[sliken]

It's an appealing platform. Entry level is $600, nice memory systems (66GB/sec to 800GB/sec), and nice iGPU. The laptops have nice keyboards, nice trackpads, nice screens, and great battery life. The desktops are built in a solid aluminum chassis and have a single fan (instead of the normal 4-8) and are small and quiet.

I do wish apple did a native apple port, but the community is making good progress on that front.

[sixothree]

> but the community is making good progress on that front

You mean in reverse engineering hardware?

[sliken]

Yes.

Marcan, Asahi Lina, and related folks have been working on improving 3d accelerations. It's good enough for desktop use and some gaming so far, games like tuxracer, video playback, minecraft, etc. First the driver was in user space in python, then in the kernel with rust, and recent improvements have increased parallelism (from Lina) and removing Mailboxes (from Marcan).

OpenGL and Vulkan compliance has been increasing. Last I heard OpenGL was at 99-100% (almost all tests passing) and Vulkan wasn't as good, but improving. I believe Alyssa Rosen is doing much of that work.

Last published update I've seen is: https://asahilinux.org/2022/12/gpu-drivers-now-in-asahi-linu...

There are some posts on Twitter and/or Mastodon, and regular updates on YouTube from "Asahi Lina" and Marcan, often by Live stream and Patreon.

Oh, and Neal Gompa is working on getting the GPU working with Fedora. One problem is most ARM linux distros default to 4k pages. But the GPU (which shares memory with the CPU) requires 16k pages. Seems like a performance win (less TLB thrashing), with a marginal increase in memory use.