In a major technical breakthrough, the open-source community has successfully booted a graphical Linux desktop on Apple's M3 silicon. This deep dive explores how developers reverse-engineered the proprietary chip in record time, the implications for the developer workstation market, and what this means for the future of ARM-based computing.

In a major technical breakthrough, the open-source community has successfully booted a graphical Linux desktop on Apple’s M3 silicon. This deep dive explores how developers reverse-engineered the proprietary chip in record time, the implications for the developer workstation market, and what this means for the future of ARM-based computing.

  • NGram@piefed.caEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    This reads like LLM slop.

    According to technical reports from Phoronix, the milestone was reached by Alyssa Rosenzweig, a key figure in the graphics driver development for the Asahi Linux project.

    The linked Phoronix article (published yesterday) credits Michael Reeves, noopwafel, and Shiz and does not mention Alyssa Rosenzweig at all.

    The speed at which the M3 was tamed—booting into a KDE Plasma desktop environment so soon after the hardware’s retail release—

    The M3 is two generations old at this point…

    Booting a kernel is one thing; rendering a fluid graphical user interface is entirely another. The M3 achievement is particularly notable because it involves the GPU, historically the most obfuscated component of any System on Chip (SoC).

    Again, the Phoronix article (and its linked Xwitter post) completely contradict this, saying instead the rendering is done with “LLVMpipe CPU-based software acceleration”. The GPU is only involved in so far as is necessary to send data to the display.

    This article is misinformation, which is against this community’s rules.