More About Asahi Issue
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Lilbits: New Apple hardware, Asahi Linux shakeup, Android 16 Beta 2, and Amazon makes backing up Kindle eBooks tougher, - Liliputing
This week Apple launched an Apple TV+ app for Android, which means you can watch Severance on your Pixel phone without using a web browser. Next week the company plans to launch some new hardware – most likely a new iPhone SE, but a current-gen mid-range iPhone could be just one of several new products on the way.
In other recent tech news from around the web, Google has released a second beta of Android 16 ahead of a Q2, 2025 release (9to5Google has a nice roundup of new user-facing features), the team working on bringing Linux to Macs with Apple M series processors is undergoing some changes, OnePlus has announced something it’s not doing this year, and Amazon is making it tougher to download Kindle eBooks to your computer.
Asahi Linux head quits, citing kernel leadership failure
Hector Martin, project lead of Asahi Linux, resigned from that effort early Friday, Japan Standard Time, citing developer burnout, demanding users, and Linus Torvalds's handling of the integration of Rust code into the open source kernel.
In a lengthy post, Martin explained his decision, partly blaming a lack of support from the Linux chief. Torvalds' critique of Martin's "social brigading" during a disagreement about Rust drivers prompted Martin to quit his role as a maintainer of the upstream Linux kernel code for Apple's Arm Macs earlier this month.
(Asahi is a Linux distribution for Apple's Arm-compatible PCs, hence Martin's involvement, up until now, in both the kernel's code for those machines as well as that distro project.)
Asahi Linux Gets a Reboot, Still Working On M3 & M4 Mac Support
Asahi Linux, the project bringing a native Linux desktop to Apple Silicon-based Mac computers, has hit some roadblocks with development and hardware support. The project’s founder is also retiring.
Mac computers with M1 and newer chipsets use a custom ARM-based Apple Silicon architecture, instead of the same Intel x86 processors found in most PCs, so they can’t run a typical desktop Linux distribution. The Asahi Linux project has done a lot of work over the past few years to change that, with many drivers and low-level components written from scratch, and it even surpasses native macOS in gaming and other areas.