an authoritarian government with a troubling human-rights record?
You're typically not buying a Framework just because you like the hardware. Framework represents a political project, so you typically buy Framework because you support their values and politics. I don't.
You can rationalise your decision however you want, but to me it sounds like you're mad with the little guy for their lack of moral purity, but you're implicitly fine with a larger company doing much worse. That seems inconsistent at best.
You may find it inconsistent, and that's fine. But I do actually find it worse to buy from the explicitly political pro-fascist company than to buy from the "normal company" which just "incidentally" benefit fascist governments through their normal business operations.
So in other words you've got nothing? There is literally nothing in your links that backs up your claims.
So conferences in every western country should also not invite Chinese or Japanese speakers because they hold similar views to DHH? I'm so over this exhausting need to feel self-righteous.
Your claim was that they explicitly support fascism. That doesn't seem to be the case at all. What you seem to mean instead is: They financially support a popular open source project called Omarchy, which is built by DHH, and you believe DHH to be a fascist.
You're welcome to your opinion, and I have zero insight into whether DHH is a fascist or not, but by no means is that explicit support for fascism! It's not just exaggeration, it's actually a lie.
If you buy a machine from Framework you might indirectly support a project which is maintained by someone whose opinions you dislike.
If you buy a Lenovo machine you will contribute to the revenue of an authoritarian government that will use some of that money to perpetuate human rights abuses against its own citizens, and maybe the citizens of your own country too one day.
Which is the most moral choice here in your opinion?
I mean I already answered that, didn't I? I find it worse to buy from the explicitly political pro-fascist company than to buy from the "normal company" which just "incidentally" benefit fascist governments through their normal business operations.
To exaggerate, we could imagine that there was an explicitly nazi computer manufacturer who put swastika stickers on their laptops and everything. When faced with the choice of Lenovo and this explicitly nazi manufacturer, I would probably choose the Lenovo, even though you could probably do the same consequentialist math and conclude that Lenovo does more actual harm through their utility to the CCP than what the tiny nazi computer company can do. I imagine you feel the same way.
What Framework does is obviously way less egregious than my hypothetical example, but I'm still not comfortable associating with a company which so publicly funds DHH, for the same kind of reason that I would not be comfortable associating with the nazi computer company.
International trade is extremely complex, funding and publicizing a project is not. Framework supports DHH, both financially and in terms of publicity. That's not something I wanna support.
The mental gymnastics and contortions you are putting yourself through are quite stunning. You're finding associations that do not exist. I feel I'm staring at a wall strewn with thumb-tacked red yarn, linking all sorts of nonsense together while the creator steps back and exclaims "see, proof!".
Framework makes hardware and software. If you're going to close yourself off to any product or organization that happens to have some users you disagree with - then you're not going to get very far in this world. This is a wild, and frankly unhealthy perspective to hold.
Please explain which associations I'm finding which do not exist.
> If you're going to close yourself off to any product or organization that happens to have some users you disagree with
I do not see where I mentioned Framework users. I care about the actions of the company. I care that they decide to support DHH, financially and through promoting his projects, and I care that they double down on their support in the face of push-back.
I don't know... As someone who many people would characterize as "way too woke", this doesn't really quite ruin Framework for me (though I don't own any of their products).
DHH is certainly an ass, and this is my first time reading about the racist stuff (before this I just found him generally extremely unlikable), but just general association with someone with shitty opinions doesn't fully ruin a project for me. I guess Omarchy is popular nowadays (I'm really not sure why, if someone really knows, please explain), people are going to want to use it on their Framework computers, ergo: Framework has a reason to cooperate with Omarchy developers so their devices work like the customers want them to, and I guess I'm fine with it even if DHH leaves a bad taste in my mouth...
I guess I sort of feel similar in regards to suckless, I don't really like most of their projects, from what I've heard there are some abhorrent people involved, but I wouldn't really put blame on the distro maintainer that packages their projects for their users to use, I guess?
Though, I definitely get why people might feel differently.
I tried, and all I found was some hearsay. Ethical concerns were raised by many publications without any specifics. Some mention the issue is building on top of hyprland, which (oh god, no) has some ethical issues.
I respect your opinion, but I disagree. It's not like DHH is just some contributor, he's the public face of the project and the person who stands to benefit from its success.
You don't seem to understand what fascism actually is. None of these things are that.
Even though I disagree with DHH on all of these topics I don't see how it's relevant to Free Software at all unless the distro were using the webcam and IP geolocation and refusing to work for brown people in England.
The M4 wins on slickness due to 1) unibody 2) Apple Silicon (and running local AI models, and the occasional game that is actually optimized for Mac like BG3) 3) excellent screen (HDR, high contrast, etc.), but the Framework wins on cool-ness and, frankly, ethics. (Especially since I put NixOS on it with ZFS-on-root mirrored across 2 internal SSD's.)
No idea what the future of that project, or its potential integration with other container management systems might be, but it is certainly interesting at first glance.
Promiscuous mode is just when the WiFi chipset picks up all the WiFi packet it sees. In the normal mode, the chipset will drop everything that's meant for a different MAC address. The ability to switch to promiscuous mode is very common, and Linux exposes generic APIs to switch an interface to promiscuous mode if the driver supports it.
I get this feeling but frankly I feel more comfortable running Linux on 2+ year old hardware than brand new hardware having experienced both now, if for no other reason than all the questions you have have probably been asked and answered.
And yeah each iteration of the M chip has gotten better, but even a standard M1 is a very capable chip these days.
My work laptop is a 2021 MBpro. M1, 16gb ram, nothing special. Still very capable machine for video editing. One of my department livestream machines is an M4 Mac mini, 16gb ram as well. I regularly juggle between the two and the only two big things I notice are 1) multi screen support (M1 can only push to one external which is annoying), and 2) noticeably better but not wildly improved render times (admittedly this difference is a bit more stark when you’re doing heavy lifts like resolve fusion comps and intense coloring/masking). On any given day they are basically the same machine to me.
Suffice to say if you’re running on an M3 right now and are feeling the need for an M5, unless you’re doing really bleeding edge heavy duty work, I just don’t think there’s that much you’re missing out on. So Linux on an M3 to me is great.
I don't see the connection between Asahi and Linux VMs. All the work in Asahi is about making drivers for Apple's hardware and board bring-up, none of that is relevant for VMs. It sounds like you're saying Asahi Linux would get more adoption if it was something completely different which shares nothing at all with what Asahi actually is?
Honestly anything you get beyond MacOS is probably seen as a security hole by Apple and will get blocked and patched in the long run. It's the whole point of their locked down ecosystem: There is only Apple.
> When documenting the security model, Apple use the example of an XNU kernel developer wishing to test their changes on a second macOS installation. It is apparent however that the platform security model was engineered to allow third party operating systems to coexist with macOS in a way that does not compromise any of Apple's security guarantees for macOS itself. *Rumours circulating that Apple are actively hostile towards efforts such as Asahi, or that their security must be bypassed or jailbroken to run untrusted code are unfounded and false*. In fact, Apple have expended effort and time on _improving_ their security tooling in ways that _only_ improve the execution of non-macOS binaries.
Regarding Framework laptops being "Macs for Linux," Frameworks are fantastic in their own way but they don't come anywhere near the build quality (or battery life) you get with a Mac.
IIRC, when the Asahi project first started, Apple's response was they they didn't care about the project, and would make no efforts to hinder or help them. They also hinted that running an alternate OS was an acceptable use of device.
Man you randomly reminded me of when magic lantern was completely changing the game with their firmware side load on Canon DSLR’s. Then after a few years Canon decided “nah screw y’all” as they quietly pushed a firmware update that blocked it.
I was an early adopter of Asahi Linux on my M1 Mac Mini (and later M1 Mac Studio). As a result, I benefited from the most amount of support for the platform at the beginning of the project (laptop-specific hardware support was provided after desktops) and have been using Asahi ever since (now Fedora Asahi Remix).
It's nice to see that M3 and later is coming, but as a Linux person, it's not necessarily a bad thing to be a bit behind the latest hardware. After all, many of us still use ancient Thinkpads running Linux, and prefer to buy used hardware for a better cost (M1/M2 hardware can be had much cheaper now).
Well said. There is a large number of inexpensive, long-batteried, powerful devices with lovely designs, good keyboards and trackpads that Asahi Linux has enabled to run Linux on beautifully.
There are a 1st gen M1 Air wedge and M1 Macbook Pro 14 in my home that belong to other family members. I look forward to running Asahi on them when the users eventually upgrade.
"I really love what Asahi Linux is doing, but given Apple’s yearly release cadence of new chips, it feels like a Sisyphean task."
This is more true on the gpu side than the cpu/soc side for sure.
Speaking as someone who worked on this (i did a bunch of the m3 work here, and some wifi work) - it's not anywhere near as bad as embedded work i used to do many eons ago.
Apple doesn't like to spend tons of time/energy either, and since they make most of their own hardware interfaces (or force others to their specs), most of the time the driver->hardware interfaces are just being extended/improved year over year.
Sometimes things move from one bus kind to another, and there's different hookup to do, or you have to get around to some functionality you never did, etc. But it's not like you need a brand new driver every year for the usb controller, for example.
Power management is probably one of the worst changing areas, along with NPU/GPU obviously.
Put another way - outside of NPU/GPU, you can slowly build up enough of the driver base that it can be maintained and kept up to date by a small number of people with not huge amounts of time.
It's not there yet, but it's possible to get there.
This is because Apple doesn't get a lot from changing this stuff either.
As others have noted, Linux is fine on older hardware, always. In fact, laptops I would have otherwise thrown away were given totally new life by Linux alone. Windows is too bloated the last few years. It is really ridiculous how much Windows bloat there is, no amount of breaking the OS with unstable tweaks ever did it any better either. With Linux you can go as lean and minimal as you want and need, without breaking the OS.
Yeah when I got the first gen base model M1 Air, I put it to the test against my maxed out i9 MacBook Pro (basically the last Intel model they released, so it was the “best of the best” they had to offer on the Intel side).
I tried out using Handbrake to CPU encode the same video on both devices. Amazingly the M1 Air was slightly faster than the i9, while comparatively sipping power, and staying relatively cool without even having a fan. The i9 on the other hand drained its battery super fast, sounded like a jet plane taking off, and was too hot to sit on my lap.
That’s when I knew it was really a massive leap forward.
We're witnessing the end of the IBM PC-compatible era, and maybe more ominously of general-purpose personal computing. The future looks like custom chipsets with signed bootloaders that only run signed OEM applications. You will not have root on any of the devices you nominally own.
The tide does seem to be turning that way, though I do think it will be possible to buy general purpose computers for the foreseeable future.
Also as a minor counter point, the only reason Asahi is even possible is that Apple explicitly designed in support for booting other operating systems into the M-series chips. They certainly could have locked them down just like they did the iPhone and iPad, but they didn't. That was a conscious choice according to the Asahi folks.
So while they may not be sharing technical documentation/drivers or otherwise making it easy on the Asahi devs, even the famously "walled garden" Apple seems to have explicitly not restricted their new line of computers in the way you're describing.
> Apple explicitly designed in support for booting other operating systems into the M-series chips
Thank Xeno, who has since been creating open-source training on low-level firmware security at https://p.ost2.fyi, a new iteration of open training material published ~15 years ago at https://opensecuritytraining.info before joining Apple.
his final project was leading the M1 SecureBoot architecture - being directly responsible for designing a system that could provide iOS-level security, while still allowing customer choice to trust arbitrary non-Apple code such as Linux bootloaders.
