Have it on my M1 MacBook Air and the experience is solid. Sad to see one of the original crew gone. Reading his blog makes it sound like he’s burned out again - it was sad to read both for him and also sad because his perspective of the user base is also oddly skewed. He was surprised users wanted better battery life? That’s one of major selling point of the hardware platform. Surprised users wanted external display support? “Can’t you just be happy with what I gave you?” Bit of a strange take that makes me think he probably needs a long break away from something that’s become both too personal and toxic. I’m saying this because I’ve been there and can empathize.
But hey - grateful this project exists. It means Apple Silicon Macs have a much more open future.
I would have figured the whole point of the project is getting to feature parity, right? It makes it a harder sell if you lose a bunch of them when migrating to Linux.
That’s my feeling too.
And I’ll keep surporting them financially whether they get there or not.
But the whole “users act entitled by [insert basic feature]” leads me to believe other issues are clouding Martin’s judgement.
It’s a really wonderful project and it’s great to see the rest of the team deciding to use this event to build an even more resilient organization.
I wish them luck and hope they can find better ways to work with the existing maintainers.
As a solid outsider, this whole Rust thing seems like it keeps simmering under the surface in a way that could one day boil over and seriously damage the entire Linux project.
I don’t have a machine capable of running Asahi today, but I also don’t feel like I need it now. Reading this and reading marcan’s resignation makes me feel like I should find some way to chip in to Asahi now so that whenever Apple eventually stops supporting my hardware, Asahi will hopefully still be there and ready to keep the hardware going. I figure I probably have about 6 years of Apple support, but I’m also suspecting Apple might support the ARM hardware longer than they ever did Intel or PowerPC, so I might have even more time.
Make sure you never buy apple hardware again.
Really?
According to Hector Martin (Asahi Linux developer) making things easier for Linux developers is the only known reason Apple would have added this.
The asahi project shouldn’t even exit with Apples purse, this is their job as far as I care. To be honest I would never use asahi for that reason.
… Asahi will hopefully still be there and ready to keep the hardware going. I figure I probably have about 6 years of Apple support …
i used to use & contribute to linux/foss projects for ppc architectured macs and it took years for them to be fully supported at the same level that intel architectured users enjoyed; chipping in now is the only way that something like asahi is ready to take over once apple inevitably leaves you out in the cold like it did its ppc (and soon intel) users.
they have excellent hardware and it would be a shame to throw it away or allow it to collect dust when you can’t get 100% utility out of it simply because your options aren’t developed enough at the time you need them.
Linux is what keeps my Macs alive 🤭
But this is good thinking
Think like jqubed
Donate in your future
See far
Peace
You are just being silly, there is no way its going to “seriously damage the entire Linux project”. There is nothing too technical about the whole R4L drama (esp. the recent one), its mostly political opposition to Rust from some C folks. We have seen this before in Linux (Wayland/X11, systemd/sysv, etc.).
The problem is that those issues have, and continue to, cause damage to the Linux project. Good maintainers have been hounded out, or simply given up, and bad blood exists where it absolutely shouldn’t. You’re right that much of it is political, although that usually stems from deep technical differences backed up by corporate encouragement. Political turmoil can be as damaging, if not moreso, than technical differences. At least technical differences can usually be resolved technically, politics is infinitely more nuanced.
From Marcan’s description, the way certain people treated him was absolutely unacceptable, although I’ve no doubt they’d describe things very differently. I hope the whole kernel team, maintainers and contributers, can find a way to work through these differences and work more harmoniously before more members end up burnt out, frustrated and bitter.
Yeah the whole situation really sucks. Im a big fan of both marcan and linux so its just sad how it all ended. But Im hopeful the R4L project will be successful despite these setbacks. Some of the first rust drivers are really close to landing and I think once that happens, the dust will mostly settle as hopefully most of the things around rust would have been figured out by then. Even this situation led to some improvements like the R4L policy (and also brought the issue to greater public scrutiny). Though the drama probably won’t end there, especially if rust starts making in to the core kernel (thus start being required for building the kernel). That is probably going to be the final obstacle; if rust makes it to the core kernel code, I think the R4L project will have succeeded.
I agree. For everyone’s sake they should rip Rust out and put all that effort into RedoxOS. There is way too much misalignment for this to be constructive.
Our king Sir Torvalds has spoken. And hence let there be rust in the kernel
