That is something asahi has vowed to never enable.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/#apples-unspok...
It might have worked out better if Apple had forbidden Linux on Apple Silicon instead of controlling a pet Linux project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
Note, keeping competitors barely operational inside a walled garden is classic Apple policy. No other company has the goodwill inertia to pull off such stunts. =3
MacOS isn't sold anymore, it's a free download for all supported Macs - meaning Apple is not "selling one product or service as a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product", regardless of which product you think is being tied to the other (hardware or software).
I can see where you're coming from, but Apple wouldn't necessarily be in trouble due to the wording of the law. Maybe in some countries where the spirit of a law matters more than the specific wording, but we're quoting US legal definitions here, and my mental model of the US legal system has the phrasing mattering more than the intention
See also Windows and Internet Explorer.
I much prefer ARM over x64 and Linux/BSD over the alternative but it's a wasteland of patches and technical debt out there.
I also imagine they will be left behind, for better or for worse as AI-authored software and hardware will satisfy people's needs faster than that developed by humans.
I don't see a way to merge these rapidly moving frontiers of software without radically different distributed software development and distribution networks where AIs collaborate on a global scale. Perhaps the only way to keep playing is to grow a "super cortex", a projection of ourselves into the digital. Like today's agents, but improved, grounded by our knowledge and understanding.
This smells a bit like Skynet. Also, Software Heaven.
I'm not sure how I feel.
And more importantly, documenting Mac hardware takes time. Components like the speaker on a Macbook can be permanently damaged if you don't write the drivers in a specific way. Other features like the Secure Enclave, power management, and TouchID might be unsupportable depending on how Apple designed it.
Asahi's stance isn't particularly crazy, and it probably aligns with how Linus feels about upstreaming code that nobody understands.
Personally I don't think it's very likely the tables would turn and Asahi became dependent upon their contributions. I foresee a much bleaker future for Omarchy, crashing and burning from some reckless and unnecessarily abrasive whim of DHH. I'm not optimistic about Gravity Linux either, it's a single-dev project and that's prone to failure for many reasons.
It is quite remarkable how far along support has come: https://aurorasilicon.org/devices/
And the way they have written that driver is absolute crap, not submimissible at all. They will need to write it from scratch, properly, using a TEE driver, a sensor driver, a userspace supplicant plumbing and an fprintd patch. What they did, instead, is they run pretty much everything in-kernel.
So, can't wait for ridiculous exploits that make your fingerprint effectively a backdoor to your OS.
That fingeprint implentation to me is a perfect example of how ignorant Omarchy people and their users are about security and I wish more people were loud about it. Just point your LLM at that TouchID code to audit it, see the amount of stuff it flags.
> Please note that installing on an M-series Mac is not directly supported at this time.
> It is quite remarkable how far along support has come
Is it? All I'm seeing from that page is that they forked Asahi's M1-M4 work, and then failed to bring up M5 and M6. What's remarkable here?
Then those distributions will fail.
It's 2026. Any open source project with an anti-AI stance will get its milkshake drunk by a fork that embraces AI. How can people still not see this?
You fanboy people are so insufferable, if you had any clue about the code quality standards and cared about security, YOU would see this other way.
I have personally vetted their code for TouchID and some other aspects, including USB-C/Thunderbolt.
I absolutely cannot wait to hear your apologist brown-nosing when you start getting targeted with exploits.
The primary message we get out of the AI ecosystem is "MORE MORE MORE FASTER FASTER FASTER".
First off, that's not really what plenty of projects are about. You might like your favourite Linux distribution or desktop environment because it represents less, as a curated vision-- an AI "workalike" could offer ten thousand new features per week, but break the earned trust that a single clear vision provided.
Second, beyond a certain point, speed burns through the human components of a software project. There are only so many reviews that can be done, whether the source is AI or enthusiastic humans. Quality eventually suffers, contributors burn out, and the project dies.
If you point a well-funded slop cannon at an unfunded open-source project, they're not going to say "let's find 20 new reviewers to keep up with the firehose of commits!" They either have to circle their wagons and get finicky about what they allow, throw up their hands about quality, or rely on the machine itself, the dreamworld where they build enough test suites and harnesses to somehow keep Microsoft Paint from having zero-days.
Given those choices, I feel like I'd be happier to see "we circled the wagons". This doesn't necessarily mean "no AI" but it means keeping the project at a manageable scale, and right now, the way to handle that is to push away AI contributions without a bulletproof background behind them.
Going even further, it's high time we saw a "slow software" movement to counter the "move fast and break things" and its new cousin "move even faster and let the bot break things for you". I want smaller programs written by happier people under less psychic and economic assault.
Perhaps the 30+ years of non-LLM generated Linux support for UEFI/ACPI and ARM device tree chips has something to do with it.
The state of the art has changed.
I keep repeating myself, but make an effort to check the "state of the art" of the crap they added to their kernel tree.
It may shock you to hear that coding was never the bottleneck for emulation or reverse-engineering.