> Apple explicitly designed in support for booting other operating systems into the M-series chips
Don't you think it's interesting that it's an option for Macs but not iPad Pros? They both use the same SoC.
> So while they may not be sharing technical documentation/drivers or otherwise making it easy on the Asahi devs, even the famously "walled garden" Apple seems to have explicitly not restricted their new line of computers in the way you're describing.
Give it a few more years. Asahi will probably be so far behind that it wouldn't even matter. Eventually they can just turn off allowing third-party operating systems on new hardware.
> Don't you think it's interesting that it's an option for Macs but not iPad Pros? They both use the same SoC.
Apple has always sold iPads as a closed walled garden and Macs as an open platform.
Apple designed the Apple Silicon Mac hardware to allow you to run an unsigned third party OS without a negative security impact when you run MacOS, because it is an open platform.
However we have definitely seen examples of other formerly open platforms facing new restrictions.
Android was sold to the public as an open platform that Google is actively closing with new restrictions to side loading apps
Windows was sold to the public as an open platform, but Microsoft is locking out users who refuse to use an online account to access their local computer.
> Don't you think it's interesting that it's an option for Macs but not iPad Pros? They both use the same SoC.
I think that has more to due with product positioning. They see the iPad as an iPhone style device (though it’s slowly getting more Mac-like), so kept it locked down. Not saying I agree with their decision, but I get why they made it.
> Give it a few more years. Asahi will probably be so far behind that it wouldn't even matter. Eventually they can just turn off allowing third-party operating systems on new hardware.
Unfortunately I think this is probably going to be true, but fingers crossed.
I will say though that while I like the idea of Asahi in theory, I installed it for more than a year and ended up really never booting into it. When I needed Linux for something (which is pretty rare since most any tool I would want I can just run natively in macOS terminal) it was always more convenient to use a VM, so I personally won’t lose anything if I can only run macOS, but in principle I’d like it to stay open just like the Intel Macs were with Bootcamp.
The team implemented a version of the Qemu Tiny-Code Threaded Interpreter (TCTI). Qemu TCTI interprets the code rather than compiling it, allowing Turing Software to get around the JIT ban. Mind you, this results in a rather slow experience even by the standards of the emulated hardware.
StikDebug enables on-device JIT for any app, making it possible to run DolphiniOS without sideloading or tethering to a PC or Mac.. approved in the U.S. App Store.
Emulation is completely different to actually running a different OS on your device.
The fact that you need to launch apps through a debugger to enable JIT is hilarious though. Every other platform either allows it all the time or doesn't! I would not count on it staying on the App Store - Apple can remove it whenever they want to
> Asahi will probably be so far behind that it wouldn't even matter.
Why would they fall behind? Asahi caught up from scratch the first time, they might catch up again. Maybe not for every new model, but they can simply skip some of them if forced to prioritise.
> Apple explicitly designed in support for booting other operating systems into the M-series chips
Is it possible to buy a compatible M-whatever Mac and install Linux on it without network access, without it phoning home to Apple for permission?
Sincere question since I have only used one Apple Silicon Mac ever, and it was a work machine so I never tried Asahi on it. I am curious about the privacy implications of non-macOS support.
Hmm you know I’m actually not sure. I think at least currently you have to do the install from macOS so I guess you have to set it up once at least, but I’m not sure if that actually requires internet access.
I so know that once you have Asahi installed you never need to boot into macOS again if you don’t want to and don’t require network checkins or anything like that to keep using it.
Also unlike Windows 11, it’s trivial to set up macOS without ever creating an account with Apple, so you don’t have to give them personal info or even an email or anything to do the initial macOS setup.
They mention Hollow Knight in their update, but I should note that Silksong also works on my M1 Air flawlessly. Games with more 3D graphics also work to some degree. I tried Bakeru on it and got decent results though the texture load time was significant.
Asahi has been fun to watch, and I’m happy it’s still moving along, even with the messiness of the past twelve months. I rarely boot into MacOS on the machine these days, and while I’m mostly using a PC these days, I am debating getting a used M1 Pro or Max for the battery life benefits (and access to Mac graphics programs on the rare occasions I need them).
The fact that M3 is technically possible, even if likely a while off, is promising.
I appreciate the focus on older hardware and virtualization challenges in this thread, but I'm also interested in the broader implications of the Asahi work beyond just running Linux on used Macs. Getting a bespoke SoC supported in the mainline kernel and rewriting low‑level firmware in Rust could set a precedent for other ARM64 platforms with opaque boot chains.
It might also encourage more laptop makers to ship machines with first‑class Linux support so people aren't forced to pick between hardware they like and the OS they want. And for folks who don't need a Mac specifically, the growing ecosystem of non‑Apple ARM laptops could offer a smoother path than shoe‑horning Linux onto proprietary silicon.
Twenty years ago people went to great lenghts to run the best OS available at that time on cheap commodity x86 hardware with hackintoshes. Fast forward to today, similar efforts are made to run linux on the best hardware available. It's funny how things turn around.
The various Hackintosh projects are on life support not because the interest for that kind of thing has died; it's because Apple doubled down on chain-of-trust and is abandoning x86.
Apple made it impossible to use iMessage on a Hackintosh without spoofing another Mac that's not in use. That pushed A LOT of people away from using a Hackintosh.
The second thing is abandoning x86. Apple has already announced that macOS 26 is the last release to support their Intel machines. That means that next year, there will be no way to run the latest macOS on any Intel machine. That's basically the end date for all these projects, as the Hackintosh crowd has always been about running the latest version of the OS. They're not interested in running System 7!
Even before the AS transition, GPUs were becoming more important and Mac OS GPU support was becoming even worse. At some point you were basically limited to a few AMD options. Very unattractive OS for a custom tower by then.
Like I did put a Nvidia 650ti? in my Mac Pro, and it sorta worked initially under OSX, but way slower and glitchier than in Windows and eventually just fully incompatible.
Well there's that (I think cause MBPs kept BBQing) and also Mac OS deprecating OpenGL and overall being different in ways that often prevent you from taking advantage of a dedicated GPU.
Which I'm fine with on my laptop or Mac mini, but if you're building a tower with a GPU, yeah
To clarify, people then and now have in common trying to run the software they prefer on the hardware they prefer. There's no objective "best"; it depends on what you need.
For the vast majority of customers' utility functions, Apple has the best hardware (both in absolute and per dollar terms) on the market right now. It's not "objectively best", but it certainly meets the most stringent definition of "best" that's still useful in conversation.
Hate to break it to you but before the term "hackintosh" existed there was an army of folks making linux work well on cheap commodity x86 hardware, the success of which ushered in the dot-com booms - filling datacenters across the globe with cheap x86 hardware running linux. A reality persisting to this day, though with far fewer players thanks to decades of consolidation.
The hackintosh is a far smaller and more ephemeral niche hardly qualifying as ever orienting the proverbial table.
The project is currently mainly focused on upstreaming as many of their patches as possible, and maintaining the existing code. M3/4/5 have a completely different GPU instruction set from M1/2, so they would need a large amount of new reverse engineering to get the GPU support where it is on M1/2. I don't believe there's anyone working on GPU support for those newer platforms.
The project is currently focusing primarily on reducing the number of patches against the Linux kernel which has somewhat slowed their rapid development rate.
It’s a massive task keeping the large number of patches going, while simultaneously trying to land them in the mainline kernel.
i was using Asahi on my M1 laptop, it was great, but have since switched to UTM.app (from the app store, but available outside it too), and configured to use Apple Silicon Hypervisor rather than QEMU, and it's been excellent, on M2 series processors at least. UTM warns its wrapping of the Apple Silicon hypervisor is not perfectly tested, but it's perfectly great.
(When configuring a new hypervisor-ed OS, i use a Fedora ISO for arm64 (or aarch64 (?)) and in the UTM.app gui choose Linux, which reveals the option to use native Apple Silicon hypervisor over QEMU.)
If I was stuck on Mac and wanted Linux for my dev machine, I would go the VM route. I did that over a decade ago and it was great.
Asahi, while a heroic project, was always going to struggle long term and I wonder what kind of battery hit you take using it. I’d rather keep the vertical integration in the Mac ecosystem and just log into a vm that I full screen. Best of both worlds
when this project was first announced I was incredibly skeptical it would ever become something useful. then sometime last year they actually put out something that worked way better than i ever imagined and i became incredibly optimistic and hopeful. then hector, lina and alyssa all left and this project appears to be on life support.
While upstreaming is incredibly important for long-term support it isn't nearly as exciting as the reverse engineering work the people mentioned were responsible for
The amount of effort and polish that goes into Asahi is commendable. I installed it on an M1 MBP and the process was seamless, from the initial curl, to it handling the disk partitions. It was a work of art. Fighting to install native linux on apple silicon is an uphill battle though.
I honestly dont get why apple isn't more open with their drivers and stuff to get linux working on macbooks, they don't charge for macos, most of their profit comes from hardware it feels like opening up macbooks to be used by people that are linux diehards would just open up more sales
Most of their profits come from software or ecosystem lock ins. So while they do profit off of each Mac sold, if those sales don't translate to more iCloud subscriptions, app purchases, or iPhones then it really doesn't make financial sense for them. Even if they only had 3 people and a PM dedicated to Linux support, that's still roughly a million dollars a year for a nebulous promise of "slightly more hardware sales." It sucks but it's the reality of the situation.
As other comments have mentioned, they have kind of a "total hands-off; neither help nor hinder" policy around 3rd-party operating systems on Apple Silicon. They aren't providing any kind of assistance, but they aren't doing anything to obstruct it either: even though the Linux drivers have to be reverse-engineered, the actual installation process is very easy and not inhibited at all by the extensive cryptographic boot chain protections built into macOS, even though it easily could be. And as far as I know, what little they have said publicly about this is that they don't intend to ever try and actively block Linux.
So in that sense I think it's mostly just a resources thing: they don't feel it's worth their time and money to assist this process. Which, honestly, I can't get that upset about: we're not entitled to Apple spending resources to help people install other operating systems on their hardware; so long as they don't actively impede the process I see no reason to get upset.
I don't understand the obsession with the new apple hardware. How is it worth this much trouble? My XPS13 works perfectly with Linux straight out of the box for half the price... and never in my entire life have I needed more than the eight hours of battery life it reliably delivers for me.
I do most of my work over SSH on big metal machines, maybe that's the disconnect? But seriously, there are few things in the world that matter less to me than how fast my laptop is. I did some real work a few weeks ago on a ten-year-old Celeron POS and it didn't bother me at all.
> I do most of my work over SSH on big metal machines, maybe that's the disconnect?
Yeah, I believe that's where the disconnect is. I moved from a Thinkpad to the 16in Macbook Pro with the M3 Pro chip, and I am able to reliably build and write code that runs locally on 5 different Docker containers, for at least 10 hours. I once did a 48hr hackathon with this laptop and I only had to charge it I think 4 or 5 times. I need to be very mobile as I'm going to different locations to attend meetings or write code, and it's able to do everything reliably for a (very extended) workday.
I would have to move from wall socket to wall socket on my old Thinkpad, but something to note is that I was using Windows 10 at the time. The Macbook's best-in-class (in performance-per-watt and per-kg) hardware combined with the software was something that became unbeatable for my workflow.
That being said, my next laptop will be a reliable, non-Apple, but Apple-like performance, ARM64 laptop, and I'll be using some Linux distribution on it.
