Asahi linux effectively only supports the M1 and M2 chips, so even a modern macbook air won't work, and even on "supported devices" you can't use thunderbolt or a usb-c display yet.

These use the A series chip, and even supporting new M chip revisions has been enough of an undertaking that I wouldn't really expect this to get Asahi linux anytime soon....

And apple can lock down the bootloader to be closer to the iPad/iPhone at any time with no notice, and based on their past actions, it would be quite in-line with their character to do so.

By “past actions”, do you mean doing extra work to make the bootloader support other operating systems? https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/introduction/

The Asahi folks have also demonstrated M3 support, though without GPU-accelerated graphics (the M3 GPU is very different from the M1 or M2). Much of the effort is currently on getting the existing components upstream.

Surprisingly enough you don’t need Linux to learn about computers. You know that Macs have terminal?

I'm confused. Isn't coreutils a just small subset of even macOS's current zsh's builtins? What do you prefer about systemd to launchd? defaults seems like a convenient way to manage settings. Is it confusing for people from other operating systems?

My first unix was ultrix. I'll take the default mac stuff over that any day of the week.

Wow so you mean you need to actually run brew to install core-utils!!! The inhumanity!!!

Name one thing lacking in the utilities included with MacOS (which come from BSD).

`grep -P` kinda annoying. GNU has Perl-compatible regex, and BSD does not. You're reaching for `perl` or installing `ggrep` the moment you need a lookbehind.

BSD grep is the pure grep version though. Perl regex is unnecessary bloat.

Is it unnecessary bloat to match for digits X in patterns $X, say among a bunch of receipts? Eye of the beholder and all, but I'm inclined to think no.

Is it still shipping with that ancient bash, the awful Iterm and without a package manager? I haven't used OSX for a while.

No. Zsh is now standard, though it still included an old optional version of bash. Apple hates GPLv3 that's why they moved away from bash.

The terminal app is not iterm. But Apple's own Terminal.app

And no there's no package manager but there's brew and macports.

I didn't know it was an homemade terminal, it's just that it looked old and abandoned compared to your average Linux distribution.

It is made by Apple yes. It's not very bad, it even has big font support from the VT100 series. And a lot of style settings in the menu bar. It's not iterm2 but it's way better than what windows offers (not just the console but the newer windows terminal isn't as good either IMO)

The overwhelming majority of UNIX-like software isn't designed for BSD runtimes, to name one.

I ask for a specific example, and you respond with more generalities.

The overwhelming majority of UNIX-like software is available in the package managers right now for major BSDs.

So exactly eves “Unix like software” will kids be missing that prevents them from learning about computers?

Throughout history the overwhelming majority of unix-like software was designed to work only on the particular flavor of unix used by its author.

And guess how many people care?

Asahi only supports M1 and M2 series Macs currently. The Neo uses an A18 Pro, which was only ever in an iPhone before. I wouldn’t count on Asahi coming to these soon.

Maybe some of these agentic AI superstars can point their 100x engineering chops at this. This would impress me but not going to hold my breath for that.

I see no reason they couldn’t.

But we know there’s lots of other models that they’re already working on. We don’t know how similar or different it is from an OS perspective.

The reason is the lack of documentation from Apple.

Reverse engineering needs a lot of time and hard work, which may not be worthwhile.

Sometimes someone does this work, and everyone may benefit from it, but you should never count on this happening, unless you do the work yourself.

Reverse engineered documentation is very often preferable to the internal kind, which is not necessarily accurate. So either way, the Asahi folks are doing valuable work.