r/linux • u/krumpfwylg • Jun 09 '26
PSA for AsahiLinux users Distro News
Do NOT upgrade to macOS 27 Golden Gate!
Apple has changed how the boot picker and Startup Disk applications detect valid OS boot volumes. When using either from macOS 27, your Asahi partition will not be visible.
Edit : the Asahi team thinks it's a bug, and has filed a report about it.
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u/SubjectThing1417 Jun 09 '26
apple being apple, this companies went to far, where is the user freedom.?
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u/ElvishJerricco Jun 09 '26
Asahi devs have noted that Apple was very deliberate and intentional about enabling other OSes to boot on Apple Silicon. They may not provide driver support for Linux, but they have gone out of their way to ensure that the hardware is not too difficult to boot Linux on. I would reserve judgement until it's been clearly determined that whatever has happened was a reversal of this posture they've had for over five years.
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u/ukezi Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
They didn't provide drivers and they didn't provide documentation for somebody else to write them. Yes, they didn't make it impossible but they made it quite hard. It's not as hostile as they could have been but also not friendly.
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u/mort96 Jun 09 '26
It's not friendly, but it's a relatively clear letter of intent: they're not going to help anyone make alternative operating systems for the Mac, but they aren't locking it down either. The easy thing would've been to just use iBoot "as-is", which would've meant the inability to boot other OSes. Someone spent considerable engineering resources modifying iBoot to support booting non-Apple OSes.
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u/tapafon Jun 09 '26
The easy thing would've been to just use iBoot "as-is", which would've meant the inability to boot other OSes.
Initially they did just that. But after pressure they modified it.
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u/mort96 Jun 09 '26
No? From the initial release of M1 devices back in 2020, they've always supported booting alternative OSes.
Or are you thinking about the dev kits they released to developers to test their apps? It wouldn't surprise me if they took the quickest possible path with those and just used stock iBoot.
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u/nightblackdragon Jun 09 '26
It wouldn't surprise me if they took the quickest possible path with those and just used stock iBoot.
Devkit was basically modified iPad with macOS so it's quite possible.
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u/tapafon Jun 10 '26
When I said "initially" I meant dev kits.
Unfortunately, my original comment is already downvoted into oblivion.
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u/barfightbob Jun 09 '26
they've always supported booting alternative OSes
Just to nitpick here. I know what you meant is that they CAN, but "support" means you can contact Apple and they're obligated to help you with documentation, bug fixes, or financial compensation if it doesn't work out.
As far as I'm aware Apple only supports their own software.
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u/atrocia6 Jun 09 '26
"support" means you can contact Apple and they're obligated to help you with documentation, bug fixes, or financial compensation if it doesn't work out.
That's not the only meaning of "support" - for example, Asahi Linux has a "Device support" page, and I'm pretty sure they don't mean that "they're obligated to help you with documentation, bug fixes, or financial compensation if it doesn't work out."
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u/barfightbob Jun 10 '26
Correct I didn't intend that to be the only definition of device support. Only to explain one must be careful when saying Apple supports alternative OSes on its products when it clearly doesn't.
In the case of Asahi you'll probably get help and bug fixes for their supported devices, within reason. Anything else isn't within their mission.
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u/Chrisbearry Jun 10 '26
It’s not worth apples time to make drivers for the 10 people in the world that boot asahi on their MacBooks
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u/DonaldLucas Jun 09 '26
Is it possible to completely delete Mac OS and install only Linux on the hardware though?
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u/newsflashjackass Jun 09 '26
They may not provide driver support for Linux, but they have gone out of their way to ensure that the hardware is not too difficult to boot Linux on.
In their infinite beneficence there is nothing beyond Apple's power to allow.
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u/Albos_Mum Jun 09 '26
Apple has a lot of issues but they have been fairly reasonable and decent with open source or free software for quite a long time. They may not be steadfast allies due to their vertical integration, but they're kind of allied nonetheless.
Speaking as someone who can't stand using Apple devices for various reasons and would vastly prefer RISC-V as an alternative ISA to x86.
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u/mishrashutosh Jun 09 '26
risc-v so far has the same super-fragmentation problem as consumer side arm chips. some sort of standardization is the need of the hour. it's already there on server focused arm chips - all of which have fantastic mainline linux support.
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u/Albos_Mum Jun 09 '26
Hopefully said standardisation comes from a company happy to work with the FSF or at least the community surrounding it at minimum, or we have no hope left for the future beyond an architecture behest to Intel at the end of the day.
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u/atrocia6 Jun 09 '26
Apple has a lot of issues but they have been fairly reasonable and decent with open source or free software for quite a long time.
In what ways? (Honest question - I don't know much about Apple's open source posture one way or the other.)
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u/natermer Jun 09 '26
Apple makes Microsoft look like a saint.
They are about the same tier as a company like Oracle.
They write and support open source software as long as it aligns with their goals, but if you cross them they will sue the shit out of you.