It's not that I actually write code over SSH (I usually work with wifi disabled), more that I just push things to big machines for building and testing them, rather than doing that locally. My pair of 32-thread Ryzen machines are worth their weight in gold for the amount they juice my productivity. No laptop can ever touch that, for obvious physics reasons.
I can do everything you're describing with my XPS13. I regularly go days without plugging it in.
I suppose for folks here, they like being able to do dev work (as well as web browsing) on a fast laptop with low power draw. Sounds like that's not exactly your use case.
To add a bit (I wrote this in response to a deleted comment):
The yocto build I'm currently working on takes about six hours to complete on my biggest machine. Yes, it's an incremental build, but warming up a laptop would require several days of 100% CPU :)
It's also not really possible to test locally, even a VM of the right architecture is insufficient without doing a bunch of work to make it match the target hardware.
Often you can build a quick little ad hoc thing that lets you test some piece of it locally, but sometimes it's too much work.
Frequently I need to compile test several dozen Linux kernel configurations with different cross compilers, each of which takes half an hour to run on the huge box.
I can't imagine doing any of this locally on a single laptop, I would get 1% as much done as I currently do.
Honestly, I almost wish there was a push to get Apple to be more open on their OS code instead of trying to get Linux to support Apple Silicon. MacOS is a BSD of sorts, after all.
While it'd be nice to be able to run Linux on my M2 MBP someday when Apple stops supporting it, ultimately, the reason many (but not all) power users buy Macs is because they want the UNIX/UNIX-like work done for them and for it to run on fast hardware. If I want something more customizable, I'm barking up the wrong hardware tree.
Does that solve the question of "what do I do with this Mac that no longer gets updates?"? No, but most people either list theirs for sale to someone who isn't as bothered by that, or trade it in at an Apple Store for credit towards the new shiny.
Not happening—at least not under the current leadership— apple is not in it from the tech side, they're a design company, they make appliances not computers. Your macbook is like a fridge with certain restricted interfaces. The mindset and tradition is different from purely unix hacking, despite the userbase having an overlap. If you can convince your fridge manufacturer to be more open with their code in a competitive market, then maybe you can convince apple with similar sort of reasoning, probably involving some benefit in terms of profit.
i mean, i did a bunch of the m3 support that m1n1 has, and i did it because it was fun. The reason you get blinking cursor and not linux is because hacking on the linux kernel is decidely less fun (I did a bunch of wifi work).
Oh, that's interesting. Linux kernel hacking is the area where I have the best chance of contributing something. If I can get my m3 max bootstrapped to a blinking cursor then I'd be very happy to participate in kernel work.
It's not so much that other companies support Linux. It is that they support industry standards and protocols. Apple is totally vertically integrated and they always cut corners on hardware implementation to save money. This means their hardware does not work how it should and requires custom work arounds and patches if you want to run a normal OS.
This is very different from PC hardware. It doesn't need to support linux. It just needs to not cut corners.
I have a 2021 MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro.
It's getting a bit old, so it would be nice to replace it with a new MacBook Pro in not too long. But honestly, losing Linux support would be pretty devastating.
Docker and virtualization just isn't the same. There's lots of interesting stuff you can do with your hardware in Linux, there's for example Linux-specific software which puts the WiFi card in promiscuous mode and does useful stuff with that. That sort of software doesn't work virtualized. And I have all sorts of issues with loopback devices in Docker in macOS; 'losetup --partscan' doesn't seem to work at all, even in a privileged container. For these sorts of things, having a genuine bare-metal Linux install I can reboot into is invaluable.
I wish things had turned out otherwise, and we didn't have to choose between buying a Mac without Linux support and buying a 3-5 year old Mac with Linux support. And I expect that as time goes on, Asahi will just fall further and further behind.
I'm not really sure what to do. Maybe this MacBook Pro was just a one-off, and I have to go back to buying Windows laptops and putting Linux on them. But they just aren't as nice.
> I have a 2021 MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro. It's getting a bit old, so it would be nice to replace it
Why though? My 2021 M1 still feels more beefy than pretty much any other laptop on the market. I have a M1, and an M4 for work and I barely feel any difference between the 2, they’re pretty much top notch. Sure, the M4 pro is more future proof, I can imagine myself still using my M1 in 2030 and my M4 in 2035. But I honestly don’t see the point in replacing an M1 with an M4 today.
Just my opinion though, I’m sure you have your own reasons for wanting to upgrade (I would guess RAM), but manage your expectations: the M1 is still an amazing machine.
Don't get me wrong, it still is an excellent machine. But the prospect of over double the multi-core performance and 1.5x the single-core performance, hopefully equating to close to half the compile times, is tempting. Wildly better GPU performance would also be useful now and then. I
“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” M5 is roughly twice the speed of M1 now. It's a no brainer other than money. 4 years of wear and tear and battery cycles is also not nothing.
On macOS you can use OrbStack [1] for a much better experience working with Docker on Mac, as well as quickly spinning up headless Linux VMs (WSL on Mac kind of thing). The free tier will probably be rug-pulled someday, but I've been using it for a couple of years and it makes my life a lot easier when I'm on macOS.
[1]: https://orbstack.dev/
There’s also https://github.com/apple/container now
All of these things are running Linux under virtualization and faking it to the Mac user and they naturally have all the same limitations as running a VM. They are effectively like WSL.
P.S. I believe that specific company did some level of rug-pull early on already and started charging people who already relied on it for free because they left Docker which started charging earlier, so I would be vary of relying on them.
> They are effectively like WSL.
You mean WSL2. WSL1 was more like Wine than a VM. I am still sour they did away with that approach, I thought it was the coolest thing.
Not a rugpull; monetization was at the top of the FAQ from the beginning.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230331034854/https://docs.orbs...
Them saying “we’re going to pull the rug” in advance doesn’t make it not a rug pull, it just means you have advanced notice of the rug pull.
How is wanting to build software sustainably a rug pull? Like seriously, if you get value from orbstack, it's fair to pay them.
Otherwise you can still stick to free alternatives like colima which would be CLI only
[delayed]
Isn't an intrinsic part of a rug pull deception?
And you're saying that this can set my WiFi card in promiscuous mode as if I was running Linux bare metal?
I'm not.
You mentioned Docker and virtualisation and this tool has addressed most of my pain points with those, that's it.
Sounds like it doesn't address my pain points then...
Indeed, I misunderstood "Docker and virtualization isn't the same" as "Docker and virtualization on Mac is not as good as on Linux". Now I understand you meant "Docker and virtualizating Linux isn't the same as bare metal Linux".
Oh, I get the misunderstanding now. Yeah I meant that Docker and virtualization isn't the same as bare-metal Linux. Sorry for being a bit unclear
You can in principle use USB passthrough to do that on a USB WiFi card to do that, I believe, but sucks to carry around a USB dongle especially since macs seem to barely have USB ports...
I'm happy with my AMD Thinkpad running Linux ...
My daily driver is a 2014 Thinkpad. The only mod compared to stock is that I maxed out the ram. It's been an absolutely amazing machine, especially given that it cost all of $200 second hand (W540). I find it really hard justifying buying hardware that doesn't allow me to do anything that I couldn't do before. Up to 2003 or so I was always chasing the latest and the greatest but now I find that I can do everything I need on this old beast.
I got a new laptop recently and while I didnt need more speed or memory, the fact that it uses less than half the energy as my previous laptop (and correspondingly lasts more than twice as long on battery) is extremely nice.
As an aside - I was under the impression x86 chips were still way behind Apple in battery life, but this doesnt seem to be the case. My new computer has a generation or two old Intel CPU (Meteor Lake) and I am getting 12+ hours out of a ~50Wh battery.
I used to have a W540. It was a stunningly useful and practical machine. Fond memories.
I had an M2 air running asahi that I loved and had similar worries. I ended up buying a maxed out refurbished M2 which I expect will last me a few more years.
how's the battery life / what's your usual workload
> I wish things had turned out otherwise, and we didn't have to choose between buying a Mac without Linux support and buying a 3-5 year old Mac with Linux support. And I expect that as time goes on, Asahi will just fall further and further behind.
IMO your expectation is correct. Such is the fate of all reverse engineering projects, or more generally, all heroism-based projects. Heroism is not sustainable. A sustainable business model is sustainable.
>I'm not really sure what to do. Maybe this MacBook Pro was just a one-off, and I have to go back to buying Windows laptops and putting Linux on them. But they just aren't as nice.
Why would you think that? They're working hard on upstreaming all patches ATM, adding new hardware support will be much easier afterwards.
And what's the ETA for M5 support?
If you want M5 support faster, maybe you should go volunteer your time and help out the project.
That's not a helpful answer.
How is that not helpful? A group of volunteers working in their spare time to do something incredibly difficult clearly aren't working fast enough for this person. The logical thing to do would be to jump in and help.
It's ok for a free thing to not meet someone's needs.
Agreed. But it seems a not insignificant number of people think they should get everything they want immediately
How is it helpful?
If you read the rest of the posts above the one I'm replying to I think it's pretty clear this wasn't a serious question. It was asked ironically as in "the rest of the work doesn't matter, they're taking too long to get M5 support out"
I'm saying it's an open project and if people want to bitch they're going too slow they are welcome to contribute.
Doesn’t give anything like an ETA… which was the question.
If you read the rest of the posts above the one I'm replying to I think it's pretty clear this wasn't a serious question. It was asked ironically as in "the rest of the work doesn't matter, they're taking too long to get M5 support out"
I'm saying it's an open project and if people want to bitch they're going too slow they are welcome to contribute.
More cooks in the kitchen doesn't always move the needle. You're being needlessly flippant for no real reason.
Alternatively, you can buy a laptop from an OEM that doesn't play keep-away with the Linux upstream using their drivers.
I write lots of Linux software but I have no intention to explicitly support Asahi or Macs whatsoever. Apple's greed is not something I will support with my money or my time, if Apple wants to court the Linux community then they can do it the same way Intel, AMD and Nvidia get along with us. Making your fans reverse-engineer devicetree drivers is just insulting.
Mac hardware is and will be a second-rate Linux experience, which is a shame because Apple could be competing with Nvidia for market share if they simply gave a shit.
It's really pretty incredible - that people are putting up with Apple's "keep-away" is evidence of just how unbelievably far ahead they are in hardware.
Or it could be a symbol of an unhealthy emotional attachment to Apple, that customers perceive to be symbiotic but business-wise is wholly parasitic.
Like I said, Apple could be a real player... if they had any incentive to compete.
> Or it could be a symbol of an unhealthy emotional attachment to Apple
Pretty hard to make that argument about people who explicitly want to get rid of Apple’s OS from their hardware.
Not really. Apple hardware is great, but MacOS sucks big time (compared to Linux).
And do you think it makes sense to argue that someone who says “macOS sucks big time” but likes their hardware has an “unhealthy emotional attachment to Apple”? If anything, it seems to show a pragmatic relationship (that whatever you like/need from each).
If someone likes their partner's body, but despises their personality and the way they treat them, I would call that an unhealthy emotional attachment, not a pragmatic relationship.
It's almost never pragmatic to assume that your own suffering will necessarily yield a better outcome. Maybe your smoking hot partner eventually becomes a better person, but is it worth investing 10 years of mental anguish for the chance of getting there? A real pragmatist starts dating again, which forces their partner to stop taking themselves for granted. If Apple wasn't a literal monopoly, their customers could be holding them over a barrel and forcing their software products to compete naturally.
macOS sucks because their customers have an unhealthy emotional attachment to Apple. Americans forfeit their opportunity to regulate Apple into real competition, and now we are paying the price with top-down app censorship, UI disaster updates and bugfixes that add more bugs than fixes.
