Not sure what will happen when people will directly contribute to the Linux kernel with LLM patches though for these devices, I guess they will have to live with it.

I saw they managed to apply their no-llm policy on top of mesa but I'm not sure how long that will hold if the forks are getting too popular

Would really prefer they didn’t lose to DHH of all people tho

In the PR’s that were merged in that kernel I also see they are actively working towards m4 and m5 as well. Must be hard for Asahi to keep up this way.

I personally vetted that TouchID code you mentioned and it's an absolute hellhole, with everything done in-kernel and no userspace separation what so. That code is also a security nightmare.

regarding 'the useless gui': it was what actually was missing in in the linux world.

i used kde before, which is fine, but it is too bloated and kwin_wayland is unusually heavy on the machine: it maters, especially for mobile devices like laptops.

of course if you use macos and apple hw, you don't care about it , since the stance. i don't run (yet) omarchy on my servers. but there are a ton of other, especially developer / ai friendly, defaults that would make one tinker for days with other distros. as i said i had my own "dot files", but a community built distro with the right defaults is much better energy management than everyone on their own.

If you're comparing Omarchy to KDE, I don't think you understand what either actually is. You can use Hyprland/Quickshell in other systems.

> but a community built distro

Omarchy is also not a community built distro.

Omarchy (first it was Omakub) changed that by serving it all up to me in less than five minutes. There are, perhaps, other similar projects, but this one got to me first. For me, it's an improvement. Someone else's defaults aren't a constraint as long as I find them useful. I only wish M4 Pro was supported, because macOS (even though I'm still running 15.x) has gone downhill.

It's, of course, less useful if you have 20 years' worth of dotfiles and custom workflows that you aren't keen to replace and I fully respect that.

https://gravitylinux.org

Spoiler: We have Vulkan 1.4 working, all of M4 and most of M5 working, are making significant progress towards full suspend to ram (no version of Asahi supports this) and this will all be shipped to users very soon!

We also have vrr!

Not sure if it would be useful for you, but I did get an M3 GPU driver kinda working (it boots KDE, runs Quake and GLXGears, etc) but isn't quite usable yet. But feel free to yank the code if it's helpful: https://github.com/SuperDisk/asahi-plus-slop

I'd be very interested in seeing the parent post's project get M3/M3 Pro support; have it working in my system with a patchset on top of Asahi but suspend is leaving a lot to be desired. Unlike Omarchy, the parent post's diff would also be much more reviewable due to it's more limited scope.

Asahi at least guarantees the quality of their stuff because they upstream everything, sooner or later. Gravity apparently also intends to be upstream-first.

Same. I've been waiting 6 years to run no-compromises Linux on my MacBook. At this point, I don't care if someone uses LLM decompiled firmware ported to Linux.

If I could run linux on apple hardware without compromise, my life would meaningfully be improved.

It's not well understood how important it is that humans feel in control of their environment. I feel like it's a fundamental to human happiness. Software that takes that away contributes to the general malaise and hopelessness that many are feeling today. Because it's what they interact with.

Making that a true option to millions of people could do a lot of good for the world.

It's important work.

I would like to see a full-featured Linux on Apple hardware too, but I think over 99% of people don't feel anywhere near this strongly. Do you feel this strongly about being able to replace the engine in your car with one you made yourself? I don't, and I think most people view computers the same way.

I am not one of those people, as I do not do cars, but I would hazard a guess that most men over a certain age do in fact feel very strongly about what modern cars have become. The ones who grew up without knowing what ownership feels like less so, which reflects the exact same dynamic with younger generations who are growing up without ever knowing what it feels like to own the hardware they use.

So, yeah, yes, definitely. I wouldn't be working with computers on a daily basis if I had to use Windows.

I'm not gonna overly generalize this though. I don't think it'll be the same for most people but I tend to not care about what most people do 99% of the time anyways.

I have run Asahi and while I love the project, it's not ready for that type of use.

Recently, I got a new MacBook and repurposed my old M1 MacBook Pro for local inference. The unbelievable number of compromises and hacks you need to do to run daemonized always-on software on MacOS was another reminder.

Would love for Asahi or similar projects to be fully usable but it also doesn't seem very likely. Apple is arguably not hostile to other OSes on MacBooks, they're designed to freely boot non-Apple operating systems, but by not publishing any hardware manuals Apple ensures that an Asahi-style project is always going to be well behind, likely years behind, in hardware support.

Despite the ethical grey area of LLMs regarding stolen IP, I'm at the point where I'd cheer on a complete set of reverse engineered firmware appear.

Damn the consequences

Gravity Linux vs Asahi Linux

Gravity Linux and Asahi Linux are two independent projects working towards the shared goal of a strong, open OS ecosystem on Apple Silicon devices. Gravity Linux was initially forked from Asahi Linux over differences in policy, namely regarding LLM use. We have tremendous respect for the Asahi Linux project and emphasize our shared goal of running Linux on Apple Silicon.

A shame that the community is split like this but happy to see progress regardless.

This is confusing - your website shows M4 as Wip (i.e. pre-alpha) and only M4 mini as alpha. M5 is not listed at all.

Wip is described as "Bring-up in progress. Not usable yet." So is it "not usable" or "all of M4 (...) working"?

Does it though?

So, "it's better because our code exists, and their code doesn't" isn't the brag you think it is.

Especially since the only reason your code exists in the first place is that they did the hard work and your project forked.

Enshittification comes for everybody.

I must have missed that; could you share a link to the Linux kernel that's tested and certified as functional on M4 hardware?

It's the operating system, mate. People don't just use operating systems to take screenshots and then post on social media.

> it's better than Asahi code, because our code exists, and their code doesn't

This is an especially horrific comment if you are really related to the project and this also adds to the perspective on why Asahi team might have wanted to have no nothing to do with this project and related people and their thought process. Anyway, good luck.

> This release is intended for developers.

RE always ran a risk of everything you mentioned.

If this project had been started before the AI craze by some RE amateur you probably wouldn't be this dismissive.

