There's an M1 Mac Mini. What's this about a touchpad?

M1 Mac mini supports the shiv trackpad of course. Comes in clutch when you have limited desk space (and to me the superior input device).

It seems difficult to use long-term for RSI. What are your thoughts?

I totally had this problem with a magic touchpad.

Great device. Loved it - for about a month. Couldn’t touch it without pain after that.

No idea what a shiv trackpad is. I did find this while googling for it though: https://www.etsy.com/listing/783328345/

Weird auto correct. Should be Magic Trackpad

A shiv is an improvised, easily concealed, close quarters DIY weapon, constructed of pretty much anything that can be formed into a sharp point or cutting edge. They are popular in prisons due to supply side constraints on other armament options. Think "toothbrush sharpened into stabby thing" or "piece of bed frame filed down into cutty thing." Just about the furthest thing from Apple hardware I can think of.

> That doesn't sound as interesting as this article suggests when stuff like USB, the touchpad, keyboard, speakers, 3.5mm audio, suspend/sleep are all still WIP downstream.

I wonder what kind of realistic ETA there is (if any) for these kinds of features.

A lot of them sound pretty close. Sleep for example is something they know how to get working, all that’s left is someone to come up with a plan to integrate it nicely in to the Linux kernel in a way that isn’t copy pasting the existing system and changing the values that are different on Mac.

Speakers also do work but they are disabled by default so a bug in the current implementation doesn’t blow up the hardware.

And a whole set of major features will be supported as soon as the thunderbolt driver is done which I’ve heard is in progress.

The touchbar, fingerprint reader, and camera are things I wouldn’t hold my breath for.

> come up with a plan to integrate it nicely in to the Linux kernel in a way that isn’t copy pasting the existing system and changing the values that are different

Laughs in NetBSD

speaker support is being actively worked on [1]

[1]: https://phpc.social/@[email protected]/10981800943090...

I used to be pretty pessimistic about the team. While it had some solid heads in it, I thought things would take much longer than they have. Given their current progress/speed I wouldn't be surprised if most of these are functional enough for upstream by the end of the year, with iterative progress towards M2.

Agreed. Bad article because it sets false expectations which leads to poorer adoption.

   stuff like USB, the touchpad, keyboard, speakers, 3.5mm audio, suspend/sleep are all still WIP 

That makes it sound as if they are barely (un)usable which isn't true either

Are speakers enabled in Asahi stable already? If they're still behind a build flag (which is for a good reason, you can blow them up if you're not careful), I'd say those are indeed unusable.

I don't understand why USB support should even be an issue. Is the controller integrated into the SoC or something? Or is it a chipset thing?

Feels like Apple have made this a lot harder than it needed to be. Of course they're masters at designing great hardware with ridiculous flaws. Like somehow being fragile despite the metal construction. Missing connectors, weird keyboard design choices. Soldered-on components. I bought a Macbook Pro once almost a decade ago. Never again. Never before or since have I felt less like I actually owned the hardware I'd bought.

I often have to read this kind of comments about apple, but it never aligns with my personal anecdotes about apple, and it never mention actual hardware or brand whose qualities are so much more valuable than apple's.

You sound like anything but apple is good, but there's a lot of awful hardware out there, that is for sure. How to you avoid it ? What's your foolproof buyer method ? I might sound snarky, but I'm also genuinely interested !

Apple is kind of in their own price-point which is (potentially) justified by their quality. The main alternative is "buy something cheaper".

Is their any laptop that is even in the same ballpark on a performance-battery-life plot?

There's plenty of terrible hardware out there, indeed. Personally I prefer Thinkpads. I've owned a lot of shitty laptops over the years, though the Macbook Pro(2013/2014 retina) is the only one that's managed to become permanently dead as yet. The others I've been able to repair to some extent. I've had my Thinkpad for six years now and it's still going strong. It's not even a powerful model, I just run pretty low-overhead stuff on it and test the stuff I code remotely on my home workstation through a vpn. It's sturdy as hell though. 6 years of not-so-gentle use and no accidental damage has happened. The Macbook display was damaged and useless after 3 months, because it was dropped, once. Of course it was deemed user error, because it was. But man, I expect a bit more sturdyness from a $1400 laptop built in metal by a company that is supposed to deliver "superior quality" at a hefty premium.

I expect to keep my Thinkpad for another 5 years at least. But I might switch to Framework at some point if they can match the Thinkpad build quality. For laptops I value sturdyness and repairability over all other considerations, because I'm clumsy as hell. Apple products are far too fragile for me and far less sturdy than they look.

> Apple products are far too fragile for me and far less sturdy than they look

Amen.

I really like my thinkpad and basically all my family has second hand thinkpads, but let’s not pretend that they are flawless — their last few generations of intels have terrible throttling issues.

Sure, that could be, I don't have any issues, though my thinkpad also just has an i5 in.

"What's your foolproof buyer method ?"

Reading trustworthy test sites, before buying anything expensive. Which has gotten a bit harder, due to LOTS of paid content, but it still works, if you know how to spot the signs of a bad site.

Before I buy a laptop, I pretend I accidentally put my fist through the screen, and shadowbox the process of replacing the panel.

