Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2

> Thanks to the combined efforts of mildsunrise and chaos_princess, we discovered that ACE3 has pretty much the same register set as CD3217, only wrapped in a SPMI interface instead of addressed over I2C. Both the SPMI interface and ACE3 itself are now working in Asahi Linux, bringing USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt support to all M3 series devices. When I got my M3 Pro MBP, I got it with the intention of eventually installing Linux on it. In hindsight I seriously underestimated the amount of effort needed for even partial Linux compatibility, which makes me all the more grateful for the work Asahi contributors have put in! I'll still be keeping macOS installed for iOS dev work(which I plan on doing soonish), but other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life.

I have immense respect for the incredible work that the Asahi team does, but at the rate that Intel and AMD have been catching up on power efficiency I wonder whether anyone will really _have_ to run Linux on M series laptops. There was a clear case for it back when Apple silicon absolutely dominated anything else you could buy but with Panther Lake I'm not so sure that Apple's lead will continue to be big enough to justify needing to wait several years for full Linux hardware compatibility to be reverse engineered.

I hope they will support M4 soon, I cant stand macos and its desire to be different than everything else by custom keyboard shortcuts etc. After 2 years of usage, I still have issues with basic actions like copy paste. edit: omg, writing this post, i checked if there is some way to use linux shortcuts and there is (Kanesh/KMonad or Karabiner-Elements). Maybe my suffering will finally stop.

We seriously need an open hardware law or something. Like it doesn't have to be regulation necessarily (as by law) but we really need to start very strongly pressuring/forcing companies to open up their hardware and provide all documentation to get any operating system to run on it, and to hell with what the manufacturer wants (to prevent things like attestation requirements). This entire "just let random volunteers figure it out" isn't sustainable and locks out competition.

This project has been so impressive and exciting. I hope power management is a serious concern once they nail all the reverse engineering and functionality. Battery life would be a huge differentiator for the day to day macbook usage and traditionally Linux has been terrible at that due to lack of proprietary & highly tuned drivers