> If someone likes their partner's body, but despises their personality and the way they treat them
Then they have to take the whole package or nothing at all. You can’t swap your partner’s brain. But you can change your OS on your computer. These things are not comparable.
> macOS sucks because their customers have an unhealthy emotional attachment to Apple.
No, macOS (currently) sucks because Apple is doing a bad job. Their customers’ relationship to the company is orthogonal to the OS’ quality.
Nope, as a former macOS user myself I can assure you it's quite trivial.
I don't think that the people who want to buy a Mac to run Asahi Linux have (an unhealthy) emotional attachment to Apple, they wouldn't run Linux on a MacBook otherwise.
(I love macOS, though I also have a ThinkPad with NixOS.)
I recently spent around $6k in a new 14in MacBook Pro with 128gb unified ram and 4tb HD. To replace my old Linux running 2012 MacBook pro.
I searched throughly for something as close to that MBP hw conf but with Linux compatibility. There's just no hardware equivalent to what the Macbookpro, including the build quality.
So I de idea to go for the MBP and install vmware + Linux. It's an amazing piece of hardware.
It's funny that this exact question is mentioned in marcan's "I'm leaving Asahi Linux" blogpost, haha.
> And, of course, “When is M3/M4 support coming?”
https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-l...
It's just amusing to me that Linux users since the beginning of time have been working hard on ensuring the maintainers of their software get upset at them and quit working on their software.
Over decades of seeing this, it is entertaining that people never change. There will be a great beauty to the vim v emacs wars in 5723 CE between the people of Gliese 251b and Gliese 251c.
To be clear, I would not ordinarily ask these kinds of questions. I understand that things take time. That's why I'm resigned to the idea that Asahi will never again be roughly up to date with the latest Apple hardware. I only asked this question because hanikesn seems to think that Asahi will magically suddenly be up to date once they've upstreamed everything.
Would I be correct in thinking that once M3 is up and running, M4 (and M5?) - the basics at least - should be relatively easy due to architectural similarities? In the same way that M2 was relatively easy because it was quite similar to the M1?
lenovo p1 and x1 are pretty nice. lunar lake machines are posting macintarm style benchmarks for battery life for light tasks. the screens are matte by default. you can upgrade ram and disk rather than discard (all the framework hype has been the thinkpad standard of upgradability for over a decade). the keyboards are fantastic. they have a pointer stick.
no unified cpu/gpu memory, but you can get nvidia gpus and work with cuda rather than mlx.
it's actually getting really good.
Most engineers/scientists/tech people will just have to understand at a fundamental level that they are just not the target market for apple.
That is the kind of thing that needs a strong vision from the top to provide.
The eternal optimism of the techie mind. I saw this coming when Asahi was launched.
What they did was impressive but nobody is superhuman and inherently Apple is all about control. Linux will always be - at best - a third rate citizen.
/thread
> there's for example Linux-specific software which puts the WiFi card in promiscuous mode and does useful stuff with that
In the past, I've made this specific thing work with USB passthrough, Virtualbox, and external USB WiFi adapters with monitor mode support.
>I'm not really sure what to do.
Get any of the modern laptops with good battery life, install linux + Elementary OS without any hacks or workarounds (or better yet, i3wm which is the best window manager for laptops), and never look back.
Or do what I do, which is buy $200 dells/thinkpads of ebay, and for anything requiring CPU, just ssh into your home server.
Personally I went a step further and use a lapdock with a samsung phone - acts like a laptop with Termux, and I can do pretty much everything with good battery life, because lapdock battery also charges the phone.
I used to be in this camp until I tried and bought an M1 Macbook as my daily driver. I thought I was going to be Thinkpad/XPS w/ Linux until I die. I don't love MacOS but POSIX is mostly good enough for me and the hardware is so good that I'm willing to look past the shortfalls.
Seriously I would love to switch back to a full-time Linux distro but I'm more interested in getting work done and having a stable & performant platform. Loosing a day of productivity fixing drivers and patching kernels gets old. The M-series laptops have been the perfect balance for me so far.
>Loosing a day of productivity fixing drivers and patching kernels gets old.
You are talking like it was 1997.
The typical linux users don't have to do that. Only those who buy unsupported devices on purpose for the challenge to make them work.
That’s just not true. Every coworker I know who use Linux[1] have occasional issues with webcams, mics, Slack notifications, whatever. It’s all fixable and this kind of inconvenience can be worth it when balanced with the perceived advantages, but saying driver issues are a thing of the past is just a lie.
[1]: I’ve seen these issues on Dell (XPS 13), Thinkpads, and HP laptops
I've been using Linux for 25 years and I think its been nearly that long since I had kernel issues that required patching the kernel (if ever). Maybe back in the 2.5 days?
The only drivers that I've had memorable issues with over the years are printer drivers, but those have nothing to do with the kernel. And printers are pretty cursed on every platform.
Every coworker I know who use Windows have occasional issues with webcams, mics, Slack notifications, whatever.
Well you should tell that to Dell because I have coworkers with a range of their models that are constantly fighting with webcams, audio, bluetooth, wifi, and Nvidia driver updates.
If they're new models, the webcam issue is not Dell specific, but an Intel / ipu6 thing. It should be integrated into most systems by now though, even as an out of tree module. The rest should just work, especially on xps machines. Without specifying the models/issues, it's hard to take it as more than an anecdote.
I am surprised. My former employer game me a Dell and the experience was quite smooth on Fedora.
They have a line they sell with linux pre installed. Those always work fine. It takes so e work to figure out which old ones on ebay were in that situation.
I'm not really sure what you mean? I've been in fast and crazy startups now years, all the time ton of work to do. Never having issues with Linux, the CachyOS and Fedora spins I run just keep on chugging day to day.
Using a workstation and an AMD Thinkpad.
This was me too. It just works and it's nice to use. Sometimes life's too short to be hacking around all day.
I used to have the same one, with Asahi. There were some problems which were never fixed (battery drain in sleep mode, no working Thunderbolt ...). Now job will give me a brand new one (I guess M4 or M5), I don't know how I'll do to run Linux on this. Either it'll be a VM or I'll use my own thinkpad. So sad.
The battery drain in sleep mode is why Linux is relegated to a dual-boot option for use when necessary for me, rather than my daily driver. Battery drain when in use or idle seems perfectly acceptable, but I can't use a laptop which discharges itself overnight while the lid is closed. I'm sad that Asahi never implemented a proper sleep mode.
Why not just suspend to disk?
My Asus laptop with 32 GB of RAM is 4 years old, but resumes from the encrypted swap partition in under 5 seconds, which is fast enough for me.
I don't think suspend to disk is properly supported in Asahi. I remember looking into it a couple of years ago and found that it wasn't a solution, and a quick Google search now indicates that it's still not implemented.
Suspend-to-disk (or rather, suspend-then-hibernate) is notoriously unreliable on Linux. Hell, its occasionally unreliable on Windows and OEMs taper their firmware to Microsoft's spec and quirks.
I think buying a year old laptop helps give time for the quirks to get worked out in the kernel.
I was able to follow a fairly standard NixOS config with lvm and encrypted swap. I've never had any issues after hibernating a couple times a day for 3 years.
It's very reliable on normal desktop hardware.
I don't know what the fuck is going on with laptop hardware. That stuff seems to barely work, despite the chips and stuff being off the shelf. Most windows laptops cannot handle sleep correctly either.
All the Lenvo laptops I've bought for personal use and the HPs my work gets have fully functional sleep under windows. The Lenovos also sleeps just fine under Linux. Wonder if its really specific brands that don't put the effort into their HW or drivers support for sleep?
My Lenovo would just randomly kill its battery even when it was supposed to be full suspend-to-disk - under Windows.
Setting the BIOS option to "Linux-compatible sleep mode" fixed this, but it took me FOREVER to figure this out and I'm reasonably certain I first heard about this fix in a comment here.
Not a bit of a problem since.
The existence of a BIOS option called "Linux-compatible sleep mode" is a dead giveaway that the default behavior is enshittified sleep that wakes up your system periodically so it can check your email, phone home to Microsoft, and maybe fail to go back to sleep.
Having such an obvious name like that is a gift, because otherwise you have to start decoding Intel Marketing names for their features to figure out which are actually anti-features.
If UEFI Secure Boot is enabled, Fedora kernels detect this and lockdown. And hibernation is then disabled. The reason is lack of an autheticated hibernation image. This work has had several proposals but still isn't implemented.
I'm not sure of the status on other distro kernels but allowing it would be a significant bypass of Secure Boot's purpose.
This exact thing is irrelevant to Asahi; the reason they don't support suspend-to-disk is that their drivers don't support full reconfiguration. This is a difficult task, as is "true suspend," because Macs have tons and tons of peripheral SoCs running firmware with their own SRAM, so resuming from suspend or hibernate creates a delta between the firmware state and the system state. (and, before the usual Apple trolls show up, this is true on x86 lately too, but on x86 the driver and platform interface is more standardized to support these kind of state changes without as much OS support).
Needing a way to securely verify the hibernate image is ALSO a problem, and one of the reasons Asahi haven't focused on suspend-to-disk, but it's not the first-order issue.
You can always set the system up to boot in insecure mode via shim, even if UEFI Secure Boot is active. It requires an explicit configuration step with physical presence, but it's doable.
Can secure boot be disabled on Macs?
Macs allow the device owner to install an OS that isn't signed at all, without having it degrade the security of the system when you do boot into MacOS.
Fine, but can it be disabled? If secure boot is interfering with another function of the computer, the owner might decide they prefer hibernation over secure boot.
I think what you're missing is that "secure boot" isn't a system-wide on/off thing on a Mac, it's a per-OS thing. And UEFI Secure Boot specifically is something that only exists on a Mac to the extent that Asahi shoehorns it into a system that doesn't natively do anything UEFI-related. It would be very surprising if Asahi Linux didn't still provide a way to skip their UEFI Secure Boot code paths and just plain boot.
Yeah, the security freaks basically broke hibernation across Linux ecosystem.
Honest question: why would you care about battery in your daily driver? aren't you sitting or standing at a desk?
When I'm at my desk at my office I use my Linux desktop. My use case for my laptop is to use when I'm out and about, commuting on the train or bus, visiting people, or just relaxing on the couch.
I do that too. But it's like 5% of my computer usage time. And maybe 10% of that fracrion I don't have access to power outlet. My point is that it's just a tiny fraction - for me anyway.
which begs the question why even get a laptop as a daily driver
people do it all the time for gaming laptops etc when probably 99% of their usage is at the same desk
I have a desktop, but I could imagine a life with only a laptop. Sure, maybe 99% of my usage would be at one desk, but if I need that other 1%, I need a laptop. It's the desktop that's an optional nice-to-have. And not everyone can afford or wants to have two computers which are powerful enough to do what they need.
In reality, far more than 1% of my computer use happens away from the desk where my desktop is located. I'm guessing I'm not alone in that.
You still only need 1 powerful computer. Networks are so fast these days and we have stuff like Tailscale it’s pretty easy to use the laptop as a dumb terminal and do all your work still on the fast computer.
Completely depends on what you're doing. If you're working on GUI software for example, you need to run that on your local machine. This is much easier if you're compiling and running the software on the same machine.
Then there are non-development tasks, like 3D modelling or video editing.