For example with Thinkpad that meant finding a compatible panel based on specs they publish about all their models, then finding a teardown and rebuild video published on the Lenovo website for the model.

I was really interested in an m1 laptop but I tried my process with it and all research pointed to "send it in to apple care" which I don't want to do because I know how to use a screw driver and order parts, that should be enough.

Yeah, display, battery, and storage replacement being doable is absolutely key to me. But even more importantly, the display needs to be well shielded, especially if it's an LCD panel, because with those one crack is enough to make the entire display unusable. The Macbook I had was very vulnerable if it fell and landed in its side. It's because Apple prioritise a thin bezel over durability, I think.

>Self Service Repair is intended for individuals with the knowledge and experience to repair electronic devices. If you are experienced with the complexities of repairing electronic devices, Self Service Repair provides you with access to genuine Apple parts, tools, and repair manuals to perform your own out-of-warranty repair.

https://support.apple.com/self-service-repair

Is that the thing where they mail you a pelican box of parts?

Apple used their own physical transceiver for the USB3/DP/TB port. They probably could have found an existing one that worked and supported Linux but it doesn't seem to be unreasonable to develop their own. To support the astounding bandwidth of USB3 and above these devices are a marvel of engineering. Every different cable needs the hardware to re-tune its timing and analog circuitry to match.

Sure, they can develop their own. But nothing is stopping them from also providing drivers/patches to the Linux kernel. Many companies that develop hardware do.

Apple is not charity. Why would they do that? It have to be economically justified.

They’d sell a lot more to Linux-only users… but that’s obviously not their goal, and Apple seems to be unusually good at being ruthless in their prioritisation.

You just need to care about Macbook. It's a luxury item after all. I made the same mistake treating my first Macbook as ordinary laptop. Of course it broke very quickly. Bad USB port, GPU issues, keyboard issues, broken SSD, broken audio port and so on.

I bought my second Macbook and I'm using mostly wireless accessoires to prevent port damage. I don't use its built-in keyboard and touchpad to prevent them from breaking. I don't disconnect it from power to prevent battery damage. I bought huge SSD (2TB) and don't fill it with data to prolong its life.

And you know what? It works wonders. This macbook works without hiccups for almost a year! Sure, I'll need to replace my Apple Keyboard soon, but that's just $250, not $5200.

Oh no, be careful. You should keep it in a dry clean room with external cooling, only ever run a stripped down minimalist, headless linux distro to avoid taxing the hardware too much. Only ever use it through SSH.

Instructions unclear, I updated to Catalina and half my software broke.

I hope this is sarcasm.

> are all still WIP downstream

For full clarity, having observed Marcans socials for a while, a big reason as to why upstreaming into the kernel is slow is because the Linux kernel suffers heavily from having BDFL maintainers.

Basically a specific maintainer can make upstreaming patches to their part of the kernel a process few people want to go through due to how much leeway they have in approving/rejecting patches. Stuff like yelling at merges that also happen to fix bugs in the parts that they modify because "bugs should be upstreamed separately" (even when splitting out the bugfix makes zero structural sense) or getting angry at contributors for lines they didn't contribute but that git diff happened to spit out around their commit to keep the diff readable.

Having watched that for a few weeks really gives you an understanding as to why so few Linux modifications for obscure devices have their patches upstreamed. (Switchroots main project, which is the Linux kernel but modified to run on the Switch for example doesn't bother upstreaming anything as far as I can tell.)

These days it’s hard to ignore the fact that Linux enjoys its continued success in spite of these sorts of crusted in grumps, not because of them.

Would you give the project to other contributors, working for Meta or Google for example?

What does "give the project" mean?

Giving the ultimate control for what gets accepted and rejected

Absolutely not, but it's also not a binary choice between "power-mad maintainer" and "corporate management".

There's plenty of maintainers who aren't that sort of a stick in the mud (even on the Linux kernel), the problem is that the Linux kernel has a few too many entrenched ones who are basically using their position to be a bully to interested contributors. They're generally aware enough that they know that the people they get into fights with aren't likely to use any of the official processes and are more willing to put up with it.

It's more akin to "this maintainer should be replaced" rather than "the entire management is bad"; to my understanding the actually important trees (as in, the server related components, since Linux is primarily used as a server kernel) don't have these maintainers; they're mostly on the stuff that matters less like well... Sleep/Wake related things, speakers and batteries, all of which are mostly useful for desktops and laptops.

I'm not that knowledgeable in this department, but: if the BDFL is really hurting the usability of their library / service, can't it just be forked by more benevolent actors?

> BDFL

(Benevolent Dictator For Life)

> Linux 6.2 adds (checks notes): cpufreq to M1s, devicetree for newer hardware, HDMI out to Mac Studio (2022) and bluetooth support.

It's worth noting that these features were long available since July 2022 (https://asahilinux.org/2022/07/july-2022-release/) to Asahi users. And like other Asahi users, I've been using them since that time on my Mac Studio running Asahi (with HDMI output, 10G ethernet, and Bluetooth too): https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/stuff/AsahiSwayM1Ul...