Too bad Asahi doesn't support GPU acceleration on M3 [1] nor does it support Macbook Neo, and Omarchy supports both. And fwiw, DHH did acknowledge that they are building on top of Asahi's initial work [2].
I imagine some of the maintainers of distributions are uncomfortable with the amount of LLM-generated code.
I also imagine they will be left behind, for better or for worse as AI-authored software and hardware will satisfy people's needs faster than that developed by humans.
I don't see a way to merge these rapidly moving frontiers of software without radically different distributed software development and distribution networks where AIs collaborate on a global scale. Perhaps the only way to keep playing is to grow a "super cortex", a projection of ourselves into the digital. Like today's agents, but improved, grounded by our knowledge and understanding.
This smells a bit like Skynet. Also, Software Heaven.
It doesn't mean that people don't review the code, though. You still can't ask Linus to merge a million-line patch, even if it works.
And more importantly, documenting Mac hardware takes time. Components like the speaker on a Macbook can be permanently damaged if you don't write the drivers in a specific way. Other features like the Secure Enclave, power management, and TouchID might be unsupportable depending on how Apple designed it.
Asahi's stance isn't particularly crazy, and it probably aligns with how Linus feels about upstreaming code that nobody understands.
> It’s just not true that most Mac users use Macs because the hardware is better designed. They’re Mac users because of the Mac OS. What the original cloning program showed was that many of Apple’s customers were Mac fans, not Apple fans.
It was always a combo for me. But for all of the macOS warts, it's not like I'm going to switch to Windows. There was a time I could have seen myself using a Mactel system running Linux as a daily driver, but the M-series chips make that less viable today. So, macOS it still remains. Luckily, with recent career changes, I spent drastically less time on a computer every day. It's glorious.
As much as I used to love MacOS as an operating system, the more I spending time on it, I'd rather wish that my Macbook can run Linux, hopefully Asahi Linux will eventually support M5 :(
It wasn't my favorite, but my first Mac was a PowerBook G4 17-inch, which I ran Gentoo and (I think) Yellow Dog Linux on at various times. It never worked super well, and I eventually joined the dark side. In 2003, a 17-inch laptop was ludicrous among all the netbooks that seemed to be the future of laptops. People around me called it the "aircraft carrier Mac".
Seeing that Macs can now run Switch 1/2 games natively because of the ARM CPU is actually incredibly. And to me personally the first hand on sign of the end of x86.
I'll believe that when there's an open ecosystem of state-of-the-art ARM (or RISC-V) devices based on industry consortiums reference specs. Until then, it's device trees all the way down or waiting for Qualcomm to get their Linux shit together. Yeah, didn't think so.
That’s so cool. It makes it even more of a bummer that iDevice bootloaders are locked. It’s an ongoing tragedy there’s still no macOS on iPads. Looks like if you want that, you’ll have to go with non-Apple hardware.
funny enough, the only use case I want to run macOS on non-Apple software is a headless build machine. Without Apple hardware, using macOS is less useful to me.
> Without Apple hardware, using macOS is less useful to me.
Assuming full hardware compatibility (which I know we're not yet at), there's a bunch of laptops out there today with better feature sets than any sub $1800 macbook.
Being able to dual-boot macOS and linux on a lightweight OLED laptop with a nicer keyboard would be extremely useful. This is before even factoring in the upcoming years of likely substantial hardware advancements in the laptop market. Laptops still have a long way to go before we reach peak laptop.
I think he's underselling Qemu/KVM side of things, quick search shows that Tahoe works for instance. It was always a better route for this, going back to patching kexts isn't an improvement in my book. I'm sure near-native performance should be possible on ARM machines.
It’s always been the combo, throughout their history they’ve rarely been the best at hardware OR software but typically the best at integrating the two
It's maybe minor but the three features that keep me on macOS address iMessage integration with my iPhone, clipboard sharing with my iPhone, and seamless projection to my Apple TV as mirrored or an external monitor.
Such a throw back, I built a hackintosh back in x86 days and had it mostly working for a year, but of course tried to apply an update (10.08 I think?) and it blew up.
Ended up selling the hardware to some guy who insisted he would get it working and I am sure it was possible, but I pretty much switched to using Mac after that as I loved the dev experience.
Things got much better with OpenCore. Sometimes you had to tweak a few extra settings, but generally you could update it just like a regular Mac. Point updates worked especially well.
