I do laud the effort here, but personally I will not buy apple again, even with linux. The software is not the only problem with apple's closed system - the hardware is all but irreparable, locked to approved parts and so on.
And this is why I only buy Apple phones. Since I buy pre-owned I want as many guarantees as possible that the insides are genuine. My hope is that one day I can check that every single component is genuine.
It would be fine, and also serve your purpose, if apple merely flagged non-apple parts as such, with warnings and so on. Rather than refusing to use them, or to even boot, or degrading the quality with software, or otherwise f*ing around with the experience in a user-hostile way.
Maybe that sums up my aversion to apple; they've become user-hostile, the moment you try to step beyond their gilded cage.
Apple have the same obligation as any other company to be compatible with third party parts, which is legally no obligation as far as I can tell. Expecting them to spend engineering time and effort to ensure compatibility with other peoples parts isn’t reasonable in my opinion when other companies aren’t held to the same standard.
That said, I agree with you - if there was the option to use third party parts but also tell then that’s fine with me, but it would have to be a law to ensure that other manufacturers are forced to spend the engineering effort too. They should also force all manufacturers to support devices for minimum periods too.
I have seen no user-hostile moves from apple in my 20 years of using their devices. I’ve seen lots of people misunderstand some of their moves and wrongly attribute it to hostility however.
Other companies are quite willing to expend the effort to make apple-compatible parts, which are in any case often just off-the-shelf parts, sometimes with a few mods.
That's exactly why apply are tagging their parts crypto-graphically - to ensure that those other parts cannot in fact be compatible, however hard they try.
And indeed, if you've spent 20 years being a good user and obeying apple's proscribed usage patterns, hardware lifetimes, etc, you've probably never experienced user hostility.
I’m sure other companies want a share of the pie. Whether they offer identical performance or some degraded version (or better) is neither here nor there. I want genuine.
People will knee-jerk on any bad news so I can understand Apples concern that third-party components get conflated with their users product experience. If a third party battery burns a house down the headline will still be “iPhone burns down a house”.
You’re right that I have enjoyed the extended lifetimes that apple products afford. For iPhones this has allowed me to move to the second hand market safe in the knowledge of many more years of excellent support. Repairability is great - only if the product is still supported.
Walmart recently had a blowout sale on M1 MacBooks for $399. Absolute bottom-spec machines but based on the good things I'm hearing about Asahi I plan to keep an eye out for future sales, particularly with the M4 refresh coming we should see something like that happen again. So I'm sharing in case anyone else wants to know about relatively impulse purchase sale prices for Mx MacBooks for use with Asahi.
My understanding is that a lot of the reason is simply that Fedora stepped up. With the Arch-based distro, they were in the unfortunate position of working both on everything involved with developing and maintaining an Arch-based Linux distro and on everything related to getting Linux working on these machines (and Arch Linux ARM proved to be a fairly shaky foundation as well). Now, Fedora is taking care of the Linux distro development stuff, and the Asahi team can focus on drivers and what not.
My own experiences with Fedora are mostly positive, both with Fedora Asahi Remix on my Mac laptop and normal Fedora Workstation on my desktop.
And as an early Asahi user who remembers when it was based on Arch (https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/fedora-asahi-remix/), I can tell you the move to Fedora has been amazing on all fronts. Bottom line: If you want to run Linux natively on your Apple Silicon Mac, Fedora Asahi Remix has you covered.
My only gripes with Fedora are it's lack of out of the box proprietary codecs, non-FOSS SW and repos, and lacking the creature comforts and user friendly tweaks that ship with the likes of Mint, but that' mostly because it's aimed at corporate workstations rather than home users.
But other than that, it's probably one of the most solid Linux choices you can make right now give the abomination Ubuntu has become.
I've been using Fedora now for 10 years (over a 15 year period due to some distro hopping and a love affair with Arch that lasted a few years and still kindles inside of me and pokes it head up every so often), and I often forget about the lack of proprietary codecs and stuff out of the box. Early on after installation I always add the RPM Fusion repos, which have much of the creature comforts.
In my case, I've repeatedly had bad experiences with Fedora itself, and bad experiences with a lot of other software coming out of that part of the Linux ecosystem.
For example, I had one computer about a decade ago where the Fedora installation image wouldn't boot properly. It didn't matter if I burned it to disc or used a USB key, and I remember trying a number of different versions of Fedora over the years. It'd lock up very early on, without giving any useful diagnostic information. Meanwhile, I had no problems installing and using distros like Debian, Ubuntu, and Slackware with that same computer. Whatever the problem was, it seemed to be isolated to Fedora, while other distros worked fine.
