Those Intel Macs aren’t really that old. I had the last good MacBook Pro they made in 2015, which still had the glowing logo, then the the slump with the touchbar shits happened in 2016-2017.
In 2017 I traded the MacBook for a Dell XPS 13. Like the MacBook, the build quality is really good. It’s running as a server in my media room. I’m running Ubuntu and I open it up daily to acquire new media, organize files, tweak my Jellyfin settings, etc.
There is no reason that 2017 XPS laptop couldn’t serve as my daily driver. My OS is fully up to date and I applied a firmware update last night. The end of life for that device is nowhere in sight; it’s peaking honestly. But if I had kept the MacBook, which was the highest quality laptop hardware you could possibly buy, for a premium price, Apple would be telling me it was no longer supported?
Regardless, Linux rocks so I hope Mac owners find joy installing a fun new OS on their good quality hardware. Here’s to the next ten years of life!
Just a quick heads up for those planning on installing Linux on their Mac. There are about three types of Macs: Intel Macs, T2 Macs and Apple Silicon Macs.
- Linux should work fine on Intel Macs, but some people at least seem to have problems with the Touch Bar.
- T2 Macs are a flavor of Intel Macs. If your Mac has T2 chip, you must use T2Linux flavor of your distro. The overall experience might not be perfectly smooth, expect some issues with at least Touch Bar, suspend and connectivity. Some fixes should arrive later this year, as far as I know.
- Asahi Linux currently supports M1 and M2 Macs. M3 and M4 are unsupported.
As a T2 Ubuntu user, the only thing that I really notice is that sleep/wake is pretty iffy. It’s annoying, but not a deal breaker by any means.
For anyone thinking of making the jump: the installation is pretty straight forward if you follow the directions
Honestly Linux desktop is in such a good state these days that I have absolute zero care what happens to the rest of desktop ecosystem. If you’re looking to get away from macos then just do it - get linux with gnome and you won’t regret it. If you’re moving from windows get KDE instead but both are incredible desktop environments that are far ahead of competition.
RIP Hackintosh 💔
At this point put Linux on them. There are distros that even look and feel like Mac OS out there too.
Why tf would you want to ruin Linux like that
“Golden Gate”? That’s the lamest name for a macOS release ever IMO.
Edit: As expected, half the page on Apple’s website talks about AI with only vague things about performance and UI improvements. I’ll be staying on Tahoe for now.
I’ll lift a comment I posted elsewhere on the topic of the name.
From a 9to5mac article on the topic:
Breaking with tradition, Apple didn’t name macOS 27 after a national park, lake, or other natural landmark. Instead, this year’s release is named after San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge.
Typical of 9to5mac “reporting.” The Golden Gate is a natural landmark, it’s the strait between San Francisco and Marin which the famous bridge spans. Nowhere in the OS release even says the word bridge.
Fun fact. While it might seem safe to assume the “gold” in Golden Gate refers to the gold discovery about 100 miles upriver that started the California gold rush, it was in fact named the Golden Gate prior to the gold discovery. John C. Fremont (my favorite early Californian) named it such because of the color of the hillsides when he first arrived.
While I loathe AI bullshit, Apple is at least prioritizing local, on-device AI and end-to-end encryption with their cloud AI services.
I’ll still be passing on any of this bullshit, but I appreciate that they tried to make a less problematic version.
What does end-to-end encryption even accomplish when you’re just feeding the information into an obscured, blackbox AI on the other end?
Like yes, I understand the importance of E2EE, I’m just making a point, it’s all rather ridiculous.
It’s not E2EE that matters most, but Apple’s Private Compute
Thank you, this is exactly true.
Most internet things are E2EE nowadays, but it matters not when the other end is AWS, Google, Cloudflare, or OpenAI.
Supposedly Apple claims to encrypt it at rest and in transit.
But data goes to the mothership anyway.
‘Bad actors’ can’t read your chatgpt conversations either, but OpenAI still does and can sell it.
