> However, CS42L42 supports all the other common sample rates, and while the register layout and programming sequence is different, the actual values programmed in for 48 and 96 kHz are the same across both chips. What would happen if we simply took the values for all other sample rates from the CS42L42 datasheet and added those to the CS42L84 driver? As it turns out, you get support for those sample rates!
> The patch to enable hardware support for 44.1, 88.2, 176.4 and 192 kHz sample rates on both the input and output of the headphone jack was submitted directly upstream, and has been merged for 7.1. We also backported this to Asahi kernel 6.19.9, allowing users to take advantage of this immediately.
Nice bit of chip sleuthing and reverse engineering from the Asahi team!
> This is quite limiting, as it forces PipeWire to waste CPU cycles (and therefore battery life) on resampling audio streams that are not either 48 or 96 kHz.
So the Asahi team thinks that only supporting 48 or 96 kHz wastes battery life by forcing the software to resample audio streams. But why does Apple still do this? Presumably Apple has a very high commitment to save power and increase battery life.
So either someone said "we must disallow the other options" or they didn't and it's a bug.
https://github.com/hasenbanck/resampler#quality-analysis
This is presumably what Apple does. You kind of have to anyway or you have the stupid situation Linux used to have where only one app could play audio at a time.
When was that? I think my first Linux distribution was Ubuntu 8.04 and fairly sure it shipped with PulseAudio which in mind always been able to play audio from multiple sources at the same time, maybe I misremember?
Upsite: Highest quality playback.
Downside: Only one process could play audio at a time.
Which is why the whole "we must use pulseaudio even if it's terrible and has awful standards that blast volume or multiple streams won't work!" was so weird… everybody who tried knew that just removing pulseaudio the multiple streams kept working :)
So only those who never applied the scientific method kept insisting that without PA it was not possible to do that.
Plus of course, initially you had to regularly run killall -9 pulseaudio to fix the sound. All in a moment when ALSA with dmix worked just fine.
Sometimes I think fedora and ubuntu are trying to hinder linux as mainstream desktop.
OpenBSD still present raw audio devices, but they have sndio which provides a more helpful interface for applications including resampling (not the best algorithms there, according to them).
I'm concerned that after all these years, it's still a separate project and not an effort sustained directly within the kernel mainline and mainstream distributions like Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora.
These kinds of reverse engineering projects are extremely challenging. With skills & field knowledge, it's "easy" to get to "80%" and have something useful for you and the most dedicated users. But reaching the "95%" required for a polished & general public ready experience needs nearly as much effort, often on tedious and time consuming tidbits.
That’s a big reason why progress slowed recently because they were focusing on reducing their diff count.
A lot of stuff has landed in the mainline kernel, but Asahi is how they keep experimenting on new functionality.
Yes, but also no? Because I think a reasonable argument can be made that ARM Macs are like game consoles with a more rapid generation: yes there are changes between each generation, but then you've got millions of units which are good for a very long time that are all near identical. Apple definitely is not changing everything between gens at all, work they've done for M1 has been plenty useful since. And support stretches awhile. The final M3 generation chip only came out about a year ago (the M3 Ultra for the Mac Studio was March 2025).
So sure there's ongoing effort needed for newer systems, and that may require ongoing RE more then typical. I don't want to brush aside the effort there at all. But at the same time there doesn't seem to be the same long tail of hardware variations and dozens to hundreds of players doing their own little tweaks either. Aside from memory and storage, every single Mac of a given SoC is the same so each time one gets covered they all get covered and are a stable experience. It's definitely a different thing then developing for PCs, and I definitely wish there was and support serious legal backing for no rug pulls being allowed, ever. Hardware owners should always have access to the root of trust if they want it. But that aside, I don't think their efforts are wrong or somehow wasted just because each new generation might need some new work. That doesn't appear from the outside to be intractable, and fact is the pace of hardware change for computers has slowed and continues to slow. A system from many years ago can still be very good for most tasks... so long as the OS can still be updated and work. Apple themselves seem more then limiting factor there, whereas Linux shines in long term support.