As software like GNOME since version 3, NetworkManager, PulseAudio, PipeWire, Wayland, and systemd started making its way into other distros like Debian and Ubuntu that I did frequently use, I almost immediately ran into a lot of problems that just didn't exist before.
I find GNOME since version 3 to be very unintuitive, and very inefficient to use. If it's the default desktop for a distro, I have to strip it out and replace it with something else.
Wayland has either not worked, or has been horrifically slow, or has had annoying glitching on the systems I've tried to use it on. X, meanwhile, works fine on the same systems.
I've found software like NetworkManager, PulseAudio, PipeWire, and systemd to be unstable. Too often they will kind of work, but then they'll spontaneously break, often in ways that are a hassle to debug.
These days, I try to use FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of Linux. They tend to just work for me, unlike Fedora, and unlike the other non-Fedora distros that have started incorporating more software from the Fedora world.
Yeah on the other side of the spectrum - i have been using linux for two years as daily driver and Fedora is my favorite distro.
Gnome 3 is probably only DE that cares about small details and looks great. Wayland unlike X11 has working fractional scaling and works best on Fedora. I couldnt live without pipewire and pulseaudio - audio was such a mess before.
If will Linux ever have its Blender moment it will be thanks all the software you mentioned.
My daily development machine has been on Fedora without interruption since FC16.
At the beginning that was a Sony VAIO, only issues were due to the dual integrated graphics. Then a Dell XPS which was perfect, and for the last 8 years a desktop.
It has been brilliant. I have been running it with swaywm for 2+ years now (which brings its own niggles) but I couldn't be happier.
I really want to replicate this on my MBP, maybe in a VM or external SSD if that's even possible.
Every other desktop environment feels like swimming in molasses.
(The reason why I switched to FC16 was because our product was shipping on FC16 (a questionable decision - but it worked out fine) and I wanted to force myself to learn the in and outs, and face any and all problems - and what better way to do that :-)
Fedora First (tm) - they are always trying to push the NEW HOTNESS way before it's ready. PulseAudio, wayland, systemd, all the extra systemd features that shouldn't be part of an init system, Gnome 3, there's always jank new thing they're pushing. 3 to 5 years later this stuff is fine, but Fedora is always First.
I use Debian and Arch, used to use Ubuntu and Gentoo many years ago ... I like the model of Arch (and Debian and Gentoo) of being minimal by default, you add the components you want when you want them, for some components you can choose between the stalwart classic and the new upstart depending on what you need. Use boring technology where you can, use the new thing where you have a specific need, stuff will work much more reliably, without all sorts of excuses about how it's some other old component's fault.
Best for what, and for whom? Just saying “Best Distro” feels like an extraordinary claim.
To give two examples of where it might not be best — running Fedora on a server, or running Fedora on a workstation where you need long-term stability and support for running CAD/CAM or CFD software which doesn’t play nicely with major OS changes every few months.
Fedora does have a Server flavor that has all the nice default settings you hope for in a server/headless environment.
But on long-running machines (i.e. not containers or temporary boxes) I concur.
I use either RHEL or AlmaLinux for those. But given that RHEL and AlmaLinux are based on Fedora, I don't really consider them to be different. Everything you know and love from Fedora (for the most part) will be the same there. For example most of my setup scripts I write for Fedora work without change on AlmaLinux, and package names, config files, etc are very (though not entirely) consistent.
Software like CAD/CAM is indeed a lot more painful on Fedora, although IMHO that has basically been solved by distrobox. For softare like that that wants a specific Ubuntu version or whatever, I just install it in a distrobox and export it back to the host. My biggest complaint is that it usually works so well that I sometimes forget it's inside a distrobox :-)
> support for running [...] software which doesn’t play nicely with major OS changes every few months
Half-kidding, this is a normal experience for people with macbooks coming from macos, ie updating the os and praying that all software will be working properly after. So it is probably not such a big deal in this case.
May I ask why? Just curios. What did Fedora do? I use Ubuntu and Debians but I hear good things about Fedora, updated regularly, lots of modern packages, people I know like it, etc.
I tested it some days ago and I’m really impressed by the quality and usability.
I mean, some things aren’t working (like touchID or external displays) but everything else is working incredibly well. Everything that still doesn’t work is well identified by the team and they are working on it.
I didn’t stumble upon something that barely works or is unstable.
Even their work with the audio "driver" is amazing since it is capable of overdriving speakers safely which allows the same sound quality as in macOS. It looks like it’s the first time it happens on Linux on any hardware.