Apple may better than Google, but I still don’t want my data there.
Yeah also Prism - hello? Over 10 years ago we discovered that US can just enter any US based company’s server and read anything they want unless it’s directly encrypted but for these tools to function they have to decrypt data server side so LLMs can read the contents. Which means your data is not private in any way shape or form, not from Apple and not from US and not from anything in-between.
These claims by Apple are absolutely meaningless smoke for the ignorant who just follow tech buzzwords.
Apple addressed that exact issue:
Since Private Cloud Compute needs to be able to access the data in the user’s request to allow a large foundation model to fulfill it, complete end-to-end encryption is not an option. Instead, the PCC compute node must have technical enforcement for the privacy of user data during processing, and must be incapable of retaining user data after its duty cycle is complete.
We designed Private Cloud Compute to make several guarantees about the way it handles user data:
- A user’s device sends data to PCC for the sole, exclusive purpose of fulfilling the user’s inference request. PCC uses that data only to perform the operations requested by the user.
- User data stays on the PCC nodes that are processing the request only until the response is returned. PCC deletes the user’s data after fulfilling the request, and no user data is retained in any form after the response is returned.
- User data is never available to Apple — even to staff with administrative access to the production service or hardware.
There’s no on device AI in Apple land - what are you talking about?
Also literally everything is end to end encrypted in this niche, that’s what s in https stands for.
There is on device AI in the Apple ecosystem. Many of the AI features that they announced will run locally (assuming hardware requirements are met). Things like Spatial Reframing will touch the cloud (via private compute) though. Other than that, Apple has an entire entry point for running AI close to the metal via MLX. It is kind of their entire angle at this point given their inability to create a competitive compelling AI product of their own. They appear to be taking on the role of “platform” once again.
Yes but these are nothing features compared to LLM. Samsung does on device picture moving nonsense too but in the grand scale it’s single digit % usage of AI if not below that. LLM is everything so the on-device tasks here are almost entirely meaningless.
The WWDC presentation yesterday was hilarious. Almost everything they said about the UI could be boiled down to: “We’re undoing some of the incredibly bad decisions we made last year. Not all of them, but some of the big ones!”
They then went on to demo the new improved Siri, and as someone who doesn’t use Siri, all I could think was “wait…Siri couldn’t do this 10 years ago?!”
What a sad state of affairs.
It was incredibly tonedeaf. AI is not what people want, Tim.
It looks to me like the main draw is performance optimization especially on older devices, which is a fantastic thing for them to focus on IMO.
For that reason, I wished they gave it a “Snow Leopard”-esque name. I’d have liked to see Lake Tahoe.
I’d hope that’s the case, and I hope it’s geared towards base M1s and such as they need it the most. Maybe they’re improving RAM management to improve performance on the Neo.
More like ‘golden shower’
Good thing almost all flavors of Linux run flawlessly on the x86 models.
T2 Macs are a flavor of Intel (x86) Macs, and they require T2Linux flavor of Linux.
Meh, I’ve only had trouble with TouchBar MacBooks: because TouchBar, sound and webcam processing are delegated to a secondary chip, they do not work natively on Linux.
If it’s T2 Mac, you should use T2Linux. If it’s a non-T2 TouchBar Mac… Maybe something in the T2Linux wiki helps? At least on T2 Macs, certain modules needs to be loaded in specific order, or the TB won’t work.
As someone who owned a touchbar macbook - I see no loss here lol
True but also sadly as all the new models are a struggle to get working. So locked down they will likely end up much more in the landfills.
My daily driver is an M2 Macbook air running Asahi Linux. There are certainly some hardware parts I wished worked better right now, but its fully for my needs usable as is. Improvements are occurring regularly by the development team. Apple hardware really is solid, and I’m very happy that in the rare cases I do have to use a commercial OS (Netflix streaming for example), I don’t have to use Windows. Its a dual boot machine (Linux/OSX).