Remote desktop is a kind of solution, but it's extremely sub par. Latency is not good unless you're on the same LAN in my experience.
Ever try Parsec or Moonlight/Sunshine? They're very low latency because they're made for gaming
There’s a latency cost to encode and decode, and there’s a definite PQ change going from uncompressed video to h.265.
Powerful desktop at home + Tailscale + super light old Thinkpad with amazing battery life has been working really well for me whenever I need to be out and about. As long as remote development works for you I think this is the way.
Yes a MacBook Air as remote terminal back to the beefy PC at the mothership is ideal usually even for for GUI remote desktop unless internet is already unbearable and/or pay-per-GB.
It's not going to support WiFi promiscuous mode but maybe pick up a Pi Zero 2W or similar if that's a requirement.
For the same reason people tend to buy much larger cars than they really need.
They could own a much more economical car, and have enough money left in the pocket to rent a van when they go on big trips, get delivered or rent a trailer the few times a year they need to carry large stuff.
Personally I like having a laptop because I use my computers in different rooms depending on the use case and occasionally on travel.
For my case, and probably the case of many such people, that's closer to 90%. The 10%, however, is a big deal. When you need to take it somewhere, you need to take it somewhere, and a device you can use in that 10% of the time is better than a device you can't use in that 10% of the time, regardless of how superior the latter is in the happy path cases.
I would go nuts if I was confined to working from one spot. Versatility and mobility are too important to give up. And there’s no tradeoff with apple silicon.
I made this determination myself recently, and switched back to a Mac Mini after about a decade of docked laptop use. I use my 13" iPad w/keyboard and 5G when I want to be mobile.
I bought a m4 mac mini but even if 95% of my usage would have only been at my desk, that 5% actually makes me regret not going at least paying about $400 more for a macbook air so I can take it to the bedroom or to a coffee shop.
Thankfully my worklaptop is an m4 mb pro, so I have flexibility with that.
And indeed with virtual backgrounds in I do probably 3 meetings a week in my car so I can do quick errands without skipping a meeting here or there.
How Linux-like can you make a Mac act without changing OS now? It's been a few years since I used a Mac regularly, but even back then you could go a fair way towards making it seem nice enough to use.
You can mostly do that, but: forget about system wide debugging, desktop shell changes, easy security sandboxes, being able to just run new AI software (they're often assuming cuda or CPU), building obscure software without patching makefiles. And the get the general feeling of "whatever I want to change, I'm fighting against the system".
I wonder if you’ll find apples native contains support useful at all
https://github.com/apple/container
"Native" is a misnomer as it is still virtualizing Linux.
No, it doesn't really solve any of the issues I mention.
My advice is if you’re truly a Linux user first, give up the idea that Mac hardware is the only best/acceptable hardware. Break the cycle and don’t just buy Apple because their hardware is 10% better than competitors.
The market really isn’t limited to “buying a windows laptop and putting Linux onto it” anymore.
Lots of OEMs support Linux as a first-class citizen.
For me personally I’m enjoying my Framework laptop a lot. Is it the same kind of hardware polish as a Mac? No, of course not. But owning a Framework is like owning an Apple in the sense that the community has fully integrated Framework systems into the ecosystem.
One command installs Framework fan profiles into Bazzite Linux. One command inside Linux updates UEFI and device firmware, try doing that with Windows!
Is the battery like half as good as a MacBook Pro? Yeah. It sucks a little bit. But also, owning/carrying around a $50 portable battery isn’t such a bad thing, and the weight difference is a wash since the 13” Framework is lighter than the 14” MacBook Pro.
And on the plus side, I paid a less than MacBook Air money for a system with 2TB of storage and 32GB of RAM (DIY previous AMD generation model), fully upgradable, fully repairable, with customizable I/O.
A new battery is DIY, $60, not $250 with a wait for service. Replacing a broken screen is DIY $200, not $700 and a visit to the Apple service depot.
One day, I’m sure framework will be selling an ARM mainboard with similar battery life compared to a Mac, and when that day comes I don’t even have to buy a whole new system to get one.
And on top of all that, it’s still a nice laptop that feels premium even though it’s assembled DIY. I’d say the keyboard is better than a Mac keyboard (though the trackpad isn’t).
But also, there are other OEMs where running Linux is a joy and a breeze, along with being fully supported and even sold preinstalled. System76, Lenovo, Dell, and HP all have Linux-supported configurations.
I don't think any other competitor makes hardware of a similar class in terms of quality.
Framework is great, but it doesn't even come close in terms of quality. Specs are one thing, how the product looks, feels, attention to detail, and most importantly: long term viability! even if you take away everything else, macbooks are though. I've used a couple for over a decade with no hardware repair (except when I broke a screen). Most mac users have similar experiences, so it's not survivor's bias.
If all you care about is specs or open hardware, obviously Apple hardware is not for you.
I don't want framework or system76 to move to ARM, a lot of people like me still _need_ x86 hardware.
Thinkpad X1 is very solid and sexy hardware imo, tastes may vary
But my favorite machine of late is a tiny ultra portable with a Ryzen AI 9 chip with 64Gb RAM, it's an x86 that's competitive with the new ARM stuff on power efficiency
What does it matter if hardware still works in 10 years if you can't upgrade software anymore, nor can you replace it with something you have control over (like Linux)?
I still have a fully functioning iPhone 4s somewhere. I could still use it as a daily driver hardware-wise, but it is sadly deprecated (32-bit), so - no software support anymore.
I installed Linux Mint on a 2014 macbook pro for my wife and its still going strong.
That's the thing. Even when you consider the hardware benefits. Let's say they're 10% better (I feel but happy to be corrected, that feels understated).
There isn't a single machine out there that's even moderately close in terms of build quality. Either at the dollar cost for an entry series MacBook Pro or Air with 36GB (38?) memory.
I don't think there's an OEM Linux or Windows laptop with Linux as a first class citizen laptop out there even moderately close for value, performance and build quality.
Shit I'm not sure if there's even one out there if you spent considerably more than on a MacBook. MacBook Pro's are pretty good value now.
From personal experience, laptops that cost $30000+ (yes, USD) still come nowhere close to even a macbook air in terms of build quality. They have much better specs, but if you run Windows on it, the effects are much less pronounced. I have moved from a new Dell to a macbook with half the cpu and ram and for me t least it "feels" like the macbook is twice as fast and as responsive. I don't know if it is just better architecture or fine tuned software, but that's my experience.
Apple used the whole "economy of scale" effect to invest in specialized tooling/machining that would be too costly to recover the ROI for other OEMs. Keep in mind that consumer laptop makers to the most part don't make a profit (or have a low profit margin - last i checked at least) on laptops and printers. No one else has made the economics of using quality material, top of the line design, and specialized machining/tooling work like Apple.
I think for generic OEMs that may hold , however for manufactures like Huawei with their matebookX line the build quality is pretty much on-par while the components and options being offthe shelf standard means it should be easier to upgrade/support and port Linux to than MacBooks.Also the price is pretty much competititve for the kit that one gets. The blocking isseu would be getting one as the whole US attack on the company means their kit is pretty much limited edition within China at the moment currently.Maybe in a year or two they should be available at previous volumes.
My 2000 euro Thinkpad has better specs, I run Windows 11 on it, get to do CUDA and Vulkan natively, and there is DirectX 12 Ultimate as well.
Macs are great as an OS with UNIX infrastructure, aa graphical laptops relevant for workloads besides Photoshop and Sketch, not so much.
And then there’s battery life and sleep drain. Only a handful of competitors come close, and those have caveats like significantly reduced peak performance and the usual papercuts so common in the x86 laptop world.
It’s such a problem that if I were to switch away from Apple, I’d try to find a way to go desktop-exclusive and not use a laptop at all, because everything else on the market is so compromise-ridden as to not be worth the trouble. And I say this as the owner of an X series ThinkPad, which are among the better options in that world.
It’s as if most laptop manufacturers can’t be arsed to take their products seriously. So frustrating.
I’d say newest Surface Laptops are on par.
I can’t believe you’re gaslighting us all by claiming “long term viability” is better on a MacBook, a system with zero user-replaceable components, a glued-in battery, soldered-in memory, etc.
A MacBook loses software updates in 10 years. Sometimes less. You can install what amounts to reverse engineered Linux on one if you lose your macOS updates. You have a choice of basically one viable distro.
And this idea that no other competitor makes hardware in a similar class of quality is extremely outdated. I actually own both a modern MacBook and a Framework. This isn’t some HP shitbook from 2011. It’s all aluminum, like I said the keyboard is literally superior to Mac systems, and are we just going to gloss over 2016-2020 when Apple just shit the bed and made utter garbage? Are we going to gloss over how the current systems have a gigantic notch blocking the menu bar that’s somehow bigger than FaceID but only houses a middling webcam?
You admit you broke a screen on your MacBook. How much did that cost you to repair? How long did you wait without your system to repair it? Or did you just go off and buy a new one?
> owning/carrying around a $50 portable battery isn’t such a bad thing
Carrying an extra powerbank that has to be charged daily (assuming you'll use your computer full day) is not something I'd just handwave like that.
For some types of work, I carry around 3 power banks if I'm to do a full days work away from power. Max screen brightness + high CPU use of long compiles means I'm averaging 40 watts
Add on a starlink and you need a trolley to carry the weight of the power packs needed.
Sure. For your type of work, that's the only solution.
To clarify, I'm totally fine with powerbanks, especially that these days even the cheapo ones support a subset of PD to charge a laptop (sometimes even 12V is enough, my Thinkpad allows that, I've read somewhere that Framework can charge from even 5V). I'm just not fine with solving an objectively poorer battery management (compared to Macs) by just buying external battery and calling it a solution. It's a workaround at best.
Why not? My framework weighs 1 pound less than my MacBook Pro did and the spare battery weighs about one pound itself. Net backpack weight is the same.
If I am guilty of hand waving a spare battery aren’t MacBook die-hard guilty of handwaving away major downsides to the device like soldered-in storage? I saved something like $500 compared to Apple by buying my own 2TB of storage.
And let’s be honest, it’s rare to actually need MacBook Air levels of “sitting away from a power outlet” battery life. It’s definitely nice to have and I definitely wish my framework had that level of battery life but it’s a want not a need, and it’s not as important to me as having a system I can repair myself, having a system that runs Linux with first-class support, plays PC games easily, etc.
I will also say that the spare battery being in my backpack now has coincidentally come in handy countless times outside of the laptop.
And if you want better battery life than that there are other choices like Lenovo, you don’t even have to use a Framework to get a great Linux laptop.
I have a Framework 13 that I use as my personal laptop and a work-issued M3 MacBook Pro.
I love my Framework 13. I'm a long-time Mac user, but I increasingly found myself alienated by locked-down hardware and increasingly locked-down software, and so I ended up switching back to PCs. I greatly appreciate my Framework 13's user-serviceability. While I use Windows 11 + WSL (Microsoft Office is the main thing holding me back from using Linux exclusively, and yes, I was a regular LibreOffice user back in my student days when I couldn't afford a Microsoft Office license), it's great to have the option to go to Linux full-time on well-supported hardware.
With that said, my M3 MacBook Pro has absolutely amazing battery life. By comparison, my Framework 13 has rather abysmal battery life by 2025 standards. In fact, it feels reminiscent of my very first Apple laptop: a 2006 Core Duo MacBook, which got roughly five hours when brand new. Even putting my Framework 13 to sleep drains the battery after a few hours, while on my MacBook Pro, it barely sips from the battery.