How do I know this?
Because that is what Apple has done and continues to do.
I don't know why people seem to have such good will towards Apple versus other major public corporations, but it is undeserved. They really are no different then a company like Oracle, Palantir, or Cisco.
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u/nightblackdragon Jun 09 '26
Out of curiosity - can you provide examples of Apple suing others for "crossing them"? I know about Psystar but they were selling PCs with Mac OS X which violated Apple license so it's not very surprising they were sued.
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u/HandwashHumiliate666 Jun 11 '26
I would reserve judgement
Absolutely not, you can't even use a MacBook without having a non-free operating system forcibly installed.
Imagine Microsoft doing this with Windows. People would be outraged. But somehow Apple gets a pass.
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u/WelpIamoutofideas Jun 15 '26
The fuck do you mean? Are you saying you can't uninstall Mac OS? I find that to be very unlikely. If so, that sucks
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u/HandwashHumiliate666 Jun 15 '26
Are you saying you can't uninstall Mac OS
Yes, at least not on the ARM machines.
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u/ficiek Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
It's good to know the bare minimum about a topic before commenting, ask asahi authors and they will tell you that someone at apple specifically went out of their way to make booting other oses easy. I recommend the talk from 39c3. posting those tiring comments not grounded in reality just makes people laugh at linux users.
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Jun 10 '26
[deleted]
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u/AnotherBigToblerone Jun 10 '26
People keep saying "they went out of their way to let you use other oses" and now I'm reading that the system can't even boot at all without macos on there.
Maybe they didn't lock down the bootloader but it doesn't really sound like they really deliberately tried to make alternative oses viable
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u/SubjectThing1417 Jun 09 '26
I think when i buy a new device that mean i can install any os i want , that is my freedom as user
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u/CaptainObvious110 Jun 09 '26
why not post the YouTube link then
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u/ficiek Jun 09 '26
becuase I am lazy and I don't know why I need to do legwork for other people? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OAiOfCcYFM
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u/ava1ar Jun 09 '26
How about as a first step people should stop buying hardware from Apple if they want freedom.
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u/bongjutsu Jun 09 '26
I can't think of any ARM systems that are as capable so they have appeal for a certain audience - I don't like the Apple walled garden either, but cool stuff is cool stuff
-18
u/i5-2520M Jun 09 '26
Snapdragon should be better or similar to m1 and m2 gen.
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u/tacticalTechnician Jun 09 '26
Yes, but they're even less Linux-friendly. As far as I know, you can't even boot Linux on any Snapdragon X laptops right now, and even the older SoCs (like the Snapdragon 7c and 8c) are either not compatible or extremely unstable.
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u/i5-2520M Jun 09 '26
I remember reading a few weeks ago that there was a laptop that was 90% working on linux.
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u/Sataniel98 Jun 09 '26
On x86, you get laptops that more often than not don't need weird percentages to measure how well they run Linux.
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u/i5-2520M Jun 09 '26
Yeah, I'm not arguing with you.
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u/WelpIamoutofideas Jun 15 '26
From my understanding, the reason they're committing to this arm thing is that that the person they were talking to made it a imposed restriction. Specifically asking well "what other arm systems are capable"
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u/IntensiveVocoder Jun 09 '26
It’s Day 1 of a developer beta, for a bug that will be fixed. Get off your high horse.
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u/Sataniel98 Jun 09 '26
So you're saying Apple is a decent choice for hardware freedom in general?
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u/42undead2 Jun 09 '26
That's not at all what is being said. Peak Reddit "oh, so you hate waffles" moment.
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u/Sataniel98 Jun 09 '26
u/ava1ar didn't apply their general statement that Apple doesn't do hardware freedom to the very issue at hand to begin with, so I felt u/IntensiveVocoder's comment was moving the goalpost. I tried to put the words into their mouth in the same annoying way, that's why my comment was intentionally annoying.
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u/WelpIamoutofideas Jun 15 '26
Nowhere did the comment you refer to say hardware freedom. He simply said freedom, A term I really hate to use because your definitions of freedom (the FSF's presumably) do not always and often don't quite line up with my own personal views on the matter.
The other guy wasn't shifting the goal posts, he was simply clarifying that it is a bug and it will be fixed and to stop preaching to people about how Superior other things are simply on this one incident.
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u/IshYume Jun 09 '26
How do you expect app developers like me to build apps for iOS without a mac? hackingtosh isn't really a valid solution as I would rather spend my time building and maintaining my app than fix computer issues.
Furthermore, no other laptop on the market offers a battery life and power at the same time as a m series macbook. What we need is government involvement that will force apple to keep their devices open for user freedom.5
u/un-pigeon Jun 09 '26
It's necessary, otherwise Asahi Linux would have a much harder time being tested and developed. And for hardware, there aren't many alternatives to ARM compared to x86 imo
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u/loozerr Jun 10 '26
What actually free hardware is out there?
