Read the linked article.
It is exciting that they are working on AVD driver.
God bless the asahi team
I’m in absolute awe that a handful of motivated people can crack these problems
I wonder what the dev/CI process looks like on this.
Will it ultimately be manually loading a build into specific hardware each time, or is there a level of automation that can be done here?
It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this. The goodwill/brand marketing alone is worth their comp, and it will absolutely move units as well. Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate.
Will this forever exist as a Fedora “remix”. Or will we find the support in upstream so I can one day run Debian-based distro?
I think the last time I used an RPM-based distro was almost 2 decades ago.
They are upstreaming their patches, so upstream Linux will eventually get the necessary drivers.
Though their kernel fork is (obviously) open source, so there’s nothing stopping you from taking a Debian aarch64 roots, build your own Asahi kernel (or take the build from Fedora), and set up Debian on these machines with Debian yourself. Just requires some elbow grease.
Or, if you find Ubuntu acceptable, there’s Ubuntu Asahi: https://ubuntuasahi.org/
EDIT: After some googling I found this wiki article: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1
You can still run Arch, and Ubuntu Asahi also exists. (1)
They’re working hard on upstreaming everything exactly so it’s easier for any distribution to be ported.
Because Apple is not just a hardware company anymore. They track users and they sell ads. Sure, they are not at the same level as Meta and Google, but their ad platform is not insignificant anymore. Also that same software platform allows to get more money out of their users via their App Store.
Selling hardware with the software that helps them track means more revenue than the same hardware with the software.
The ad revenue is a drop in the bucket compared to the app store rent, which is a drop in the bucket compared to hardware sales.
Do you have any sources for hardware sales vs app store revenue?
linux-asahi is available in Void Linux:
https://voidlinux.org/download/#arm%20platforms
It’s a regular package of linux in the distro: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/tree/master/srcp…
Nobody gets promoted for building open-source software at corpos. It is allowed, at best, not condoned. So what manager is going to go for this? Let’s dedicate our limited resources to gratuitous goodwill work. Carrer suicide, I expect. Unfortunately.
Apple is a digital services company that happens to sell hardware. Their big money maker is their app store, and no Linux user is ever going to buy apps from the app store.
They still have the Darwin kernel open,but more and more of the open core is moving to closed components, a recipe for what Google started doing to Android. Now that they’re no longer the hipster underdog, I don’t think they care much about the brand marketing. You already believe they make the best laptops by far, what more marketing do they need?
may their codebase remain pure without seasoning from the ai spaghetti monster
https://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-segment
iPhone: 50.4%
Mac: 8.1%
iPad: 6.7%
Wearables, home and accessories: 8.6%
Services: 26.2%
I assume that the majority of service revenue is App store revenue.
Other services they provide are iCloud and Apple care
Their big money maker is their app store
That said, their AirPods division could be a Fortune 500 on its own.
Their amazing laptop hardware pushes you into their ecosystem. Once you’re on macOS, might as well get iphone rather than Android and benefit from the synergy, same for airpods or the apple watch.
The only reason I’d see support for Asahi making sense for Apple is a Firefox situation, keeping the project alive to prove to regulators that there are alternatives.
Upstreaming something like this is a monumental task, even small changes can take ages. It will take a while.