I hope future releases of Framework laptops have better battery life; it makes a difference.
My beef with the Framework laptops is that their memory bandwidth is 5 to 8 times slower (depending on the generation, CPU, and RAM) than that of a $1,500 refurbished MacBook Pro M1 Max 64GB.
But then you have a 5 year old laptop that’s going to lose official Apple software support in 5 years and become a paperweight unless you install your choice of ONE Linux distro.
If you don’t specifically have a memory bandwidth-constrained workflow this doesn’t matter at all and having upgradable memory is still better for most people.
If Framework starts using CAMM modules or releases a Ryzen AI board with soldered RAM this difference is lessened/disappears.
> choice of ONE Linux distro
fwiw the asahi kernel and patches are usable from other distros just fine; i've done it on nixos in the past and the linked blog post shows some stuff running on gentoo
Sounds like a bunch of extra work and potential bugs/issues compared to “download iso, install iso”
if only it were 10%
even the things you mention in your post paint a picture of a difference that for a lot of usage patterns is much more significant than just the last 10%
My only issue with Intel at this point is Lunar Lake only supports 32GB of RAM max. If it supported 64GB, I'd buy it today.
I believe that Arrow Lake supports 64gb. I'm waiting on availability before I replace my aging (9yo) Lenovo X1 Yoga.
> A new battery is DIY, $60, not $250 with a wait for service. Replacing a broken screen is DIY $200, not $700 and a visit to the Apple service depot.
This is a weird assertion to make, if you don't have the parts on hand and can't walk into a store to buy them same-day. A big part of the reason I _do_ buy Apple laptops (besides the fact I do like the OS, battery life and hardware) is that I can walk into an Apple Store in any major city I'm likely to be in and purchase a replacement immediately should disaster strike while I'm traveling.
But now you’re comparing buying a whole new computer to repairing one. It’s not like it’s hard to buy an x86 laptop at a Best Buy.
The fact of the matter is that sending a MacBook to depot and fixing it takes around a week including transit times to and from. Apple no longer does any computer repairs in store.
At $60 for a battery or $200 for a screen those parts are so cheap that I could just buy them to keep on hand and they’d still cost less than AppleCare.
Many parts like storage and RAM are standard where, yes, I can walk into a store and buy them and install them same day.
It is in fact very difficult to buy a professional grade computer of any kind from Best Buy, let alone something like a Thinkpad with reasonable specs. You might luck out and be in a city with a micro center, but you probably won’t.
If I’m on the road and my laptop breaks, I’m buying a new one post haste, and resolving the problem when I get home. It’s like 2-3 hours worth of billing time to do so vs screwing about trying to repair. Simply not worth the time.
Framework used to be an interesting option, but then they went ahead and made themselves a non-option by first very publicly financially supporting explicitly far-right software projects and then very publicly doubling down on that support in face of criticism.
I have been looking at the Lenovos though.
if you're going to hold Framework to that standard, wouldn't you also agree that buying a Lenovo machine would be indirectly supporting an authoritarian government with a troubling human-rights record?
You're typically not buying a Framework just because you like the hardware. Framework represents a political project, so you typically buy Framework because you support their values and politics. I don't.
You can rationalise your decision however you want, but to me it sounds like you're mad with the little guy for their lack of moral purity, but you're implicitly fine with a larger company doing much worse. That seems inconsistent at best.
You may find it inconsistent, and that's fine. But I do actually find it worse to buy from the explicitly political pro-fascist company than to buy from the "normal company" which just "incidentally" benefit fascist governments through their normal business operations.
I don’t see any mention of their explicit support for fascism on their homepage, can you justify this claim?
They haven't exactly been quiet about it. Here are some links;
* https://x.com/FrameworkPuter/status/1960029405067313546
* https://x.com/FrameworkPuter/status/1975721241345728683
* https://bsky.app/profile/frame.work/post/3lvm6ahbrf22n
* https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ...
So in other words you've got nothing? There is literally nothing in your links that backs up your claims.
So conferences in every western country should also not invite Chinese or Japanese speakers because they hold similar views to DHH? I'm so over this exhausting need to feel self-righteous.
Hm? My claim is that they back Omarchy and DHH, I think my links back that up?
Your claim was that they explicitly support fascism. That doesn't seem to be the case at all. What you seem to mean instead is: They financially support a popular open source project called Omarchy, which is built by DHH, and you believe DHH to be a fascist.
You're welcome to your opinion, and I have zero insight into whether DHH is a fascist or not, but by no means is that explicit support for fascism! It's not just exaggeration, it's actually a lie.
If you buy a machine from Framework you might indirectly support a project which is maintained by someone whose opinions you dislike.
If you buy a Lenovo machine you will contribute to the revenue of an authoritarian government that will use some of that money to perpetuate human rights abuses against its own citizens, and maybe the citizens of your own country too one day.
Which is the most moral choice here in your opinion?
I didn't say they explicitly support fascism. I said they are explicitly political, and they are pro-fascism.
Ok, sorry I misread what you wrote. The question stands though
I mean I already answered that, didn't I? I find it worse to buy from the explicitly political pro-fascist company than to buy from the "normal company" which just "incidentally" benefit fascist governments through their normal business operations.
To exaggerate, we could imagine that there was an explicitly nazi computer manufacturer who put swastika stickers on their laptops and everything. When faced with the choice of Lenovo and this explicitly nazi manufacturer, I would probably choose the Lenovo, even though you could probably do the same consequentialist math and conclude that Lenovo does more actual harm through their utility to the CCP than what the tiny nazi computer company can do. I imagine you feel the same way.
What Framework does is obviously way less egregious than my hypothetical example, but I'm still not comfortable associating with a company which so publicly funds DHH, for the same kind of reason that I would not be comfortable associating with the nazi computer company.
And that is not a transitive property which then means Framework supports fascism. The US buys from China, does that mean we support communism?
International trade is extremely complex, funding and publicizing a project is not. Framework supports DHH, both financially and in terms of publicity. That's not something I wanna support.
The mental gymnastics and contortions you are putting yourself through are quite stunning. You're finding associations that do not exist. I feel I'm staring at a wall strewn with thumb-tacked red yarn, linking all sorts of nonsense together while the creator steps back and exclaims "see, proof!".
Framework makes hardware and software. If you're going to close yourself off to any product or organization that happens to have some users you disagree with - then you're not going to get very far in this world. This is a wild, and frankly unhealthy perspective to hold.
Please explain which associations I'm finding which do not exist.
> If you're going to close yourself off to any product or organization that happens to have some users you disagree with
I do not see where I mentioned Framework users. I care about the actions of the company. I care that they decide to support DHH, financially and through promoting his projects, and I care that they double down on their support in the face of push-back.
I don't know... As someone who many people would characterize as "way too woke", this doesn't really quite ruin Framework for me (though I don't own any of their products).
DHH is certainly an ass, and this is my first time reading about the racist stuff (before this I just found him generally extremely unlikable), but just general association with someone with shitty opinions doesn't fully ruin a project for me. I guess Omarchy is popular nowadays (I'm really not sure why, if someone really knows, please explain), people are going to want to use it on their Framework computers, ergo: Framework has a reason to cooperate with Omarchy developers so their devices work like the customers want them to, and I guess I'm fine with it even if DHH leaves a bad taste in my mouth...
I guess I sort of feel similar in regards to suckless, I don't really like most of their projects, from what I've heard there are some abhorrent people involved, but I wouldn't really put blame on the distro maintainer that packages their projects for their users to use, I guess?
Though, I definitely get why people might feel differently.
Fascism is when Arch BTW
I bought my Framework 12 just because I like the hardware. It's so cute! And purple! The repairability is bonus.
Sure for similar reasons (+ few other) I'm moving away from Apple. Framework is no longer on my list.
I didn't hear about that and a simple search isn't surfacing that. Can you expand?
He's probably referencing Framework's involvement with Omarchy, which certain people had problems with.
Can you elaborate on 1) What makes dhh far right? And 2) How that makes the omarchy or framework projects problematic?
I have a hard imagining a far right software project, can you explain this to me?
You should look into the political views of Omarchy's creator and sole developer, DHH
I tried, and all I found was some hearsay. Ethical concerns were raised by many publications without any specifics. Some mention the issue is building on top of hyprland, which (oh god, no) has some ethical issues.
I couldn't find anything specific.
Would appreciate a link to any based explanation
That's the dev not the project. Quickly looking over Omarchy I see nothing aligned with the political right. Could you link it to me?
The developer is the project.
Of course not, a project is removed from the person. Especially in open source.
I respect your opinion, but I disagree. It's not like DHH is just some contributor, he's the public face of the project and the person who stands to benefit from its success.
hyprland? That's ridiculous.
I would understand if it was Lunduke or XLibre folk, but that's a complete non-issue.
Omarchy. DHH is absolutely on the level of Lunduke.
I don't know, I dislike DHH and actively debated with him on many occasions, but I wouldn't put him on the same level as Lunduke.
I don't have time to go over everything. But here are some things:
* Here's his screed about how London was better before all the brown people moved in: https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
* Here's your typical right-wing anti-DEI rant: https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-waning-days-of-dei-s-dominance...
I'm sure there's more stuff I could link, but I don't have the time right now to go looking for more. I think this should get the point across.
You don't seem to understand what fascism actually is. None of these things are that.
Even though I disagree with DHH on all of these topics I don't see how it's relevant to Free Software at all unless the distro were using the webcam and IP geolocation and refusing to work for brown people in England.
It's okay for you to disagree with me, I have explained my views.
I have a Framework laptop and it's pretty sweet.
I also own an M4 so I can compare the two.
The M4 wins on slickness due to 1) unibody 2) Apple Silicon (and running local AI models, and the occasional game that is actually optimized for Mac like BG3) 3) excellent screen (HDR, high contrast, etc.), but the Framework wins on cool-ness and, frankly, ethics. (Especially since I put NixOS on it with ZFS-on-root mirrored across 2 internal SSD's.)
Why is docker so bad on mac and why is apple not fixing that?
There is now work from Apple in that direction: https://github.com/apple/container
No idea what the future of that project, or its potential integration with other container management systems might be, but it is certainly interesting at first glance.
Because they don't care and don't have to care.
Son has a Framework with Linux and he prefers it to a MacBook Pro (with or without Linux).
Can you tell me more about promiscuous mode in Asahi? I'm not able to find much reliable stuff when I search.
Is they possible with the built in WiFi chipsets?
Promiscuous mode is just when the WiFi chipset picks up all the WiFi packet it sees. In the normal mode, the chipset will drop everything that's meant for a different MAC address. The ability to switch to promiscuous mode is very common, and Linux exposes generic APIs to switch an interface to promiscuous mode if the driver supports it.
I get this feeling but frankly I feel more comfortable running Linux on 2+ year old hardware than brand new hardware having experienced both now, if for no other reason than all the questions you have have probably been asked and answered.
And yeah each iteration of the M chip has gotten better, but even a standard M1 is a very capable chip these days.
My work laptop is a 2021 MBpro. M1, 16gb ram, nothing special. Still very capable machine for video editing. One of my department livestream machines is an M4 Mac mini, 16gb ram as well. I regularly juggle between the two and the only two big things I notice are 1) multi screen support (M1 can only push to one external which is annoying), and 2) noticeably better but not wildly improved render times (admittedly this difference is a bit more stark when you’re doing heavy lifts like resolve fusion comps and intense coloring/masking). On any given day they are basically the same machine to me.