Overall I’m pretty happy with Linux on this M2. Theres a handful of us here on Lemmy running it. You can find us at !asahilinux@lemmy.world
A quick question before research: is it fully working by now? Or are there some things you can live without?
E.g. I remember Thunderbolt wasn’t working, and wasn’t sure what that means. Either the port is not functioning or it works slower. I’d like to have a functioning display, so that matters to me. I’ve got an impression that Linux can work on Apple Silicon, if you’re ready to abandon some things here and there. I’d love to have it at least mostly functioning.
A quick question before research: is it fully working by now?
Is every hardware function in the laptop that works in OSX available in Asahi? No.
I’d like to have a functioning display
I think you’re asking about “DisplayPort Alt Mode” which is where you can plug a dongle into one of the USB-C ports and output the local GPU to DP or HDMI. The answer to that is “yes, depending on how adventurous you are”. There’s an experimental kernel that does support it today. I don’t think its in the main branch yet. I intentionally run version 43 (1 behind the current 44). However, I use a USB-C DisplayLink HDMI adapter for an external display and it does most of what I want right now without the experimental kernel. I do want “DisplayPort Alt Mode”, and will use it when its available though.
If you have an M1 or M2 Macbook Pro with HDMI port built-in, those work right now. The challenge being worked through is a display port that gets unplugged, which only happens on the USB-C port Display Port.
I’ve got an impression that Linux can work on Apple Silicon, if you’re ready to abandon some things here and there.
I wouldn’t use the word “abandon” but rather “wait for”. Power management efficiency doesn’t come close to native Apple OSX, but under Asahi it has enough battery for my needs. I only charge to 80% (supported natively in Fedora KDE) and get about 3 hours of runtime on battery for light to moderate use. I also read that this has improved a chunk in version 44, but again, I’m not running that version yet.
Another piece of hardware not supported on Asahi yet is the MLX engine. I’ve been experimenting with running local LLMs, and they do run under Asahi Linux, but the hardware includes MLX in OSX. There are some models specifically made to utilize MLX which result in significant performance improvements in inferencing speeds. The unified memory of the Macbooks means system RAM is available for LLM use, so I can run 16GB models while still having 8GB of RAM left over for other applications and OS functions on this Macbook Air. The RAM footprint for LLM works in both Asahi and OSX.
Keep in mind, this is a dual boot system. I still have OSX available if I need one of those Apple OSX specific function or extended battery life only one reboot away.
The main stopper from merging the fairy dust branch (the one with thunderbolt/dp over usbc) is the fact that upstreaming will require a large refactor to the entire Thunderbolt system in the kernel because the entire thunderbolt system is apparently designed with a single manky implementation for an Intel chip iirc
Thank you for this excellent long answer. I had the same questions and you addressed them all.
EDIT: One question. Did you follow a guide to setup the dual boot and if you did, can you link it?
The dual boot is the default install. The installer is a single terminal command in OSX with the installer being the guided setup. The installer is right on the front page of the distro web site: https://asahilinux.org/
It is literally just:
curl https://alx.sh/ | sh
The biggest decisions you have to make are how you want to partition the SSD between OSX and Linux.
I’ve been installing Linux in various ways since the late 90s using Slackware, and the Asahi installation experience was the easiest and seamless installation of Linux I’ve ever experienced. It on only occurred to me later why the installer could be so good. Asahi only runs on M1/M2 hardware. The developers knew exactly what the hardware would be and could tailor the experience around it.
I wouldn’t really recommend Asahi if you only have 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD in your Mac. It will certainly run, but is cramped in daily use.
Thank you for taking time for a detailed review!
I’m not having an Apple Silicon machine at the moment, but I’m eyeing one. Mostly to use Linux. I’m not in real need here (still running an Intel model with Linux, which is plenty for me right now, including okayish battery life). But I think of getting one to play around either this year, or early next year. Initially I thought of waiting for M1 models to be phased out of the macOS support and get one then. Which would make them an ideal Linux laptop in my book, as the price would drop significantly, while providing outstanding value. But I think I’d get at least one earlier.
