The only blocking point for me before I would use Asahi Linux is the support of the USB-C displays. I was considering and reconsidering to install Asahi so many times, but I just cannot give up the ability to plug an external display into my MacBook Air.<p>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?
I believe the blocker here is that USBC display support requires getting full Thunderbolt support working. Apple built their own Thunderbolt chips, which diverge from the Intel hardware that everyone else has used & that the Linux kernel drivers are written against enough to make support much harder than you'd expect.<p>IIRC Asahi has finally acquired Thunderbolt support but that support still doesn't have the pieces needed for external displays.
This works, tried last night in my M1, you need to install the fairydust kernel and reboot.
<a href="https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/lacamar/fairydust-kernel/" rel="nofollow">https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/lacamar/fairydust-ke...</a><p>My Dell external monitor (+builtin usb/ethernet hub) connected via usb-c thunderbolt started working right away.<p>My problem is I can't use my 2nd external monitor. :)<p>Also no luks fde support which is a big deal, basically I can't take it anywhere.
> no luks fde support<p>You can get an "unecrypted boot, encrypted root" setup though.<p><a href="https://davidalger.com/posts/fedora-asahi-remix-on-apple-silicon-with-luks-encryption/" rel="nofollow">https://davidalger.com/posts/fedora-asahi-remix-on-apple-sil...</a><p>Did you consider that? I am personally using that and feeling pretty good about it, but maybe I am missing something?
Huh. Thank you for the info!<p>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 :)<p>[1] <a href="https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support" rel="nofollow">https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support</a>
Sometimes this can be because the people working on one aspect of the project are not the same as the people working on another, or the same number of people, and also maybe supporting later chips is less problematic than supporting external displays. The project as a whole doesn’t just work on one problem at a time in priority order.
> <i>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.</i><p>Is this referring to Omarchy? Anyone have context? TBH I'm surprised their work was ever MIT-licensed instead of GPL.
The whole reason why people are trying to replace them is because they have stubbornly refused to use AI, which has directly impeded progress in getting M3/M4/M5/M6 working. It's fine of course for them to continue pursuing their hobby of doing everything manually, and honestly it is insanely impressive.<p>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.
Wanting stuff to work is a valid reason to not use AI for more sophisticated development projects. Having a computer that kernel panics once every three days is useless to me, even if it works for you.
A kernel panic is the least of your worries with this hardware. Asahi had to introduce a custom daemon to avoid frying speakers. Apple doesn't need to care about making the hardware interfaces safe if they control the entire stack, so they don't, and expose dangerous capabilities to the OS.
Does this generalize to basically anything outside of speakers though? I think a pretty easy solution is to not use AI for that specifically.
There was a fun period of time where Boot Camp still existed, but Windows could fry the speakers because it didn't have any of macOS's thermal protection. I think this was after the 2016 redesigns, as I had a mid-2015 with no such issue.
Linux kernel itself is AI development friendly.
Some of us think that is a mistake.
Hmm very vague. "Some of us".<p>Do the massive amount of vulnerabilities not make you think twice?<p>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.<p><a href="https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenAI-948-Linux-LPE-Bugs" rel="nofollow">https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenAI-948-Linux-LPE-Bugs</a>
LLMs will introduce new vulnerabilities. What Linux should have done is stop using non-standard C, or better, stop using C completely in favor of Rust, support code analysers.
So validate with an llm and humans. People committing code they haven't read - which will inevitability happen - is dangerous and hard to remotely verify.
Some people will always disagree with something. That's what's great about free software. There will probably be some Luddite anti AI Linux fork at some point.
That's not what they meant. It's AI friendly, not slop-friendly.<p>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.
Exactly. As an example, read that Gravity Linux guy's responses here. I will never ever trust him. I will stay away from his code as far as possible. Asahi team: I have my trust in you.
How do you define the difference between ai friendly and ai slop?
I'm pretty sure Asahi devs experiment with LLM tools, but not to Omarchy's extent. LLM ban is purely a filtration filter, so that they wouldn't be spending time overbearingly exhausting number of patches generated with AI, and not someone who cares about this than a shiny tool.<p>Everyone understands that LLM is a mean to an end, but it's clear that Omarchy got two confused and it's showing.