Suffice to say if you’re running on an M3 right now and are feeling the need for an M5, unless you’re doing really bleeding edge heavy duty work, I just don’t think there’s that much you’re missing out on. So Linux on an M3 to me is great.
another POV is that Asahi Linux would get way more adoption if it were "just" a better way to run Linux VMs and containers on macOS.
I don't see the connection between Asahi and Linux VMs. All the work in Asahi is about making drivers for Apple's hardware and board bring-up, none of that is relevant for VMs. It sounds like you're saying Asahi Linux would get more adoption if it was something completely different which shares nothing at all with what Asahi actually is?
Honestly anything you get beyond MacOS is probably seen as a security hole by Apple and will get blocked and patched in the long run. It's the whole point of their locked down ecosystem: There is only Apple.
Just get a Framework, they're Macs for Linux.
This is false. Per the asahi project, https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/#apples-unspok...
> When documenting the security model, Apple use the example of an XNU kernel developer wishing to test their changes on a second macOS installation. It is apparent however that the platform security model was engineered to allow third party operating systems to coexist with macOS in a way that does not compromise any of Apple's security guarantees for macOS itself. *Rumours circulating that Apple are actively hostile towards efforts such as Asahi, or that their security must be bypassed or jailbroken to run untrusted code are unfounded and false*. In fact, Apple have expended effort and time on _improving_ their security tooling in ways that _only_ improve the execution of non-macOS binaries.
Regarding Framework laptops being "Macs for Linux," Frameworks are fantastic in their own way but they don't come anywhere near the build quality (or battery life) you get with a Mac.
IIRC, when the Asahi project first started, Apple's response was they they didn't care about the project, and would make no efforts to hinder or help them. They also hinted that running an alternate OS was an acceptable use of device.
We will see if they continue that attitude.
Man you randomly reminded me of when magic lantern was completely changing the game with their firmware side load on Canon DSLR’s. Then after a few years Canon decided “nah screw y’all” as they quietly pushed a firmware update that blocked it.
The actual update: https://asahilinux.org/2025/10/progress-report-6-17/
Thanks, this should replace the current URL.
I was an early adopter of Asahi Linux on my M1 Mac Mini (and later M1 Mac Studio). As a result, I benefited from the most amount of support for the platform at the beginning of the project (laptop-specific hardware support was provided after desktops) and have been using Asahi ever since (now Fedora Asahi Remix).
It's nice to see that M3 and later is coming, but as a Linux person, it's not necessarily a bad thing to be a bit behind the latest hardware. After all, many of us still use ancient Thinkpads running Linux, and prefer to buy used hardware for a better cost (M1/M2 hardware can be had much cheaper now).
Well said. There is a large number of inexpensive, long-batteried, powerful devices with lovely designs, good keyboards and trackpads that Asahi Linux has enabled to run Linux on beautifully.
There are a 1st gen M1 Air wedge and M1 Macbook Pro 14 in my home that belong to other family members. I look forward to running Asahi on them when the users eventually upgrade.
I really love what Asahi Linux is doing, but given Apple’s yearly release cadence of new chips, it feels like a Sisyphean task.
Though in the plus side, even the base M1 is so capable that even if they stopped there it would be useful for years to come.
"I really love what Asahi Linux is doing, but given Apple’s yearly release cadence of new chips, it feels like a Sisyphean task."
This is more true on the gpu side than the cpu/soc side for sure. Speaking as someone who worked on this (i did a bunch of the m3 work here, and some wifi work) - it's not anywhere near as bad as embedded work i used to do many eons ago.
Apple doesn't like to spend tons of time/energy either, and since they make most of their own hardware interfaces (or force others to their specs), most of the time the driver->hardware interfaces are just being extended/improved year over year.
Sometimes things move from one bus kind to another, and there's different hookup to do, or you have to get around to some functionality you never did, etc. But it's not like you need a brand new driver every year for the usb controller, for example.
Power management is probably one of the worst changing areas, along with NPU/GPU obviously.
Put another way - outside of NPU/GPU, you can slowly build up enough of the driver base that it can be maintained and kept up to date by a small number of people with not huge amounts of time.
It's not there yet, but it's possible to get there.
This is because Apple doesn't get a lot from changing this stuff either.
Thanks for the insight!
As others have noted, Linux is fine on older hardware, always. In fact, laptops I would have otherwise thrown away were given totally new life by Linux alone. Windows is too bloated the last few years. It is really ridiculous how much Windows bloat there is, no amount of breaking the OS with unstable tweaks ever did it any better either. With Linux you can go as lean and minimal as you want and need, without breaking the OS.
> even the base M1 is so capable that even if they stopped there it would be useful for years to come.
My M1 Air is 4 years old and it's by far the most capable 4 year old Mac I've owned.
Yeah when I got the first gen base model M1 Air, I put it to the test against my maxed out i9 MacBook Pro (basically the last Intel model they released, so it was the “best of the best” they had to offer on the Intel side).
I tried out using Handbrake to CPU encode the same video on both devices. Amazingly the M1 Air was slightly faster than the i9, while comparatively sipping power, and staying relatively cool without even having a fan. The i9 on the other hand drained its battery super fast, sounded like a jet plane taking off, and was too hot to sit on my lap.
That’s when I knew it was really a massive leap forward.
We're witnessing the end of the IBM PC-compatible era, and maybe more ominously of general-purpose personal computing. The future looks like custom chipsets with signed bootloaders that only run signed OEM applications. You will not have root on any of the devices you nominally own.
The tide does seem to be turning that way, though I do think it will be possible to buy general purpose computers for the foreseeable future.
Also as a minor counter point, the only reason Asahi is even possible is that Apple explicitly designed in support for booting other operating systems into the M-series chips. They certainly could have locked them down just like they did the iPhone and iPad, but they didn't. That was a conscious choice according to the Asahi folks.
So while they may not be sharing technical documentation/drivers or otherwise making it easy on the Asahi devs, even the famously "walled garden" Apple seems to have explicitly not restricted their new line of computers in the way you're describing.
> Apple explicitly designed in support for booting other operating systems into the M-series chips
Thank Xeno, who has since been creating open-source training on low-level firmware security at https://p.ost2.fyi, a new iteration of open training material published ~15 years ago at https://opensecuritytraining.info before joining Apple.
https://archive.fosdem.org/2022/schedule/speaker/xeno_kovah/
> Apple explicitly designed in support for booting other operating systems into the M-series chips
Don't you think it's interesting that it's an option for Macs but not iPad Pros? They both use the same SoC.
> So while they may not be sharing technical documentation/drivers or otherwise making it easy on the Asahi devs, even the famously "walled garden" Apple seems to have explicitly not restricted their new line of computers in the way you're describing.
Give it a few more years. Asahi will probably be so far behind that it wouldn't even matter. Eventually they can just turn off allowing third-party operating systems on new hardware.
> Don't you think it's interesting that it's an option for Macs but not iPad Pros? They both use the same SoC.
Apple has always sold iPads as a closed walled garden and Macs as an open platform.
Apple designed the Apple Silicon Mac hardware to allow you to run an unsigned third party OS without a negative security impact when you run MacOS, because it is an open platform.
However we have definitely seen examples of other formerly open platforms facing new restrictions.
Android was sold to the public as an open platform that Google is actively closing with new restrictions to side loading apps
Windows was sold to the public as an open platform, but Microsoft is locking out users who refuse to use an online account to access their local computer.
> Don't you think it's interesting that it's an option for Macs but not iPad Pros? They both use the same SoC.
I think that has more to due with product positioning. They see the iPad as an iPhone style device (though it’s slowly getting more Mac-like), so kept it locked down. Not saying I agree with their decision, but I get why they made it.
> Give it a few more years. Asahi will probably be so far behind that it wouldn't even matter. Eventually they can just turn off allowing third-party operating systems on new hardware.
Unfortunately I think this is probably going to be true, but fingers crossed.
I will say though that while I like the idea of Asahi in theory, I installed it for more than a year and ended up really never booting into it. When I needed Linux for something (which is pretty rare since most any tool I would want I can just run natively in macOS terminal) it was always more convenient to use a VM, so I personally won’t lose anything if I can only run macOS, but in principle I’d like it to stay open just like the Intel Macs were with Bootcamp.
> an option for Macs but not iPad Pros
PTSD can block lights in tunnels.
2024: UTM SE entered iOS App Store, https://www.tomshardware.com/phones/iphone/utm-se-emulator-r...
2025: https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/01/jit-enabler-lands-on-app-stor... Sep 2025: sideloaded UTM supports JIT on iOS26 with StikDebug, https://x.com/utmapp/status/1967990008364798091Emulation is completely different to actually running a different OS on your device.
The fact that you need to launch apps through a debugger to enable JIT is hilarious though. Every other platform either allows it all the time or doesn't! I would not count on it staying on the App Store - Apple can remove it whenever they want to
> Asahi will probably be so far behind that it wouldn't even matter.
Why would they fall behind? Asahi caught up from scratch the first time, they might catch up again. Maybe not for every new model, but they can simply skip some of them if forced to prioritise.
> Apple explicitly designed in support for booting other operating systems into the M-series chips
Is it possible to buy a compatible M-whatever Mac and install Linux on it without network access, without it phoning home to Apple for permission?
Sincere question since I have only used one Apple Silicon Mac ever, and it was a work machine so I never tried Asahi on it. I am curious about the privacy implications of non-macOS support.
Hmm you know I’m actually not sure. I think at least currently you have to do the install from macOS so I guess you have to set it up once at least, but I’m not sure if that actually requires internet access.
I so know that once you have Asahi installed you never need to boot into macOS again if you don’t want to and don’t require network checkins or anything like that to keep using it.
Also unlike Windows 11, it’s trivial to set up macOS without ever creating an account with Apple, so you don’t have to give them personal info or even an email or anything to do the initial macOS setup.
They mention Hollow Knight in their update, but I should note that Silksong also works on my M1 Air flawlessly. Games with more 3D graphics also work to some degree. I tried Bakeru on it and got decent results though the texture load time was significant.
Asahi has been fun to watch, and I’m happy it’s still moving along, even with the messiness of the past twelve months. I rarely boot into MacOS on the machine these days, and while I’m mostly using a PC these days, I am debating getting a used M1 Pro or Max for the battery life benefits (and access to Mac graphics programs on the rare occasions I need them).
The fact that M3 is technically possible, even if likely a while off, is promising.
I remember my mind was blown when Alyssa Rosenzweig demoed Cyberpunk running on Asahi Linux a year ago. https://rosenzweig.io/blog/aaa-gaming-on-m1.html
I appreciate the focus on older hardware and virtualization challenges in this thread, but I'm also interested in the broader implications of the Asahi work beyond just running Linux on used Macs. Getting a bespoke SoC supported in the mainline kernel and rewriting low‑level firmware in Rust could set a precedent for other ARM64 platforms with opaque boot chains.
It might also encourage more laptop makers to ship machines with first‑class Linux support so people aren't forced to pick between hardware they like and the OS they want. And for folks who don't need a Mac specifically, the growing ecosystem of non‑Apple ARM laptops could offer a smoother path than shoe‑horning Linux onto proprietary silicon.
I mean sure, but ARM SoC in Linux has been a thing for quite some time in the embedded space. This is hardly new.
That’s true, but the Apple chips are not built on the base Arm designs and don’t use Adreno, they also use more proprietary IP in the SoC.
Adreno is proprietary IP; it's an exclusively Qualcomm thing.
