I would just like to point out that Michael Reeves (the poster, no relation to youtuber) is a high schooler who has also found numerous high impact vulnerabilities in Apple software. Immensely talented.
If I get a nickel every time a high schooler with a decorated history of hardware tinkering goes on to work on Linux for Apple Silicon, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird they all happens to gravitate to Apple.
Not to downplay his efforts, but back in the 8 and 16 bit home computer days, kids were coding Z80, 6052, 8080, 68000 Assembly aged 10 - 12 years old onwards.
Having been one of those kids, I kind of expect a high schooler to be able to have such skills, when deeply interested into a specific subject.
Asahi is one of the projects I support monetarily cause I really hope that one day I can run linux natively on my M4 max with GPU acceleration. They did an amazing job with M1 and M2 - great to see they are still pushing forward after the departure of Alyssa Rosenzweig, who did a lot of the work on the GPU support for those.
It is worth noting the distinction between display acceleration and compute support here. While the desktop rendering is impressive, for local AI or LLM inference the Linux stack on M-series is still significantly behind Metal/MPS on macOS. I tried to switch my local dev environment over recently but without a mature compute stack it is hard to justify leaving macOS if you need to run models locally.
While the M series hardware is impressive and the Asahi project is doing miracles, I myself don't want to support Apple in any way, including buying any of their hardware.
Does anyone know if M3 support is likely to lead to M4 or M5 support in relatively short order? AIUI M3 took a long time because it was a substantial departure from M1/M2, especially in the GPU architecture, but I don't know if M4 or M5 made similar leaps.
The main reason M3 took a long time isn't related to m3 itself, but rather that the asahi project took on a ton of tech debt to get M1/M2 working. M3 wasn't too difficult, but before taking on the additional tech debt, the Asahi team focused on getting all of their changes upstreamed to the linux kernel.
The M5 reportedly has a newer generation GPU compared to the M3/M4. For one thing, the GPU-side Neural Accelerators are obviously new to the M5 series. Other stuff is harder to know for sure until it gets looked into from a technical POV.
I'm a lifelong Mac user who now has a KDE device courtesy of SteamOS. What are the best options for porting Mac default keybindings over to KDE?
I'm using SteamOS and Nix/Home Manager, so I have a preference for something that I can easily use in that environment (e.g. nothing that needs me to unlock the system partition or run as another user).
I tried asking Gemini to find where KDE stores its default keybindings, and came up short.
You can try to remap KDE keybindings but it won't affect Gnome applications, games, etc.
Personally, I found the most reliable thing to be a keyboard-level swap of Ctrl and the Cmd key. That way, whenever you're asked for Ctrl, which is all the time, you can always safely hit Cmd with no need for extra configuration. You can then remap various things in KDE Shortcuts to be more Mac like, like Cmd+Q, Cmd+Tab, Cmd+`, etc. (The only thing lacking is the Ctrl v. Cmd separation in a terminal, so I manually remapped all the Ctrl sequences in my terminal emulator to Win sequences, which matches my hardware Ctrl key. So, like on a Mac, Cmd+C works to copy, Ctrl+C is the escape code.)
This works for a Mac keyboard. For a Windows keyboard, you'd have to shuffle Alt -> Ctrl, Win -> Alt, and Ctrl -> Win. There are settings for this in xkb. (KDE surfaces these in its Keyboard settings panel.)
Keyboard layouts/shortcuts are a huge pain point with Linux. xkb is geriatric, and acts as such. Compose keys are flaky and inconsistent across applications. Virtually all Linux software is going to default to some idiosyncratic take on Windows shortcuts, often without much by way of customisability. (And those Windows shortcuts weren't very good to begin with.)
Given that you're already using Home Manager: Make sure to also take a look at plasma-manager! [1]
It extends HM's declarative config to KDE/Plasma's config files, which are harder to manage since they also contain volatile state like window geometry. For discovery, there is also a `plasma-manager` executable that prints out most (all?) active settings. In particular the keybindings are included in there.