M1&2 are pretty much fully implemented in Asahi.
3 and 4 much less so. I hope the Asahi team can keep it up. But there’s no guarantee.
Pfft you should try installing arch or Proxmox on a t2
Which was the reason to buy a well specced MacMini before the M1 switch
Stop being so pushing with the 26.5 update on my my devices. Everyday multiple times a day holy fuck. I need Linux mobile devices.
I thought they already did that a few years back?
Very few Intel devices supported Mac OS 26. They’d been winding down supported machines for a while before that.
they just used their own arm chips, but didn’t require them for macos until now. that meant up until now you could still use older intel macs with the newest macos version, but won’t be able to do that anymore starting with 27. only apple chips will get the newest version.
This is one of the reasons why I stopped buying Mac’s.
Apple talks a lot of trash about windows and Linux, but both offer far better long term support
Win 11 required TPM 2.0 (even though they went back and forth on it). That’s essentially the same thing, and Apple supported intel for a lot longer than was expected
They stopped selling the last Mac Pro and mac mini 3 years ago… So literally, their top end computer had 3 years of support of the latest OS (if you bought at the end of the cycle). And, they pulled this same BS from PPC to Intel, so, its not the first rug pull. And, its not like Windows hasn’t maintained excellent backwards compatibility otherwise (they still offer windows 95 backwards compatibility in a lot of cases in the latest OS). In fact, if your computer supports it, you also got a free upgrade to Windows 11 .
In this case, the Intel Macs include a T2 chip, so, its not like there is a valid security reason to break MacOS… They literally just blatantly screwed them (the Mac Pro was NOT a cheap computer).
Coincidenally, MacOS 27 beta breaks Linux too. https://www.phoronix.com/news/macOS-27-Beta-Breaks-Asahi .
I’d agree that buying an Intel Mac Pro three years ago and losing support is shitty, but on the other hand anyone buying Intel in the past six years certainly should’ve known their days were numbered.
It’s the same cost as a car and high profit
It should deserve a bit more support then only 3-6 years
Has it really only been three years? I was thinking it’s been six, but you’re right. I had to double check Wikipedia. I did read on HN that the asahi issue is a bug and not intentional.
They started selling 7 years ago the Mac Pro… but, only stopped selling 3 years ago apparently. Microsoft offered 10 years of support for Windows 10, and Ubuntu even offers 15 years.
Apple generally classes their products vintage after 6-7 years…
Normally, I’d say “fine”, but, this is now the second time they’ve done this within 20 years (they did it with the PPC -> Intel too), and the exact same way, and not all new apps are generally backwards compatible with the old CPU architecture either. So realistically, a lot of people are forced to upgrade regardless.
The Mac mini… Fair enough, its cheap. But, the Mac Pro was ridiculously overpriced (even the wheels cost $700 lol). You had to even pay extra money for 3 years of HARDWARE warranty.
The reality is, nobody knows is the Asahi breakage was intentional or not at this time. All we know is that Apple has contributed absolutely sweet F*** all to asahi Linux (despite it benefiting Apple primarily). The timing is interesting though…
I remember the ppc to intel transition. That’s when I bought an Intel Mac running leopard, right before snow leopard came out iirc.
I agree it’s shitty (especially since it’s only been three years).
I have a 2019 MacBook Pro and stopped updating it at Sonoma. The new OSes are just too much for that Intel chip anyway.
The M-series processors are amazing though, I’ve had such a good experience with them.
Yeah, say what you will about Apple, but they really nailed the M processors.
Just install Asahi or Fedora and get your speed back.
Right up until Apple drops support for them too
Well, there’s nothing yet that even resembles a comparable replacement with a different architecture (RISC-V?). So even if they were angling for that, it would have to be at least 3 years away, plus if Intel and Power PC are anything to go by, there’s another 5 years until they drop support. So at a minimum, if someone buys a M-series laptop today, they can expect support for 8 years.
