alt Hacker NewsI'm not sure I understand the target user for Asahi.
Is this someone that only wants to run Linux and wants to use their GPU on Linux? Seems like this is not the case, yet.
Or, is this for someone that wants to dual boot and use Linux sometimes, and then reboot into MacOS when they want to use the GPU?
Replies
Asahi on previous M-series chips supports the GPU, they just don't support it on M3 yet (they have to reverse-engineer the GPU to write the driver)
More info: https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html
Are you talking about using a thunderbolt dock and GPU? I doubt that's a use case high in the developers minds. I'm curious though, I wonder if the open source NVIDIA driver can be built for it.
I think it is more the technical challenge of doing it that drives development than any target users.
> I'm not sure I understand the target user for Asahi.
If you want to run bare metal Linux on Apple's hardware (instead of running it in a virtual machine) you are the target audience.
I have an M2 Macbook Air that i sometimes boot into Asahi to play Steam games that doesn't work natively on mac. It works unreasonably well given that there is something like five different translation layers to make it work!
Why does it have to be for anyone other than the people involved in it?
(Though I’m sure people outside the project get value from it as well, like OpenBSD using Asahi bootloader)
I bought a Mac mini M4 simply because it was very cheap and the M4 chip offers great performance. It is currently mounted on the back of my TV and serves as a media station.
It runs macOS, but I have no particular interest in the operating system, nor do I own any other Apple hardware. (So no synergies.) It is alright (and better than Win11) but the preinstalled software does not even properly update without an Apple account. As soon as I can switch over to Linux, I will. ... I would just wait for all the ports to work.
Honestly I wouldn't waste any of my time trying to run a worse OS than MacOS in a hardware that wasn't completely supported by the sw
As much as I like Linux this kind of tinkering is only for people with more time and less expectations about the experience
If I need Linux I can always go for UTM or something similar
I don't think it makes much sense to expect such a cohesive/specific philosophy from an open source project like this.
The goal is "Linux on Mac". In a commercial product, specific details of what gets built usually stem from a more detailed vision that can be articulated as one. In open source projects those details are determined by what individual contributors are motivated to work on.
That doesn't means a cohesive vision can't emerge, there might be one for Asahi actually. But I think the default position is that it's kinda just a mob of people doing what they each feel like doing.