My definition, FWIW.<p>AI-friendly: you can use the LLMs however you wish, but you must thoroughly understand every part of submitted code.<p>Slop-friendly: understanding anything is optional.
I also agree with that definition. But for example if I get an LLM to generate 95% of a program, but I understand and have read every line of code, is it still slop?<p>Some would say yes unfortunately.
Not the OP, but I wanted to share my 2 cents:<p>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?<p>I think "AI-friendly" says "I don't care if it's written with an AI or not: I want good quality PRs".<p>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.<p>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.
Ai friendly patch:<p>* Author posts patch with a manageable number of lines so maintainer doesn't gets burned out reviewing it.<p>* Tries to outline on the body what the patch is about and his rationale for the design decisions on the code.<p>* Promptly answers any maintaners questions about the line changes.<p>* Discloses which AI model he used to assist on the patch and how was it used.<p>AI slop patch:<p>* Submits patch with huge lines of code without explanation.<p>* 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<p>* When questioned by maintainer about some line changes either goes radio silent or reply with the usual AI tone of marketin salesman.<p>* rarely if ever discloses AI usage.
experience
It's amusing that people still default to "human-written code is solid and AI code sucks" after the enormous quantity of bugs that AIs are finding in human-written code.
Ok boomer
So why those people using AI do not write the code from scratch without breaking the license and without vibe-copying existing code?
Its the monetizing part that makes me think its not Omarchy - they have no monetizing things.
They're referring to Omarchy, it's very clear on their IRC
Omarchy has gotten somewhat of a reputation for getting a lot of sponsorship money from commercial actors. If by monetize you mean "Get people to pay us" omarchy are definitely monetizing. Not much different to Asahi themselves of course, but is it right/moral to fork another active projects code and use it in order to gain your own patrons? I don't hold the answers. But no they aren't selling anything.<p>edit: worth noting this example, where DigitalOcean started cutting OSS support only to pledge millions of dollars to Omarchy. No wonder people consider the project a leech to the OSS community, but also consider correlation != causation: <a href="https://itsfoss.com/news/digitalocean-open-source-credits-end/" rel="nofollow">https://itsfoss.com/news/digitalocean-open-source-credits-en...</a>
They do have large entities donating to them
Is Omarchy trying to monetize Linux?<p>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.<p>With how good LLMs are at reverse engineering, I've been looking forward to being able to ditch MacOS and still have decent hardware soonish.<p>Taking back the ownership of our devices to run our software is the positive future LLMs are giving us. We need only to take action.
I don't get this complain. MIT does not forbid commercial use. So what's the fuss about?
Right, this seems deeply confused. If you care about how your code is used, don’t use MIT. Especially, if you care about monetization, probably use GPL or AGPL.
From TFA:<p>> <i>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>
There are licenses that require attribution without being copyleft though. I'm not saying the Asahi developers are wrong to use copyleft, but it's weird to me to mention "without attribution" as a sticking point when there are fairly standard permissive licenses that require attribution like Apache and BSD.
It's one reason I've favored GPL of late, after many years using MIT. Not that many people these days would explicitly follow the terms of <i>any</i> license.
They are mad that vibecoders are building on top of their work, making real progress, then re-releasing it as "look it works" while containing a bunch of their work. Which is sort of fair but I don't get how that works in practice because in reality anyone can read the code which is open source and do whatever they want. Licensing won't stop them.
I really don't get why people even start with permissive licenses if they have people they don't like to use their software or if they're just going to go "not like that" at the first real use.<p>It seems like many times it's open source but "just to look".
They explain that they expected that MIT licensed code would encourage contributions from BSD OSes<p>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
Because permissive licensing, and free software in general, rightfully comes with a certain cachet, and it turns out some people want the benefits of that reputation, but don’t <i>actually</i> believe in the freedom “to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose.” Hence the treadmill from permissive licensing to copyleft, and then later from copyleft to “source available”…<p>“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.”<p>—Theo de Raadt (2001)
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Shameless plug for my own project:<p><a href="https://gravitylinux.org" rel="nofollow">https://gravitylinux.org</a><p>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!
From the FAQ:<p>Gravity Linux vs Asahi Linux<p>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.