Not terrible, given how Microsoft left 3-year-old computers unsupported by surprise with the TPM requirement in Windows 11.
there’s nothing yet that even resembles a comparable replacement with a different architecture (RISC-V?).
There are a bunch of comparable x86 processors such as Panther Lake and Qualcomm.
Not terrible, given how Microsoft left 3-year-old computers unsupported by surprise
They also supported 10+ year old computers for a long time. But MS shouldn’t be the bar we hold these companies too. Some dude was able to add support for the latest MacOS to 20 year old computers in his spare time, so we know it’s not that hard, and nothing at all to one of the wealthiest companies on the planet. They don’t do it because they make more money selling new computers.
But can it finally run Minecraft better than a 10 year old cheap Intel?
EDIT: For the downvoters - this was a joke (But can it run crysis?), but since this got attention - my pet peeves with Apple is that they advertised M chips as universally powerful and good, a serious competitor to Intel. It’s a mobile chip with instructions mostly for media encoding and decoding. It’s like comparing Prius to a bulldozer. If your workstation involves watching YouTube and using final cut pro, then sure, but anything remotely more advanced mostly falls apart on it. Don’t even get me started on AI and how slow the unified memory is
Everything you’ve said here let’s me know that you have no idea what you’re taking about. Lumping video editing with watching YouTube lmao.
It’s called decoding and encoding…
EDIT: Please stop ruining my impressions of average Lemmy person. Majority right now are acting really fucking stupid and immature just because I touched your favourite corporation. Read my explanation below. Shit, there was even a guy who posted a link thinking he’ll get me, while failing to read it and the article pretty much agrees with me (industry professionals)
It’s called decoding and encoding.
But the big data centers doing all the video processing for the big video services (including both permanent videos from a library and things like live streaming) are encoding the videos with settings that require less computational power to decode. The idea is to be able to let even old budget smartphones still be able to display the video with very low power requirements on the client device. There’s no universe where consumers decoding digital video will be a high-power computational task.
Restaurants have sharp knives in the kitchen, but generally serve food that requires only minimal cutting effort from the table knives set out with the rest of the table settings. Dining will always be easier than cooking, by a margin that makes the difficulty of dining not worth mentioning, so it would be bizarre to criticize a knife as being only good for cooking and eating food, when plenty of dining tableware knives out there would be insufficient for kitchen work.
You’ve made the mistake of lumping decoding and encoding together based on the algorithmic/mathematical similarity of those tasks, when everyone else is more inclined to discuss the very different end user use cases of those computing needs.
Which is heavy on the CPU and GPU…
You don’t know much about encoding or decoding either.
Many plugins and apps I use don’t really work with GPU/Hardware acceleration when it comes to rendering, same applies to encoding in different codecs. I’d know, because I’ve been unfortunately doing this shit for nearly 20 years and building my workstations (definitely not ARM, screw your downvotes and love for it) around it.
Pretty much every serious studio out there uses either EPYC or Xeon and to me it seems ridiculous that apparently majority here doesn’t see the problem with my initial argument of apple marketing these chips as God-tier and beat-them-all, when clearly, as it has been proven before, apple heavily misleads with their marketing and it’s not as simple as it seems.
EDIT: And people who feel like arguing by bullshitting accusations (like the guy above about me not knowing anything) are basically how redditors argued.
You put editing and watching YouTube under the same umbrella and then speak of using EYPIC and XEON CPUs?
What editing software do you use?
You put editing and watching YouTube under the same umbrella
Video encoding and decoding is generally under the same category - video processing.
What editing software do you use?
Like, right now, or have used (pretty long list)? My favourite is still After Effects just because of how used to it I am, but I seriously do not feel like listing all the plugins and extra apps (probably any professional knows about mocha/syntheyes or nuke). That’s my main, I’ve even learned to mostly skip premiere (still gotta use media encoder for obvious reasons). For 3d stuff and effects - Cinema 4D (FumeFX, xparticles, realflow, etc). Good enough, detective?