But that would probably result in burn out from the crazily talented dev team :P
LOL
If anything Apple is infamous for keeping around hardware blocks for as long as they can. IIRC the serial port driver for everything Apple ARM dates back to the very first generations of iPods.
Of course Apple will remain a moving target, but they are orders of magnitude more stable than everyone else in the non-x86 universe.
I am curious what the boot situation is. It seems like Qualcomm actually has pretty good support for their cores. But since these PC systems sort of lack a bios, each one needing a hand built DeviceTree: it makes supporting them kind of a nightmare. Even a raspberry pi has a much more advanced and accommodating boot environment than these frustrating Qualcomm laptops. Alas. I don't know but I expect Asahi has to do similar hand tailoring. I am curious to know what the boot chain looks like! How much the system willingly helps vs how much hard to be bespoke hand coded system config! (Wish it wasn't like this, it's so bad)
Just several months after leaving Qualcomm, distinguished CPU and system architects Gerard Williams, John Bruno, and Ram Srinivasan, who are celebrated for their high-performance processors developed at Apple, Nuvia, and, more recently, Qualcomm, established a new CPU startup — Nuvacore — that promises no less than to 'rewrite the rules of silicon.'It offers an A/B test of "similar" SoC performance and battery life (which users now expect from laptops), without a vertically integrated operating system that was also created by the company who designed the SoC.
What does this mean? Hardware support is rarely developed inside these organizations; what makes it seem like these groups would be a good home for this effort?
It makes sense to have a group of experts in a field (Apple hardware/firmware) contribute patches upstream, which is the exact system here. And Asahi have done an above and beyond job also maintaining their installation framework while carefully moving changes upstream as well.
Doing so would enabled mainstream distributions to provide maintainable M-series builds, with all that entails in terms of stability, enabling choice, maintenance or security fixes.
The whole fork + dedicated distribution made sense at the start of the project since it provided a playground for quickly iterating and experimenting (which is a no-no to do directly in the mainline kernel or in a major distribution).
But Asahi is still the only Linux on Silicon option after all these years, which is a bit worrisome. Asahi should have been a cool but temporary initiative.
At some point, the project will lose momentum and for its accomplishments to last, it should be merged into the general effort, i.e. drivers maintained directly in the Linux kernel, and the userland stuff made to be easily packaged and shipped by mainstream distributions.
They do try to upstream and eventually just have Linux natively support Apple Silicon!
No Mac in history has been locked down in the way you describe, and there's really no indication that Apple would start now. If they were ever going to, the ARM transition would've been the perfect time to do it, yet they invested engineering resources into adding support for booting non-Apple kernels into their bootloader.
They could of course release a new line of laptops or a firmware update tomorrow which locks down the bootloader and prevents booting non-Apple kernels. But so could Lenovo, Dell, HP, Samsung, Sony, or any other laptop vendor. Or Microsoft, Intel, AMD or Qualcomm could exert their influence, as owners of various parts of the ecosystem, to shift the PC landscape in that direction.
In contrast, Asahi is specifically doing all the challenging RE work that typically gets passed over in favor of flashy headlines. If anyone can get to 95%, it's them.
[0] Prior to the M1 Mac, Apple did not allow anyone but themselves to load EL2 code. The ability to load other OSes on Apple Silicon Macs is, strangely enough, an allowed use-case. Prior to this we had to rely on once-in-a-decade bootrom security bugs.
The only way to get the battery life Framework advertised is on Windows' 'Ultra Efficiency' mode which cuts CPU performance by 25-50%, lowers brightness by 30% and deprioritizes everything in the background to such an extreme that responsiveness of those is measured in seconds.
It is not comparable at all to M-series or Snapdragon laptops happily chugging along at full capability and getting (compared to AMD / Intel) stellar battery life.
When I play Bitburner, if I want to run it in the background, I have to run the game on Firefox or chrome. It’s a shame because safari actually gives best performance by quite a large margin.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/arm-mainboard-for-fra...
My variosu Linux adventures have always resulted in doing random patches for audio or screen incompatibility.
My windows days were plagued with battery issues.
