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simonmalestoday at 10:55 AM9 repliesview on HN

Will this forever exist as a Fedora "remix". Or will we find the support in upstream so I can one day run Debian-based distro?

I think the last time I used an RPM-based distro was almost 2 decades ago.


Replies

mort96today at 11:09 AM

They are upstreaming their patches, so upstream Linux will eventually get the necessary drivers.

Though their kernel fork is (obviously) open source, so there's nothing stopping you from taking a Debian aarch64 roots, build your own Asahi kernel (or take the build from Fedora), and set up Debian on these machines with Debian yourself. Just requires some elbow grease.

Or, if you find Ubuntu acceptable, there's Ubuntu Asahi: https://ubuntuasahi.org/

EDIT: After some googling I found this wiki article: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1

jasoneckerttoday at 1:41 PM

This comment made me smile, as my preference is opposite - I prefer RPM-based distros and primarily use Fedora on everything (including Fedora Asahi Remix on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio), but occasionally use Ubuntu and Debian on some of my cloud instances.

As a result, I understand the desire to stick with a particular distribution that we're already familiar with - it's less work, and less having to remember subtle differences in structure. But when there is a time where I'm forced to use a new distro (e.g., when Asahi was first released exclusively as an Arch Linux ARM distro), I never regret the small learning experiences involved :-)

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weikjutoday at 11:09 AM

You can still run Arch, and Ubuntu Asahi also exists. (1)

They’re working hard on upstreaming everything exactly so it’s easier for any distribution to be ported.

1- https://ubuntuasahi.org/

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MYEUHDtoday at 11:15 AM

linux-asahi is available in Void Linux:

https://voidlinux.org/download/#arm%20platforms

It's a regular package of linux in the distro: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/tree/master/srcp...

matrsstoday at 2:00 PM

There is an effort by the Bananas Team to get standard Debian working on Apple silicon, and they have installation instructions for how to get it running now with an additional unofficial repository: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1#The_Bana...

I haven't actually tried to install it yet, though.

tuna74today at 4:02 PM

You will probably always need a "fork" because Asahi needs a custom installer and bootloader. It is also probably a good idea to recompile everything for the Apple ARM architecture.

leenixxtoday at 11:52 AM

The founder of asahi linux famously quit due to how hard it was to upstream patches. It’s not easy to deal with linus’ project.

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realusernametoday at 11:36 AM

Upstreaming something like this is a monumental task, even small changes can take ages. It will take a while.

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tensegristtoday at 11:45 AM

i've been using nixos on an m2 air for a year now, the kernel is enough