I had OSX running on an old school flip-screen HP tablet/laptop combo with touchscreen support. It was bulky but cool to use as a drawing tablet in the pre-iPad days. You did need to have a paper clip inserted into two holes of the VGA port for it to work, and I don't think it handled sleep very well. But still a fun project.
There used to be a use-case for Hackintoshes maybe a decade +/- 5 years ago, especially when macOS started working with x86 and x86-64 Intel-based CPUs. But it always felt subversive and it seemed like one update away from breaking due to some unforeseen, artificial limitation.
Is there a use-case now? I don't know. Linux has made serious strides in part thanks to very user-friendly distros like Ubuntu. People may have individual grievances and I don't want to downplay those, but we're not dealing with oddball Shrike issues anymore.
Apple should seriously consider allowing their OS to be used independently of the hardware, especially the build tools, the server stuff (whatever is left of it, not a market they had a big part to play in anyway). But, it is unlikely of them to do this.
Well done nonetheless. I think it is more likely that the old PowerPC-MacOS-on-Wii will be more stable long term than any of these new releases.
Edit: I'll also add: I am questioning what value MacOS itself has, the raw OS and kernel stuff. Linux, BSD and Windows each have their own -isms which are curiosities that one can, and should, consider as pros and cons. People might say "Windows is bad", and I agree, Win 11 experience as a daily driver is god awful. But the kernel and OS itself is something else. I don't know if MacOS has any of that "meat" that we can look at and say it's worth looking deeper into.
I never really saw the appeal of Hackintoshes. MacOS is fine, but it's not so head and shoulders above the rest that I want to run a buggy unsupported version of it on commodity hardware. It's just a nice-ish Unix-ish system.
Really the hardware is most of the point of buying a Mac, since Apple somehow continues to be the only people making laptops which aren't dogshit. A Hackintosh gives you the worst of both worlds, I don't get it except as a technical curiosity like running Doom on your toaster.
Back in the 2010s much of the appeal of hackintoshing was getting the niceness of macOS on hardware that was much more powerful and better cooled than anything Apple sold.
They were also quite stable if one selected their hardware for it and adhered to best practices. My custom built i6700k hackintosh tower was solid and quiet and expandable.
Yes there’s also Linux but if one enjoys macOS as a desktop, there’s precious little in the Linux world for you. Most DEs are windows-like, and though GNOME and Pantheon share a few qualities with macOS the resemblance is skin deep at best.
It used to be that MacOS was so slick and user friendly, and had the kind of software that Windows did not have, that it was worth botching around with to get it to work.
But that hasn't -really- held up. MacOS burned a lot of the "Creative" class that Steve Jobs used to market to early on. While there are still plenty of designers that use MacOS, the market is more fragmented now since the design tools are more Web-based and less Desktop-based. Audio tools have become more cross platform as well.
This explosion of "hacking" is interesting. Like wow I can run X on Y or wow I decompiled Z and I can add feature A and B.
So there is this wow factor, but really we just enjoy mathematic transformations on a greater scale than we used to have just few years ago.
My guess is that the legal system will catch up with it, but also people will get bored.
Like, I can run macOS on thinkpad! Great! but ultimately this is a crap hardware in comparison to Mac. Will it have backdoors, will it be stable? Who will maintain it? and so on.
The travel on my Macbook's Butterfly keyboard was like typing on concrete. Even with a light keystroke, it became a source of physical discomfort for day-to-day work. Add in the Touch Bar, and it was quite literally impossible to touch type on that machine.
The modern Lenovo keyboards aren't perfect, but they're comfortable for desktop-esque use. Plus, I prefer the arrow cluster with pgup/pgdn nearby so I don't have to reach for the function key every time. It's also nice to be able to buy a replacement on Ebay for $20, too.
On one hand, this is kinda cool.
On the other hand, why would I want to run MacOS in the first place?
Modern versions I mean. With the deterioration general quality, Liquid Glass and all that.
The only reason I do that is because I _have_ to do that due to MDM and the fact that Asahi doesn't do the Standby. Excellent hardware, bound by a sad OS.
Why take normal hardware and add a sad OS without being forced to do so?
I suppose "for the sake of it" is a good answer here. For the fun of making computers do something they really do not want to do.