> all of M4 and most of M5 working<p>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.<p>Wip is described as "Bring-up in progress. Not usable yet." So is it "not usable" or "all of M4 (...) working"?
Hasn't been shipped yet, integration is being done now, we're shipping a new installer, from scratch graphics driver, and new kernel so there's a lot of moving parts we want to get right.
It's vibe-coded slop. Probably the reason why the Asahi team wanted to exclude these contributions in the first place.
Are you saying "vibe-coded slop" because of the quality of the end result? Who cares if it gives you the features with good-enough performance?<p>Otherwise one can also say Asahi is compiler-generated slop compared to hand written assembler code.
><i>Who cares if it gives you the features with good-enough performance?</i><p>Some of us still care.
><i>Are you saying "vibe-coded slop" because of the quality of the end result? Who cares if it gives you the features with good-enough performance?</i><p>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 <i>never</i> go to certain bad states, purely from software.<p>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).<p>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.<p>><i>Otherwise one can also say Asahi is compiler-generated slop compared to hand written assembler code.</i><p>No, one cannot say that. Or at least not without looking really stupid.
I prefer reliable software for the Operating System. Like, I can tolerate slop for a game or a one-time-thing of converting a doc or something. But for running the base software (your OS), I think you need better standards.
Just remember that for however bad our code is (and I have no issues saying that most of our linux driver code is absolutely horrific, for now) it's better than Asahi code, because our code exists, and their code doesn't.
Wow man, "horrific code" can be worse than no code. Bad code can damage hardware, destroy data, allow exploits, etc. all manner of bad things.<p>Unless your meaning is that you already have work-in-progress code that you are working on to make much better whereas they have not even started, I don't see how your point makes sense.<p>But even then it debatable whether making bad code good is better than creating good code from the start.
I absolutely don't want to run "horrific code" as my OS. Why would anyone?
You're talking about code with the potential to damage hardware. So, no.
That's just... not how it works.<p>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.<p>(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.)<p>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 <i>certainly absolutely fucking not</i> any kind of user-facing <i>OS implementation</i> scenario... (T_T)
"Code is a liability" - is one of the fundamental tenets of programming.<p>So, "it's better because our code exists, and their code doesn't" isn't the brag you think it is. Yes, a quick thrown together utility is better than having to manually do something. But that's not the same for an OS, or god forbid, a filesystem.<p>Especially since the only reason your code exists in the first place is that they did the hard work and your project forked.
> however bad our code is (and I have no issues saying that most of our linux driver code is absolutely horrific<p>It's the operating system, mate. People don't just use operating systems to take screenshots and then post on social media.<p>> it's better than Asahi code, because our code exists, and their code doesn't<p>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.
Uhm, I don’t think this is the flex you think it is.
> Hasn't been shipped yet<p>Does it though?
Sounds extremely exciting!<p>If I could run linux on apple hardware without compromise, my life would meaningfully be improved.<p>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. It's just water to them at this point. They don't even see it. But it's the primary means of interaction.<p>Making that a true option to millions of people could do a lot of good for the world.<p>It's important work.
I wholeheartedly agree. If I think about it, I must have thought "god I wish this ran Linux" at least once every single time I opened my MacBook - likely for the last several years.<p>I have run Asahi and while I love the project, it's not ready for that type of use.<p>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.
I know it goes completely against Apple's business model, but I'd love to be an Apple customer if I could buy their hardware and use it with software of my own choice. Holding an iPhone or a MacBook feels great, they're all easily among the best consumer electronics ever as far as the physical part goes. But Apple's software is completely different from how I want to use my devices so I just don't end up considering them when buying.<p>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.
> 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.<p>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.
> Do you feel this strongly about being able to replace the engine in your car with one you made yourself?<p>I am not one of those people, as I do not do cars, but I would hazard a guess that most car people 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.
Considering how easy it was to replace engines of most cars before the integration of electronics I'd say it used to be quite common. Just as most hardware vendors used to ship full specs for their components up until the 80s or even 90s.<p>So, yeah, yes, definitely. I wouldn't be working with computers on a daily basis if I had to use Windows.<p>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.
If it was as cheap and easy to install a new engine as it is for an OS, I imagine swapping engines would be even more popular than new OSs. (And I think far fewer would clamor to replace their OS if it cost $x,xxx for each OS swap and took many hours of manual labor - I.e. I think whether someone wants something can be <i>heavily</i> influenced by whether it is ~free vs cost $x,xxx, etc.)
