I believe this statement is a protest about apple following the current trend of oligarchy brown-nosing the musk/trump administration and reversing all inclusive and diversity programmes, supports and policies.

It’s cute to see the massive amount of “take care of yourself! Your health is more important than work!” on Mastodon, but I feel it is completely beside the point.

I bought my m mac because of the Asahi project ; I wouldn’t buy it today because of apple current stance.

?

A bit late tho. This should have been his first reaction, as underlined in the article, rather than coming after losing Marcan and Herbst.

As a Asahi user I am a bit partial to this: the kernel has tons of corporate-backed devs on a stable payroll - Asahi is 100% volunteers, and this shit reminds us of the frailty of it all.

And of the human being behind:

https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-lead/

…After coming in mid-fight with “you are the problem”, acting just like another bickering drama-queen & solving nothing, worsening the situation & prompting actual damage.

“You can ignore the SHA... files if you do not know what they are needed for. They are not important for you.”

…That’s where I stopped reading this.

Any windows power user or dev on a mac can follow a wiki, read a bit and learn.

Good for beginners? I didn’t describe a beginner right here. Anybody with experience in computing will find arch straightforward and satisfying. Heck, a CS student would probably go through a first install process faster than I do after 5 years.

What are the concept involved? Partitioning, networking, booting… These are all familiar fields to tons of very normal computer users.

Arch can be a good first distro to anyone who knows what a computer is doing (or is willing to learn)

Debian is good at being basic, generic, stable AND has an automatic security-update-in-the-background feature

The whole amount of instruction to give to Dear SO is just to reboot the machine if it ever seems to misbehave

Full message from Karol Herbst on LKML:

I was pondering with myself for a while if I should just make it official that I’m not really involved in the kernel community anymore, neither as a reviewer, nor as a maintainer.

Most of the time I simply excused myself with “if something urgent comes up, I can chime in and help out”. Lyude and Danilo are doing a wonderful job and I’ve put all my trust into them.

However, there is one thing I can’t stand and it’s hurting me the most. I’m convinced, no, my core believe is, that inclusivity and respect, working with others as equals, no power plays involved, is how we should work together within the Free and Open Source community.

I can understand maintainers needing to learn, being concerned on technical points. Everybody deserves the time to understand and learn. It is my true belief that most people are capable of change eventually. I truly believe this community can change from within, however this doesn’t mean it’s going to be a smooth process.

The moment I made up my mind about this was reading the following words written by a maintainer within the kernel community:

"we are the thin blue line"

This isn’t okay. This isn’t creating an inclusive environment. This isn’t okay with the current political situation especially in the US. A maintainer speaking those words can’t be kept. No matter how important or critical or relevant they are. They need to be removed until they learn. Learn what those words mean for a lot of marginalized people. Learn about what horrors it evokes in their minds.

I can’t in good faith remain to be part of a project and its community where those words are tolerated. Those words are not technical, they are a political statement. Even if unintentionally, such words carry power, they carry meanings one needs to be aware of. They do cause an immense amount of harm.

I wish the best of luck for everybody to continue to try to work from within. You got my full support and I won’t hold it against anybody trying to improve the community, it’s a thankless job, it’s a lot of work. People will continue to burn out.

I got burned out enough by myself caring about the bits I maintained, but eventually I had to realize my limits. The obligation I felt was eating me from inside. It stopped being fun at some point and I reached a point where I simply couldn’t continue the work I was so motivated doing as I’ve did in the early days.

Please respect my wishes and put this statement as is into the tree. Leaving anything out destroys its entire meaning.

Respectfully

Karol

Signed-off-by: Karol Herbst

We’re a bit further than that I’d say : https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support yes battery life not as good, sleep eats through battery a bit much and stuff, but as hardware (and everyday life) goes, it’s running pretty well: if you get all outputs, WiFi, BT, keyboard backlighting, sleep and resume, excellent sound output (thanks adahi-audio and its crazy good DSP’s), correct screen def with scaling, what exactly are you missing?

Even my cheapo rj45-to-usbc adapter works.

Some months ago I was missing a particular piece of CAD software, but that just popped up a few weeks ago (QCad).

As hardware goes, beside not being able to rely much on sleep, everything else works (for me).

Asahi doesn’t wipe macos by default (you can do it but it is an extra step) ; the Asahi install splits your system in two, and you can choose how much space to allocate to each.

As an everyday distro, it’s pretty much stock fedora with possibly a few missing niche software - think Bitwig if you’re into that, you will have Ardour / Pipewire etc but not (yet) Bitwig, which is proprietary and would need them to compile for aarm64. But the amount of stuff available is astounding, and getting better by the day.

Then it depends on your use case. For “general computing” it absolutely works, for more specialised stuff you should check beforehand. I use it as a DAW mostly, with the occasional Kdenlive bout of editing now and then. Oh, and Steam ! We have gaming now it works great. The install process is so smooth, trying it out is a 30 minute affair, tops.

I’d ask the question of why a mac tho : I can’t do without because of one macos soft I need IRL (QLab), and the very existence of Asahi allowed me to overcome my repulsion for apple products and buy the thing, heavily discounted. I’m 90% on the Asahi side, only rebooting on macos for live performances.