True, meant Mali, mb
Twenty years ago people went to great lenghts to run the best OS available at that time on cheap commodity x86 hardware with hackintoshes. Fast forward to today, similar efforts are made to run linux on the best hardware available. It's funny how things turn around.
The various Hackintosh projects are on life support not because the interest for that kind of thing has died; it's because Apple doubled down on chain-of-trust and is abandoning x86.
Apple made it impossible to use iMessage on a Hackintosh without spoofing another Mac that's not in use. That pushed A LOT of people away from using a Hackintosh.
The second thing is abandoning x86. Apple has already announced that macOS 26 is the last release to support their Intel machines. That means that next year, there will be no way to run the latest macOS on any Intel machine. That's basically the end date for all these projects, as the Hackintosh crowd has always been about running the latest version of the OS. They're not interested in running System 7!
Even before the AS transition, GPUs were becoming more important and Mac OS GPU support was becoming even worse. At some point you were basically limited to a few AMD options. Very unattractive OS for a custom tower by then.
Like I did put a Nvidia 650ti? in my Mac Pro, and it sorta worked initially under OSX, but way slower and glitchier than in Windows and eventually just fully incompatible.
Yeah, Nvidia was forsaken by Apple after a kerfuffle where Apple blamed Nvidia for problems and Nvidia didn’t want to take that blame.
Only Nintendo and the OEM PC companies have been able to make an integration relationship work.
Well there's that (I think cause MBPs kept BBQing) and also Mac OS deprecating OpenGL and overall being different in ways that often prevent you from taking advantage of a dedicated GPU.
Which I'm fine with on my laptop or Mac mini, but if you're building a tower with a GPU, yeah
To clarify, people then and now have in common trying to run the software they prefer on the hardware they prefer. There's no objective "best"; it depends on what you need.
For the vast majority of customers' utility functions, Apple has the best hardware (both in absolute and per dollar terms) on the market right now. It's not "objectively best", but it certainly meets the most stringent definition of "best" that's still useful in conversation.
If that was the case, the vast majority of the world would be using Apple hardware and/or software, and yet that's not the case.
> Fast forward to today, similar efforts are made to run the best OS available now (linux) on Apple hardware.
Ftfy.
Hate to break it to you but before the term "hackintosh" existed there was an army of folks making linux work well on cheap commodity x86 hardware, the success of which ushered in the dot-com booms - filling datacenters across the globe with cheap x86 hardware running linux. A reality persisting to this day, though with far fewer players thanks to decades of consolidation.
The hackintosh is a far smaller and more ephemeral niche hardly qualifying as ever orienting the proverbial table.
How is the project actually doing? Feels like most original core developers have quit.
The project is currently mainly focused on upstreaming as many of their patches as possible, and maintaining the existing code. M3/4/5 have a completely different GPU instruction set from M1/2, so they would need a large amount of new reverse engineering to get the GPU support where it is on M1/2. I don't believe there's anyone working on GPU support for those newer platforms.
The project is currently focusing primarily on reducing the number of patches against the Linux kernel which has somewhat slowed their rapid development rate.
It’s a massive task keeping the large number of patches going, while simultaneously trying to land them in the mainline kernel.
i was using Asahi on my M1 laptop, it was great, but have since switched to UTM.app (from the app store, but available outside it too), and configured to use Apple Silicon Hypervisor rather than QEMU, and it's been excellent, on M2 series processors at least. UTM warns its wrapping of the Apple Silicon hypervisor is not perfectly tested, but it's perfectly great.
(When configuring a new hypervisor-ed OS, i use a Fedora ISO for arm64 (or aarch64 (?)) and in the UTM.app gui choose Linux, which reveals the option to use native Apple Silicon hypervisor over QEMU.)
just my $0.02
If I was stuck on Mac and wanted Linux for my dev machine, I would go the VM route. I did that over a decade ago and it was great.
Asahi, while a heroic project, was always going to struggle long term and I wonder what kind of battery hit you take using it. I’d rather keep the vertical integration in the Mac ecosystem and just log into a vm that I full screen. Best of both worlds
when this project was first announced I was incredibly skeptical it would ever become something useful. then sometime last year they actually put out something that worked way better than i ever imagined and i became incredibly optimistic and hopeful. then hector, lina and alyssa all left and this project appears to be on life support.
>this project appears to be on life support
Why do you think that? The upstreaming efforts are more fruitful than ever.
Symptomatic of "if it's not growing it's dead" investor/programmer outlook
While upstreaming is incredibly important for long-term support it isn't nearly as exciting as the reverse engineering work the people mentioned were responsible for
The amount of effort and polish that goes into Asahi is commendable. I installed it on an M1 MBP and the process was seamless, from the initial curl, to it handling the disk partitions. It was a work of art. Fighting to install native linux on apple silicon is an uphill battle though.
I am still waiting for OpenBSD to add support. They do use Asahi to get the install going. But unless I am mistaken, only up to M2 is supported now.
I honestly dont get why apple isn't more open with their drivers and stuff to get linux working on macbooks, they don't charge for macos, most of their profit comes from hardware it feels like opening up macbooks to be used by people that are linux diehards would just open up more sales
Most of their profits come from software or ecosystem lock ins. So while they do profit off of each Mac sold, if those sales don't translate to more iCloud subscriptions, app purchases, or iPhones then it really doesn't make financial sense for them. Even if they only had 3 people and a PM dedicated to Linux support, that's still roughly a million dollars a year for a nebulous promise of "slightly more hardware sales." It sucks but it's the reality of the situation.
casual observers "discover" that Apple is deeply controlling with regards to monetization.. sharing or open-for-its-own-sake are not welcome
As other comments have mentioned, they have kind of a "total hands-off; neither help nor hinder" policy around 3rd-party operating systems on Apple Silicon. They aren't providing any kind of assistance, but they aren't doing anything to obstruct it either: even though the Linux drivers have to be reverse-engineered, the actual installation process is very easy and not inhibited at all by the extensive cryptographic boot chain protections built into macOS, even though it easily could be. And as far as I know, what little they have said publicly about this is that they don't intend to ever try and actively block Linux.
So in that sense I think it's mostly just a resources thing: they don't feel it's worth their time and money to assist this process. Which, honestly, I can't get that upset about: we're not entitled to Apple spending resources to help people install other operating systems on their hardware; so long as they don't actively impede the process I see no reason to get upset.
I don't understand the obsession with the new apple hardware. How is it worth this much trouble? My XPS13 works perfectly with Linux straight out of the box for half the price... and never in my entire life have I needed more than the eight hours of battery life it reliably delivers for me.
I do most of my work over SSH on big metal machines, maybe that's the disconnect? But seriously, there are few things in the world that matter less to me than how fast my laptop is. I did some real work a few weeks ago on a ten-year-old Celeron POS and it didn't bother me at all.
> I do most of my work over SSH on big metal machines, maybe that's the disconnect?
Yeah, I believe that's where the disconnect is. I moved from a Thinkpad to the 16in Macbook Pro with the M3 Pro chip, and I am able to reliably build and write code that runs locally on 5 different Docker containers, for at least 10 hours. I once did a 48hr hackathon with this laptop and I only had to charge it I think 4 or 5 times. I need to be very mobile as I'm going to different locations to attend meetings or write code, and it's able to do everything reliably for a (very extended) workday.
I would have to move from wall socket to wall socket on my old Thinkpad, but something to note is that I was using Windows 10 at the time. The Macbook's best-in-class (in performance-per-watt and per-kg) hardware combined with the software was something that became unbeatable for my workflow.
That being said, my next laptop will be a reliable, non-Apple, but Apple-like performance, ARM64 laptop, and I'll be using some Linux distribution on it.
It's not that I actually write code over SSH (I usually work with wifi disabled), more that I just push things to big machines for building and testing them, rather than doing that locally. My pair of 32-thread Ryzen machines are worth their weight in gold for the amount they juice my productivity. No laptop can ever touch that, for obvious physics reasons.
I can do everything you're describing with my XPS13. I regularly go days without plugging it in.
I suppose for folks here, they like being able to do dev work (as well as web browsing) on a fast laptop with low power draw. Sounds like that's not exactly your use case.
> they like being able to do dev work (as well as web browsing) on a fast laptop with low power draw.
I guess that's hard for me to understand... do you just not have to compile things? Or do you just not mind waiting?
No matter how exceptional the laptops are for laptops, a real computer plugged into a wall is always going to vastly outperform them...
To add a bit (I wrote this in response to a deleted comment):
The yocto build I'm currently working on takes about six hours to complete on my biggest machine. Yes, it's an incremental build, but warming up a laptop would require several days of 100% CPU :)
It's also not really possible to test locally, even a VM of the right architecture is insufficient without doing a bunch of work to make it match the target hardware.
Often you can build a quick little ad hoc thing that lets you test some piece of it locally, but sometimes it's too much work.
Frequently I need to compile test several dozen Linux kernel configurations with different cross compilers, each of which takes half an hour to run on the huge box.
I can't imagine doing any of this locally on a single laptop, I would get 1% as much done as I currently do.
I do most of my work over SSH on a Mac. Keyboard, trackpad, screen, battery life, video call peripherals.
Honestly, I almost wish there was a push to get Apple to be more open on their OS code instead of trying to get Linux to support Apple Silicon. MacOS is a BSD of sorts, after all.
While it'd be nice to be able to run Linux on my M2 MBP someday when Apple stops supporting it, ultimately, the reason many (but not all) power users buy Macs is because they want the UNIX/UNIX-like work done for them and for it to run on fast hardware. If I want something more customizable, I'm barking up the wrong hardware tree.
Does that solve the question of "what do I do with this Mac that no longer gets updates?"? No, but most people either list theirs for sale to someone who isn't as bothered by that, or trade it in at an Apple Store for credit towards the new shiny.
Not happening—at least not under the current leadership— apple is not in it from the tech side, they're a design company, they make appliances not computers. Your macbook is like a fridge with certain restricted interfaces. The mindset and tradition is different from purely unix hacking, despite the userbase having an overlap. If you can convince your fridge manufacturer to be more open with their code in a competitive market, then maybe you can convince apple with similar sort of reasoning, probably involving some benefit in terms of profit.
They're still working on M1 support. Still no thunderbolt or display port alt mode.
Its painful to watch people choose Apple over a user respecting company that supports Linux well
i mean, i did a bunch of the m3 support that m1n1 has, and i did it because it was fun. The reason you get blinking cursor and not linux is because hacking on the linux kernel is decidely less fun (I did a bunch of wifi work).
Oh, that's interesting. Linux kernel hacking is the area where I have the best chance of contributing something. If I can get my m3 max bootstrapped to a blinking cursor then I'd be very happy to participate in kernel work.
Is it theoretically feasible for Apple Silicon M3 (with nested hypervisor support) to run pKVM as bare-metal hypervisor?
There really aren't that many companies that respect users and support Linux well that need this sort of work done on them.
Then again, the hardware that those companies release isn't quite as good as Apple Silicon, IMHO.
It's not so much that other companies support Linux. It is that they support industry standards and protocols. Apple is totally vertically integrated and they always cut corners on hardware implementation to save money. This means their hardware does not work how it should and requires custom work arounds and patches if you want to run a normal OS.
This is very different from PC hardware. It doesn't need to support linux. It just needs to not cut corners.
I'm mainly a Linux user, but recently switched to a M4 mbp for video editing (davinci resolve) and local LLMs.
Is Asahi able to run mlx with the full Apple hw optimizations?
I'm guessing it's a long shot for Resolve to run there, let alone with hardware optimizations.