I am looking forward to swapping the engine in my MX5, if I ever manage to kill it.
Does all of M4 include full GPU support on those chips? And what about the Apple Neural Engine stuff?<p>A shame that the community is split like this but happy to see progress regardless.
Sometimes it can be good to have two teams work independently towards a common goal. I'm sure they'll learn a lot from each other.
Vulkan 1.4 on the GPU, D3D12, full AAA gaming support
Are you upstreaming your changes?
Cool, I'm glad someone is taking a more aggressive and LLM friendly approach to doing Linux on Mac. Too bad there's no M3 since that's what I have :P<p>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: <a href="https://github.com/SuperDisk/asahi-plus-slop" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SuperDisk/asahi-plus-slop</a>
> Cool, I'm glad someone is taking a more aggressive and LLM friendly approach to doing Linux on Mac<p>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.
Omarchy works on M3 with GPU acceleration.
Omarchy has no chance upstreaming any of their work, the code is abysmal.<p>Asahi at least guarantees the quality of their stuff because they upstream everything, sooner or later. Gravity apparently also intends to be upstream-first.
Omarchy is not something I'm comfortable trusting long term, and comes with a lot of cruft.<p>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.
I just did a search for gravity linux from the search at the bottom of the HN page. HN is a fickle place as it seems you get more traction by hijacking Asahi posts that when you make your own posts.
Any plans for supporting M3 Ultra? I understand it's a small percentage of the Apple Silicon Macs out there, but I'd love running Linux on my Mac Studio?
how's thunderbolt and external display support?
What about ProMotion/120hz and HDR? Last I checked Asahi didn’t really make full use of the Macbook Display. But very interesting!
As coincidence would have it, I checked your website just yesterday and M4 Max was listed as unsupported. Has that changed in the past 24 hours?
For the people wanting "Apple hardware quality with Linux", has anyone here been using the Framework Pro? I keep staring at it in my shopping cart but tell myself my regular Framework 13 is enough for the occasional use I give it.
This is very cool. I have a project that built on Asahi[1], and the better the hardware support, the wider the audience.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/hnarayanan/hello-guix" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/hnarayanan/hello-guix</a>
After seeing the blazing progress that Omarchy has been making with making Linux work on the latest macbook I'm planning on switching all 3 of the M1/M2 to Omarchy and planning on buying an M3 macbook air in the future. I appreciate the work that Asahi did to get the ball rolling, but they've just been left in the dust with their anti AI stance.
> but they've just been left in the dust with their anti AI stance.<p>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.<p>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, <i>they're</i> the ones getting left in the dust.
I still don't understand the motivation for Asahi and other similar efforts. My impression is that Apple fully supports Linux virtualization on Apple Silicon. Why isn't that sufficient? Just asking.
From the perspective if the people working on it, I imagine it's immensely satisfying when they successfully reverse engineer something and get it working. It's not on the same scale or of the same complexity, but I feel that satisfaction when I finally understand something I've been trying to reverse engineer in a retro game.<p>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.
Why go outsite when we have VR? Yes, you answered this: it isn't sufficient.
As just one example, GPU performance is much better on native Linux than in a VM.
Some people might want to get all the apple software off the apple hardware. For example the dossier that macOS builds on users and their family behind the scenes; currently on the front page of this website.[0]<p>Unfortunately it appears that Asahi has promised to not allow doing that[1] but perhaps it will enable someone else to make it possible.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50403097">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50403097</a><p>[1] <a href="https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/#apples-unspoken-agreement" rel="nofollow">https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/#apples-unspok...</a>
Same as why so many people run Linux natively on their x86 machines. It's just part of the preferred setup because it's nicer in so many ways and there's no annoying proprietary host os in the way.
Motivation: OS/software freedom on Apple's hardware.
Because you have limited system resources with virtualization.
