Yeah, vanilla MacOS is super focused on the set of "all windows of a given Application" as the useful "unit of work". Whereas in real work, you actually handle individual windows of a set of applications (e.g. firefox window for docs, vscode for code, finder window for project files) as the single unit you are working on.

MacOS is, in my experience, incredibly clunky due to this mismatch. You can fix some (e.g. use AltTab for sane alttabbing), but not others (how can i prevent the next application window popping up when minimizing one)

My favorite is missing support for face unlock, missing "energy options" (stay on when I close lid, something Windows XP had for 25 years now), and draining the battery empty when you shut the MacBook down while plugged in.

Could you cite a few issues that you've run across, please?

I have used Macs since the late 80s, there have always been teething problems, duds and effups, but nothing that wasn't addressed by independent Mac devs. How can Apple make everyone happy?

But these days? With codex/claude/et al, you can make your Mac sing to whatever tune you prefer. I feel a bit bad for indies, but they still have not-prosumer market to make their living. I now just make my own apps to replace what I've bought in the past.

Cheers

Can you give some examples of a goal you can’t accomplish?

No. Whilst Apple's hardware is among the best in the world, I simply can't support their direction with respect to increasingly closed hardware.

Well, they will get more people buying MacBooks, though they won't really use their services.

From what I can tell from the project team, Apple aren’t being hostile. Just not contributing resource

WebKit, clang, the llvm backend for arm64

Have you tried very recently? I have a 2018 Macbook Pro with touchbar and the progress on getting T2 macs working lately has been amazing - 3 months ago I was having issues but I reinstalled last week with a 7 kernel and it has been flawless: suspend, restore, touchbar, fan control all great.

Is there anything stopping this from being thrown some investment plus LLM tokens? I wonder what a KVM connected to the machine plus a few thousand in Astra/Fable tokens could do here. It seems funny to think of software feature defects in OSS software now if people are building full recombinations of closed source software daily now!

Wow thank you for saying this. Always thought it’s my problem(because its the same with my 4 OSes), some misconfiguration etc. Mine doesn’t reboot, I am always turning off and on after SSD change; and I thought it’s about that.

Same problem with iMac - got 5k mostly working and a patch for audio using my favorite coding assistant, but that final bit remains tricky. Will post to GitHub if I can solve it.

If you don't want to play 3d games or run local LLMs, why is GPU acceleration important when you have a more than capable CPU for any desktop UI?

When Linux OEMs come out with hardware as good or nearly as good as Apple, people will buy it.

this opens up the options on the used market though. once people start dumping their early Mx Macs, they will turn into wonderful Linux machines instead of becoming landfill or a collector's item that will sit in a display case / shelf

It turns out people want actually good machines. I have the cheapest M1 Air and it still rocks and isn't power hungry. When Apple stops supporting it I will gladly switch to Asahi if capable.

Nobody is complaining about code not being provided. It’s more the schematics that are sitting in a drawer in Cupertino that would make the painstaking reverse engineering unnecessary. Someone at Apple would have a much easier time.

They could also hire somebody to sabotage this work in some ways if it helps with the bottom line. That's totally reasonable thing to do that I will defend in that case, because I would love to see the trillion dollar corporation become 10 trillion dollar corporation, because reasons.

It would be nice if Apple provided documentation, not even code.

They could open source their software so others could utilise the code instead of needing reverse engineering

Of course they do not have the obligation to do so. This is more about Apple doing a nice gesture to the "owners" of their devices

Nobody likes hearing the realpolitik of the Linux/Mac situation but you're not wrong.

> Apple has no obligation or incentive whatsoever to write Linux device drivers…

In ideal world the society would make it an obligation for general computers to remain free (as in freedom) and accessible.

Apple had no obligation to write Windows drivers for Boot Camp either but did for over a decade. They could do the same for Linux even if they never open sourced them.

I am sure the Omarchy team is throwing their best agents on the case.

https://x.com/wtsnz/status/2096815939027349574?s=20

Yes, I see people working on M4 and every few days it gets better

,,However, there's plenty more work to get it fully supported and working with Hyperland.''