People would still be nervous about the legal ramifications of accepting code from an Apple employee though.

Even good code is a liability. Admittedly "horrific" code is a 10x or 50x liability. Sometimes you accept that kind of technical debt because "it's really important" — e.g. the company will go bankrupt, or whatever.

(Historically, btw, this is why proprietary corporate code is often so much worse than even fairly incompetent open-source code. Because it's just not really that important to ship horrific slop when nobody's income depends on it.)

The idea that shipping "horrific" code now is somehow better than not shipping it until it is fit for human consumption works in some narrow business life-cycle scenarios, but not in any kind of user-facing scenario, and certainly absolutely fucking not any kind of user-facing OS implementation scenario... (T_T)

Why didn't you start from scratch building something of higher quality? Lack of skill or only of tokens?

Unironically yes. I think it's great that you don't have to be as extraordinarily skilled as the Asahi developers in order to get Linux running on new hardware.

Otherwise one can also say Asahi is compiler-generated slop compared to hand written assembler code.

Some of us still care.

Or not feeling good for the intellectual theft involved in the training of AI to begin with?

Or not caring for the de-skilling of of human brains who are delegating coding to AI, and increasingly even the architectural and decision part?

Or the training material being AI degradation that awaits most code being written by AI?

Or the baragge of slop PRs that overwhelms my favorite FOSS projects?

Or deeping of big AI dependency, in times of climate and economic crisis that it worsens, but that it also risks not having the luxury of it forever?

Or the ease with which any stupid direction can be followed via AI, and the resulting always changing projects, already a problem with short attention span project leads even for big projects like Gnome?

Or the lack of deeper understanding to control all this in future generations of programmers reduced to "AI operators"?

The rest is all just why you don't love AI generally.

(Not saying you're wrong; just that you expanded the topic substantially.)

Well, none of those stop to matter or get a free pass just because it's Asahi Linux & Gravity Linux.

Especially since I wasn't just answering for Asahi Linux & Gravity Linux. I was answering the question I quoted in general:

"Who cares [if AI is used on a project] if it gives you the features with good-enough performance?"

There are a few significant reasons worth considering when getting down to the level of OS and hardware drivers. Long term maintainability is one. But another big one is that such software is capable of physically and permanently destroying the hardware it's operating on, with the textbook example for Macs being the speakers found in Macbooks. The only way to get the kind of performance they offer out of that physically light/thin package is to give them the power to destroy themselves if run at full force continuously but then run it from software so that they aren't run at full force continuously, but rather take advantage of the headroom that offers for very brief audio spikes whose overall integrated power still falls below safe limits. This all needs to be done from software since response of real world analog isn't instant. That enables much more range then if they were hardware capped at the maximum level they could run constantly, but it also means that if they're driven wrong, poof. The drivers have to never go to certain bad states, purely from software.

LLMs can't offer those kinds of guarantees, they don't really "know" how things work and then produce something deterministic off of that. It's even worse if, as-is the case with this sort of vibecoding effort, the LLM operator is in fact depending on the LLM for that part because they don't know how it really works either (vs someone who is just using it for boiler plate and knows exactly where the critical paths are).

Obviously everyone is welcome to roll the dice with their own hardware as they wish, and it may be ok. Or if using really old hardware one might just not care. And not all hardware is as sensitive as modern notebooks of course. Just be aware the analog world can be messy and you might not actually have the guardrails to screw up that you're used to in a higher level software environment.

>Otherwise one can also say Asahi is compiler-generated slop compared to hand written assembler code.

No, one cannot say that. Or at least not without looking really stupid.

https://github.com/GravityLinux/linux https://github.com/niklassheth/mesa-wip

but as a shipped product you are currently right. That'll change when we ship.

Is this referring to Omarchy? Anyone have context? TBH I'm surprised their work was ever MIT-licensed instead of GPL.

Very interesting choice of words, but again, all their work including all issues and docs are LLM-generated.

> Omarchy on... > Apple M1/M2 chips# > Asahi Alarm is a version of Arch for Apple M1/M2 computers built on top of Asahi Linux. You can get Omarchy running on top of that with some effort. See the user-driven guide.

Source: https://omarchy.org/manual/omarchy-on/

> [...] You finished what Asahi started, and you’re already pushing on to M4, M5, and M6. Thank you!

Source: https://omarchy.org/news/2026/11/marcelo-alcantara-and-birk-...

At the same time it was mostly to small OSS projects that dont have formal non-profits so no tax exemption benefits to DigitalOcean.

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I mean, I get the poisoning the well of open source thing that some companies do. I didn't think Omarchy was trying to do that.

With how good LLMs are at reverse engineering, I've been looking forward being able to ditch MacOS and still have decent hardware soonish.

Taking back the ownership of our devices to run our software is the positive future LLMs are giving us. We need only take action.

I've seen businesses that made the infrastructure to share a 100k machine. They needed it "on premise", but the setup did not look too hard and the results were outstanding compared to Claude Opus.

Claude Pro is 15$/month. Not everybody can afford 150$/month.

It seems like many times it's open source but "just to look".

“But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.”

—Theo de Raadt (2001)

That's opposite because copyleft is ultimately about user freedom not developers freedom.

GPL wont help Asahi team for a bit.

Yeah, the whole idea of GPL is to restrict developers from doing certain things, because it would be harmful to users

It's a protection racket. The moment you produce anything of value, it is taken from you and given to those who don't deserve it.

The GPL is so Soviet-coded that, if anything, I want to know how the corporate commissars convinced all of these zealots to release their code under permissive licenses to begin with.

In 1999, I wouldn't have considered it possible.

Nobody is forced to license their software using GPL though

I don't feel like arguing with FSF/Iron Curtain types, anyways.

If somebody has a non-exploitative Liberty-based argument for the GPL, I will hear it.

If Asahi is rejecting LLM produced code, then they will get the modified source but will be unable to use it because of their own rules.

