Shop E Store Yesterday morning, Hector Martin resigned from his position as Asahi Reinx’s project lead. This was a community effort launched in early 2021 shortly after MAC began its transition to Apple Silicon. After much effort, the team finally released alpha builds of Asahi Linux for M1 and M2 MAC in early 2022. Going smoothly.
However, due to burnout and a difficult battle with the Linux community, including Linus Torvalds himself, Hector Martin decided to resign. The project should ideally continue without him.
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Porting Linux to Apple silicon has not been an easy feat for many reasons. But thanks to the massive amount of support from the community, Martin has made it possible. The project has thrived for quite some time:
The first few years were amazing. Because we brought the platform from nothing to one of the smoothest Linux experiences we can get on a laptop. Certainly there weren’t any bits and pieces of hardware support yet, but the overall experience was comparable or exceeded what you get with most x86 laptops. We also built everything from scratch with zero vendor support and documentation. It was an impossible feat, something that has never been done before, and we pulled it off.
Unfortunately, the fun didn’t last long. There were many users in the community entitled Users who, despite their incredible feat, would not stop complaining. Asahi Linux was by no means perfect, but it was pretty notable.
In addition to user complaints, the project was also a difficult battle. According to Martin, many major developers in the Linux community have tried to hurt the project.
We consider the handling of Linus’ Rust integration into Linux to be a major leadership failure. With such a large project, significant support from key stakeholders must survive, but his approach was simply to wait and see. Meanwhile, his downstream subsystem maintainers did their best to disrupt the project, issue unacceptable verbal abuse, and generally discourage morale.
Linus Torvalds, creator and lead of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, initially supported the project (he wrote the Linux 5.19 release notes on the M2 MacBook Air Runing Asahi Linux), but he practiced it Martin, who did not provide any involvement, believed that such feats were necessary to advance, especially given the context of other Linux maintainers was not so good.
Unfortunately, Martin decided to call it quits after all these hurdles. I highly recommend reading his blog post for a more detailed and technical breakdown.
What’s next?
According to Hector Martin, the effort will move forward and he will take over the torch to the rest of the Asahi Rynx team. In 2025, the team aims to achieve the kernel upstream. This means that all the drivers needed for the M1 and M2 MAC will be part of the Linux kernel.
As of now, Asahi Linux is a downstream effort, so patching is a separate effort from typical Linux development. The upstream is a great feat, but it will have a great deal of significance.
In addition, the team hopes to improve their testing efforts and develop new features for M1 and M2 devices, such as Displayport Alt mode, DirectX 12 support, and internal microphones. Internal microphone support should be shipped immediately after a few days.
Unfortunately, new hardware is not a priority, so M3 and M4 Mac users will have to wait quite a while. Although efforts have been made in that regard, all of the changes mentioned above are far higher priorities. This project requires a strong foundation for long-term survival.
There’s always a question when a project lead leaves, but although it’s not modern hardware, I hope things stay alive. I hope that the Asahi Linux team is all the best and that we can report on exciting developments in the future.
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