I feel like most Linux ricers wishs for a MacOS-like experience, except with more customisation. (Which is entirely possible now with the ricing on Mac)
This is the kind of dated argument that really makes me dismiss most of the critics. I was running xubuntu as my main desktop since 2010 at least, switched to Debian + nix + XFCE in 2022 and switched to full-on nixOS in 2024. I never had issues with audio then and had to go out of my way to "break" audio on NixOS when I wanted to try pipewire instead of pulse.
> feel like most Linux ricers wises for a MacOS-like experience
I've put together a Hackintosh once, tried for a few weeks as the daily driver. Aside from being able to use tools that dealt with real-time audio processing, there was nothing else I wanted to copy or bring to my Linux system. It cemented my opinion that most software developers that keep touting the "superiority of MacOS" never gave a fair shot at Linux on decent hardware and were just rationalizing their prior choice.
Did you ever do any DAW ? Did you have to use is jackd ?
Stuff like streaming games from my desktop in a non native resolution is a no-go with Wayland. I can't do HDMI 4k/120 with HDR/VRR like I can on windows (I know it's HDMI fault, but that doesn't change the fact it doesn't work).
Oh and I've given up on using Linux for productivity a year ago - one can take only so many full browser crashes for simple stuff like desktop sharing, camera/mic stopping mid call.
I'm running linux on my desktop with about as vanilla hardware as you can imagine - the amount of compromises/stuff that just doesn't work is quite annoying.
It's just nowhere near the level of reliability of MacOS - that's why I use my air for productivity and I SSH into the workstation to do actual work in VMs (with all the recent supply chain compromises no way in hell I'm ever doing dev work outside of a sandbox environment).
I've never used a device that claims first party linux support so maybe it's better.
But honestly I'm not a fan of linux desktop in general - flatpack is nice in theory but comes with so many "gotchas" and installing stuff otherwise is just "here you have all the privileges of my user". MacOS sandboxing/security scoping feels way better for desktop use.
Everything else I have it on pretty much "just works". I am not a big gamer, but Steam works. Bluetooth works. Wi-Fi works. It detects my printer and scanner better than my wife's windows laptop. No browser crashes.
NixOS is well supported on the Framework and on my workstation. The worst type of inconveniences I have nowadays would be things like what I had some weeks ago: Zoom wouldn't find an already-running process and would get stuck in a loop, solved it by running "nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade".
I am not a Linux novice, I have been using every major OS for decades at this point, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t install Windows, decrapify it, and everything just worked. You can say I should have done more research on hardware compatibility or whatever, but I didn’t have to for Windows.
And I like how you complain most devs never give Linux a fair shot on decent hardware right after describing that you MacOS experience is a hackintosh. That makes a lot of sense.
All this wall of texts to say that, respectfully, when you write >Earlier this year I built a new desktop and installed my normal Linux distro and the screen wouldn’t work after login the issue might simply be that you are doing something very wrong and/or not following the proper instructions for whatever distro you are using.
I'm not saying that I was expecting to run a Hackintosh and suddenly get the advantages of Apple hardware. I am doing a pure software-to-software comparison.
There was no application in the MacOS desktop that made me feel like I was missing out on something. Of all the tools that I am used to use - emacs + developer tools, email clients, messaging clients, media players, media managers, browsers, the occasional office productivity - none of the MacOS counterparts had any significant advantage over what I have in a Linux desktop.
I would argue this is impossible at this point. Most of the benefits of the entire Apple ecosystem are about integration - Macbook Pros are the fastest machines with the best battery life because of the great hardware but also the software integration.
> There was no application in the MacOS desktop that made me feel like I was missing out on something. Of all the tools that I am used to use - emacs + developer tools, email clients, messaging clients, media players, media managers, browsers, the occasional office productivity - none of the MacOS counterparts had any significant advantage over what I have in a Linux desktop.
This isn't really comparing OSes is it? You're comparing software that runs on the OS. Every tool I have on my linux machines I have an equivalent tool for on Mac, or I use the same tool, but the Macbook with MacOS is a workhorse that I can trust to "just work."