The author seems to have done it, at least in part, for the purposes of iOS development. That seems to be a bit more compelling than "because you can", though Doom running on refrigerators and pregnancy tests shows that's already plenty on its own.
> ... Doom running on refrigerators and pregnancy tests ...
If that's a real example and you didn't make it up, I want to know what pregnancy-test devices have enough buttons to make it possible to control the game. Or are they coming with touchscreens now? Refrigerators, sure, I can easily see that. But pregnancy-test devices? Why would they have enough buttons to be able to simulate WASD and a fire button? The only pregnancy-test devices I've seen are the home test ones where you put the sample in the device then wait to see if there's one line or two (some of them arrange the two lines in a + shape so that - means a negative result and + means a positive result, which is clever), with no electronics. What pregnancy-test devices are using more than that?
If you did it right it was like having a Mac except you had better specs and it was more customisable while costing much less to build.
For others it was just about the money. If you needed to run Mac software e.g. Xcode but didn't want to have to buy a Mac for that reason alone it was much cheaper to do a bit of tinkering to get OSX working on the hardware they already had.
When I first build my Hackintosh it took less effort than installing Linux on some of the other computers I had.
Exactly this. There was a point in the late 2000's / early 2010's where Mac's were very overpriced relative to the hardware they were selling.
I built two Hackintoshes in those years, and they were rock solid. You did have to pay attention to the hardware you were buying (mostly motherboard and GPU), but if you got that right, they worked really well.
In my part of the globe, ignoring iOS development, any computer does the job.
So in such case I would have opted out for a cheap PC built of parts running some Linux distro, or Windows, which has most audio and design tooling as OS X has.
That is something asahi has vowed to never enable.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/#apples-unspok...
It might have worked out better if Apple had forbidden Linux on Apple Silicon instead of controlling a pet Linux project.
> instead of controlling a pet Linux project.
Huh? Apple does not control Asahi and never did.
I much prefer ARM over x64 and Linux/BSD over the alternative but it's a wasteland of patches and technical debt out there.
[1] https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/
[2] https://x.com/dhh/status/2118007579796439246
I also imagine they will be left behind, for better or for worse as AI-authored software and hardware will satisfy people's needs faster than that developed by humans.
I don't see a way to merge these rapidly moving frontiers of software without radically different distributed software development and distribution networks where AIs collaborate on a global scale. Perhaps the only way to keep playing is to grow a "super cortex", a projection of ourselves into the digital. Like today's agents, but improved, grounded by our knowledge and understanding.
This smells a bit like Skynet. Also, Software Heaven.
I'm not sure how I feel.
And more importantly, documenting Mac hardware takes time. Components like the speaker on a Macbook can be permanently damaged if you don't write the drivers in a specific way. Other features like the Secure Enclave, power management, and TouchID might be unsupportable depending on how Apple designed it.
Asahi's stance isn't particularly crazy, and it probably aligns with how Linus feels about upstreaming code that nobody understands.
> It’s just not true that most Mac users use Macs because the hardware is better designed. They’re Mac users because of the Mac OS. What the original cloning program showed was that many of Apple’s customers were Mac fans, not Apple fans.
https://daringfireball.net/2006/04/asinine_and_or_risky_idea...
I just got a new-to-me Android phone and told AI to use adb to debloat and install the custom APKs that I normally run.
Asahi Linux has great support for M1/M2, or so I heard.
There are now Switch 2 emulators that can run any dumped game on PC/Mac etc. https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Nintendo_Switch...
Most Switch 2 games are getting dumped, including the just released Ocarina of Time Remake https://imagepaste.org/i/kx5c925r.png
As I mentioned in my comment there is a native Switch code compiler for Mac, so not emulation https://github.com/seedds/nxnative
I'll believe that when there's an open ecosystem of state-of-the-art ARM (or RISC-V) devices based on industry consortiums reference specs. Until then, it's device trees all the way down or waiting for Qualcomm to get their Linux shit together. Yeah, didn't think so.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772#ipadobsolete
Assuming full hardware compatibility (which I know we're not yet at), there's a bunch of laptops out there today with better feature sets than any sub $1800 macbook.
Being able to dual-boot macOS and linux on a lightweight OLED laptop with a nicer keyboard would be extremely useful. This is before even factoring in the upcoming years of likely substantial hardware advancements in the laptop market. Laptops still have a long way to go before we reach peak laptop.