I agree it was a poor choice of license and that GPL helps build a better community, I'm glad they mad ethe license choice

> In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin.

Permissive licences require attribution. It's okay to complain when people publish your permissively-licenced work without attribution, and hence without honouring the licence.

These remedies would still be needed to actively police misuse of the new license.

> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.

I think it's clear that they don't want people to use their code and close the door behind them. They also clearly want clearer attribution. I'm sorry but if those are things you desire, then deliberately choosing MIT because of a GPL hate-boner was plain stupid.

But most people just want stuff to work, so it's odd to complain about it when others do manage to get it to work using AI to build on top of their prior permissively-licensed work.

Do the massive amount of vulnerabilities not make you think twice?

At this point, I trust human code less than llm code. Design and architecture of the code still greatly benefit from a good human touch, but I'm not sure how long that will remain true.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenAI-948-Linux-LPE-Bugs

A lot of projects just stopped accepting any outside contributions rather than deal with the tidal wave of slop they were getting. Choosing to not accept LLM code is IMHO a better compromise.

I believe that there may be valid reasons to refuse anything that was touched by an AI, but that's not about security. It's more about the non-technical problems coming from AI (centralising power, increasing inequalities, carbon footprint, ...).

There's a reason no Omarchy patch of any kind has made it to the kernel list yet. I did personally look into some of their code and it is certified, hacked-togeter slop.

AI-friendly: you can use the LLMs however you wish, but you must thoroughly understand every part of submitted code.

Slop-friendly: understanding anything is optional.

As an open source maintainer, when someone opens a PR, I don't know who they are. But I don't really care. I care about the PR: is it a "good" PR (there are multiple dimensions: is it understandable, does it add maintainable code, was it tested, etc) or not?

I think "AI-friendly" says "I don't care if it's written with an AI or not: I want good quality PRs".

I would think that "slop-friendly" is the kind of projects where the maintainers don't read the code. Maybe they try the feature (maybe not even?). I think the Omarchy guy was explaining somewhere that he does not read the code anymore, he just lets his AI write Rust. This is slop-friendly IMO.

If you are not AI-friendly, it means that you refuse to accept a good PR even if you cannot tell that an AI was involved. The mere fact that an AI was involved disqualifies the PR.

Are you iterating to help you understand, prompting to rename/restructure/document until you would have been able to easily understand without AI? Then probably not slop.

Everyone understands that LLM is a mean to an end, but it's clear that Omarchy got two confused and it's showing.

AI slop patch: - Submits patch with huge lines of code without explanation. - The body is written in a self-patronizing tone with superfluous formatting that helps nothing but annoys who is looking for the actual substance of patch - When questioned by maintainer about some line changes either goes radio silent or reply with the usual AI tone of marketin salesman. - rarely if ever discloses AI usage.

I don't see why this is necessary ? Does it provide any useful info, or just noise.

It reinforces trust.

Monitoring the CPU temperature feels very different to me. I'm pretty sure the CPU can't cook itself. This is probably documented somewhere so we don't need to speculate, but I can't research right now...

Haven't encountered any reports about it yet.

You’re reading their blog

For example, recently Opus 5.5, in some multithreaded app I was working on at work, used complex timing analysis with hardcoded time values 1.2, 0.95 etc to ensure that some activities only happen in a sequence (A->B->C). I had to tell it to just serialize these activities by putting them in a buffer. Both versions passed all tests (I’m sure it wasted a lot of time tuning the first set of numbers to pass the tests, but no human would do that nonsense). Increasingly, you feel it’s thinking diverging from humans more and more as the labs lean into RL.

It's literally why GPL was invented.

Do you think there would have been something working on mac if omarchy didn't start from the solid foundation of Asahi? Please don't make me laugh too hard.

And by the looks of it, they're very intent on gatekeeping. Deep down I don't like AI either, it has taken away a lot of what I love about coding. But it's here to stay. What if we can use it to wrestle hardware control away from Apple and other authoritarian vendors? Hell yes, we should.

The likely problem with the Asahi team is that they (by not accepting AI) feel that control is being wrestled away from them, and instead of adapting they choose to swallow the poison pill of GPL.

We might not like it, coding as it was pre-LLM is done for. No one is going to come groveling at the feet of those who stubbornly insist on not using it.

????

not sure that concept makes any sense at all. the entirety of LLMs' capability to perform software design and development tasks, such as it is, comes from the massive resource of copyleft projects, including those using GPL, that the AI companies have ingested

The intent was for their work to be usable on non-GPL distributions and OSs (including the BSDs).

The new licence is pretty restrictive — proprietary platforms will just regurgitate it with LLMs, but other open ecosystems will have to re-invent things from scratch.

You cannot exploit permissive licensing when its entire purpose is to encourage others to use it.

The way you can exploit an open license is to grab the code, invest massive amounts of resources in it and close the platform. Embrace, extend, and extinguish.

I struggle to wrap my mind around it. It's like buying an EV so you can convert it to work on gasoline.

- MacBooks are still among the nicest if not the nicest laptops hardware-wise, so some people like to run Linux on it.

- People have older Macs that they like to repurpose. E.g., we still have an M1 Mini that was used by our daughter before she got handed down a MacBook from my wife. It's now collecting dust, but I might install Linux to use it as a headless server.

Also, this is Hacker News.

Yes, daft people.

There are plenty of very nice PC laptops out there that are built and TESTED with explicit Linux support in mind, out of the box.

With a Mac you can count on it never working 100% as well as it could, and will receive NO support. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple voided the hardware warranty, claiming it overheated or something and Linux was to blame.

You are paying Apple hand over fist for a subpar experience and to screw you over.

Repurposing old hardware is one thing and there are plenty of those projects about.

But deliberately buying incompatible hardware? Retardation.

Well, you made it half way through the comment before running out of real points and deciding to make up imaginary ones to support your point. That's not nothing!

You're also not looking at the whole picture, at the time of Asahis creation it was both the Linux on Mac project but ALSO one of the most mature Linux on arm projects; surely you wouldn't say that is daft too?

