One of the key things that makes a Mac computer a Mac is clearly that it ships with Apple’s macOS software. But back when the company was still making Macs with Intel processors it was fairly easy to install a different operating system – Apple even offered its own Boot Camp solution for dual booting Windows and macOS.
That changed when Apple started selling computers with M-series processors that the company developed in-house. But the folks at the Asahi Linux team have been reverse engineering Apple’s chips and developing Linux-based software capable of running on Apple’s latest computers. And now they’ve just announced a major update.
Up until recently Asahi Linux wasn’t able to take advantage of the graphics cores in Apple’s chips. But the CPU cores were fast enough that you wouldn’t even notice the omission for some basic tasks.
Now the Asahi team has released the first public build of a graphics driver for Apple Silicon. While it doesn’t support the latest graphics technologies, it does have everything you need for hardware-accelerated graphics in the GNOME and KDE desktop environments. You can also use it to play older 3D games at over 60 frames per second on a 4K display. But there’s plenty of work that needs to be done before you’ll be able to play newer games using Linux on a Mac with an M-series processor.
Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.
Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux [Asahi Linux]
Asahi Linux team has made its first public release of an Apple Silicon GPU driver. It’s still a work in progress, but it brings OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support to Linux on Macs with M-series chips.
Amazon brings Fire TV interface to the Echo Show 15 [Amazon]
First promised in September, Amazon is now rolling out an OTA update that lets you use an Echo Show 15 smart display as an Amazon Fire TV device. You can stream video by voice or pair a Fire TV remote. Echo Show 15 also now supports spatial audio.
New Release: Tor Browser 12.0 [Tor]
Tor Browser 12 is now available. Based on Firefox Extender Support Release 102, the private, secure & anonymous browser also adds native Apple Silicon support, multi-locale support for the desktop browser, and HTTPS-Only by default for Android users.
$150 Celeron J6412 barebone [FanlessTech]
This fanless mini desktop has a 10-watt, quad-core Intel Celeron J6412 processor, room for mSATA and 2.5 inch storage devices, and a $151 price tag for a barebones model (without memory, storage, OS, or WiFi).
Winamp Player Now Allows You to Play Your Music NFTs [Winamp]
Winamp 5.9 brings memory usage and load time improvements, a 10x increase in maximum bandwidth and… support for playing music from an NFT library if that’s a thing you’re interested in.
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