</li></ul></div><p>You’ve all been waiting for it, many of you have guessed, and now, as announced at <a href=https://flocktofedora.org/>Flock To Fedora</a>, it’s time to make it official:</p><p><strong>The new Asahi Linux flagship distribution will be Fedora Asahi Remix!</strong></p><p>We’re confident that this new flagship will get us much closer to our goal of a polished Linux experience on Apple Silicon, and we hope you will enjoy using it as much as we’re enjoying working on it.</p><p>We’re still working out the kinks and making things even better, so we are not quite ready to call this a release yet. We aim to officially release the Fedora Asahi Remix <strong>by the end of August 2023</strong>. Look forward to many new features, machine support, and more!</p><h2 id=in-the-beginning>In the Beginning</h2><p>From the start of the Asahi Linux project, our goal has been to bring full Linux support to Apple Silicon machines, across all distributions. Supporting new hardware like this, especially hardware this special in the relatively young embedded ARM64 desktop Linux space is no easy task, and involves a huge amount of reverse engineering, development, and integration work, spanning all the way from bootloaders to desktop audio servers!</p><p>Much of our initial work focused on the kernel and bootloaders, which can be shared between distros. But as we started reaching the point where kernel support was enough for a (bare-bones) usable system, we still had a lot of distro integration work left. Making hardware work out of the box requires a bunch of subtle integration engineering, as well as working together with userspace-level projects to improve them and add the features we need for these systems.</p><p>Our goal is for all distros to eventually integrate all this work, so that users can use their choice of distro and be confident that it will work well on their machine. But, in order to kick off this process, we had to prototype what this integration looks like, which meant we had to create our own distro.</p><p>And so, the Asahi Linux Arch Linux ARM remix was born. We took Arch Linux ARM, added our own <a href=https://github.com/AsahiLinux/PKGBUILDs>overlay package repository</a>, and packaged all of our integration work there. Notably, this is a fully downstream project: we have no significant involvement with upstream Arch Linux ARM or Arch Linux, and we directly use the Arch Linux ARM package repositories for the core distro. Our overlay just adds integration scripts, bootloader components, extra userspace support packages (for things like audio), and our forked kernel and Mesa packages.</p><p>This worked well to bring Asahi Linux out into the world and the hands of eager users, but it was but a step along the way to our ultimate goal. After all, maintaining bespoke downstream distro remixes is a chore, and we can’t rely on unofficial third-party support to bring our work to every other distro. We’ve always had our sights on deeper cooperation with upstream distros to bring Apple Silicon support directly to them as an officially supported platform, and the Arch ARM integration was mainly intended to serve as a reference for this.</p><p>It didn’t take long for some people to come knocking on our door…</p><h2 id=fedora-reaches-out>Fedora Reaches Out</h2><p>Very soon after Asahi Linux started (well before our Arch ARM-based release), <a href=https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ngompa>Neal Gompa</a> joined our IRC channels and we started talking about working towards integrating our work into Fedora. This was the very first offer to officially collaborate with a major upstream distro, and we were very excited! The Fedora Asahi project started in late 2021, and work began in 2022 alongside the Arch ARM release.</p><p>Over the following year, we worked closely with the Fedora folks to fully integrate Apple Silicon support into Fedora, including all our custom packages, kernel and mesa forks, and special image packaging requirements, and now we’re finally on the final stretch before release.</p><h2 id=upstream-first>Upstream-First</h2><p>The Fedora Asahi effort is upstream-first, just like all of our kernel and Mesa work. Our bespoke tools, like the <a href=https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/m1n1/m1n1/>m1n1</a> low-level bootloader and our <a href=https://packages.fedoraproject.org/pkgs/asahi-scripts/asahi-scripts/>asahi-scripts</a> tools, are already in upstream Fedora repositories and available directly to all Fedora users (though they won’t do much if you install them on a non-Apple machine!). Meanwhile, our hardware enablement package forks are kept in <a href=https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/groups/g/asahi/coprs/>COPRs</a> maintained by the <a href=https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/Asahi>Fedora Asahi SIG</a>, built and served from Fedora infra.</p><p>Collaborating with distro integration experts and using distro infra like this frees us up to continue focusing on what we do best: reverse engineer hardware and develop bespoke drivers and software. But not only that, it also means we can offer an even better experience for Linux on Apple Silicon users!</p><p>Working directly with upstream means not only can we integrate more closely with the core distribution, but we can also get issues in other packages fixed quickly and smoothly. This is particularly important for platforms like desktop ARM64, where we still run into random app and package bugs quite often. ARM64 desktop Linux has been a niche platform (until now!), and with much less testing comes a higher propensity for bugs, so it’s very important that we can address these issues quickly. Fedora already has a very solid, fully supported ARM64 port with a large userbase in the server/headless segment, so it is an excellent base to build upon and help improve the state of desktop Linux on ARM64 for everyone.</p><p>We’re very happy to have this level of collaboration with Fedora, and the Fedora folks have been an absolutely amazing team throughout this whole effort. We want to thank Davide Cavalca, Eric Curtin, Leif Liddy, Neal Gompa, and Michel Lind for kicking off the Asahi SIG and making this all possible.</p><h2 id=racing-to-the-finish-line>Racing to the Finish Line</h2><p>We still have a lot of work to do, including integrating even more packages for new hardware support and more. Adventurous users can <a href=https://fedora-asahi-remix.org/>try out the Fedora Asahi Remix today</a>, but please expect rough spots (or even complete breakage). We’re still very much in the process of integrating everything and a bunch of new features are coming, and things are expected to break while we get everything in shape. Please keep that in mind if you choose to try it ahead of time. We ask that reporters and bloggers wait for the official release before evaluating our work.</p><p>We hope you enjoy our efforts when the time for our first official Fedora Asahi Remix release comes. You may be wondering what new features are coming, but we’ll have to keep that a secret until release time (stuff isn’t even integrated yet, you’re not going to get a sneak peek even if you install early). Until then, please hang tight and look forward to the release!