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Hector Martin

I just realized that one of the things that bugs me is people equating stereotypical Linux problems on Asahi with other platforms, because it's not the same, because we actually care.

Suspend not working, audio not working, display tearing issues, power management being bad... all those things are Linux on $random_platform support memes. And they're memes because they never get fixed, because nobody cares. Acer isn't fixing their ACPI to make suspend not break for you. Nobody is spending time getting your speakers on your OEM laptop sounding good. Intel sure aren't fixing their Linux drivers to not tear on my Ivy Bridge laptop. And good luck getting anyone to even think about debugging why your NVMe drive stays warm in suspend and kills battery life.

Yes, you're going to run into similar things in Asahi today, but the difference is we care. And we're going to fix them. And since we control all the drivers and the pre-Linux bootloaders and everything is open source and we know things can be made to work at least as well as macOS, we can fix them.

4 Mar 2023 at 18:01 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
21 comments
thomholwerda

@marcan That's certainly a take when there's countless people working very hard to make all these things work on all kinds of hardware. None of these things have been an issue on my random Dell XPS13 or my several self-built machines, for instance, and there's countless Linux OEMs (like @system76) selling machines where all this works just fine too.

You're building on top of the work of all those people, so your toot seems in rather bad taste?

4 Mar 2023 at 18:19 | Open on social.tchncs.de
Hector Martin

@thomholwerda @system76 If your machines do all those things properly then they aren't the ones the memes are about.

The memes are about random combinations of hardware/vendors/etc who absolutely don't give a damn about Linux support, and most of the time nobody on the Linux side cares about those machines either, because there's just too many combinations.

4 Mar 2023 at 18:20 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
karolherbst 🐧 🦀
Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) :fedora:

@karolherbst @marcan When it comes to PC hardware, we've gotten lazy in Linux land: we think that the hardware vendors care. But the only reason Linux hardware support got as good as it did was because *people* cared to fix it. I feel like I can pinpoint the time when we started getting to "nobody is going to fix anything anymore because we need a vendor to do it" to around 2013. That feels like the turning point in which community-based hardware enablement stopped being the norm or expected.

4 Mar 2023 at 18:23 | Open on fosstodon.org
Hector Martin

@Conan_Kudo @karolherbst Meanwhile Lina's out making comments on Intel's Mesa merge requests pointing out bugs... 🙃​

We *can* do a better job than the vendors. I have no doubt.

4 Mar 2023 at 18:25 | Open on social.treehouse.systems
Drew 🐘

@Conan_Kudo @karolherbst @marcan that's not entirely due to a change in mindset though. With industry consolidation and less competition among chip vendors it can be a lot harder to know how to make something work. Chips are getting more and more functions which makes isolating misbehaviors more difficult.

4 Mar 2023 at 18:49 | Open on mastodon.social
Baudouin Feildel

@marcan that reminds me of one thing I like with ArchLinux. 80% of stuff works out of the box. For the remaining 20% it is explicit that I have to make it work myself, so I can't go around saying Linux is broken, I have to actually investigate what is going wrong in order to make things work.

Most of the time it is bad hardware or bad/missing drivers. Quite rarely it is buggy user space.

4 Mar 2023 at 18:20 | Open on diaspodon.fr
Richard "RichiH" Hartmann

@marcan any idea when the M2 Pro could be a daily driver? I keep being tempted as the X1 Carbon Gen11 is still two months off...

4 Mar 2023 at 18:35 | Open on chaos.social
caleb ×

@marcan this applies to Linux Phones as well, though thankfully not to the same extent because of the form factor differences.

i just wish we were able to actually use our own bootloaders, bah

4 Mar 2023 at 18:52 | Open on fosstodon.org
Alice🌸

@calebccff @marcan Isn't it theoretically possible to use your own bootloader on the PinePhone? Afaik it boots from u-boot on the eMMC or SD card but you should be able to replace that bootloader with something else, someone would just have to port it.

4 Mar 2023 at 19:03 | Open on mastodon.online
Peter Bindels

@marcan honestly this is why I might eventually end up buying a mac. To run Asahi Linux, obviously, but still.

4 Mar 2023 at 18:57 | Open on mastodon.social
Mike Mol

@marcan Finally, a reason for me to look at Apple hardware. Not this refresh cycle, since my laptop's only a year old, but maybe the next one.

4 Mar 2023 at 19:08 | Open on pony.social
Jeff Goldschrafe

@marcan Ah, so the advantage of Asahi is that the people building it are better and smarter people than anyone who's come before.

4 Mar 2023 at 19:15 | Open on hachyderm.io
Paul Richards

@marcan so, honest question, why aren’t there groups like Asahi but doing it for other vendors? For example an “Asahi for ThinkPads”.. What makes Asahi and the Apple hardware different? Is the reason technical, funding, something else?

4 Mar 2023 at 19:28 | Open on mastodon.scot
Sobex

@pauldoo @marcan I'd say the difference is that apple is a huge vendor, in number of computer sold, but that sells a vey small number of different models, and they are releasing right now hardware unmatched by anything the competition has to offer, aka Apple Silicon, beating everyone on Perf/W by a lot.

Making things work on AS Macs is something that is attractive: 1. It's a challenge for nerds 2. It has pretty clear benefits (unmatched hardware) 3. Wide applicability (lots of macs around).

4 Mar 2023 at 19:52 | Open on social.sciences.re
interru
@marcan why do you assume that you are the only one who cares? There is no evidence to support that claim. You don't know the thoughts of other people. You only see the endresult of their work.

You yourself are claiming that Asahi has similar issues... so. It's good that you care but why are you trying to belittle the work of other people?
4 Mar 2023 at 19:28 | Open on our-town.social
Dave Airlie

@marcan what's the plan when MacOSX doesn't work that well? Like having a laptop that works at least as good as Windows isnt often a major bar to cross, windows screws up a lot. You then realise it's all fw bullshit the OS can't fix. Use a wayland compositor to fix tearing.

4 Mar 2023 at 19:45 | Open on fosstodon.org
remote procedure chris

@marcan that's really neat tbh, I really should try it now that i have an arm mac

4 Mar 2023 at 20:02 | Open on tech.lgbt
Steven Rosenberg

@marcan Thanks for the message. It's an exciting project.

4 Mar 2023 at 20:07 | Open on ruby.social
Anders Rytter Hansen
Zperretta

@marcan I have never had any of these issues with Linux, although in saying that I acknowledge that I have exclusively used Linux on my framework laptop and my Valve Steam deck and whenever I use peripherals I make sure to use ones that are made for Mac or Chrome OS or are well known / advertised for their Linux support

4 Mar 2023 at 20:26 | Open on techhub.social
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