Because we want computers that work without macos
> It may surprise some to learn that WINE was originally made available under the MIT licence. The 90s and 2000s were a very different time in the Free Software ecosystem, and permissively licenced projects were viewed by tech companies as free real estate to pilfer and exploit. WINE was not immune to this, and many monetised proprietary forks of WINE were marketed and sold by various bad actors. The WINE development team grew increasingly concerned that these proprietary forks, while well within their rights to exist, would eventually cause so much fragmentation in the ecosystem that WINE itself would become unviable. In 2002, WINE was relicenced under the LGPL to prevent further proprietary forks from being created, and to encourage direct upstream contribution.<p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p>Hear, hear! Perfect clarity of thought. I love these people!
> 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.<p>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.
><i>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</i><p>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.<p>><i>It's like being a free speech supporter and being surprised that people say things you find abhorrent</i><p>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.<p>><i>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.</i><p>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 <i>ARE</i> 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.<p>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.
> Free speech is about opposing the use of violence (direct or indirect) to decide debates as a near-universal default. That's it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>don't</i> care who uses it or how. I'm not criticizing Asahi so much as I'm pointing out to avoid the MIT license or other similar ones if you have any opinion whatsoever on how your code is going to be used in the future by your friends and enemies alike.
> 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<p>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.<p>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!"
> <i>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><p>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.
Nice. One thing I like about Asahi is that they're relatively anti-LLM.
honest question - how hard it is to use LLM and tools like REA to reverse engineer MacOS to figure out how its hardware works in terms of getting linux support on such hardware?<p>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.<p>Did I miss something here?
Yes, read that blog entry to understand how different that hardware is from any other Linux-supported ARM stuff to see how much deep understanding you need to actually bring that support upstream to Linux or Mesa. Some(most?) stuff requires fundamental changes and no LLM is going to design and write it in an uostreamable way.<p>Debugging is not an issue, Asahi seems to have it figured out, especially with the virtualization. It's the design that takes time.<p>Meanwhile Omarchy, for example, just brute-forces everything, with ugly patches that work today but cannot be upstreamed as such, 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. Regressions may actually kill their effort.
They prohibit RE of the binaries. What Asahi doing is observing macOS as a black box with input and outputs, and translating observed behavior back to Linux.
This thread is full of folks saying, "Asahi can't keep up with Omarchy," when Omarchy Mac's own readme[0] states that it is, "Asahi Alarm + Omarchy." That's like bragging that someone sitting on Lebron's shoulders can dunk a higher rim than he can.<p>[0]<a href="https://github.com/omacom/omarchy-mac" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/omacom/omarchy-mac</a>
But at the end of the day, like in your example, you have "Lebron" vs "Someone sitting on top of LeBron's shoulders" facing off against each other. Who are you putting your money on, to get the higher dunk?
They're supposedly vibecoding support for hardware Asahi doesn't yet.<p><a href="https://omarchy.org/news/2026/09/introducing-omarchy-m/" rel="nofollow">https://omarchy.org/news/2026/09/introducing-omarchy-m/</a>
<a href="https://github.com/omacom/omarchy/graphs/contributors?selectedMetric=commits" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/omacom/omarchy/graphs/contributors?select...</a><p>Intereting top two contributors.
Y'all should just let asahi cook. I trust them more to make actual working stable OS than meat proxies.
I do it. I just found it hard to use it without the touch id. Hope that changes.<p>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?
Yeah I don't trust anyone's judgement whose installation process is:<p><pre><code> curl | sh</code></pre>
> Install from MacOS<p>> `curl <a href="https://alx.sh" rel="nofollow">https://alx.sh</a> | sh`<p><a href="https://asahilinux.org/" rel="nofollow">https://asahilinux.org/</a>
Of course not. Everyone knows you've got to do<p><pre><code> curl | sudo bash
</code></pre>
for it to work. Duh.
Ah yeah, a .dmg installer that asks for sudo permissions is much safer /s<p>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.
>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
GPL protects against someone taking your code, adding proprietary extensions, and closing off access to the source code.
This really leaves a bad taste in my mouth too. It's unfortunately inline with their absurd AI policy. Instead of working for the good of the users they literally are trying to halt progress. It's pretty clear the omarchy people will run circles around asahi very soon. Asahi people think this too and are trying to limit them as much as they can with license changes.
Also, they say this:<p>> with a direct view to replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon<p>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.<p>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.
