this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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Being something of a Linux novice, I tried having a go with Asahi on my M2 MacBook Air a few weeks back. After a couple of days of struggling to figure out why I couldn’t install a number of different extensions, it gradually began to dawn on me that Linux on ARM is essentially non-existent right now.
So yeah, I’m all for this speeding up development of that sort of thing, because as it stands it’s so very close to being daily usable.
Linux on ARM has existed for longer than MacOS on ARM. Do you want to know the problem? That the hardware manufacturer, Apple, didn't provide any kind of support for it. Asahi is a community project developed by volunteers.
When Linux is supported by the manufacturer, it works like a charm, both ARM and amd64. If you need an ARM example, linux in Raspberry Pis have been running flawlessly for years.
Ah yeah, that’s a fair point.
Like I said, I’m a Linux novice. I jumped from Windows XP to OS X 10.4 back in ‘07 and have only used Macs since. But as much as I appreciate how good Apple’s hardware is, by the time my M2 Air has lost OS support I’ll be very, very keen indeed to be using something other than macOS.
And yes, I meant no shade at all to the folks behind Asahi. What they’ve managed to do so far is nothing short of astonishing. It’s just not quite at daily driver level for people who don’t really know what they’re doing. Not that they advertise it as such, of course.