I pretty much recommend testing it, you only need some disk space and the installation from macOS is really as easy as running a command line and being asked how much GB you want it to use.
Since it uses the native UEFI bootloader, it’s also pretty easy to uninstall, just delete the partition and you are done.
> Most software outside Fedora's own repositories isn't available in 64-bit ARM (or "AArch64"), at least not without some deeper compilation and configuration work. That means no Slack or Steam for the time being.
Really?! Is Slack — a glorified web browser — what people trying to run Linux on Apple hardware are looking for? Personally, I'm happy running Slack in Firefox.
My main concern with the Asahi project is Apple's reluctance to help out. Personally I'd love to give them my money if I they would just stop pushing MacOS and force feeding their app store ecosystem.
I don't mind well intended UX beloved by many consumers, but please make life a little easier on developers.
> I'd love to give them my money if I they would just stop pushing MacOS and force feeding their app store ecosystem.
But that's opposed to Apple's revenue goals. They make far, far more money from services and their app ecosystem than from hardware. It's in Apple's best interest to keep you in their walled garden.
You owning and controlling your own software keeps Apple from making money on you. You're much better off in the long run supporting vendors who make their money from hardware and don't lock you in.
While op was a little exaggerating with service revenues, his points still stand. The thing is Apple is not selling you a computer but an ecosystem. Their products are all meant to work together and this is only possible with their software.
Running macOS as your daily driver makes buying an iPhone a very easy choice. It’s hundreds of little things like using your iPhone camera as a scanner from Finder on your Mac to scan a paper to the current folder, unified clipboard, using your Apple Watch to lock your screen when you leave your computer, having your AirPods automagically switch from iPhone to Mac when you start a video and instantly switch back to your phone and pause your video when you answer a call … and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Apple software is made to make you buy other Apple hardware so running Linux is pretty much not interesting for them. I’m positively surprised it’s even possible.
Services are only the cherry on the cake, you subscribe to them when you are already tied to the ecosystem because they became pretty obvious. And Apple is smart enough to not force them down your throat like Microsoft.
So yeah, it’s really important for Apple to keep you on their software if they want to sell you more hardware.
I remember a discussion back when the first M1 chips came out where someone observed that it was quite likely that they had the Linux kernel running before they got XNU ported. The theory was that the hardware engineers would've probably used Linux during the hardware validation phase before the MacOS kernel team got their hands on it.
They did to a degree with changes to the bootloader. Hector Martin explained it but basically they did this for no other reason than to help the project along without also needing to invest very much development time on it.
> Really?! Is Slack — a glorified web browser — what people trying to run Linux on Apple hardware are looking for? Personally, I'm happy running Slack in Firefox.
This kind of gatekeeping is one of many things that keeps me away from the desktop Linux community these days.
Having Slack as a separate desktop app that I can launch quickly and alt-tab to separately is important to me. The standalone app is better at keyboard shortcuts and multiple workspaces, which is also important to me.
If I can’t even use a common communication app, a distro is a non-starter for real work. It’s great that they’ve made so much progress, but every time someone tries to discuss the actual limitations it’s tiresome to hear people jump out and try to shame people for expecting common things to work.
The Linux community is huge and diverse. One person's opinion shouldn't keep you away from the community, anymore than having a comic-con attendant be rude in the grocery store should keep you from comic-con. Also I don't know how you get that GP is "gatekeeping" with their comment. I don't see anywhere they said you shouldn't be able to run Slack as an app, merely that they personally don't do it and they are very surprised that other people do. I also don't see where they have any power to limit you, should they even want to (which most Linux people don't want to limit anybody).
Can you elaborate more on why you feel this is gatekeeping?
I also use the Slack app (on Fedora). I much prefer it to a web browser because of the reasons you mentioned. Keyboard shortcuts, multiple workspaces, etc. It's also nice to just have it in it's own process so when it gets memory hungry I can kill it, and I don't have to deal with Slack tabs.
The beauty of Linux is the diversity IMHO. GP isn't wrong, you're not wrong, I'm not wrong. Linux is about flexibility and power, and empowerment of the individual (especially the user). Here the user is always right, and I love that. It's where all hackers should live IMHO (but I'm not trying to force anybody to Linux, you do you :-D)
Mac users aren’t beholden to the App Store the way iOS users are. There’s some things people get from there but the bulk of useful third party Mac software is distributed outside the App Store.
Apple also sees Macs as being in their own category amongst their devices, which is why AS Macs had OS agnostic multi boot capabilities added despite being descended from iPads architecturally.