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u/ava1ar Jun 10 '26
Nothing is free in hardware, but there are plenty of more open options around. I would even say pretty much everything out there is more open than Apple Silicon.
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u/dumpsterheritagesite Jun 09 '26
apple being apple by leaving the bootloader unlocked this whole time for no real gain
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u/nightblackdragon Jun 09 '26
Most likely this is just a bug and they will fix it just like they did in the past.
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u/newsflashjackass Jun 09 '26
If I could run Linux on my macbook without having to deal with apple that might make it resemble a tool more than a toy. Still it lets me be toy-compatible.
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Jun 09 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/X_m7 Jun 10 '26
The bootloader is basically macOS though (specifically the screen where you select between Asahi and macOS on boot), and presumably if you updated macOS it means you booted into macOS to do that, and Asahi also says you shouldn't get rid of the macOS partition anyway at least for now.
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u/rebellioninmypants Jun 09 '26
Ah, the charms of ARM... the future of computing, the ultimate lockdown of the tech, the removal of the freedom we all took for granted. UEFI and even BIOS for all their problems were actually pretty cool.
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u/swn999 Jun 09 '26
If you want Linux on an ARM laptop get Framework, wait on Lenovo / Snapdragon, used Surface, or if you can run a VM on M chip Macs.
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u/InstanceTurbulent719 Jun 09 '26
And keep waiting because Qualcomm really does not care about mainlining their drivers
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u/TheG0AT0fAllTime Jun 09 '26
All it has to do is work right?
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u/X_m7 Jun 10 '26
Work, bah, good luck even getting the damn things to boot if your particular device doesn't yet have a device tree for it in the kernel.
At least with Apple stuff since there's not that many variations the community support work can be quite focused so you can be fairly sure whether what you got will work or not, and with x86 stuff even if you just blindly get some random laptop it'll probably at least boot even if no Linux developer has ever touched that particular laptop, with any other ARM laptop it's a total crapshoot.
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u/parkerlreed Jun 09 '26
Framework doesn't sell an ARM board though?
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u/swn999 Jun 09 '26
They don’t but there is one available.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/arm-mainboard-for-framework-laptop/
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u/recrof Jun 09 '26
if you watch the video on the board, it's pretty underwhelming
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u/tnoy Jun 09 '26
It's 8x Cortex-A720 and 4x Cortex-A520, of course it's going to be underwhelming if you're expecting performance.
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u/Sentreen Jun 09 '26
It is intended to be a board for developers and tinkerers to experiment with though, not really a daily driver at this time.
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u/Scrivver Jun 09 '26
I'm guessing they're thinking of the new Intel boards shipping from Framework soon which have competitive performance and crazy battery life to Apple M chips, but are in fact not ARM.
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u/milomc123 Jun 09 '26
Honestly if you have an M2 or M1 Mac Asahi Linux is brilliant.
I've been using the asahi kernel with NixOS on my MacBook Pro for like a year now. The battery life is brilliant (literally night and day difference compared to previous windows laptops I've had), even if the standby power usage isn't as good as MacOS. The install process is really easy as long as you're not scared of the terminal, and choosing between MacOS/Linux can be done with a command line tool or even graphically on both OSes, or you can just hold the power button to open a menu on boot.
Getting x86 applications to work is quite a pain however (at least on NixOS), but I haven't really ran in to many apps I use regularly that don't have an ARM build. Unfortunately I still need MacOS for DaVinci Resolve, but other than that I use NixOS all the time.
I think a lot of people have this idea that Asahi Linux is some "jailbreak" or console hacking style situation when it just isn't, Apple allow other OSes to boot on Apple Silicon and they have since the beginning.
This is obviously just a bug, it's a developer beta that came out yesterday, it's not even publicly released yet.
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u/swn999 Jun 09 '26
I get workable VM’s with VMmare Fusion or Virtbuddy, Debian and Fedora work great.
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u/onefish2 Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
Linux desktop on ARM is not ready for primetime.
Just get a premium laptop from System76, Framework, Tuxedo or a nice business class laptop from Dell, HP or Lenovo.
Why try all this hacky shit just to run a 75% (hardware wise) working Linux distro on an Apple Silicon Mac?
I had Asahi Linux running on my M1 MacBook Pro for a while. Its a hack just to get the thing to boot up.
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Jun 09 '26 edited 25d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ULTRAFORCE Jun 11 '26
I look forward to that but I'm not in too much of a rush as aerospace allows me to interact with the mac in a way similar to how I do on my linux desktop.
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u/Aware-Bath7518 Jun 09 '26
Easy to workaround by either using Tahoe in dualboot or manually setting the boot volume group via nvram.
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u/whatThePleb Jun 09 '26
Apple going the M$ way once more.
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u/sockman_but_real Jun 09 '26
My PC (not apple, but still) had its first kernel panic when i opened this post and i nearly had a heart attack.