I don't think desktop Linux is bad, not by any means, and there are reasons I still go to it first on my personal machines until something forces me to make a different decision, but I also get tired of Linux users telling all of us that our experiences are old and all of these issues are fixed when they're just not, even if that isn't Linux' or the distro's fault.
If System76 said PopOS only works on their hardware, it would be fair to only evaluate it on their hardware. When SteamOS only claimed to work on Steam Decks, the only good evaluation way to evaluate it was on Steam Decks.
Who exactly is "Linux", and what specifically is the claim? It looks to me like you don't want to lose the argument on these grounds, but maybe you could still have a nice laptop with Linux on it that just works.
Linux distributions have a set of claims for what hardware they work with, usually as minimum system requirements. Since they are the minimum system requirements the expectation should, within reason, exist that the OS will work if you meet or exceed those requirements.
I say "within reason" because no OS can promise that, minimum is not a forward looking statement and the newest hardware is often the hardest to support.
> It looks to me like you don't want to lose the argument on these grounds
Agreed, because I didn't make any claims that this direction of argument negates. Linux has a harder task supporting a broader array of hardware, that doesn't mean that every argument should compare it to MacOS only on golden/chosen hardware.
If you build a distribution that only claims it works on specific hardware, like SteamOS did, then I agree that's a valid comparison.
> but maybe you could still have a nice laptop with Linux on it that just works.
I'm sure I could, I never claimed you couldn't.
It's the inverse. You claim that Apple "just works" for you and that Linux doesn't. I am saying that if you want to lend credibility to your argument, you need to use hardware that has a certifying vendor behind it.
"Linux" isn't even an operating system. There is no entity in the world who claims "bring any Linux distro at all to any random assortment of hardware you happen to already own, it'll be great and we'll commercially support it!".
I don’t understand all the folks who crawl out of the woodworks as Acolytes of the Holy Linux Empire every time this topic comes up. Linux is a good desktop OS these days, it is my default, but I don’t have any problems acknowledging its issues and moving to another OS if it can’t meet my needs or if I have hardware/software that it has issues with.
What I am refuting is basically the idea that MacOS provides a better "experience" than a modern LInux Desktop installed on any reasonably conventional hardware.
I don't refute that are limitations on Linux. I am not saying that it will run everywhere flawlessly. But I am saying that the average college student, the average "web developer" and the average "elderly folk with basic computing needs" can have a good desktop experience without being forced to pay the Apple tax.
Modern Apple laptops seem less special now but you also have to look at them through the lens of their introduction.
A similar thing is true for Sonos. They don't seem all that special now, but you have to realize they have been offering multi-room synced audio with a good UX since 2006. That's before the iPhone even was released.
On Apple hardware. Call me when you put MacOS on any random laptop and get suspend to work.
Windows and Linux is judged by whether it works on any hardware, including the so-cheap-it-should-not-have-been-produced-ever machines, that will obviously just plain suck. No amount of software can save shitty hardware.
Also, Linux expressly aims to run on a wide array of hardware, and macOS doesn’t. So Linux should be judged across a large range of hardware and macOS shouldn’t, in the same way a Jeep should be judged on its off-roading abilities and a Civic shouldn’t.
A supersonic airplane is not better than a bicycle, nor the reverse is true. They are just.. different and only marginally related.
Also, "revive" a device is more of a niche thing. What's more generally in line with linux's philosophy is it scaling down to embedded-like hardware, but also scaling up to supercomputers. Neither end is "a bad experience", and none of the other mainstream desktop OSs can even hold a candle next to it.
Countless other things about the way they work and how they handle what you want to do with them? We're not comparing radically different things, I was intentional about my comparison of Jeep vs Civic: they're the same basic tool, with different applications and contexts where they shine. This isn't an airplane and a bicycle.
:/
That combined with a lack of good creative software on Linux kind of kills it for me. I’d rather use it than Windows, but MacOS seems like the best option currently.
Some people seem to get better battery life with Windows than with Linux.
Most users on any OSes are not ricers. Most of my customisation is functional - panels and widgets placed for practical reasons. A lot of people do not seem to customise at all, or barely.