This is where I disagree fundamentally.

If you are interested in woodworking and want to become a carpenter, your initial reaction shouldn't be, "I have to become a blacksmith first so I can forge my own tools".

At that point you would have wasted your time building tools when you could have been building cabinets instead.

I want to do the same with Asahi on Apple silicon. I don't understand why this would be "daft".

Because AFAIK you still need macOS to periodically update the firmware and binary blobs that supports the house of cards. That doesn't sound like the premium Linux experience it's cracked up to be.

In other words, think of macOS as a somewhat bloated vendor-supplied firmware update tool. "Premium" is subjective, but I wouldn't personally limit my options for SSDs or storage controllers to those that supply Linux firmware update tools, so why should I do so with laptops?

And dual booting to a small native OS partition and auto-updating is hardly less convenient than manually downloading firmware, creating an appropriately configured USB boot disk, and installing it by rebooting and invoking a vendor-supplied tool by hand from a DOS or EFI command prompt.

This is the craziest cope ever.

Having to dual-boot a copy of macOS is quite literally a Mac-specific problem.

UEFI updates can be pulled off a FAT32 thumb drive, natively.

By the time said macbook is fully supported, it is in sorry state. Judging by what I found when looking for second hand laptops, macbooks don't age well.

Are you dumpster diving for your MacBooks, perchance? I buy all of mine second hand, they are all still mint by the 5 year mark, and I have several at the 10 year mark that all I've had to replace is the battery.

The problem with used Macs is that they're still really expensive, and if you want to only run them with Apple software, the support duration is limited (especially true for phones, even more for Android ones). You can pick up used Thinkpads or Dells in great condition for very cheap after a few years.

That's how Linux has been for PCs also for most of its lifetime. Only in the recent 5-10 years things have kind of improved, slightly.

Macbook hardware is superb. I understand why people are interested in replacing the (in some parts) lackluster operating system Apple forces into it.

One major FU was with the 5.x kernel when suddenly it no longer supported my external monitor, this with Intel graphics (and one by one all distros upgraded to that kernel). Not sure what happened there and why, but I had to do using Linux for a while because of that.

Dino fuel generator hooked up to Tesla EV: https://youtube.com/shorts/46bRaGP4uqM

I wish I could install windows or linux on it because MacOS kind of sucks, but the device itself is amazing and reason enough to switch away from PCs.

It didn't used to, but now does.

> but the device itself is amazing and reason enough

By continuing to reward Apple they have no incentive to improve macOS and it will continue to get objectively worse because people keep giving them money.

Strange argument. Their hardware is without competition, that's the reason I use it and also warrants rewarding them with my money. Why should I reward Linux for (mostly) only working on hardware that sucks in comparison?

I was very surprised that almost nothing had changed in that long time! They got virtual desktops (finally), and widgets changed from an expose-like effect to only becoming visible at the right side of the screen, and tbh that's about it. All other "features" seem to be changes to Apple's built-in apps.

I think the OS still sucks about as much as in 2004, it's very much a matter of taste.

To go with your analogy, if I can buy an electric car and replace the engine in it with something that does what I want and gives me 95% of the usable features of the locked down engine that it ships with, why wouldn't I do that? Especially when the rest of the cars on the market are getting 100 miles to a charge when my Apple M2 is getting 300?

What about buying a really nice gasoline car and convert it to an EV?

From a user's perspective, I can only speak for myself, but I'm grateful for the Asahi Linux project's work. I have less than zero interest in ever running macOS again. It's user-hostile, constraining, and not a good experience. I prefer Debian with Plasma 6. But Apple makes high quality hardware, and they are one of the few choices for a fast ARM laptop with excellent battery life. I avoided getting one for a long time until Asahi got to a point where it ran pretty well on the M1 and M2 with relatively few caveats. Then I bought an M1 Air second-hand, and have used it exclusively with Linux ever since. I'm very happy with it. My only complaint is that I have to waste a big chunk of disk space to keep a macOS install on a separate partition that I can never remove and occasionally need to boot into to get firmware updates since I can't get them through fwupdmgr like I can on most of my other systems.

Unfortunately it appears that Asahi has promised not allow doing that[1] but perhaps it will enable someone else to make it possible.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50403097

[1] https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/#apples-unspok...

Choosing GPL and similar licenses is the only way you can publish open source software without running this risk. As professional programmers, we must insist that people either pay us for our work or act as a equal collaborators.

And yes, there's a reckoning coming for AI companies who trained their models on GPL software.

What would that look like in your opinion? Hard to fathom that the people with all the money and power could get into trouble over a licensing dispute.

It's because of something called "Rule of Law"... Most free societies in the world have it.

If you find it difficult to fathom that rule of law applies to corporations, maybe it's time to start practicing fathoming it, or they will have won before the fight even started.

I mean, I hope you’re right…

So far the precedent and the law implies the open source licence won't matter for training and the result. And these decisions will now be brought up in the US in any new cases raised.

GPL doesn't prevent that at all. That's not why Asahi made that change. It's about contributing back to the project, not the money they want to see.

Developers have their own good reasons to stick with permissive licenses. Either because they are completely selfless, or they want to help users who want to kick-start their own business selling software. Just virtuous reasons.

It's one thing to pick a few berries in the commons, even to make jam and sell it from your stall. AI companies are setting up jam factories.

That is not a fact at all. I choose to use permissive licenses because I am giving my work to the public out of charity. If someone uses it to turn a profit, and I never see a dime, I have not been exploited or abused in the least degree. It would certainly be virtuous for the people making a profit to give something back, but it isn't required. If I did require that, it wouldn't be much of a gift.

This lack of class-consciousness is the reason the OP used the c-word.

It's not going to stop any commercial activity that they do not like that was already happening.

[0]https://github.com/omacom/omarchy-mac

https://omarchy.org/news/2026/09/introducing-omarchy-m/

This made me laugh. For context: some people used LLMs to import code to get Omarchy to work on macs. So, these people are switching licenses so that they could stop competitor distros from being compatible.