</p><div class=post-bottom>marcan · <span class=publishdate>2023-08-02</span></div></div></div></section><script>document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",function(){document.referrer.match("//news.ycombinator.com")&&(document.body.ariaHidden=!0,document.body.classList.add("hnsucks"),document.body.innerHTML="<style>body { padding: 20px;}body p { margin-bottom: 20px;}.hnsucks a { text-decoration: underline;}</style><p>Hi! It looks like you might have come from Hacker News.</p><p>We're going to be blunt: Hacker News is increasingly a haven for alt-right trolls and hateful abusers, and the administrators have demonstrated that they have no interest in improving the situation despite repeated pleas by multiple people, in public and in private, even going as far as deploying countermeasures to prevent us from blocking HN traffic*. A significant number of Hacker News commenters have repeatedly directed harassment, abuse, doxxing, and bigotry at multiple Asahi Linux developers, and much of this content remains available and not flagged or downvoted.</p><p>This may surprise you as a HN user, since overly hateful content is indeed often flagged and not immediately visible in HN top-level comment sections. While this is true, there is a major flaw in the HN moderation mechanism that enables abuse to continue unabated. This is the fact that, when a comment is flagged and killed, its child subthread is not. Once the high-level comment is no longer visible in the top-level comment section by default, this significantly reduces moderation activity in the subthread, as users are less likely to click to expand it. The deeper you go, the less likely it is for content to be moderated. Entire subthreads with dozens of comments are spawned, both abusive content and anti-abusive content that serves to feed the trolls, and it is rare for any of the child comments to be ultimately killed and hidden. The original comment being flagged/hidden becomes completely irrelevant, as the context provided by the replies sends the same message (sometimes, an outright quote exists with the exact flagged content). This completely defeats the moderation system, merely slightly reducing the exposure of the abuse but allowing it to continue with impunity.</p><p>At the time of this writing, a recent HN subthread of a killed comment contained replies including comparisons between an Asahi Linux developer and Hans Reiser, direct support for Kiwi Farms, doxxing content, and general insults and abusive assertions. These comments were at most slightly downvoted by the community, but still readable and not in any way killed or hidden by default. These threads pop up more often than not on Asahi Linux discussions on Hacker News; previous comments that again remain unkilled to this day include transphobic abuse, allegations of mental illness, etc. We have brought up some of this content to Hacker News administrators directly, and they have chosen to ignore it (abusive content we reported almost a year ago remains up and unflagged/unkilled to this day).</p><p>We believe that this pattern is the result of explicit, organized abuse perpetrated by a group of users overlapping with communities like Kiwi Farms (this is evidenced by the talking points used and certain style patterns we will not explicitly describe here that are a hallmark of that website's users). These people seek to harass others until their <a href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_(programmer)'>life is destroyed</a>. It is not low-level trolling, but rather an organized and directed effort to hurt and destroy people. Multiple lives have been <a href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms#Suicides_of_harassment_targets'>lost</a> to this kind of abuse already.</p><p>Hacker News being susceptible to this kind of content is particularly dangerous. By being a highly-ranked website, and thanks to the abuse subthreads being crawlable and easily reached by search engines, this provides an avenue to seed hateful content that ranks highly in Google searches for our project and its developers, even when not directly visible from top-level HN comment sections. Google's algorithm has even used this content to seed abusive 'answers' about our project and its developers at some points. Most of the time, this kind of content is limited to sites (like 4chan) that rank poorly and are not trusted by such services, but HN is different and provides a backdoor for trolls and abusers to make their content highly visible.</p><p>In addition, Hacker News administrators regularly engage in moderation practices that exacerbate the problem, such as detaching bad comment threads from their parent and burying them at the bottom of the comments page. This practice seeks to preserve the 'clean' image of the community by ensuring that the vast majority of visitors never stumble upon the toxic threads and they are not easily findable for a casual observer, but in fact further undermines ongoing community moderation and leaves the threads fully indexable by search engines open to further replies and toxic discussion, all hidden from most public view as a safe haven for abuse. This is at best shortsighted and represents a clear lack of understanding of the responsibilities of a competent moderation team and framework for a website as notable and highly ranked as Hacker News.</p><p>By letting this abuse run undeterred, Y Combinator and Daniel Gackle are tacitly approving of this conduct and hurting the reputation of the entire site and its userbase. If you want to support us and what we do and you are a Hacker News user, please bring this up and demand change within the community.<br><br>As things stand today, we consider Hacker News traffic to be a net negative for the project, and we kindly ask you to move on to the next story.</p><br><br><p>To Daniel: I <a href='https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbz4b/what-i-learned-from-near-an-emulation-legend-and-real-person'>lost a friend</a> to this kind of harassment. I had to go to the police station to testify about the online abuse they suffered, after police confirmed they found them hung in their apartment that morning. This happened after the Asahi Linux project started. One of the things they told me on our last conversation a few weeks prior was that they wanted to try to contribute to Asahi Linux. They never got the chance. If you have the slightest bit of humanity, please take this stuff seriously. It's not a joke. People actually die. -marcan<p>* Historical note: At the time this message was first written, Hacker News had begun tagging links <i>specifically to asahilinux.org</i> with <code>rel=noreferrer</code>. They later extended this policy to all outgoing article links, in an attempt to mask their obvious targeting of us. This forced us to resort to less-accurate CSS-based methods to display this message. Daniel himself <a href='https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36231387' rel='nofollow'>admitted to being behind this change</a>. They have since reverted this policy, and we are once again checking the referrer.</p>")})</script>
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