Asahi Linux Still Working on Apple M3 Support, M1n1 Bootloader Going Rust

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.

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/

>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.

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.

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.

Son has a Framework with Linux and he prefers it to a MacBook Pro (with or without Linux).

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

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I mean sure, but ARM SoC in Linux has been a thing for quite some time in the embedded space. This is hardly new.

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.

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!

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 first dot-com boom - 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.

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.

>this project appears to be on life support

Why do you think that? The upstreaming efforts are more fruitful than ever.

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.

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).

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.