So, before, Asahi people were happy with Linux working on macs; now they want THEIR linux working on macs (they are not changing to GPL out of the goodness of their hearts or that they believe in everything being open, remember, they are only doing it so that Omarchy, or similar, can't copy their work without having to be GPL themselves).

Meanwhile Omarchy is MIT; which means Omarchy is allowing Asahi (and everyone else) to copy their work, with the actual intent of getting Linux everywhere.

> with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon

which I hope everyone knows is completely dishonest. Nothing in Omarchy is about monetizing Linux; and monetizing Linux is and has been completely fine since its inception.

Asahi people just seem to be sour that someone else is joining the initiative but in a different project where AI use is encouraged to get to the same goal faster.

> When Asahi Linux was first started, it was with the intent that we develop a Free Software ecosystem for the Apple Silicon platform. To facilitate and encourage the particiation of our friends at the BSDs and other Free Software operating systems, we endeavoured to licence as much of our code as possible under the permissive MIT licence.

> Unfortunately, this is no longer viable. The malicious practices of the 90s and 2000s have reared their ugly heads once again, this time driven in large part by both the insatiable appetite of frontier AI labs for high-quality training data, and militant animosity toward the Free Software community.

> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.

> As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Hear, hear! Perfect clarity of thought. I love these people!

Attribution is the one and only condition of the MIT license, aside from the disclaimer of warranty, so I don't see how it "explicitly allows" publishing without attribution.

It makes no sense to me why you'd adopt MIT in the first place for its permissiveness, and then be surprised that people you don't like are using your code. It's like being a free speech supporter and being surprised that people say things you find abhorrent. That's the point. If you only support speech you agree with, you don't believe in free speech, and if you only support code being developed by people you agree with, then you don't believe in free software.

It makes no sense to me that this makes no sense to you. The Asahi Linux project kicked off in December 2020. About 2 years before the first ChatGPT (Nov 2022). It had a lot of ideals including working with the BSDs at the time, and so they surveyed the landscape and considered the downsides at the time vs the upsides and decided a BSD approach was the right tradeoff. Now, 6 years later, the landscape has changed pretty radically, so they've decided that the downsides have gone up and any value they're getting from the BSDs is not high enough, so they're changing course. This is not hard to follow.

>It's like being a free speech supporter and being surprised that people say things you find abhorrent

No, it's nothing like this at all. Though utterly tortured, convoluted and wrong analogies to free speech are common from people who don't understand it.

>If you only support speech you agree with, you don't believe in free speech, and if you only support code being developed by people you agree with, then you don't believe in free software.

It is apparent that you are overloading "support". Free speech is about opposing the use of violence (direct or indirect) to decide debates as a near-universal default. That's it. Social and economic consequences unbacked by violence are not opposed to free speech, they ARE free speech themselves. If I think your opinion is wrong and stupid, I may "defend to death your right to say it" but then not invite you over to dinner, donate you any money/time/resources to get your message out further, etc etc. That is my own personal free speech in response to yours. And you can criticize that in turn and not invite me and so on and so forth. Free speech preserves this unending dynamic.

By the same token, believing in "free software" is easily overloaded, and claiming that using the GPL means someone doesn't believe in free software like you just did is one of the most absurd and also ancient, tired bad faith attacks that's been around for decades. It diminishes you to make it.

I don't believe that's it. Free speech in addition to being opposed to violence to silence individuals is also against censorship. If you want to publish a book of opinions society finds repulsive, you should not incur violence for saying so, but also you should not be prohibited from publishing your views.

Now of course there's a difference between you not inviting this person to dinner and the government prohibiting this person from publishing their speech, and I understand that. Even before ChatGPT, there still existed bad actors and especially with MIT licensed software, it was inevitable that people were going to take this very valuable code and use it in closed source projects.

Asahi has every right to examine this new landscape and make changes to their licensing as a result. But speaking personally, I release my software under an MIT license specifically because I don't care who uses it or how. I'm not criticizing Asahi so much as I'm pointing out to avoid the MIT license if you have any opinion whatsoever on how your code is going to be used in the future by your friends and enemies alike.

Asahi themselves cited WINE forks from the early 2000's as a case study in "bad actors" abusing permissive licenses. So AI really has nothing to do with this, they were well aware of the precedent in this area.

To me it's just another example of this weird hypocritical stance some free software people have. They love putting the code out there and letting it spread far and wide, but once someone _else_ starts making money building off it, "hey no fair!"

The only thing you ask with a permissive licence is attribution. Why would it not make sense to you that they want it honoured?

In the copyleft world, people are a lot more vocal. If you abuse a copyleft licence, chances are that some people will make noise :-).

  curl | sh

> `curl https://alx.sh | sh`

https://asahilinux.org/

    curl | sudo bash

Why do people get hung op on this so much? You can just read the script before running it. Of course you won’t though, just like you don’t read the source of the .dmg installer.

If it's someone's fuckass vibecoded app though, just why.

By the way how safe that OS and data in it are? Or even that partition is safeguarded by the safeties offered by Apple on a silicon mac?

The short of it is that you can make it relatively secure, but it will never reach the same levels of security as macOS. The tight integration apple has allows them to do far more for security, for better and for worse.

Worse being apple putting the entire might of the platform's security into making sure the Chess app can't be uninstalled or tampered with.

And also that Safari can't be updated without a macOS update.

I am just surprised that other features like support of the newer CPUs still get a higher priority than this one. I am not complaining or anything, I am not even related to the project in any way, so not in the right place to ask for anything, but I really am surprised that this seems to not to bother most of the users?

My Dell external monitor (+builtin usb/ethernet hub) connected via usb-c thunderbolt started working right away.

My problem is I can't use my 2nd external monitor. :)

Also no luks fde support which is a big deal, basically I can't take it anywhere.

