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A comment on Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now?. Parent comment

Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? by tourmalinetaco on Saturday September 16, 2023 @05:57PM (#37539141)
One major problem is in the fact that Hector/Asahi has very little experience with distribution maintenance, and is mainly suited to the role of reverse engineering the M1 chip and implementing the driver. It would be far better if he put all of his focus into the M1 driver itself and let others handle the surrounding distro variants. In fact this recently came up when he misconfigured GRUB during updates and soft-locked Macs until they ran a list of sudo commands to fix the error.
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Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? by NoahKAndrews on Saturday September 16, 2023 @06:07PM (#37539240)
That's the whole point of their new partnership with Fedora
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Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? by charcircuit on Saturday September 16, 2023 @07:45PM (#37539976)
That didn't help as the parent mentioned as Fedora Asahi Remix shipped a bug that caused people's grub config to be overwritten with one that didn't work preventing the machine from booting. There was no way to remotely fix users and a solution took days to come out for people to manually fix it by typing in commands to the bootloader.
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Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? by mort96 on Saturday September 16, 2023 @06:44PM (#37539540)
To their credit, this is a more challenging than your standard Linux distro. Lots of software just has a bunch of subtle bugs on arm which don't exist on x86_64. Other software has a bunch of subtle bugs on 16k page sizes. Those problems aren't ones you'll face as a distro maintainer for some x86_64 Linux distro. Then there's the issue that Arch Linux ARM is itself not always super competently managed, so it's not a solid foundation to build on top of.

I think it'll be very good for them to leave all the distro responsibilities to Fedora and focus on the hardware specific stuff. But I don't think they'll stop facing weird issues related to not being part of the 4k page size x86_64 monoculture.

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Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? by tedunangst on Saturday September 16, 2023 @09:57PM (#37540727)
But was the grub issue caused by the 16k page size?
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Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? by saagarjha on Saturday September 16, 2023 @10:34PM (#37540935)
Ok, but the page size is something they chose themselves?
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Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? by vulcan01 on Saturday September 16, 2023 @11:16PM (#37541174)
My understanding is that the chosen page size is optimal for the M-series integrated memory.
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Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? by saagarjha on Sunday September 17, 2023 @07:11AM (#37543762)
It doesn't really matter all that much for userspace; the page size really is a choice. It can improve performance in some cases and regress them in a handful of others. That said, the pain of having to deal with apps that need updates is entirely on Asahi by their own volition.
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Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? by slikrick on Saturday September 16, 2023 @11:58PM (#37541392)
do you not understand the underlying architecture or do you think they just chose it willy nilly? if you don't understand why are you commenting
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Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? by dang on Sunday September 17, 2023 @01:31AM (#37541820)
Please don't post in the flamewar style. We want curious conversation here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? by kaba0 on Sunday September 17, 2023 @03:37AM (#37542478)
I wonder, wouldn’t a NixOS Asahi fork make sense? It has proper, fail-safe updates (you can select the previous version in the boot menu) and reproducible package builds even for very finicky configs.
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Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? by mort96 on Monday September 18, 2023 @10:24AM (#37556513)
The only actual problematic update I'm aware of was the one where grub broke, and if grub breaks, being able to select the previous system state from grub doesn't really help.
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Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? by tourmalinetaco on Monday September 18, 2023 @08:49PM (#37564356)
It should be noted GRUB itself didn’t break at all. Hector used a bad config which broke things, and the fix was to replace that config with a new one. GRUB did exactly what it was told to do.
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Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? by naniwaduni on Saturday September 16, 2023 @08:14PM (#37540183)
This was, to put it uncharitably, kind of predictable if you were familiar with their social circles...
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Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? by progman32 on Saturday September 16, 2023 @09:09PM (#37540480)
Such accusations should be backed up with facts and examples.
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Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? by naniwaduni on Saturday September 16, 2023 @10:54PM (#37541055)
Okay, so, without pointing fingers, it's not particularly weird or surprising that a few people gathered up from mostly the RE/console hacking/security scene have a penchant for breaking things and lack releng expertise. There's nothing particularly wrong with that, though I'd consider that in itself good reason to side-eye relying on their software, more or less the same way I'd side-eye running suckless or, idk, MAS_AIO.cmd in production.

But then it also happens that they sit adjacent to one of the most drama-infested intersections of a few scenes; I'm probably brain-poisoned by bad experiences there and not extremely comfortable airing that dirty laundry in public, but it's not secret or anything—their mastodon instance is pretty representative.

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