They are competitively priced for what they are, but I don’t trust them to be particularly solid nowadays. I hate the keyboard and the coldness/finish of the case, and find mine weighty. Also real-life use make them feel like a snappy i7, not some crazy fast supercomputer.

So if you don’t need a mac, it is not a straightforward proposition unless the price is right in regard to other available stuff. I complement mine with a Thinkpad BTW. I buy them secondhand super cheap, they last 3 or 4 years then I buy another.

Best value ATM is a good specced Air model I believe (Weight, silence, battery life / but quite no outputs, especially no external screen through USB). People in the know says to avoid 8gb ram models, go for 16.

Before I bought that mbp m2pro with 16g of ram (discounted because of M3 being all the rage at the time), I did my homework and compared: nothing framework / thinkpad comes close in price with that processing power, battery life and screen

I don’t especially like them, I certainly despise the company, it’s branding and ethos, but these are competitively priced actually

Not as good as on macos currently. Killing feature is “sleep” eats about 4~6% per hour

Lubuntu ?

We just installed one as a media player for a show and this popped up when sitting unused

Welcome to the club 🤗

It’s too good not to be posted here :

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the “ratio studiorum” of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach – if not the Kingdom of Heaven – the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation.

DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment.

You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come to resemble more closely the counterreformist tolerance of the Macintosh. It’s true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to change things in accordance with bizarre decisions…

And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is Talmudic and cabalistic.

Be sure to click the link to a fuller version provided beneath this one. Eco is just excellent.

Welcome to… being a normal Linux user

Switching distro is something every user does, thinks about doing, then does it again.

It’s normal. You just discovered a new way of using your computer, and opened a ton of possibilities in front of you, from customising your current install to the death thanks to the choice in desktops and display managers to just slap an entirely different distribution on your machine. A ton of possibles.

Try them out! There’s Live USB for about every one out there, but my favorite way is to dual-boot and see fully how the install process turns out, how the software management works, how updates occurs etc.

You’ll notice a lot is the same, a lot is different, and most any feature from a distro can be slapped on another!

To give you a taste, try openSUSE Tumbleweed - not because I think you should switch to Tumbleweed over Ubuntu, but because it’s quite different in a few key points, and I believe it is interesting for you: there’s this Rollback backup feature, a beautiful and quite simple installer, a polished user interface, a different software format, and a powerful admin tool.

Have fun with your hardware. Now backup your files and go crazy! So many out there!

(I started with Ubuntu)

Ultra-specific: soundtracks for theatre plays. I’m happy with the available vst’s, but I am not a musician, I don’t play instruments - I record people or I rip stuff & work from there. That said it means multi-band comps, tube-like preamps, parametric eqs, de-essers, echo/delays etc… It’s OK really.

Maybe all this is a bit like photoshop vs gimp: I mostly only ever used Ardour since forever and I cannot compare / suffer / get my workflow irremediably blocked because it doesn’t work for me like I expect it to.

Ardour is really a powerhouse now, and with the Pipewire audio stack, switching inputs or monitoring in every which way is just a breeze.

There’s tons of Linux musicians advice out there, including on, ahem, reddit. Yeah I know.

Now that we have Steam on Asahi my macos partition gonna get shrinked to minimal functional lol.

I ran into issues while exporting (rendering) with kdenlive, where you will notice available formats being different between the Mac version of kdenlive and the Linux one.

But to me it was a matter of compatibility, I don’t really care as long as I get useable files of sufficient quality, so I didn’t pay much attention, works-for-me style I’m afraid.

Same applies to hardware vs software encoding/decoding - the M chipset is quite powerful enough you shouldn’t have to worry about it in a pro context where encoding is something you gotta do and it’s doing it reasonably fast.

Just try it out, it doesn’t kill your mac install, and you can compare.

I use it everyday. Got it with Gnome, which is very mac-y but think ultra-zen, minimalist, early macos style. Also with the spinning cube and the wobbly windows, I just can live without these very important productivity addons.

YMMV but for my use case it just works, period - and my use case isn’t light-browsing-casual-text-editing but multitrack mixing with Ardour over Pipewire and some video editing on kdenlive. Oh and we’ve got steam games now lol, I just started Portal (unavailable on Mac haha) for 0.99!

Good thing about Asahi is that it is dualboot by nature, you won’t loose your macos partition for that pesky proprietary app (fuck u Qlab)

Try it out, you’ll love it if nothing specific arm64-related gets in your way. Software availability is great, there’s Ftapak of course for more stuff… It works and is painless to try out.

The Air macs are the best: light, thin, with awesome batteries. The only words of warning are about the reboot mid-process during install: Mac laptops tend to boot on any keystroke, lid movement anything so be sure to not touch anything & just long-press the power button 'til the appropriate screen shows up. That’s all there is to it, the only risky moment. Just (long-)press that button.

Yup! Must say this stemmed from a not-so-long-ago public comment by a “lead actor” which later took an hour-long dressing down by the director straight through his face. He apologized.

That what I do is easy and that I’m “just pushing buttons”. Yeah, I’m pushing the right button at the right time because the whoke shebang has been program’d, cued, mixed over weeks of rehearsals so that, come show time, it’s all by magic. Magic of pushing the right button at the right time while also reading the brochure, watch the stage, issue cues to other dept sometimes in 2 different languages.

Easy peasy!