Definitely good to have the option, but you'll most likely never get quite the same performance or battery life on linux
Is that on Mac hardware? I run a 14 year old Mac Book Air, and it works flawlessly with the latest Nixos, and has done for the last 11 years.
If you have issues on random PCs, it's because there are an enormous variety of them out there, with all kinds of incompatibilities that have to be worked around. On Mac hardware, there tends to be a more restricted number of variants, and after a few years, Linux becomes rock solid on them.
So the OP is correct, Linux on Mac hardware is the best combo.
M series Macs are still very much a work in progress. I'm typing this on one, in Linux, so plenty of things work, but not for example USB-C output to an external display, and a lot of the processor power level / suspend stuff is still not fully there so battery life is quite a bit worse, especially when suspended. I think the situation is rather worse on the latest generation hardware, too.
I was burned by the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard, and once Liquid Ass was announced I knew it was time to get out.
Sold my MacBook Pro M2 Pro, which has a stupid gigantic notch that blocks the menu bar items with no built-in mechanism for getting to them when they overflow.
Now I’m on a Framework 13” and I’ve had zero issues with Linux. Everything just works. KDE Plasma is way more customizable than macOS or Windows. I’m finally able to ditch slow Homebrew and use a real package manager. I can finally play light PC games on my laptop without dealing with streaming or Crossover.
My preorder is in for the Framework 13 Pro, which looks to get even closer to delivering a MacBook Pro for Linux. Meanwhile, Apple hasn’t changed their chassis design in 5 years, while Framework updates their hardware constantly while maintaining cross-compatibility. A company with less than 500 employees is catching up to a trillion dollar corporation.
I’ve already got my fully modular LPCAMM RAM delivered and ready with no Apple tax. I’ll get better battery life watching YouTube videos than a MacBook Pro and the graphics are just as powerful as the M5 base chip.
And if something breaks I won’t have to deal with the nightmare I went through with my 2016 MacBook Pro.
Works like rocm seem so close. But you need either the pre-compiled packages or 2+ year old Ubuntu to compile them. https://github.com/ROCm/TheRock/issues/3477
Sad because I really want the better One drive integration that Ubuntu 24+ comes with.
All the classic reasons ("competitive advantage", "secrets", etc) do not hold water in this day and age.
Apple documents lots of things the genius bar won't help with. For example, Apple provides instructions for compiling custom builds of the XNU kernel. However, if you replace the stock kernel and your Mac kernel panics, the genius bar isn't going to help you. (Maybe they'd help you wipe the computer and restore everything to stock, but I imagine they'd do that if a Linux user walked in too, even today.)
I suspect Apple hasn't shared documentation because it would take time to prepare for external release (legal stuff, plus the need to avoid leaking future products). What I don't understand is why Apple hasn't made an engineer available to talk on the phone for a couple of hours a month. This would amount to a rounding error in their budget.
untrue. There are no obligations from other hardware vendors, yet you can sometimes get good drivers from them, or at least specs. I think Apple indeed want their hardware to fade out to enforce buying another. Imagine that 20% of your returning customers no longer return after 3-5 years of planned obsolence
What do you mean by needed? A lock-in is more profitable so is needed to maximise profits.
You can't lock-in Linux users because vast majority of them won't switch to macOS and ecosystem at large. This is simply a currently untapped market they could easily almost entirely own if they wanted to. With growing Linux popularity, extra 3-4% of the laptop market share is nothing they can ignore in front of shareholders.
Go team Asahi!
A 1-3% of the market out of the 5% that Linux already is, is little to no monetary benefit?
Apple's MO is that it's their baby. End of. They don't do open. Their compiler is closed source, and so on.
The laptop has various pieces of hardware in it and corresponding drivers in macOS to make them tick. Did we buy the hardware and the drivers as an inseparable package, or should we be provided with the manual to make one component work when the other breaks, be that either third party trackpads or third party (Linux) drivers.
Apple might argue that drivers, unlike gears or motors, will never wear down and fail. They won’t need repairing so you don’t get to know how they work. Does right to repair only apply to products that could ever need repairing? Does it also extend to knowing how your purchased product is built so that you could repair it?
