Re:Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now?
by zamadatix on Sunday September 17, 2023 @09:02AM
(#37544616)
I'm not trying to hold Asahi Linux to any standard - I'm trying to find a single standard in which Apple's platform could be viewed as generationally stable.
If we look at M1->M2:
- It doesn't have backwards compatibility even with the manufacturer's own OS. The gap here is 2 years yet I can get farther in support than that just booting a 10 year old stock installer on my 13900k system.
- You can't natively boot launch-day Linux at all, by any means or know-how.
- Getting the kernel to boot, display output is flat impossible. The keyboard and external input doesn't work. Hardly anything just works really.
- Once you get past those kinds of base things the Wi-Fi doesn't work, any type of backlight is not adjustable, the GPU doesn't work, the speakers don't work. Some of these do just need minor tweaks to make as functional as they were on the M1, others still aren't as functionally equal to this day. Anything that might sometimes be broken on x86 is broken but it's not "some new chipsets have broken that before" or "some basic users may get a black screen and get stuck not knowing what to do" they just plain do not work at all. To get it to do so again someone needs to do 100% of the programming work needed with zero no participation from the manufacturer.
Meanwhile the basis a traditional x86 system is supposed to be no different:
- When the many year old Linux release boots, non-advanced users can sometimes end up with a black screen and not know what to do
- Certain examples of chipsets have had broken day 0 support for one of their storage protocols
- Not every operating system from 10 years ago had native support for UEFI boot
- Despite booting, lease day versions of your Linux distro may not have e.g. working graphics hardware acceleration
Next to me I have my M2 running Asahi. It's been a little over a year since the release and it's still not up to support parity of my M1 at the time of launch. Next to me I've also got a few Intel and AMD boxes, they all boot many years old Linux with more working hardware than the M2 has in Asahi to this day.
I haven't been selective on the history of x86 support but even if I was to do so and intentionally only pick every bad thing that happened in a single generation x86 upgrade, over a 5x longer period than we're looking at Apple, and put it in context of a single release to compare to the M1->M2 transition... it would arguably still have been in better shape and, at worst, have been the same. From that I cannot conclude the new Apple hardware has shown itself to be any more stable a target, if anything it's looking even worse these days.
If we look at M1->M2:
- It doesn't have backwards compatibility even with the manufacturer's own OS. The gap here is 2 years yet I can get farther in support than that just booting a 10 year old stock installer on my 13900k system.
- You can't natively boot launch-day Linux at all, by any means or know-how.
- Getting the kernel to boot, display output is flat impossible. The keyboard and external input doesn't work. Hardly anything just works really.
- Once you get past those kinds of base things the Wi-Fi doesn't work, any type of backlight is not adjustable, the GPU doesn't work, the speakers don't work. Some of these do just need minor tweaks to make as functional as they were on the M1, others still aren't as functionally equal to this day. Anything that might sometimes be broken on x86 is broken but it's not "some new chipsets have broken that before" or "some basic users may get a black screen and get stuck not knowing what to do" they just plain do not work at all. To get it to do so again someone needs to do 100% of the programming work needed with zero no participation from the manufacturer.
Meanwhile the basis a traditional x86 system is supposed to be no different:
- When the many year old Linux release boots, non-advanced users can sometimes end up with a black screen and not know what to do
- Certain examples of chipsets have had broken day 0 support for one of their storage protocols
- Not every operating system from 10 years ago had native support for UEFI boot
- Despite booting, lease day versions of your Linux distro may not have e.g. working graphics hardware acceleration
Next to me I have my M2 running Asahi. It's been a little over a year since the release and it's still not up to support parity of my M1 at the time of launch. Next to me I've also got a few Intel and AMD boxes, they all boot many years old Linux with more working hardware than the M2 has in Asahi to this day.
I haven't been selective on the history of x86 support but even if I was to do so and intentionally only pick every bad thing that happened in a single generation x86 upgrade, over a 5x longer period than we're looking at Apple, and put it in context of a single release to compare to the M1->M2 transition... it would arguably still have been in better shape and, at worst, have been the same. From that I cannot conclude the new Apple hardware has shown itself to be any more stable a target, if anything it's looking even worse these days.