Again, any RE project that forbids AI use will get its milkshake drunk by a similar project that embraces AI.
Yes, and LLMs work well for the non-coding parts too. Pointing Claude at Gravity's repos has gotten Linux running well on my M4 Pro mini, with GPU acceleration as of a few days ago. So either I'm a genius or LLMs are pretty good at this, and I'm not a genius.
Also tried LordOS very quick, very easy to install, looks and feels like macOS, but Debian distro underneath.
I also tried GhostBSD. It's easy enough to work with, but it does not have any packages for "spice-vdagent," which I needed to resize the screen size and clipboard copy/paste support between host and guest devices when using Virt Manager :(
[1] https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/
> It’s just not true that most Mac users use Macs because the hardware is better designed. They’re Mac users because of the Mac OS. What the original cloning program showed was that many of Apple’s customers were Mac fans, not Apple fans.
https://daringfireball.net/2006/04/asinine_and_or_risky_idea...
Maybe we can say that they’re still the best, but it’s not 2x better like 2020, it’s more like 10-20% better.
For example, Panther Lake beats M5 battery life in real laptops available on the market, GPU performance, and multicore performance.
Just look at Marques Brownlee’s review of the Framework 13 Pro. Or the review of the ThinkPad X9 15p from Just Josh Tech.
I see this mistake all the time where there’s an assumption that MacBooks are still far and away the best without looking at more up-to-date information and evaluating current competition.
They run other things, too. There's no valid technical reason it can't or shouldn't, and Apple deserves the scrutiny if they won't bring macOS up to parity with Linux. Modern macOS is legitimately terrible, and ~100% to blame for why Macs are shunned for HPC, on-prem and other professional applications.
I just got a new-to-me Android phone and told AI to use adb to debloat and install the custom APKs that I normally run.
https://github.com/aurora-silicon/linux/discussions/142 https://aurorasilicon.org/devices/?device=j873s https://x.com/JoshuaSWarren/status/2118331083330629847
It is coming along impressively fast, one of the developers has a goal "full support on the M5 Max by Thanksgiving here in the US (November 26th)." https://x.com/JoshuaSWarren/status/2118375325805547666
There are now Switch 2 emulators that can run any dumped game on PC/Mac etc. https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Nintendo_Switch...
Most Switch 2 games are getting dumped, including the just released Ocarina of Time Remake https://imagepaste.org/i/kx5c925r.png
As I mentioned in my comment there is a native Switch code compiler for Mac, so not emulation https://github.com/seedds/nxnative
I'll believe that when there's an open ecosystem of state-of-the-art ARM (or RISC-V) devices based on industry consortiums reference specs. Until then, it's device trees all the way down or waiting for Qualcomm to get their Linux shit together. Yeah, didn't think so.
I loved that thing. Light, easy to take anywhere, battery life for days. I once caught someone snooping over my shoulder trying to see if it was really running OS X. Used it for years.
You can run a vintage Mac today with a BlueSCSI and a 32GB microSD card and get a computing experience far snappier than any modern hardware.
Of course, with AI coding agents you might not notice that the windows code base has mountains of hacks and is a mess, while the macOS codebase took half the tokens to develop and is much smaller.
Assuming full hardware compatibility (which I know we're not yet at), there's a bunch of laptops out there today with better feature sets than any sub $1800 macbook.
Being able to dual-boot macOS and linux on a lightweight OLED laptop with a nicer keyboard would be extremely useful. This is before even factoring in the upcoming years of likely substantial hardware advancements in the laptop market. Laptops still have a long way to go before we reach peak laptop.
But if you want the true deals on Linux, I am working on that personally [1]. For clipboard sharing, it should be feasible on Linux if you have AirDrop compatible Wi-Fi hardware, but for iMessage integration, it's possible given Mac hardware identifiers. Apple requires attestations derived from Apple device identifiers to flag spam on iMessage. It would be great if Apple was also allowing deriving keys from the Apple account, so it can allow alternate device to borrow trust from their iPhone for example, but for now it does not seem possible (extracting identifiers once works though, and then you can use iMessage [2]). About Apple TV, idk I never seen this thing irl so I can't tell how that works but I'd guess it's replicable.
[0]: https://github.com/zackb/tether
[1]: notably in https://tangled.org/dadoum.zone/apple-crates but I also have more private crates implementing a kind of userland.
More secure than windows, more supported for bank apps etc than Linux and with most of the same software and looks amazing as a media center pc haha
Became Linux for servers , hackintosh for everything else lol
Ended up selling the hardware to some guy who insisted he would get it working and I am sure it was possible, but I pretty much switched to using Mac after that as I loved the dev experience.
Is there a use-case now? I don't know. Linux has made serious strides in part thanks to very user-friendly distros like Ubuntu. People may have individual grievances and I don't want to downplay those, but we're not dealing with oddball Shrike issues anymore.
Apple should seriously consider allowing their OS to be used independently of the hardware, especially the build tools, the server stuff (whatever is left of it, not a market they had a big part to play in anyway). But, it is unlikely of them to do this.
