Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by unfitted2545 60 days ago
From an end user perspective, I think the best thing the Asahi team could have done was solely focus on getting the M1 Air/Pro working 100% before moving onto other devices.

But that would probably result in burn out from the crazily talented dev team :P

3 comments

Asahi focusing on M1 would also encourage secondary market sales of M1 laptops, which are already a primary competitor (see Apple marketing) to current Apple laptops. If Apple wanted to encourage Asahi Linux users to move from M1 or Qualcomm to M5/M6 Apple devices, they could improve device firmware compatibility with Linux, or contribute directly to mainline Linux.
Haha, I can't imagine Apple contributing open source driver code to mainline Linux.

My assumption is that if they ever decided they would provide support for Linux, it would be a private Mac-linux fork.

It's hard to imagine they would go the shim + blob route like nvidia as that would still require upstreaming stuff.

Honestly, they should just document their hardware so we can write our own drivers without hurclean reverse engineering efforts.

Considering that M1 and M2 are almost the same architecturally isn't that exactly what they are doing? M3 are two new contributors who decided they wanted that.
I'm not really sure what it would mean for M1 air/pro to work better at this point to be honest, other than I guess power consumption during sleep but that's supposedly a super tricky problem that can't be "solved", it can just be incrementally improved through immense effort. But the main problems I have on my M1 Pro now are just the normal Linux laptop problems: bad trackpad palm rejection, input latency, inconsistent scroll speed between apps, high latency tap to click, somewhat janky fractional scaling (at least in GNOME). These aren't really problems for Asahi to fix, I feel.