I am always looking at this "Device Support" page [1] and it's still red there. I even have a calendar reminder to check it out every once in a while, but if it's not being updated I might drop my calendar reminder then :)

[1] https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support

You can get an "unecrypted boot, encrypted root" setup though.

https://davidalger.com/posts/fedora-asahi-remix-on-apple-sil...

Did you consider that? I am personally using that and feeling pretty good about it, but maybe I am missing something?

https://github.com/osx-tools/asahi-encrypt

> Luckily for us, Sven was up to the task of dealing with all this nonsense. It just took slightly longer than expected! While the patchset to enable Thunderbolt was sent upstream first (another massive win for us!), we have also pulled it into our downstream kernel and are now shipping it to users!

> But there is a catch. Currently, only USB3, XDomain and Thunderbolt Networking are supported. You can plug in USB devices or connect two Thunderbolt computers together and make them ping each other, but that’s about it. PCIe and DisplayPort tunnelling — required for most Thunderbolt docks — are not supported. Yet. Watch this space.

> An enormous amount of gratitude is owed to Sven, who has stuck with this thankless chore for nearly 5 years in between all of his other incredible work.

Thank you, Sven!

I thought it is already a solved problem? with large enough numbers of agents running in parallel reverse engineering, implementing kernel modules, testing in vm etc, the whole pipeline seems to be complete.

Did I miss something here?

Debugging is not an issue, they seem to have it figured out. It's the design that takes time.

Meanwhile Omarchy, for example, just brute-forces everything, with patches that work today but cannot be mainstreamed, so they'll break tomorrow with new kernel release. I really expect them to start struggling a lot going forward with maintaining the support they claim.

And yet they have a total of zero upstreamed PRs, and haven't fixed enormous and glaring issues like PSCI control either.

It's almost as if the parent is correct, and Apple's ARM architecture isn't standardized enough for ordinary models to blindly reverse-engineer with normal data. If tokens were the only constraint on supporting Apple Silicon, we'd have reversed the entire SOC device tree years ago. Alas:

Why should I care about if they upstream their patches or not? I have a working M3 macbook that runs Omarchy, why do I care that it's in the mainline Linux kernel? My GrapheneOS phone doesn't run mainstream Linux kernel, but it does the job that I need it to do.

clean room RE is legal across the world. with AI, it is increasingly easier to do it right.

How to get it fabbed? That's even easier as there are lots of companies with $$$ who'd like to commoditize Apple.

Asahi Linux is a project to provide an option to people who have for one reason or another got themselves an Apple Silicon Mac.

Building their own silicon would serve an entirely different goal.

[1] https://github.com/hnarayanan/hello-guix

How, exactly? AFAIK, Asahi officially supports just as many Macs as Omarchy does. The vast majority of Apple Silicon support in Omarchy comes from upstream Linux changes merged by Asahi, not any of the Omarchy devs.

The only feature I'm aware of Omarchy adding is the fingerprint reader driver, which is in such a poor state that it could never be merged upstream. Which, if that's the standard of quality Omarchy is holding themselves to, they're the ones getting left in the dust.

The battle cry of all LLM apologists. Omarchy isn't new, they have no excuse for the pitiful quality of their code.

AI cannot squeeze blood from a stone. It's bewildering that I have to tell this to "Hacker" News, of all places.

AI proponents always act like this is self-evidently a bad thing, but it isn't. When someone is going in the wrong direction, it is good for them to leave you behind. I believe that projects which embrace LLMs are going in a bad direction, and I'm glad to see more sensible maintainers get "left in the dust".

This is a wonderful thing to read. I've been a proud financial backer of Asahi since the first announcement of their Patreon account (now OpenCollective). I've only installed and booted it once on an M1 MacBook Air to kick the tires. I liked what I saw. It worked well enough to validate the work being done. I then reinstalled MacOS so that my partner had dedicated modern laptop. I also doubled my donation.

> Some time ago, we were made aware of multiple attempts to exploit our permissive licensing to hijack our work, with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon. In some extreme cases, in-development feature code was being lifted straight out of our personal forks and published without attribution or lazily rewritten with LLM assistance to obfuscate its origin. The MIT licence explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors.

> As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Oh man, I just doubled my donation again. I'm now at 4x my original donation based on reading this because hell yeah. Congrats to the team doing this stellar work. Now that my partner has a MacBook Neo, I'm gonna wipe that MacBook Air and test out the latest release. I'm so happy folks are doing this.

I support Asahi due to ideological conviction and self-interest (in case I ever want to have an alternative on Apple hardware) rather than because I want to replace MacOS. But who knows. If Apple's rent-seeking behavior with the App Store grows and further disrupts my opinion of them, maybe I'll end up on Asahi full time.

Unfortunately, the license allows this. It’s also a social issue - why shouldn’t a faster mover be able to slop a feature faster than the project owners? Who cares if it’s disruptive to them?

I’ve seen this happen on other projects and beyond rejecting the changes, I’m not sure what to do. It’s damaging morale when someone has worked weeks or months on a feature, worked with countless individuals on planning and implementation, and then someone releases a vibe coded slop fork with the last 5-10% and then takes credit as if they’re some genius doing something useful or helpful.

Ultimately the issue is manners, but when there is opportunity and generosity, the generous are going to be taken advantage of.

Punitively changing a license with an intent to further restrict what someone does with the code is childish. If the concern is "someone will feed it into an LLM to obfuscate it" — what stops them from doing that with GPL code?

GPL code is, by the way, ripped off on a daily basis and routinely ignored because it's bordering on impossible to enforce.

Who are these large commercial players worried about Asahi Fucking Linux of all things?

Oracle? HP?

Is EMC building a SAN out of recycled MacBooks?

Not to discredit any of the work they've done but this is at its core a hobby project, and no large commercial player is touching this with a 10m pole.

Furthermore, if the GPL is really as unenforceable as you say, then there’s no reason why their license change is “punitive”. Either the GPL works, in which case the Asahi Linux maintainers have the right to restrict use of their software, or it doesn’t and there’s no reason why anyone should be upset by a gesture of free speech.

