Our new flagship distro: Fedora Asahi Remix

Such an unbelievably talented and driven group of people. Having a full blown version of Fedora on Apple silicon would probably convince me to buy a macbook for my next laptop.

Buy a framework laptop instead!
- https://frame.work/
- Kinda hard to buy a Framework when they don't sell to your country! Framework laptops are only available in a handful of areas, whereas Macbooks are sold in almost every country on Earth.
- after using the m1 air, I'm sold on arm
  it doesn't have fans so no complaints of noise (my old laptop gave me ptsd of fan noise and I've also heard framework 12^th having fan noise as it has a single fan coupled with a p-series processor)
  I'd love to see amd/intel make an arm chip as microsoft also seems to pick-up the windows on arm thing
- Framework is cool, but Apple Silicon is still a pretty enticing concept if you want a silent system! I have an M1 Mac Mini that doesnt make a peep of noise even when its churning out tests and compiling, but my work laptop costs 2x the price, came out the same year, and struggles in the same tasks.
  Some of it is Windows and its shite scheduler. Some of it is ARM. One day RISC-V will be at the same level and we won't have to pick :)
Note that the people behind the Asahi don't yet recommend getting a MacBook for the sole reason of running Asahi on it.
With better battery life compared to apple macOS. I'm in. SELINUX I'm IN!

Our new flagship distro: Fedora Asahi Remix - Asahi Linux 8–10 minutes

You’ve all been waiting for it, many of you have guessed, and now, as announced at Flock To Fedora, it’s time to make it official:

The new Asahi Linux flagship distribution will be Fedora Asahi Remix!

We’re confident that this new flagship will get us much closer to our goal of a polished Linux experience on Apple Silicon, and we hope you will enjoy using it as much as we’re enjoying working on it.

We’re still working out the kinks and making things even better, so we are not quite ready to call this a release yet. We aim to officially release the Fedora Asahi Remix by the end of August 2023. Look forward to many new features, machine support, and more! In the Beginning

From the start of the Asahi Linux project, our goal has been to bring full Linux support to Apple Silicon machines, across all distributions. Supporting new hardware like this, especially hardware this special in the relatively young embedded ARM64 desktop Linux space is no easy task, and involves a huge amount of reverse engineering, development, and integration work, spanning all the way from bootloaders to desktop audio servers!

Much of our initial work focused on the kernel and bootloaders, which can be shared between distros. But as we started reaching the point where kernel support was enough for a (bare-bones) usable system, we still had a lot of distro integration work left. Making hardware work out of the box requires a bunch of subtle integration engineering, as well as working together with userspace-level projects to improve them and add the features we need for these systems.

Our goal is for all distros to eventually integrate all this work, so that users can use their choice of distro and be confident that it will work well on their machine. But, in order to kick off this process, we had to prototype what this integration looks like, which meant we had to create our own distro.

And so, the Asahi Linux Arch Linux ARM remix was born. We took Arch Linux ARM, added our own overlay package repository, and packaged all of our integration work there. Notably, this is a fully downstream project: we have no significant involvement with upstream Arch Linux ARM or Arch Linux, and we directly use the Arch Linux ARM package repositories for the core distro. Our overlay just adds integration scripts, bootloader components, extra userspace support packages (for things like audio), and our forked kernel and Mesa packages.

This worked well to bring Asahi Linux out into the world and the hands of eager users, but it was but a step along the way to our ultimate goal. After all, maintaining bespoke downstream distro remixes is a chore, and we can’t rely on unofficial third-party support to bring our work to every other distro. We’ve always had our sights on deeper cooperation with upstream distros to bring Apple Silicon support directly to them as an officially supported platform, and the Arch ARM integration was mainly intended to serve as a reference for this.