Why doesn't the Asahi team just design their own silicon? With AI it is easier than ever. And no this is not a joke.<p>How to get it fabbed? That's even easier as there are lots of companies with $$$ who'd like to commoditize Apple.
How would designing a new chip commoditize Apple?
Why doesn't Apple just contribute to Asahi?
That would be missing the point entirely though?<p>Asahi Linux is a project to provide an option to people who have for one reason or another got themselves an Apple Silicon Mac.<p>Building their own silicon would serve an entirely different goal.
I'm glad that Asahi is switching from a cuck license to a reasonable copyleft license. Even though the circumstances that made this necessary are, of course, unfortunate.
To the people downvoting this comment: I get it, it's a vulgar choice of words. But the fact of the matter is, if somebody <i>else</i> is getting paid based on <i>your</i> work, and you aren't being compensated your fair share, that's extractive and abusive.<p>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.<p>And yes, there's a reckoning coming for AI companies who trained their models on GPL software.
> And yes, there's a reckoning coming for AI companies who trained their models on GPL software.<p>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.
> Hard to fathom that the people with all the money and power could get into trouble over a licensing dispute.<p>It's because of something called "Rule of Law"... Most free societies in the world have it.<p>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.
You're referencing "rule of law" but... what exactly do you mean? Bartz v. Anthropic resulted in a ruling that training from copyrighted books is fine if you buy them. Doe v. GitHub dismissed DMCA claim, saying Copilot generated code doesn't infringe on open source licences.<p>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.
I’m aware of the rule of law, and enjoy living in a country where it (seamingly) still applies. I’m just questioning the viability (in practice, not in theory) of legal action in the US (where this would likely play out) given the economic hurdles to clear for the accusing party and the general chaos.<p>I mean, I hope you’re right…
> But the fact of the matter is, if somebody else is getting paid based on your work, and you aren't being compensated your fair share, that's extractive and abusive.<p>GPL doesn't prevent that at all. That's not why Asahi made that change. It's about <i>contributing back</i> to the project, not the money they want to see.
It doesn't change the matter of fact that it's insulting language, and I downvoted it either way.<p>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.
The inverse judo throw of GPL also turning free software advocates into copyright maximalists is quite unfortunate.
Could the projects bring in stuff from omarchy? Omarchy is a toy, but they did slop the osx thing, so maybe some ideas can be ported over?
I’ve just build the kernel from Omarchy on my fedora asahi remix and got thunderbolt and Touch ID working. You do need to patch m1n1 with their changes as well. But I’ve been able to finally ditch an extra usb hub and hdmi cable.<p>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.
It's hard because they write things with intention to upstream it. Omarchy patches simply cannot be, because they go absolutely against the established way of doing things. No one consciously designs anything in their code, it's all LLM output.<p>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.
Asahi is against LLMs so they won't.<p>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.
Asahi is patches on top of the linux kernel. If you independently get your drivers in to the kernel which does allow LLMs, the drivers will end up on Asahi too.
I believe that’s what parent was saying.
Yes indeed that's what I meant.<p>I saw they managed to apply their no-llm policy on top of their upstream mesa driver but I'm not sure how long that will hold if the forks are getting too popular
Sure, but a human could read the code and look for ideas/parts and write the actual code better than an AI can. Omarchy is 99% hype, but the fact that its working on osx is telling me that it is indeed a goal you can accomplish. I rather not have my OS be a slopfest, so thats why asahi is way better than omarchy ever can be.
I didn't know about their LLM stance, but I feel like Asahi are shooting themselves in the foot. Giving up the advantage to toxic teams like Omarchy is strategically wrong. They could use llms for reverse engineering and drafting and as you said still rewrite the final versyof the code.
Maybe to them it’s not a race, and more a journey?
Or to put it differently, why the rush? It’s not like they’re trying to corner the “Linux on Apple Silicon” market, last I checked?
At the end of the day the decision is on them. If they want to be slower in development than clank-using competitors, so be it.<p>Would really prefer they didn’t lose to DHH of all people tho
Asahi is working on Macs too. Omarchy just took their existing drivers and wrapped them in fascism. They're also supposedly vibecoding support for newer Macs (which Asahi is working on too, but without slop, and Apple making changes to the platform every year doesn't help).