(This doesn't directly answer your question, but maybe is informative regardless and/or helpful for finding related options)
KDE has a setting to switch the cmd & command keys so that e.g. command+c copies instead of ctrl+c. This works in all KDE apps (it will not work if you install any Gnome/GTK app, though). I forgot the setting but its something in advanced and used to be called Emacs key binds, but now I think it just refers to the keys.
Anyways, beyond that, have a look at Kinto which tries to do everything in one box, but it is an additional software you have to run:
Is there a reason why it's so hard to support newer M chips after supporting an older one? Like so much harder than supporting a new generation Intel or AMD chip doesn't seem too hard in comparison.
> Yes [SW rendering], should have clarified in the original post sorry! Hopefully GPU to come soon, still investigating that. I believed they changed the ISA so we have to modify our compiler, and I love compilers, so it should be fun! :)
If anyone else wants the closest thing to a MBP running Linux without waiting for Asahi to fully work, I can highly recommend the HP ZBook G1A.
* It has an all-aluminium chassis that feels a lot like a MBP.
* Hardware all works - fingerprint reader, webcam, suspend etc etc. Takes a bit of work, but all works in the end. Helps that HP ships them with Ubuntu as official option.
* Strix Halo chipset, which is basically AMD's attempt at an Apple Silicon type design. Single big chip, with unified LPDDR5X-8000 RAM (up to 128GB!) shared between CPU and GPU (which is surprisingly strong as well, 40 CU!). This thing is a beast for local LLMs!
Only downside really is the battery life. I haven't played around with it too much, I think there's a bit more room with custom tuned profiles, but rn I get like maybe 6 hours on a good day?
I also have an Apple M4 MacBook Pro from Work and an HP ZBook G1a for my personal. I used to have an Asahi MacBook but switched over with the lack of M3/M4 support. Some extra compare/contrast:
- The build quality of each are excellent. The touchpad on the G1a is probably the closest to a MacBook touchpad I've seen and it even manages to boast an OLED screen. On the other hand, the G1a is only available as a 14" option.
- Strix Halo will still leave you wishing it were Apple Silicon in pretty much every case except "I need to run a x86 native app/VM". It's certainly the best alternative, but you definitely trade away to go to it. You can load large LLMs (I have the 128 GB version for non-AI reasons) but they only run ~3x faster than a laptop without a GPU would because 256 GB/s still ends up being a big bandwidth limit. If you do actually do this regularly, then prepare to hear the fans and look for your power adapter as it does get quite hot doing so.
- Speaking of power adapter... you need either a 100 W or 140 W charger + USB C to be able to charge the G1a while you use it. If you want to use a lower wattage adapter you need to power off, or it seems to draw 0 W out of spite.
- It's massively refreshing to have a normal UEFI bootup process, and as long as you have a current kernel the hardware support is indeed pretty great on the G1a. Between the two, the G1a has better supported than the M1 w/ Asahi - as one would expect for a corporation officially supporting Linux vs a fan project.
If I were to do it all again, I'd say I might have either just gotten an M2 Pro for Asahi or an M4 w/ macOS and a Linux VM as needed. Part of going for an x86 laptop was to be able to dual boot into games with strict DRM, but after trying multiple versions of AMD graphics driver for the 8060s it was more a frustration in random stutters and I ended up not gaming on it as much as I have on other laptops anyways. Bazzite does work great though, just not with all of the different DRMs or games.
I understand where you are coming from, I think the major hurdle was getting it boot and fixing M3 specific things. Now that it is working, they can port over their driver very easily (they might just work or need a small tweak)
While it's awesome that it runs there doesn't seem to be GPU support yet as the screenshot reports the llvmpipe software renderer. From what I understand there are significant difference between the M2 and M3 GPUs so this unlikely to be implemented soon. Unless it turns out this original analysis turns out to be wrong.
Personally I don't consider it "working" as a laptop on an Apple M3 unless you actually have GPU support. Software rending just sucks, even with a SoC as powerful as the Apple M3.