It didn’t take long for some people to come knocking on our door… Fedora Reaches Out

Very soon after Asahi Linux started (well before our Arch ARM-based release), Neal Gompa joined our IRC channels and we started talking about working towards integrating our work into Fedora. This was the very first offer to officially collaborate with a major upstream distro, and we were very excited! The Fedora Asahi project started in late 2021, and work began in 2022 alongside the Arch ARM release.

Over the following year, we worked closely with the Fedora folks to fully integrate Apple Silicon support into Fedora, including all our custom packages, kernel and mesa forks, and special image packaging requirements, and now we’re finally on the final stretch before release. Upstream-First

The Fedora Asahi effort is upstream-first, just like all of our kernel and Mesa work. Our bespoke tools, like the m1n1 low-level bootloader and our asahi-scripts tools, are already in upstream Fedora repositories and available directly to all Fedora users (though they won’t do much if you install them on a non-Apple machine!). Meanwhile, our hardware enablement package forks are kept in COPRs maintained by the Fedora Asahi SIG, built and served from Fedora infra.

Collaborating with distro integration experts and using distro infra like this frees us up to continue focusing on what we do best: reverse engineer hardware and develop bespoke drivers and software. But not only that, it also means we can offer an even better experience for Linux on Apple Silicon users!

Working directly with upstream means not only can we integrate more closely with the core distribution, but we can also get issues in other packages fixed quickly and smoothly. This is particularly important for platforms like desktop ARM64, where we still run into random app and package bugs quite often. ARM64 desktop Linux has been a niche platform (until now!), and with much less testing comes a higher propensity for bugs, so it’s very important that we can address these issues quickly. Fedora already has a very solid, fully supported ARM64 port with a large userbase in the server/headless segment, so it is an excellent base to build upon and help improve the state of desktop Linux on ARM64 for everyone.

We’re very happy to have this level of collaboration with Fedora, and the Fedora folks have been an absolutely amazing team throughout this whole effort. We want to thank Davide Cavalca, Eric Curtin, Leif Liddy, Neal Gompa, and Michel Alexandre Salim for kicking off the Asahi SIG and making this all possible. Racing to the Finish Line

We still have a lot of work to do, including integrating even more packages for new hardware support and more. Adventurous users can try out the Fedora Asahi Remix today, but please expect rough spots (or even complete breakage). We’re still very much in the process of integrating everything and a bunch of new features are coming, and things are expected to break while we get everything in shape. Please keep that in mind if you choose to try it ahead of time. We ask that reporters and bloggers wait for the official release before evaluating our work.

We hope you enjoy our efforts when the time for our first official Fedora Asahi Remix release comes. You may be wondering what new features are coming, but we’ll have to keep that a secret until release time (stuff isn’t even integrated yet, you’re not going to get a sneak peek even if you install early). Until then, please hang tight and look forward to the release!

marcan · 2023-08-02 Hi! It looks like you might have come from Hacker News. We've consistently found large numbers of comments containing blatant harassment, abuse, and bigotry directed at multiple Asahi Linux developers in HN comment sections, which go unmoderated for long periods of time or indefinitely. These abusive comments rank highly in search results for our project and the names of our developers, and continue to do so to this day.

In addition, we find that only a tiny fraction of HN comments (often less than 1%) actually engage with the substance of our articles, with the majority being off-topic, misinformative, repetitive, or otherwise of low quality, making the overall value of HN exposure overwhelmingly negative for our project.

We have tried to raise the issue of rampant abuse and low-quality discussion with HN mods, but instead of replying they added rel="noreferrer" to links to our site (specifically), to make it harder for us to block HN traffic. We sent a further email and explicitly pointed out a thread with multiple severe instances of directed, explicit harassment at one of our developers (including multiple allegations of mental illness, direct insults, misgendering, and transphobic dog whistles, all unmoderated and publicly visible and indexed). Some of these were removed weeks later (after being up for months), but they stopped responding after we pointed out even more instances of abuse.