How do you justify calling it a toy when it does certain quite fundamental things a lot better?
sorry to put a dent in your fantasy world, but omarchy is awesome for day-to-day work, great upgrade on top of arch which is also awesome.
Imagine deliberately buying a $2000+ computer that doesn't work with and is actively hostile towards your OS of choice, then embarking on a multi-year bitch-fest to shoehorn the OS onto it.<p>I struggle to wrap my mind around it. It's like buying an EV so you can convert it to work on gasoline.
I don't.<p>- MacBooks are still among the nicest if not the nicest laptops hardware-wise, so some people like to run Linux on it.<p>- 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.<p>Also, this is <i>Hacker</i> News.
> - MacBooks are still among the nicest if not the nicest laptops hardware-wise, so some people like to run Linux on it.<p>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.
> Judging by what I found when looking for second hand laptops, macbooks don't age well<p>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.
[flagged]
On abstract utilitarian grounds you might have a point, but you won't find much sympathy in the real world. People like macs, simple as, and find value in running Linux on them regardless. To an extent that is part of what it means to be a hacker.<p>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?
> To an extent that is part of what it means to be a hacker.<p>This is where I disagree fundamentally.<p>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".<p>At that point you would have wasted your time building tools when you could have been building cabinets instead.
I used to run Linux on an x86 MBP. It was great, because the hardware quality was excellent and I could pair it with a desktop environment that I actually liked.<p>I want to do the same with Asahi on Apple silicon. I don't understand why this would be "daft".
I don't think you understand how Linux works overall. It's only relatively recently that manufacturers have catered to the Linux ecosystem and started to treat it as a first class build target. In the early days of Linux every piece of hardware had to be provided for and it sucked but people did it anyway because they wanted to run their own software free as in beer and have full control of it. Now they wanna do the same thing with Apple hardware. There is nothing inherently retarded about it but I do think you're kind of an idiot for writing these comments.
> I wouldn't be surprised if Apple voided the hardware warranty, claiming it overheated or something and Linux was to blame.<p>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!
Crikey lol. I haven't seen a single laptop that reaches Apple's HW quality. Besides, why are you assuming that we're buying new laptops?? Also, just generally, don't be such a dick.
Apple is surprisingly non-hostile toward these projects. They even fix bugs that only affect Linux: <a href="https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes/macos-27_3-release-notes#Resolved-Issues" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...</a>
For me the definition of actively hostile would require a locked down device that needs an exploit/jailbreak to install and a cat&mouse patch/exploit cycle - but it seems that Apple intentionally designed this to be allowed - what is giving you the “actively hostile” impression?
I used Windows and Linux all my life, but got my first MacBook Air M this year. There is literally zero competition to it. It's an incredibly powerful and cheap yet fanless device. Also, it has uniform memory, which is awesome.<p>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.
> because MacOS kind of sucks<p>It didn't used to, but now does.<p>> but the device itself is amazing and reason enough<p>By continuing to reward Apple, they lose any incentive to improve macOS and it will continue to get objectively worse because people keep giving them money. Why would they fix things if you keep buying it?
How do you think Linux gets to run on proprietary undocumented hardware generally?
>Imagine deliberately buying a $2000+ computer that doesn't work with and is actively hostile towards your OS of choice<p>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.<p>Macbook hardware is superb. I understand why people are interested in replacing the (in some parts) lackluster operating system Apple forces into it.
Apple hardware is so much better than the alternatives that people will dump thousands of hours into getting it to work with their preferred software
I got an M2 macbook air with 16GB ram and 1TB SSD for $700 and install Asahi Arch Linux and am planning on migrating it to Omarchy now that it supports M chips. It's my favorite laptop out of the Dell XPS, Precisions, and thinkpads that I own. The fact I can get 7-9 hours of battery life, have everything feels snappy while I'm doing Dev work and have a very crisp display all at the same time puts the Intel/AMD chips to shame.
Supposedly Intel is actually giving Apple a run for its money this year after 6 years of being left in the dust, so maybe I'll get something Intel next year.<p>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?
imagine being so obtuse you go around judging how other people choose to have fun and spend their own money and "pretend you don't get it".<p>Dino fuel generator hooked up to Tesla EV: <a href="https://youtube.com/shorts/46bRaGP4uqM" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/shorts/46bRaGP4uqM</a>