Nice! Good to hear that progress is still being made, I know it was on pause for a bit as developers rotated out and there was an effort to get things upstreamed.
I've been running Asahi Fedora GNOME on a Mac mini M1 for some while now (using it right now in fact) with almost zero complaints. A really solid and usable setup. I could see myself buying a used MacBook Air M3 down the road once this work is all finished up, which is very exciting. The prices are already pretty reasonable, even for a 16GB RAM model!
Can anyone point me to a good report of the current working status and known drawbacks of Asahi on Apple Silicon? Would there ever be a reason to run it on a Mac Mini or Apple desktop device? Or at that point would you just get a Linux box?
I’ve managed to get NixOS running on an 8gb MacBook air which tools a bit of tweaks but asahi installer sets everything up where you can boot and install from NixOS
Considering how far behind they are of new releases of hardware I'd imagine the most appealing use case is going to be trying to squeeze some more life out of outdated hardware that struggles running the latest Apple software. But that's kind of the sweet spot for a Linux desktop anyway, isn't it?
[+] [-] internetter|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] iknowstuff|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] xeonmc|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|1 month ago|reply
Having been one of those kids, I kind of expect a high schooler to be able to have such skills, when deeply interested into a specific subject.
[+] [-] matthewfcarlson|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] midtake|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kamranjon|1 month ago|reply
Edit: Here is their donation page if you're interested in chipping in as well: https://opencollective.com/asahilinux
[+] [-] storystarling|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] m4rtink|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] weinzierl|1 month ago|reply
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3OAiOfCcYFM
[+] [-] jojomodding|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] jsheard|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] adgjlsfhk1|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] OGEnthusiast|1 month ago|reply
Source from Asahi contributor: https://social.treehouse.systems/@sven/114278224116678776
[+] [-] zozbot234|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] bsimpson|1 month ago|reply
I'm a lifelong Mac user who now has a KDE device courtesy of SteamOS. What are the best options for porting Mac default keybindings over to KDE?
I'm using SteamOS and Nix/Home Manager, so I have a preference for something that I can easily use in that environment (e.g. nothing that needs me to unlock the system partition or run as another user).
I tried asking Gemini to find where KDE stores its default keybindings, and came up short.
[+] [-] troad|1 month ago|reply
Personally, I found the most reliable thing to be a keyboard-level swap of Ctrl and the Cmd key. That way, whenever you're asked for Ctrl, which is all the time, you can always safely hit Cmd with no need for extra configuration. You can then remap various things in KDE Shortcuts to be more Mac like, like Cmd+Q, Cmd+Tab, Cmd+`, etc. (The only thing lacking is the Ctrl v. Cmd separation in a terminal, so I manually remapped all the Ctrl sequences in my terminal emulator to Win sequences, which matches my hardware Ctrl key. So, like on a Mac, Cmd+C works to copy, Ctrl+C is the escape code.)
This works for a Mac keyboard. For a Windows keyboard, you'd have to shuffle Alt -> Ctrl, Win -> Alt, and Ctrl -> Win. There are settings for this in xkb. (KDE surfaces these in its Keyboard settings panel.)
Keyboard layouts/shortcuts are a huge pain point with Linux. xkb is geriatric, and acts as such. Compose keys are flaky and inconsistent across applications. Virtually all Linux software is going to default to some idiosyncratic take on Windows shortcuts, often without much by way of customisability. (And those Windows shortcuts weren't very good to begin with.)
[+] [-] neobrain|1 month ago|reply
It extends HM's declarative config to KDE/Plasma's config files, which are harder to manage since they also contain volatile state like window geometry. For discovery, there is also a `plasma-manager` executable that prints out most (all?) active settings. In particular the keybindings are included in there.