Ended up selling the hardware to some guy who insisted he would get it working and I am sure it was possible, but I pretty much switched to using Mac after that as I loved the dev experience.
Refreshing to hear it called its proper name instead of Apples marketing terminology.
Is there a use-case now? I don't know. Linux has made serious strides in part thanks to very user-friendly distros like Ubuntu. People may have individual grievances and I don't want to downplay those, but we're not dealing with oddball Shrike issues anymore.
Apple should seriously consider allowing their OS to be used independently of the hardware, especially the build tools, the server stuff (whatever is left of it, not a market they had a big part to play in anyway). But, it is unlikely of them to do this.
Well done nonetheless. I think it is more likely that the old PowerPC-MacOS-on-Wii will be more stable long term than any of these new releases.
Edit: I'll also add: I am questioning what value MacOS itself has, the raw OS and kernel stuff. Linux, BSD and Windows each have their own -isms which are curiosities that one can, and should, consider as pros and cons. People might say "Windows is bad", and I agree, Win 11 experience as a daily driver is god awful. But the kernel and OS itself is something else. I don't know if MacOS has any of that "meat" that we can look at and say it's worth looking deeper into.
Really the hardware is most of the point of buying a Mac, since Apple somehow continues to be the only people making laptops which aren't dogshit. A Hackintosh gives you the worst of both worlds, I don't get it except as a technical curiosity like running Doom on your toaster.
They were also quite stable if one selected their hardware for it and adhered to best practices. My custom built i6700k hackintosh tower was solid and quiet and expandable.
Yes there’s also Linux but if one enjoys macOS as a desktop, there’s precious little in the Linux world for you. Most DEs are windows-like, and though GNOME and Pantheon share a few qualities with macOS the resemblance is skin deep at best.
CI and build farms
But that hasn't -really- held up. MacOS burned a lot of the "Creative" class that Steve Jobs used to market to early on. While there are still plenty of designers that use MacOS, the market is more fragmented now since the design tools are more Web-based and less Desktop-based. Audio tools have become more cross platform as well.
So there is this wow factor, but really we just enjoy mathematic transformations on a greater scale than we used to have just few years ago.
My guess is that the legal system will catch up with it, but also people will get bored.
Like, I can run macOS on thinkpad! Great! but ultimately this is a crap hardware in comparison to Mac. Will it have backdoors, will it be stable? Who will maintain it? and so on.
For me, that's meh.
For the brief period where Apple refused to sell you non-Butterfly keyboards, it was one of the best ways to use macOS.
The modern Lenovo keyboards aren't perfect, but they're comfortable for desktop-esque use. Plus, I prefer the arrow cluster with pgup/pgdn nearby so I don't have to reach for the function key every time. It's also nice to be able to buy a replacement on Ebay for $20, too.
The only reason I do that is because I _have_ to do that due to MDM and the fact that Asahi doesn't do the Standby. Excellent hardware, bound by a sad OS.
Why take normal hardware and add a sad OS without being forced to do so?
I suppose "for the sake of it" is a good answer here. For the fun of making computers do something they really do not want to do.
If that's a real example and you didn't make it up, I want to know what pregnancy-test devices have enough buttons to make it possible to control the game. Or are they coming with touchscreens now? Refrigerators, sure, I can easily see that. But pregnancy-test devices? Why would they have enough buttons to be able to simulate WASD and a fire button? The only pregnancy-test devices I've seen are the home test ones where you put the sample in the device then wait to see if there's one line or two (some of them arrange the two lines in a + shape so that - means a negative result and + means a positive result, which is clever), with no electronics. What pregnancy-test devices are using more than that?
For others it was just about the money. If you needed to run Mac software e.g. Xcode but didn't want to have to buy a Mac for that reason alone it was much cheaper to do a bit of tinkering to get OSX working on the hardware they already had.
When I first build my Hackintosh it took less effort than installing Linux on some of the other computers I had.
I built two Hackintoshes in those years, and they were rock solid. You did have to pay attention to the hardware you were buying (mostly motherboard and GPU), but if you got that right, they worked really well.
I got my current job thanks to having one. I probably wouldn't have a tech career without hackintoshes being a thing.
So in such case I would have opted out for a cheap PC built of parts running some Linux distro, or Windows, which has most audio and design tooling as OS X has.