And yet the “mobile chip” in my Mac Studio absolutely crushes my 9800x3d while using almost half the power.
Actually I tried some of their silicon-optimized modern ports like the Resident Evil 2 Remake on a MacBook Air (The one that doesn’t even have active cooling) and I was taken aback by just how well it ran.
Of course it’s not a gaming PC, but it for sure punches well above its class with the games it runs.
idk, I use a gaming PC for that stuff.
The Mac’s are for work and creation.
Yeah, instruction sets don’t matter that much with modern processors. Try bullshitting harder.
Just like “optimization for games don’t matter anymore because everyone has 32gb of ram”, right? Because ARM is just simple RISC, right? https://simplifycpp.org/?id=a0882
What you consider unimportant is actually super important in cyber security by the way.
So super important that it’s not important at all.
Did you even read what you sent me? Do point out to me the part about cybersecurity, I’m waiting.
EDIT: Actually, it’s a great article.
Dude, pick a lane.
On one hand you’re claiming RISC is bad because performance. On the other hand you’re saying the difference is important due to cybersecurity.
On the first point I’ve already proven you wrong. And the second point… RISC is actually safer for a number of reasons than CISC.
So are you for, or against RISC? Because both topics you picked support RISC pretty much unilaterally.
Also might I add that right now the only truly viable open future architecture is RISC-V, which is getting to a point where we can blend together MCUs and CPUs based purely on available extra hardware on silicon. Meaning same tooling will be able to compile the same code regardless if you want to run it on a sensor array that lasts a year on a single coin cell, or a powerful processing node (okay okay arguably RISC-V isn’t completely there for truly high performance computing, but there’s already cheap SoCs with Pi3 comparable performance, and the market is just gearing up for better ones. Oh and if your goal is AI, pretty solid 16TOPS in a low power package).
I play Minecraft with the PrismLauncher on the M4 24GB. Shaders and DistantHorizon. 50-80fps
AI also works. Gemma 4 26B a4b MLX runs… somehow.
Yeah, I played large modpacks at good fps decade ago.
It’s not about whether you can use AI (obviously they can, commonly even larger models than similar laptops due to unified memory), it’s about how fast it is.
Gemma ran at 50/tops Qwen 27B? was way slower , 5/tops 8B models run perfectly fine, but are mostly useless for chat and agents. 8B is only good for specialists. Like one 8B model that can only write and correct python3 code. And then only in English.
A good thing in my book. Intel models are getting cheaper now. (Me eyeing a Mac mini, or a couple even.)
I’d imagine Intel Mac minis are approaching the price of a Raspberry Pi.
Well, or cheaper in some regions. Considering the RPi is sold with an extra fee in many places, while Mac mini is just an old outdated piece of hardware that cannot run its native OS any more. Unless you don’t care and use the outdated version. Most people with Macs have no idea Linux exists, and perhaps they aren’t aware Windows can be installed on those.
glad i’m still on macOS 15
Right there with ya.
Me too, I’m sad Apple stopped supporting Intel because I hoped for a 27 “fix all the stupid shit of Tahoe” release :(
At least they moved onto year-based versioning. That was probably the best part about the 26/Tahoe release.
200% agreed, i’m considering installing https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mac on my final generation intel macbook pro - it’s got max specs for that generation that I don’t wanna waste
what about their new Neo MacBooks? no mention there.
Those run on ARM CPUs
no - i get that, but the article says new OS will require M-Series. isn’t that something different?
seems silly that a brand new (wildly successful) piece of hardware might not be getting an update, after less than 6 months on the market…
It will get the update.
By phasing out Intel what they really mean is phasing out support for the x86 CPU architecture in favor of ARM.
The MacBook Neo runs on A-Series instead of M-Series CPUs, but both are ARM and all ARM Macs will be supported in the upcoming release.
Apple said it will supported “M1 and later” which means every Mac after they launched the M1 model, which will include the Neo.
thanks for breaking it down for me!
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