At this point, we are forced to conclude that Y Combinator and Daniel Gackle are actively choosing to platform hate and harassment against open source developers, and further are actively working to evade blocking of this harassment by those targeted. For this reason, we are not interested in traffic or commentary from HN. Please move on to the next story.

this includes the hn drama.
- Can we get a TL:DR on the drama?

For those not familiar with what Asahi is:

Asahi Linux is a project and community with the goal of porting Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, starting with the 2020 M1 Mac Mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro.

Slightly off topic but is there a smart person out there that can explain why having dark mode on makes this website think I’m from “hacker news” and block me (I didn’t even know what hacker news was before today). I’m not a web developer and just genuinely curious how dark mode users get lumped together with an entire website I’ve never heard of before.

they're using css :visited trickery and color filters to detect HN users because HN has been explicitly evading any other way of detecting referrers coming from them (instead of solving the moderation problems being mentioned)
using dark mode messes with the colors which makes the text that's supposed to be invisible, visible
- I'm using a web app (brave mobile browser) to view Lemmy. Android is set to dark mode and all the apps respect that setting. I have never visited Hacker News with this browser.
  That being said: why the fuck would Asahi go with a Red Hat distribution!?
  EDIT: found the setting that was causing the problem: "night mode" was activated by default on Brave.
I don't think it's triggered by having dark mode on. I have dark mode on and I'm not seeing it.
- I’d agree but the message on the website specifies it’s triggered by hacker news AND dark mode. I’m on iOS with the Noir extension for my browser so perhaps whatever dark mode method you’re using isn’t detected the same way.
- Im not sure which browser you use but Brave on Android had a setting called "night mode" that was turned on by default. Turning it off fixed the problem.
- Chromium's dark theme triggers it, dark reader on Firefox doesn't.

For comparison I got no such pop up.
Just tried clicking that link, and got a huge pop up refusing me access to the site, and accusing me from being from a site called Hacker News (???).
According to the text in the screenshot you've posted, there is no referrer header, so perhaps you're using some privacy extension that strips referrers.
- Looks like uBlock Origin triggers it. That's annoying, but whitelisting the site fixed it.
- Blocking access from everyone that wants to protect their privacy is not an acceptable policy.
Got the same thing. Whatever they're using to detect the source of incoming clicks, it isn't working. Valid rant against HN or not, IMO that just means they're morons who I wouldn't trust to support a distro.
Edit: It's also happening from their own post on Mastodon lmao. https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Igigog/110820668174707603
- It looks like they're dumping you if you hide the referral link based on the text.
  Truly gross practice.

Whatever Red Hat is doing with Enterprise Linux has luckily no direct effect on Fedora which in itself is a great distribution, so this is a good step.

This is super cool! Been following these guys for a while.

Have the speaker issues been fixed yet? That's the one thing holding me back from permanently switching. I would also prefer Debian over Arch or Fedora.

Nope, no speakers yet

I can't say I am suprised but I sure am glad that the Asahi SIG has been so successful.

Kudos to everyone involved!

Lowkey not worth, you can get much better performance laptops for the same price
- Yeah, it's an impressive amount of work and more options is always a good thing, but there's really no reason to go out of your way to buy a new MBP just to run Linux. Though I wonder what the used M1 market is looking like these days.

Such a solution is great because my girlfriend has a 11 years old MacBook pro and I’m sure Apple will find a way to render it obsolete

Asahi Linux is specifically built to run on Apple Silicon. It won't be compatible with an 11yo MBP.
- It will be in 11 years
Regular Fedora runs on that and has since this laptop came out.
It's a regular x86-64 computer

Never thought I would say this but my next one gonna be apple silicon

Where M2 Pro support :(

Where your monetary contribution?
Being developed, ask Apple to release their code or documentation to make it faster
They are literally reverse engineering hardware. Every hardware revision will be sewhat different and require even more work. This is not at all a fast or easy process. That fact this works at all to me is incredible.