(This doesn't directly answer your question, but maybe is informative regardless and/or helpful for finding related options)
[1] https://github.com/nix-community/plasma-manager
[+] [-] terhechte|1 month ago|reply
Anyways, beyond that, have a look at Kinto which tries to do everything in one box, but it is an additional software you have to run:
https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto
[+] [-] SirMaster|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] merelysounds|1 month ago|reply
> Yes [SW rendering], should have clarified in the original post sorry! Hopefully GPU to come soon, still investigating that. I believed they changed the ISA so we have to modify our compiler, and I love compilers, so it should be fun! :)
source: https://bsky.app/profile/integralpilot.bsky.social/post/3mde...
[+] [-] saubeidl|1 month ago|reply
* It has an all-aluminium chassis that feels a lot like a MBP.
* Hardware all works - fingerprint reader, webcam, suspend etc etc. Takes a bit of work, but all works in the end. Helps that HP ships them with Ubuntu as official option.
* Strix Halo chipset, which is basically AMD's attempt at an Apple Silicon type design. Single big chip, with unified LPDDR5X-8000 RAM (up to 128GB!) shared between CPU and GPU (which is surprisingly strong as well, 40 CU!). This thing is a beast for local LLMs!
Only downside really is the battery life. I haven't played around with it too much, I think there's a bit more room with custom tuned profiles, but rn I get like maybe 6 hours on a good day?
[+] [-] zamadatix|1 month ago|reply
- The build quality of each are excellent. The touchpad on the G1a is probably the closest to a MacBook touchpad I've seen and it even manages to boast an OLED screen. On the other hand, the G1a is only available as a 14" option.
- Strix Halo will still leave you wishing it were Apple Silicon in pretty much every case except "I need to run a x86 native app/VM". It's certainly the best alternative, but you definitely trade away to go to it. You can load large LLMs (I have the 128 GB version for non-AI reasons) but they only run ~3x faster than a laptop without a GPU would because 256 GB/s still ends up being a big bandwidth limit. If you do actually do this regularly, then prepare to hear the fans and look for your power adapter as it does get quite hot doing so.
- Speaking of power adapter... you need either a 100 W or 140 W charger + USB C to be able to charge the G1a while you use it. If you want to use a lower wattage adapter you need to power off, or it seems to draw 0 W out of spite.
- It's massively refreshing to have a normal UEFI bootup process, and as long as you have a current kernel the hardware support is indeed pretty great on the G1a. Between the two, the G1a has better supported than the M1 w/ Asahi - as one would expect for a corporation officially supporting Linux vs a fan project.
If I were to do it all again, I'd say I might have either just gotten an M2 Pro for Asahi or an M4 w/ macOS and a Linux VM as needed. Part of going for an x86 laptop was to be able to dual boot into games with strict DRM, but after trying multiple versions of AMD graphics driver for the 8060s it was more a frustration in random stutters and I ended up not gaming on it as much as I have on other laptops anyways. Bazzite does work great though, just not with all of the different DRMs or games.
[+] [-] n0n0n4t0r|1 month ago|reply
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/#tab...
[+] [-] michaelRostom|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] zozbot234|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] umanwizard|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zwarag|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] Retr0id|1 month ago|reply
Although, I was daily-driving Asahi on an M1 Pro before GPU support was here and it was very usable.
[+] [-] throw0101a|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] treesknees|1 month ago|reply
https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/faq/#can-i-dual-boot-asa...
[+] [-] unknown|1 month ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Encounter|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] rowanG077|1 month ago|reply
Personally I don't consider it "working" as a laptop on an Apple M3 unless you actually have GPU support. Software rending just sucks, even with a SoC as powerful as the Apple M3.
[+] [-] dralley|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] drcongo|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] jaredcwhite|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] ashirviskas|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] dangus|1 month ago|reply
The top SKU has a similar performance and efficiency profile to the base M5 processor along with faster graphics performance.
Review embargos for the top SKU just dropped today.
[+] [-] dtartarotti|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] drBonkers|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] kreetx|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] ncrmro|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] dylan604|1 month ago|reply
What exactly is a Linux box? If you're running Linux on an M3, is it not now a Linux box?
[+] [-] emodendroket|1 month ago|reply
[+] [-] zozbot234|1 month ago|reply