The Asahi Linux maintainers have the opinion that LLMs are harming their ecosystem, and if they want to prevent people from using LLMs on their software, then they should be able to do so without being unfairly attacked.

They are of course free to wish whatever they like, but also rightfully deserve — and have earned — steadfast mockery.

It's like the space program banning computers and going back to chalk and black ladies doing long division because programmers might make mistakes.

It's an incredible yet immature technology, and (too much IMO) people want to use it for everything without asking themselves any question. There was and still is a whole world of technology and knowledge before AI/LLM that left us teachings, laws, technologies that we must live with. Some of these things are here for good and maybe others for bad reasons.

In any case you should take your time to understand why something is there before blindly disagreeing with it. That's what moves discussion forward.

I suggest you take a deep breath and ask yourself where this outburst of anger was really comming from. Was it triggered by the mention of the GPL?

No, it's unfortunate that the authors didn't understand the license they used. It is not unfortunate that the license allows this use since that's the entire purpose of its existence, and is one of the most advantageous to users.

Framing adherence to the license as "bad actors" is just ridiculous emotional bias. Use a more restrictive license if you want to restrict the use of your code.

> As such, we made the difficult decision to begin the process of transitioning all of our repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward all Asahi Linux code will be licenced under strong copyleft licences only. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

I appreciate all of the hard work that's gone into Asahi linux, but this statement is basically nonsensical. Making the license copyleft does not prevent people from monetizing it, using AI to develop on it, improve it or wreck it. All it does is make sure that anyone who does will share their source code modifications.

It doesnt sound like they want their code to be open source. It spunds like they want it to be closed source. The entire point of open source / free software is that it lets you do what you want with it. The original author doesn't need to accept your AI patches or write AI code themselves, but downstream users are not restricted.

I am just baffled by how confused even very smart people seem to be about how open source and permissive licenses work, and what they are for!

> I appreciate all of the hard work that's gone into Asahi linux

Actually no, you don't seem to. Regardless of the license, remind yourself that they didn't lose ownership of what they did. They can still be disgusted at how people are building lazy derivatives just because they wanted to share what they did with a different kind of developers. I know I would.

Frankly, I'm not sure if permissive licenses have a future. No one wants dev marketeer to save tokens reusing their work.

The former and latter are nearly equivalent to both licenses AND everyone can still make cheap distributions with a different name slapped on top.

They only chose GPL because Omarchy is MIT and they _hate_ Omarchy.

> Frankly, I'm not sure if permissive licenses have a future. No one wants dev marketeer to save tokens reusing their work.

On the contrary, the AI shift means that devs who are concerned about enforcing the purity of their community and stymieing marketeers will be vastly outnumbered by people who just want to “move fast and fix things” (which is essentially what Omarchy represents)

Could be, reading what their fanboys write on X they could have more than a few reasons. In addition to details I'm not aware of related to how the fork has been developed.

> and stymieing marketeers will be vastly outnumbered by people who just want to “move fast and fix things”

These can be easily conflated in a single category of people, I don't see why the first group should not be able to keep prompting a model for days or months.

If you're disgusted at the prospect of people you don't like using and extending your code, then open source is not for you.

Regardless, I think you're also confused.

"How it is being used ... to build cheap distributions on it slapping a different name on front"

I'm sorry but this is literally exactly the thing GPL is designed to allow. I don't understand why this is so confusing.

Copyleft is designed to prevent people from improving on the code and then keeping their changes secret and closed source. That's not what Omarchy or anyone else is doing, they're all already sharing their changes.

Let's walk through it from the Asahi linux perspective so we're all on the same page:

- Asahi makes software licensed MIT

- Omarchy takes that software, slops the AI-iest slop on top.

- Omarchy releases the source code of those changes to Omarchy's users.

- Asahi is mad because they hate AI, but they have no recourse unless Omarchy violates their trademark.

Now compare how it works under GPL:

- Asahi makes software licensed GPL

- Omarchy takes that software, slops the AI-iest slop on top.

- Omarchy releases the source code of those changes to Omarchy's users.

- Asahi is mad because they hate AI, but they have no recourse unless Omarchy violates their trademark.

The right way to handle this would have been for Omarchy to give something back in another form (monetary probably) since Asahi doesn't want their Gen-AI code. Why? Because that's what a good neighbor does with upstream and because frankly I expect they will need more of the Asahi code in the future (if they don't decide to just ask Claude to get it, as Asahi seem to imply they already did). It seems to me that their shitty "community" is just insulting the Asahi people forgetting that without them they wouldn't be running Linux on their Macs.

The only thing that the move to GPL does is forcing them to adopt a compatible license if they need to take more code in the future, but considering the Omarchy is a distribution with no commercial/closed-source aspirations. Should have been GPL since the beginning.

I’m jumping in here but I really don’t understand this perspective. The license doesn’t say that downstream must be a good neighbor. In fact it explicitly avoids any restrictions on how downstream code is used. If you’re not happy with that then the GPL is not the right license. Holding others up to an unwritten standard (which is inherently not enforceable) is a recipe for disappointment.

True, but like in a working society, many things are being done even if not explicitly requested by some regulation because it's obvious that they help improving the society for everyone. For me it's pretty automatic, I have money for or coming in thanks to my project? The first thing I will do is giving back to the dependencies that made my project possible, I don't even need to think about it too hard.

And let me add also this, upstream decided that for whatever reason they don't want code generated by AI? It's their project, they are free to decide to follow this route, who cares. Pretty pathetic to whine about it on X, though.

You know how some countries have high-trust societies even without specific norms and others definitely don't? Same thing. Opensource needs high-trust and a community that punish some undesirable behaviors and who doesn't follow unwritten, but obvious, rules.

> so Asahi loses the ability to forbid downstream users from using AI to modify the source code.

Did anyone suggest they want to do this? It's in their own Asahi that they don't want AI.

