Asahi Linux has merged initial support for Apple Silicon hardware into the Linux system-on-chip (SoC) tree, where it will hopefully make it into the Linux 5.13 kernel (due roughly in July).
Asahi is the Japanese name for what we know as the McIntosh Apple — the specific fruit cultivar that gave the Mac its name. Asahi Linux is a fledgling distribution founded with the specific goal of creating a workable daily-driver Linux experience on Apple M1 silicon.
This is a daunting task. Apple does not offer any community documentation for Apple Silicon, so Martin and cohorts must reverse-engineer the hardware as well as write drivers for it. And this is especially difficult considering the M1 GPU—without first-class graphics support, Asahi cannot possibly offer a first-class Linux experience on M1 hardware such as the 2020 M1 Mac Mini, Macbook Air, and Macbook Pro.
We’re cautiously excited about the idea of first-class Linux support on the M1, but we absolutely do not recommend buying M1 hardware for that purpose unless and until the Asahi project gets much, much farther down the road than it’s managed so far.
MacDailyNews Take: It’ll be awhile – perhaps quite awhile – before Linux on Apple Silicon becomes viable.
Why except for geeks and tinkerers? To me, it means folks who are making their own paints but rarely produce paintings.
This ability of mine to paint and produce copious amounts of paintings is what led me to realise that I could double my output as a gender-fluid transcreative artist and piano player. Indeed, I could truly multiply – I could be my own force multiplier. This is why I am sometimes John Dingler, but I am also Jane Tingrrl, I am Janet, I am Jon. My Dingler has been removed and I now have a Tingler in its place, a place where Mother Earth can dwell with Father Earth to plant a seed.
I am now a receptacle. A well spring of creativity. I am a geek and tinkerer on steroids, and I use even bodily byproducts and fluids to add my own DNA and personal touch to the paints I manufacture.
It’s a wonderful life, I really take pleasure in being John/Jane Dingler/Tingrrl. An LA transcreative bilopar manufacturing artist, occasionally autistic but always switch on and ready to rumble.
Apple has made Macs so great that it makes my heart swell and burst with pride. Here’s to the crazy ones, the geeks and tinkerers, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the transcreatives, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see, feel and paint things differently — they’re not fond of rules,.. they’re fond of fluidity… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… paint things… remove things… add things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
— Steve Jobs, 1997, with edits from John Tingrrl, LA TransCreative
I bought one of the first M1 Mac minis. Wanted to run Folding @ Home on it.
It took a while. Months. Finally it became possible. Sort of.
I can now run the Folding @ Home program on my newest Mac mini.
Don’t know why it spends time in the middle of a run to ‘Connect’ or ‘Update’ – my Intel-based Macs do not – but it seems to be faster than they are. Not nearly up to the advertising, just ‘faster’.
Am I the only one here old enough to remember the last ‘transition’?
I’m old enough to remember the transition from the Apple II+ to IIe. Wow, a hardware shift key for lowercase letters! A few years later, I had to learn 16-bit assembly language for the IIGS.
Apple has made each of its processor transitions remarkably easy on end users.