I don't think "growing polarisation" is the right framing here. It gives way too much weight and legitimacy to views that have to be subjected to cordon sanitaire [1].

It's not acceptable to associate race with national identity (DHH's London post). It's not acceptable to call for ethnic cleansing (his post on Travellers). It's not "just another view, couldn't we all get along"; we can respectfully disagree on small state vs large state, on low taxes vs high welfare, on isolationism vs interventionism even, but DHH's views have to be unacceptable.

What is happening is a number of very rich, powerful, well-connected men (and sometimes women, see AfD) are trying to normalise those views and demolish the cordon sanitaire. "It's just another view" and framing this view as legitimate, just polarised, is one of their tactics. It's a moral duty of anyone remotely believing in the OG liberalism (you know, that people are equal regardless of their skin colour or ethnicity) to not let them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordon_sanitaire_(politics)

> It really boils down to DHH and his conservative worldview

That is putting a lot of strain on the word "conservative". To quote Wikipedia [1]:

> In 2025, Hansson published a blog post expressing support for far-right British activist Tommy Robinson and the 2025 British anti-immigration protests, as well as mourning that London is "no longer full of native Brits". In response, some members of the Ruby on Rails community called for his removal from project governance.

> Hansson published another blog post[36] in July of 2026 comparing the Romani population of Copenhagen to Denmark's struggles with its wolf population growth, stating that "When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them."

This isn't "conservative", this is blatant far-right talking here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson#Contr...

What you are talking about is just simply political polarization which is done on purpose by poiticians, which happened whether DHH or Ashahi Linux devs wanted or not. Also there is real human element in both, I'm just going to an Omarchy meetup that's organized next week, and DHH is also organizing some (just not in my city).

I believe eventhough they won't work together directly, with open source they can just use eachothers code (I believe Omarchy is using Ashahi's M1-M3 code, but now people are already creating Omarchy M4 GPU support using AI, and Ashahi devs can look at how it's working and understand it, they just want to take things a bit slower to have less slop).

It idles at 2-3GB but when your apps need the RAM, does it free up system memory so that it's closer to 500MB?

Why should the address and logic change, when both are defined by hardware ?

I wish they would get an Arm license and start the process like those three guys that worked at Apple and started Nuvia…

You describe an exhaustive documention, but some documentation would already be better than none. Perfect is enemy of good, as your comment illustrates.

If you’ve ever tried to lock down a mac and dealt with the 100s of system services, you’d know why. I like the hardware and base os, but I have no idea what those services are doing.

Many are undocumented. A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. And, they’re chatty and persistent in trying to communicate out. You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.

I only use my mac for development. I’m a simple man and don’t need all the bloat and hidden behavior. Plus, I always feel like I’m one automatic update away from it becoming unusable.

This is nonsense. Chinese vendors like Rockchip and Allwinner provide fairly halfassed docs at times, but they try. It's housnads of pages, total, sure. But even this along with public code samples allows to create almost perfectly FOSS supported implementations for their HW. And it's a complex HW similar to what Apple has. I've worked with all kinds of just annoyingly incomplete and badly written datasheets, and if you put some work into it having at least something helps tremendously, even if the manufacturer ignores you completely and you have no field engineer access, and just throws incomplete crap over the public fence.

No docs is clear statement Apple hates FOSS. "how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop" argument is very weak considering that only consumer platforms that engage in a complete lockdown are maybe some gaming consoles, and those are basically appliances and not a general computing machines.

> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.

Right now, yes. But Linux support is like freedom of speech in a dictatorship.

Everyone makes fun of it and says it's useless but fundamentally the powers that be are deathly afraid of it ever turning the tide.

> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.

It's only going to grow every year as apple stops releasing OS updates for perfectly functioning hardware.

> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.

I suspect there would be an element of induced demand here. IMO the MacBook range are the only laptops on the market worth buying - but not having support for gaming (or at least, hilariously bad support for a limited range of games) is compelling enough reason to install Linux for a large portion of users (filling the void left behind by the widely adopted Bootcamp).