Maybe we’ll see a test case some day when a cosmic ray blows out /System/Trackpad.kext and a litigant applies to a court for the documentation to repair their laptop — to write their own driver!
(Or vice versa: a manufacturer of coffee grinders arguing in court that they are exempt from right-to-repair because they repair their machines for free at their Genius Espresso Bar.)
Could I then submit a warranty claim and demand Apple replace my aging laptop with their latest model?
I'm running asahi on my macbook. And never touch OSX. I wouldn't even had gotten it if asahi wasn't so well supported.
Important context to understand why.
If all MacOS has going for it is better hardware, someone would have stepped up and shipped a better linux laptop ages ago. God knows I'm not going back to a flimsy creaking chassis, shit screen, and horrible battery life just so my Docker container doesn't have to run in a VM.
I’d love to dual boot Linux too but I’m under no delusions about being a very small segment of the Mac population.
And according to their stats page that sibling linked it’s more like a few tens of thousands of users.
There's a portion of another market: people who want to run Linux and want a powerful laptop who buy x86 Laptops right now. Apple could expend very little relative effort while offering no official support by helping Asahi get that to a first class platform. They won't capture them in the ecosystem (and they never would have) but will still benefit from hardware sales to them.
Obviously, if they sold their hardware at a loss and subsidized that with ecosystem capture that would be a non-starter. But from everything we know, the hardware itself is very profitable.
We really need to retire this phrase, it’s become a humblebrag way of calling the other party delusional without even trying to understand.
The list here though is long: priorities, accuracy concerns, blurring the line on official support, IP restrictions with third parties (even Apple uses plenty of licensed cores), etc.
> We really need to retire this phrase, it’s become a humblebrag way of calling the other party delusional without even trying to understand.
My dear friend I thought I was alone on this hill. It brings a tear to my eye, to learn I will not die alone.
I wonder if there would be interest in an Asahi Remix spin focused on a more Mac-like out-of-the-box experience: cmd as the main modifier key, Mac-like keyboard shortcuts, theming, gestures, etc.
Of course, you can tweak any distro however you want, but I think a curated default experience is a different thing.
Ok typical X/Wayland setups, Cmd is already the main modifier for DE features, while Ctrl is the modifier used at an application level.
There would be a lot of weird overlap with changing that.
DE features don't matter at all outside of cmd-tab and whatever the equivalent of spotlight is. The application level is the main modifier, and changing them all to cmd is essentially impossible at this point. A detail Haiku got just about perfect, I think.
Either way, ctrl as a gui modifier is a dealbreaker for me. It also breaks the use of readline keybindings for text entry.
either Asahi gets there from the software side or Framework gets there from the hardware side
> finding their way into the Asahi kernel tree are patches to enable more hardware on M3 machines. This includes support for PCIe, MacBook keyboards and trackpads support, the SMC-based RTC and reboot controller, and the NVMe controller, courtesy once again of Michael Reeves and Alyssa Milburn. This brings Linux support for the M3 up to roughly the same level as the first Asahi Linux alpha for M1!
Look forward to switching back to Asahi full time soon!!
Intelligence comes in many forms. This decision is one of them.
The fact, that there has to be a macOS partition for maintenance ruling out ZFSBootMenu somehow is very unfortunate - but I've accepted it.
Maybe the new Framework 13 Pro will be at least in the region of an alternative... :-/
1: https://forum.cgsecurity.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=39143#p3...
[1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/commit/e0...
Not to just shit all over him or anything, but it really sucks to see someone who is genuinely top-ten-on-earth when it comes to "real hacking" struggle so much with socialisation and mental health.
It's not victim blaming, marcan was clearly mentally unwell. He delusionally thought there was some harassment mob after him. After the fallout with Linux kernel devs, the lolipedo accusations, and him being outed as the vtuber Asahi Lina, he arguably did the correct thing: deleted every social media account and abandoned Asahi Linux. I hope he stepped away from screens and spent some time outdoors.
