What they've been able to accomplish in such a short time is nothing short of amazing, and I applaud them for their efforts.
That said, I've been using Asahi for a month, and I'm ditching it. Maybe in a year or two it'll be stable, but for now it's got too many bugs and unsupported features. A lot of the problems come down to Wayland and KDE/Gnome, as you literally have to use Wayland. But there's plenty of other buggy or challenging parts that all add up to a very difficult working experience.
One of the biggest challenges I see is support for hardware and 3rd party apps. Not only do all the apps need to support this slightly odd Arm system, but so do hardware driver developers. I never realized before just how much of a Linux system works because most people had an incredibly common platform (x86_64). Even if Linux on Mac became incredibly popular, it would actually take away development focus on x86_64, and we'd see less getting done.
(This kind of problem is totally common among Linux laptops, btw; there's a ton of hardware out there and Linux bugs may exist in each one. Adding a new model doesn't add to the number of developers supporting them all. If anything, the Mac is probably benefited by the fact that it has so few models compared to the x86_64 world. But it's still only got so many devs, and 3rd party devs aren't all going to join the party overnight)
Yeah, I can definitely see this being an issue going forward for quite some time. The existence of non-Apple ARM devices should hopefully lead to general interest in addressing these issues, but there's so much hardware and software out there, and only so many devs with the time, interest and access to fix them.
On the other hand, I suspect people will start making choices for their hardware/software that maximise compatibility, as they already do for Linux x86. ("Don't buy NVIDIA if you want functioning Wayland", etc.) It'll be tough, but things will hopefully get better over time.
I don't get why you were downvoted to oblivion. A perspective from someone who actually used Asahi is very valuable, so thanks for sharing.
You're definitely right that having a usable system is not just about supporting first-party hardware. Linux on its own is a huge mess of different components that all somehow need to work together, and it's a miracle of engineering that it works as well as it does, even on well-supported hardware. I can't imagine how difficult it must be getting all of this to work on hardware that requires reverse engineering. It seems practically impossible to me.
On HN downvotes are usually because of disagreement. OP's experience doesn't match mine: I have used Asahi for quite a bit longer than OP and I have experienced no serious bugs.
But then again I only use those software that's available in the distribution or those that can be compiled by me. So naturally I don't deal with incompatible third party software.
That's great. Is your experience somehow more valid then?
Downvoting because of disagreement is asinine to begin with. Burying opinions that contribute to the discussion does nothing but perpetuate the hive mind.
Most of the software that ships works, but actually I've run into a number of bugs on stock. A bunch of seg faults and other crashes I couldn't trace.
For some reason a lot of apps have bugs in Wayland, like mousing over menus, only the first menu item shows up; move to a different item, then back to the first, and suddenly all the menu items show up. Persistently happens in several apps.
Some of the Flatpak apps also have serious performance issues and bugs that native ones don't. A big app I need to use is FreeCAD, which there was no ARM build for until the recent 1.0pre releases. Their FreeCAD build has some issues that their AppImage doesn't. But even the AppImage release has some weird bugs, and I wasn't able to figure out if they're FreeCAD bugs, Wayland bugs, Fedora bugs, or what.
And then there's DisplayLink drivers+userland, which amazingly kind-of works (after a bunch of tries), but then hard crashes or prevents the machine from resumung from suspend.
I also get weird giant green flashes on straight HDMI. And because the laptop resolution is fixed, when I attach a monitor, the laptop screen "invades" the monitor screen. Fullscreen doesn't work, the panels conflict, it's kind of a mess. I'm almost certain the latter is some kind of KDE/Wayland bug, but the green flashes must be the video driver.
There's a bunch of other issues I don't remember at the moment. But all of this adds up, sadly, to something I just can't make work. Really wanted it to.
FYI it seems that your account is perma-dead, or however HN calls this. Your comments are automatically flagged and not seen by anyone who doesn't choose to enable seeing them in their settings.
That said, I've been using Asahi for a month, and I'm ditching it. Maybe in a year or two it'll be stable, but for now it's got too many bugs and unsupported features. A lot of the problems come down to Wayland and KDE/Gnome, as you literally have to use Wayland. But there's plenty of other buggy or challenging parts that all add up to a very difficult working experience.
One of the biggest challenges I see is support for hardware and 3rd party apps. Not only do all the apps need to support this slightly odd Arm system, but so do hardware driver developers. I never realized before just how much of a Linux system works because most people had an incredibly common platform (x86_64). Even if Linux on Mac became incredibly popular, it would actually take away development focus on x86_64, and we'd see less getting done.
(This kind of problem is totally common among Linux laptops, btw; there's a ton of hardware out there and Linux bugs may exist in each one. Adding a new model doesn't add to the number of developers supporting them all. If anything, the Mac is probably benefited by the fact that it has so few models compared to the x86_64 world. But it's still only got so many devs, and 3rd party devs aren't all going to join the party overnight)