> but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF.

Yeah, GPU ISA, controllers, power management, NPU, and who knows what else. I still believe that companies should be compelled by regulators to offer documentation and support necessary to write drivers as I believe it is part of the "right to repair" (M1 will lose support in 2 years, it's still a great platform).

> They chose to leave it open.

I _really_ wonder on this point. It's so uncharacteristic of Apple. Were they concerned about potential anti-competitive lawsuits and maliciously did the bare minimum to avoid them? "It's technically open hardware, but good luck figuring out how it works"

> I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.

Oh please - Apple provided a full suite of Bootcamp drivers for their hardware just a couple of years ago, not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.

What is the purpose here? You are still stuck with a full blown MacOS running the system no? That is what Asahi tries to replace, not the other way around.

I just don't trust macOS enough to run the hw, AsahiLinux/Linux Kernel I do, I love Apple hardware but want to run Linux.

I spent this past weekend giving UTM w/ Apple Virtualization a shot and can confirm that it really does work fantastically well! The only downside seems to be that it's not possible to pass USB devices through to the VM guest yet?

This misses the point entirely. What happens when apple inevitably discontinues support for this hardware.

I don't think you understand what Asahi Linux is.

This isn't about running VMs.

Yep, I suspect the goal is to reduce support footprint/burden to the absolute minimum possible, which is also why they don't maintain their legacy virtualization/translation layers indefinitely (Classic mode, Rosetta 1 (PPC → x86), Rosetta 2 (x86 → ARM)). The benefit is being able to make major changes, refactors, etc with relatively little delay and encumbrance.

This applies on both the software and hardware layers. In the past, CPU suppliers dragging their feet and/or being unable to deliver on promises were the chief motivation for switching architectures, and now that they're their own supplier they can banish that issue entirely so long as they're not beholden to any kind of external behavioral contracts or expectations.

If the OS teams need some new capability or discover substantial benefit from redesigning some part of the SoC, the SoC/hardware team can just implement it and not have to care about breaking anything. That's a major competitive advantage that practically nobody else in the computer or mobile device industries has.

> they used to let you run Windows!

They let you run Windows when they were losing in the market and needed a path to migration for users of the winning platform. Once they started winning, they stopped.

Conversely, Microsoft refused to interoperate with Linux. Until Linux became the clear winner in the datacenter space. Now they have WSL and actually work pretty well as a cross-platform development environment.

You can get a team together and do the work… Nothing worth doing is free.

> every few years of course

That sounds like a you thing; I've kept my macs for at least 5 years. My M1 is still going strong and I haven't felt any pressure to upgrade.

> past their intended lifespan

Thanks to the community, you can install macOS 15 (or older) on unsupported macs (as old as 18 years)

https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht...

https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher

> past their intended lifespan

This bullshit needs to die. The products are designed to last.

My family continues to use my old 2009 MacBook Pro.

YMMV

The sad part is that it's known that Apple internally maintains Linux ports to their SoCs

> https://talents.vaia.com/companies/apple-inc/software-engine...

I don't think Linus Torvalds has any sway on what Apple does. Or do you mean John Ternus, the new CEO?

Apple made some changes specifically for Asahi Linux to make it more robust.

I believe it was Hector Martin who discussed it on Mastodon a while ago.

Yes but: Apple has no incentive to open up.

Absent that, it'd take some kind of sustained right-to-repair, EU morality, many sternly worded letters pressure campaign.

Plus, once they did (officially), they're kinda committed to keep doing it. That's explains why they remain okay with emoloyees helping on their own time; all the upside, none of the down.

The FCC? I guess you mean their wifi chips or cellular modems or something? I can’t see the FCC having jurisdiction over anything else that Apple does. Maybe you meant the FTC?

> They want control on the walled garden.

It would have been trivial for them to lock out other operating systems entirely.

Even the Asahi team has been much more appreciative of Apple leaving this open.