The widespread normalisation of this behaviour, and the subsequent ~~thought~~ now real policing around the issue, is a clear mark of a deep societal ill.
And calling all of society ill because of a vtuber is not overly emotional? How enlightened
This person liked to dish out as much as next person but display extreme reaction when served.
(I am familiar with some comments debating the validity of Byuu/Near's gender identity, and marcan's extremely strong reaction to that, but no actual harassment campaigns)
Humans are a social species. It is easy to say "just don't be social bro". When you are actually the victim of this behaviour, it is much less easy to shrug off. Having a bunch of people hate you and say horrible things about you hurts. That's not abnormal. That is perfectly normal. Is it good for your health? No, in the same way that somebody smoking next to me is not good for my health, but it's not my fault the person next to me is smoking. The blame rests with them. To some extent, yes, stepping away from the smoker is a short-term fix, although often an unpleasant one that impacts your quality of life in other ways (what if the restaraunt you like is full of smokers, what if the airport is full of smokers, etc). In the same way society eventually changed to discourage smoking around other people, we really, really need to change the culture around the internet, to recognise that the internet is actually a social environment, that there are real people on both sides of the screen. "Go touch grass" implies that the internet is not the real world, but it very much is, with real consequences, even if you can't see the other person.
Because of that I think there’s value in focusing on what individuals can control, like setting boundaries, disengaging when things get overwhelming, or stepping away from spaces that become unhealthy.
That doesn’t mean the behavior is acceptable, or that people should just tolerate it. It’s more about acknowledging that, while broader change is important, taking steps to protect yourself is the only immediate and reliable option.
Cultural change is possible. It is not something that will happen, no. But it is something that can happen, if enough people choose to make it happen. Making it happen starts by pointing this out and not blaming the people on the wrong end of this behaviour.
This kind of thinking reminds me of my truly most loathed thought-terminating cliche of all time, "life's not fair", as a justification for supporting some horribly unfair status quo. True, life isn't fair, but humanity has collectively spent an unbelievable amount of effort doing all kinds of things to make it slightly more fair, one step at a time. We can make it more fair. That's what we do as humans. We bend the world to our collective will.
---
seems the comment I was responding to was completely rewritten while I was writing this. oh well.
The very first comment I replied to was insulting the victim's social skills and mental stability. This is the exact opposite of what is needed to reach "what the world should be like". Positive progress is not inevitable. It does not happen by some fate of the universe, where if we just wait things will naturally improve and life will get better. When positive progress does happen, it happens by humans consciously choosing to act in ways that make the world a better place rather than in ways that do not.
Now there are things I can't get with Linux that I value with macOS. The integration with the phone is just not possible if am running Linux. The power management and convenient things like Apple Music, too.
I was disgusted to see Tim Cook abase himself before Trump and spent a while researching alternative phones. I did not find anything that looked like a serious option. There are things I need that are only available for iPhone or Android, it's become table stakes for life nowadays. My E-car charger required an app to function, for instance.
I admire people who "vote with their wallet" and/or suffer inconvenience for their ideals. But I am not going to install Linux (or OpenBSD) on my M1 Macbook pro. It's too essential for me the way it is.
For the record, I pour a lot of time into my 2014 macbook running arch and a thinkpad running OpenBSD, and keep an arch server/desktop running pretty much 24/7. I spend tons of time trying to find/devise things on Linux to match things I use that are closed-source/apple only.
Hats off to people who can program at the level required to make this happen. It's beyond me. And also to those trying to make Pine Phone etc a realistic option. I think that's the most important free software battleground now.
I still want to run it on an M3 MBP so it's nice to hear progress on that is happening.
They do currently ban LLM-assisted submissions. To be honest, even if LLMs are technically capable of writing code that assists the project, this at least helps keeps the 'floodgate' closed for certain low-quality PRs that other open-source projects are getting.
am I just a smooth brained dumb dumb that has drunk the koolaid? perhaps. but I don't lose sleep on it and am not tinkering with hardware, or software anymore, I just get stuff done now.
I mean, if you only use laptops that are explicitly unsupported by the Linux kernel then I could see what gave you that impression.