https://github.com/touchHLE/touchHLE is also great but needs patches for all but the most basic of apps.
We would need QEMU support for iPhone 7, to run 32-bit apps in iOS 10.
- [1] https://github.com/boricj/qemu/tree/numworks_calculators
> Take a phone that has pretty good hardware support for postmarketOS
The first problem with this is finding a phone with postmarketOS that can both use the camera and take phone calls properly. I'd settle for that without the iOS/Android emulation...
I'm not sure what the status of the newer devices is but those older oneplus 6/poco f1 era phones tend to work well with mainline kernel:
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Mainlining#Supported_SoCs
The alternate approach is actually to utilize the fact that Android is relatively better supported and wrap Android components into a standard Linux userland, using a compatibility layer like libhybris with patched vendor kernels. It's pretty ugly but if you want Linux on phone now it's your best shot at a flagship experience.
Is the Librem 5 really that far behind still?
The exception: GrapheneOS. I installed without hassle over USB via my web browser (!).
As for flashing over USB, any device can do that thanks to WebUSB. All a website needs to know are the device identifiers for ADB mode, recovery mode, and fastboot mode.
I'd say building an image capable of booting on the phone is much harder than altering the GrapheneOS installer to actually flash that image. The process is extremely similar for most devices.
Even something as niche as the swipe on fingerprint sensor to pull notifications drawer down still works!
Everything from phone calls, camera, fingerprint, all the essentials work pretty much flawlessly.
> Apple Silicon devices emulated on QEMU, currently only iPhone 11.
demo video: https://nitter.poast.org/eshard/status/1908162866609311962
Practically speaking, they’d at minimum have to beef up the internal Yellow Box descendant they’d been previously using to make Safari and iTunes run on Windows (essentially porting large chunks of macOS to Windows) to be able to support Xcode, or following the direction of their more recent iCloud, Music, and TV apps write a WinUI-based version of Xcode for Windows paired with an all new iOS Emulator from scratch.
It’d be a huge investment with returns that are unclear at best.
The Safari version was considerably more complete and included the entire text rendering system as well as several era-appropriate Aqua UI widgets. It feels very much like a Mac app.
The iTunes version seems much more trimmed down, using Windows text rendering and win32 widgets in place of Cocoa/Aqua in most places. Accordingly, it feels more Windows-like.
It might be interesting to try to build a toy app against the Safari version just for kicks.
Their devices are well designed and generally last for a long time. They also retain their value in case you want to resell them.
Instead, I’m constantly weighing the lock-in from their walled garden - should I go all in or should remain in control over my devices.
And MacOS isn't worth my trust as a user. Big Sur feels like Mac by way of Windows 8 - it's stepping deeper into a service-integrated product that won't respect my time or money. If Apple published their driver code or at least documented their hardware as a gesture of good faith, I'd trust them a lot more. But Asahi is on the ropes right now (who'da thunk) and Apple isn't stepping in to heroically save anyone. Like the Halloween papers, with teeth this time.
It's all so tiring. I like my Magic Trackpad on GNOME, but I don't think modern Mac hardware is worth locking myself in with Dr. Tim Strangelove and learning to love his software.
- official mechanism to provision non-Apple operating systems
- global retail availability, both physical & online
- best price/perf/watt Arm desktop via Mac Mini base
- NPU and unified memory for LLMs
- upcoming LTE/wifi/BT radios without Qualcomm/Broadcom firmware
Or on a path to long term sustainability?
https://asahilinux.org/2025/03/progress-report-6-14/
When we stood up our OpenCollective, none of us really knew what to expect.. The sheer volume of support and the speed at which it flowed in left us floored and humbled beyond measure. The financial support provided via OpenCollective allows us to continue our work with confidence.. we have the resources we have always wanted to ensure the project’s viability long into the future..
After getting through all the administrative work required to keep the lights on after marcan’s departure, we’ve hit the ground running with upstream patch submission. We held our first board meeting.. we must start reducing the amount of patches we’re carrying downstream. Most of what we’re carrying is stable and has been for years..
We have submitted three new drivers upstream - the Image Signal Processor (ISP) driver, which is necessary for webcam support, and drivers for the Touchbar’s display controller and input digitiser.. both Touchbar drivers have already been accepted! Thanks to chaos_princess for taking on the responsibility of preparing and submitting all three.. Alyssa and Janne have been hard at work tidying up the GPU driver to prepare it for submission.
Rust for Linux abstractions are starting to be merged at a healthy pace.. every time an abstraction used by our driver is merged, we must drop our downstream version and rebase the driver atop the version accepted upstream. This is gruelling, menial, and unpleasant work, and Janne has our deepest gratitude for volunteering his time to get through it.
We have also been working to clean up and upstream.. fixes and changes for drivers already upstreamed such as the NVMe and I2C controllers.. changes to the upstream Texas Instruments TAS2764 and TAS2770 speaker amplifier drivers.. to support the Apple-specific variants found in Apple Silicon Macs.. we found that the ASoC maintainers had already been cherry-picking some commits from our development branches!I'm content with my dopey $150 Thinkpad and Linux. MacOS is untenable and headed down the dark monetization path that ruined Windows a long time ago. With my Macbook I have to constantly live in fear that Apple might break my package manager, disable third-party stores, remove virtualization or depreciate 32-bit programs.
Softbank's post-IPO business model for Arm is to move away from bespoke royalty-based licensing, standardize SoCs via a preferred partner like Mediatek, and demand a percentage of the sale price/value of final product.
Despite the lackadaisical Qualcomm Windows-on-Arm PC launch, Qualcomm has a huge pipeline in mobile and automotive, which should motivate support for Linux and virtualization with their gunyah hypervisor. Linux on Apple Silicon Macs can offer a point of reference for both macOS and non-Apple Arm PCs.
Post-apocalyptic Thinkpads are awesome resilience devices, engineering existence proofs, and inspiration for future US-manufactured computing devices.