When Intel-based Macs debuted they touted their support for dual-booting Windows (Bootcamp).

Apple makes money selling hardware.

Apple silicon is winning in performance and power consumption. It's not quite the same as the old Intel based generation, where they were more like premium/well built machines with good screens and hardware.

Now some people would like to use that top of the line Apple silicon but without MacOS that comes with it. I doubt this is a huge threat to apple but it's also not a huge market for them. From what I understand they are not actively impeding it but not actively helping it either.

I actually won a M2 laptop a while ago. I resold it, new in box still shrink wrapped because I did not care for MacOS, just a personal preference. People like me are a minority though.

The 1980s was filled with many companies that made the operating system and the hardware, Apple is basically the last vertical company left from that era. Why would they sacrifice that?

Many of those companies from the 1980s were very very good companies, but they gave up in the face of Wintel, Sun, SGI, Digital, Acorn (Arm processor), Amiga, Atari, etc… I would take any of those systems updated to today over Linux.

Only Apple with a mad man at the controls was able to survive (no Microsoft isn’t the reason). I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall when Intel said no to designing iPhone chips and then Steve Jobs still mad told his manager group that we have to design a new processor in house that would’ve been interesting, of course everyone in the room probably, said it can’t be done and many are probably saying the same thing about in house memory today which needs to be done.

How does providing the specs to run Linux on a MacBook open them them up to competition from junky used eBay laptops?

They publish documentation because they need OEMs to be willing to support their products.

Apple doesn’t. Apple consumes it, so Apple always has a customer.

Their Silicon was written to be OS agnostic, Apple's was not.

macOS ships with full working drivers for everything. They're unfortunately not under AGPLv3.

You're replying to an LLM-written comment.

Indeed, not sure why you are being downvoted. Contribute to open source with the energy you have to call out missing features.

Intel and AMD both support Thunderbolt on Linux, it's not impossible per-se.

I don't think it matters that Asashi is a generation or three behind, because the moment you really need it is when Apple stops updating the OS for your hardware.

When M1 drops out of support I bet Asashi for the M1 machines will be pretty polished.

Oh, so an M2 will support GPU usage? Can you run CoreML and unsloth models in the same way you would use them on regular MacOS? Are there benefits to using Linux/Asahi for running models on Apple hardware?

Me too, M4 and keen to run Linux, partly because every damn system update bloats the system by 20GB but no memorably useful novel feature actually emerges and partly because it's long term stable. That said, at this stage in my career I appreciate a working system that doesn't require umpteen kernel recompiles!

Same same. I love Mac, and macOS, but as a server, macOS is terrible, and bloated, and a pain to run docker/podman.

I have an M2 Macbook Air that I love, it's the best machine to read news from and access other machines over SSH, I only use macOS to use rekordbox, 99% of the time I'm booting into AsahiLinux

Huh, I thought Asahi would still be too unpolished on M2 to play games reliably. Could you elaborate on your setup a little? What kind of games do you play? What is performance like? Is it really better than Crossover for example?

Steam is incredible on Linux. I'm amazed my kids can play so many games using proton on Ubuntu.

So, if there are five translation layers, why not run a Linux VM using UTM and play there? Is there a technical reason that does not work?

Sounds like you haven't used Asahi. I found the kde remix to be pretty nice to use. Literally the only thing that I found frustrating was:

1) for the longest time, but no longer, Google did not ship an official chrome linux arm64 package. Chromium Browser also has not included google sync for years now. But now, google chrome does ship for arm64 linux so its all good.

2) usb-c video still doesn't work, so not ideal for a laptop without hdmi that you'd want to dock

Otherwise, it works really well.

It works for now, but one day it won’t then what?

I recently read somewhere that someone wrote a letter/email to Apple's legal team, explaining the risks. Sorry if I cannot be more specific, I already went through my browser history and cannot find it back right now. PS: Browsers really need to improve here, it is crazy that I cannot search through my history in a meaningful way.

Darwin is still sitting there all these years. It’s called market inertia.