Well done nonetheless. I think it is more likely that the old PowerPC-MacOS-on-Wii will be more stable long term than any of these new releases.
Edit: I'll also add: I am questioning what value MacOS itself has, the raw OS and kernel stuff. Linux, BSD and Windows each have their own -isms which are curiosities that one can, and should, consider as pros and cons. People might say "Windows is bad", and I agree, Win 11 experience as a daily driver is god awful. But the kernel and OS itself is something else. I don't know if MacOS has any of that "meat" that we can look at and say it's worth looking deeper into.
Given Apple's recent trajectory and custom silicon, I can only imagine that the stability of these AI-assisted ports be even worse than it was back in the x86 days. These are neat demos, but nothing I would want to seriously run in any capacity.
Really the hardware is most of the point of buying a Mac, since Apple somehow continues to be the only people making laptops which aren't dogshit. A Hackintosh gives you the worst of both worlds, I don't get it except as a technical curiosity like running Doom on your toaster.
They were also quite stable if one selected their hardware for it and adhered to best practices. My custom built i6700k hackintosh tower was solid and quiet and expandable.
Yes there’s also Linux but if one enjoys macOS as a desktop, there’s precious little in the Linux world for you. Most DEs are windows-like, and though GNOME and Pantheon share a few qualities with macOS the resemblance is skin deep at best.
But that hasn't -really- held up. MacOS burned a lot of the "Creative" class that Steve Jobs used to market to early on. While there are still plenty of designers that use MacOS, the market is more fragmented now since the design tools are more Web-based and less Desktop-based. Audio tools have become more cross platform as well.
Didn’t you omit the “by relying on a technology which is built on far-reaching copyright violations and significant ecological impact” part here?
Refreshing to hear it called its proper name instead of Apples marketing terminology.
Apple, by the way, was a co-founder of Arm and helped develop ARM processors for use in the Apple Newton. Its early work on making ARM CPUs highly power efficient paved the way for their now-widespread adoption in mobile devices. There's some irony in how a part of the Apple Newton reverberates throughout the industry today.
So there is this wow factor, but really we just enjoy mathematic transformations on a greater scale than we used to have just few years ago.
My guess is that the legal system will catch up with it, but also people will get bored.
Like, I can run macOS on thinkpad! Great! but ultimately this is a crap hardware in comparison to Mac. Will it have backdoors, will it be stable? Who will maintain it? and so on.
For me, that's meh.
For the brief period where Apple refused to sell you non-Butterfly keyboards, it was one of the best ways to use macOS.
The modern Lenovo keyboards aren't perfect, but they're comfortable for desktop-esque use. Plus, I prefer the arrow cluster with pgup/pgdn nearby so I don't have to reach for the function key every time. It's also nice to be able to buy a replacement on Ebay for $20, too.
The only reason I do that is because I _have_ to do that due to MDM and the fact that Asahi doesn't do the Standby. Excellent hardware, bound by a sad OS.
Why take normal hardware and add a sad OS without being forced to do so?
I suppose "for the sake of it" is a good answer here. For the fun of making computers do something they really do not want to do.
If that's a real example and you didn't make it up, I want to know what pregnancy-test devices have enough buttons to make it possible to control the game. Or are they coming with touchscreens now? Refrigerators, sure, I can easily see that. But pregnancy-test devices? Why would they have enough buttons to be able to simulate WASD and a fire button? The only pregnancy-test devices I've seen are the home test ones where you put the sample in the device then wait to see if there's one line or two (some of them arrange the two lines in a + shape so that - means a negative result and + means a positive result, which is clever), with no electronics. What pregnancy-test devices are using more than that?
For others it was just about the money. If you needed to run Mac software e.g. Xcode but didn't want to have to buy a Mac for that reason alone it was much cheaper to do a bit of tinkering to get OSX working on the hardware they already had.
When I first build my Hackintosh it took less effort than installing Linux on some of the other computers I had.
Maybe it helps that in my part of the globe Apple was largely irrelevant until they manage to survive bankruptcy with the iPod, and iMacs.
I built two Hackintoshes in those years, and they were rock solid. You did have to pay attention to the hardware you were buying (mostly motherboard and GPU), but if you got that right, they worked really well.
I got my current job thanks to having one. I probably wouldn't have a tech career without hackintoshes being a thing.
Nowadays, every time I open my work Mac, the only thing I can muster is "at least it's not Windows." And the only reason I even use one for work is that the unified memory does come in handy for compute.
What to set up?
A local business that interacts with real humans and serves a purpose in the community.
Not the answer you are looking for but this is perfectionism at play. Use anything you like well enough and seek out the task to solve instead. These are tools, you can sharpen them to work better but cutting is the task not just sharpening all the time.
I have also counterintuitivly found Arch Linux (a rolling release distro) way more stable than Ubuntu LTS. Things like sleep works, and any bugs are small and fixed quickly, bug reports are followed up on within a couple of days. With Ubuntu bug reports go without any replies from the maintainers, and maybe it will be fixed by happenstance by the next release.