It’s because they are not stating what is their true motivation.

What you are seeing is not primarily open source enthusiasts advocating licenses based on merit.

You’re seeing open-source being used as a store-front for leftist politics - and their primary issue is that Omarchy, AI and DHH is not on “their” side politically.

And thus they want to restrict open-source and lock it down so that (more) politically neutral or AI-friendly projects can’t use their code.

Hope this helps.

Omarchy devs with LLM support have implemented this functionality not available on Asahi:

- TouchID

- M3 GPU

- DisplayPort over USB-C

- demoed DisplayPort over Thunderbolt (WIP)

- deep sleep (0.05W discharge)

- MacBook Neo support

- demoed M4 Pro/mini support (WIP)

If that's slop, then please, sir, I'd like some more slop.

It's ok, here, read the speakers section: https://asahilinux.org/2024/01/fedora-asahi-new/

And also, I see many people forgetting that someone has been accused of taking code from unreleased branches for new features and adding it to the rest as its own.

I'm definitely not anti-genAI since that allows me to focus only on the less boring things but man, some people sound like they never wrote a line of code in their life, zero respect for years of work of someone else.

I guess you're talking about me

> sound like they never wrote a line of code in their life

I see. Well, I have, quite a few.

> zero respect for years of work of someone else

Unclear how "respect" is supposed to manifest in this case. Not contributing to open source? Not forking or extending open source?

> They could have tried building that form scratch... and instead... I wonder why.

They could have started from zero, reading the Apple specs and probing the hardware to discover how it works, rather than extending existing code? Why would anyone do that? Surely the goal is to ship software, not chase purity.

> Not contributing to open source? Not forking or extending open source?

What? Are you really asking? You keep ignoring that Asahi pointed out some dishonest behavior like integrating parts of code from unreleased branches and so on.

> They could have started from zero, reading the Apple specs and probing the hardware to discover how it works, rather than extending existing code? Why would anyone do that? Surely the goal is to ship software, not chase purity.

There are no apple specs. The hypothetic "could" means nothing.

> "Why would anyone do that?"

They wouldn't. Because they are not capable of doing it.

> Surely the goal is to ship software, not chase purity.

Ok, so they take what they want and are free to criticize those who gifted them the source like idiots. No decency.

The concept above was quite simple: You take code from someone? In addition to following the license also show some appreciations for those that saved you months if not years of development and bug fixing.

> they are not capable of doing it.

So someone who leverages tools is incapable of doing something? To make a good meal, I must raise my own cows instead of going to the butcher.

Anyway, if you do not like AI. That is fine. But do not tell the rest of the world how they are allowed to use it. Some of the most talented people use and leverage AI to increase their velocity. Does that make it slop? What a silly view of the world.

Also stop bringing nationalities and politics into things. It's moronic and makes you look like an idiot.

Brought what? What does that even mean? Don't daydream on what others think kid and try to come up with better opinions. This whole exchange was a complete waste of time, and the silly stuff you just attempted to write is just the cherry on top.

Imagine trying to explain that you should respect the upstream code YOU TOOK FOR FREE to a guy that I hope was playing dumb.

What a time to be alive, full blown idiocracy, even worse than the movie. I hope that AI (that I don't use as a meat proxy) will help me reduce this kind of interactions.

You, go out an play with the other morons.

You just wrote word slop. It's ironic you want AI to help reduce these kind of interactions, because so do I. It'll help you understand what is going on, or at least help you write your thoughts so you can actually articulate them well.

Normally you do something in response that would solve your perceived problem. In this case, it seems to be a random unrelated action they've taken to the problem they identified.

Sometimes some people change their mind.

Once you choose a license you just cannot get mad at people who read the license and then do what it says.

The cynical argument is that the spirit of the MIT license was kicking in, but most people would prefer for the spirit of the MIT license to not be like the way it is.

Here I think the Asahi Linux team came to some realization of this variety and made a change. I don't think there's much to argue over here.

They didn't even name the people in the announcement! This is fairly muted when it comes to re-licensing announcements.

Perhaps childish is right, but... hey, they are within their rights to re-license.

I’m not saying that the GPL is a bad choice, or that they shouldn’t switch. I actually prefer for software to use the GPL over the MIT license!

But it is wrong to complain when someone sees your license and takes advantage of it. The whole point of a copyleft license is to give people extra advantages for using your software, so calling anyone who relies on those advantages a “bad faith actor” is pretty outrageous. In fact I think it is Asahi Linux who are acting in bad faith now.

However, I think, what they want is for people to stop making those shoddy additions altogether. And open source does not solve that problem because that's exactly what open source exists to allow.

"My [GPU/whatever] doesn't work right"

"Why don't you buy hardware that officially supports Linux?"

"I couldn't possibly"

Apple makes very high-quality hardware, and unlocking the full capability of that hardware via strong Linux support is absolutely a noble cause. Rather than giving in to corporate lockdown, the Asahi folks are gifting the world a way to take advantage of this new lineage of Apple Silicon based personal computers.

In 10 years when Apple has long abandoned support for the M1, M2, etc, that hardware will still be able to run strong thanks to the efforts of this team. I salute them.

That is highly unlikely to happen. See proprietary GPU drivers.

Also, if you've bought a high-end PC laptop in the past decade, you'd know that you still can't get one without prior research to see if everything actually works with Linux.

It can't? Not a laptop, but my desktop still has L1 without secure boot enabled. Don't have Netflix subscription to actually test your claim but idk what they'd be detecting / requiring outside of that

People that did and have some opensource projects would never write some of the silly stuff I'm reading here. I don't expect permissive licenses to be popular for long.

Damn I feel old now. Lol.

Will probably be a road block for *BSD and other bare metal experiments on Apple Silicon.

Given this and the supposed anti-AI stance I read Asahi is having, I can’t help but wonder if they will be able to retain front runner project position for Linux support on new Macs.

Does anyone have the tea on what this is referencing? Big if true. I am unaware of any monetization effort for apple silicon