Enlarge / RIP, Neofetch. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Asahi Linux, the project that aims to bring desktop Linux to Apple hardware with Apple silicon—the M series of chips—is out with Fedora Asahi Remix 40. More hardware features of Apple devices are supported, the Fedora Linux 40-based distro ships with KDE's new Plasma 6 desktop, and untold numbers of bugs are squashed, to be replaced with reams more.

Fedora Asahi Remix is a "fully integrated distro," according to the Asahi team, and you can "expect a solid and high-quality experience without any unwanted surprises." It supports all the M1 and M2 devices in the MacBook, Mac Mini, Mac Studio, and iMac lines. It's OpenGL 4.6 and OpenGL ES 3.2 certified, and comes with "the best Linux laptop audio you've ever heard."

So, should you install it on your Mac? Keep scrolling down Asahi's release page and check the "Device support" section. Still missing from most M-series Apple devices are support for Thunderbolt and USB4, built-in microphones, and Touch ID, as well as USB-C display support. Speakers are not supported on the iMac. And HDMI audio is in rough shape, being able to "break audio on the system completely."

Still, for someone using an Apple laptop primarily as a portable device, or simply connecting to a monitor with less modern all-in-one cables, there is a desktop awaiting. Installing it is a single cURL command. Let's give it a shot.

Pretty easy install, given the target

The rest of this post was written inside Fedora Asahi Remix 40, newly installed on an M2 MacBook Air. The script to install Asahi was as helpful and straightforward as a terminal script that resizes your hard drive can be. After choosing a size, choosing which version of Fedora Asahi to install (KDE by default, but GNOME or server options are available), and reading an extended warning about how to properly restart the machine in Fedora, I was almost in, but not quite.

It's a lot of green text, but really it's just telling you to wait, then hold down a button. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

You have to first stop by the Mac's barren recovery environment, giving your new Linux partition permission to have an alternate security scheme. I was fine with this until the command prompt asked me to type out which user was approving this change, with no options to select. The macOS interface does a pretty thorough job of abstracting away your actual Unix username to the point where I had to guess a few times until I got it right. Make sure you've got your own written down before you jump in.

The welcome center in Fedora Asahi Remix is quite nice.

Finally, I arrived at the Fedora Asahi Remix desktop. I am very unfamiliar with KDE generally, but it's not hard to get around. In a few hours of use, I encountered no crashes, no visual oddities, and only a bit of harsh speaker clipping when adjusting the volume. I got the keyboard set up to a reasonable facsimile for my Mac-familiar hands (left command as control, change alt+tab to control+tab). The touchpad settings lacked for palm sensitivity options, so after a few accidental scrolls and selects, I switched off tap-to-click.

Fedora Asahi Remix 40. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

The chicken-egg-chicken scenario

The biggest barrier to getting your ideal setup in Asahi Linux remains the architecture. Most software outside Fedora's own repositories isn't available in 64-bit ARM (or "AArch64"), at least not without some deeper compilation and configuration work. That means no Slack or Steam for the time being. I know there are ways to get there, but with everything working so well in this Fedora-sanctioned desktop, I'm not ready to scatter the parts across the lawn just yet. As my colleague Andrew Cunningham noted in his Raspberry Pi 5 desktop experiment, using and engaging with Asahi Linux, Raspberry Pis, and other ARM variants of Linux can only help, though it will take time.

It's easy to forget what a remarkable thing Asahi Linux is on a broad level. That there's a common Linux distribution available for this very new and purpose-built hardware is impressive in any regard. With this, the second release of a Fedora Remix, Asahi is becoming an almost normal distribution to install, a reasonable place to compute. Where it leads from here should be exciting.

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Veruca Salt: Like Captain Ahab, you are defined by an all-absorbing monomaniacal obsession: to find comfortable shoes that aren’t hideous.

Pavement: You spent your twenties watching movies off the Criterion Collection to impress boys, and it actually worked, so now you’re stuck with plotless black-and-white subtitled movies forever.

Smashing Pumpkins: You’ve disowned family members because they weren’t supportive enough of your career (i.e., they stopped buying the rash-inducing makeup and/or piss-scented essential oils from your MLM company).

Nirvana: You could never be one of those stereotypical soccer moms. (Your kids play lacrosse.)

Nine Inch Nails: You’re learning to pretend that gardening is an adequate replacement for the sexual adventures of your youth.

Eve 6: You go to PTA meetings just so you can whisper “critical race theory” into the microphone and then slip out the back door amid the pandemonium.

Jane’s Addiction: You suddenly realize you’ve saved a little money. You can’t decide if you should use it to fix your roof, your vision, your garage door, your feet, your skin, your wet basement, your dry vagina, your broken sidewalk, or your broken mental health. Before you choose, the dentist informs you that your kids need braces.

The Cardigans: In your quest to find comfortable shoes that aren’t hideous, you’ve convinced yourself that, with the right attitude, flats can be sexy. Unfortunately, your attitude is “desperately trying to make flats sexy.”

Neutral Milk Hotel: You vowed you’d never get a minivan. You got an SUV with a third row.

Mazzy Star: You have not yet admitted to yourself that succulents and macrame wall hangings are your generation’s Live Laugh Love decor.

Rage Against the Machine: You use the term “journey” to describe your training for a charity 5K, changes to your skincare routine, your evolving relationship with gluten, the fact that you occasionally take a yoga class, and your secretly failing marriage.

The Cranberries: Because you procrastinated so long on covering your grays, and now people think you’ve chosen to age gracefully, you’ve become a minor feminist icon.

Bikini Kill: You talk about your produce choices way too much, and now your friends’ secret nickname for you is “manic organic dream girl.”

Everclear: After hearing about the resurgence of lower back tattoos, you started an organization to educate young women on the dangers of the Tramp Stamp.

4 Non Blondes: You knit, and you’ve already given everyone you know a scarf. Time to retreat into decades of obscurity until people start having grandkids so you can make them baby blankets and regain some semblance of a purpose in life.

Pearl Jam: You’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on your town’s Facebook page complaining about how your favorite restaurant raised its credit card fees.

Blur: Just try to talk to you about TV without you explaining that the British Office was better than the American Office.

Garbage: You tell yourself you’re microdosing shrooms for creativity and productivity benefits, but in reality it’s the only way you can deal with the other moms at the playground.

Cake: Your entire identity is built around being Karen who is not a Karen.

Ben Folds Five: You know that no amount of glitter, hot glue, and parchment paper will fill the gaping pit of loneliness that is your middle-aged existence, but you’ll be damned if you aren’t going to at least try to craft your way out of this crippling depression.

No Doubt: You’ve finally given up on the quest to find comfortable, non-hideous shoes, but you still pretend your Birkenstocks are part of the “ironically ugly shoes” fashion trend.

Hansen: You’ve lost multiple friends because you say “don’t yuck my yum” too often.

Porno for Pyros: In a misguided attempt to bond, you showed your daughter a YouTube video of yourself flashing Perry Farrell at the original Lollapalooza. (“Look, honey, we have the same boobs!”)

Sixpence None the Richer: You love the Royal Family more than your own.

Hole: You don’t understand what the Bad Art Friend did wrong.

Harvey Danger: You can’t get through a single conversation without mentioning your junior year abroad in Paris.

Stone Temple Pilots: You put a HATE HAS NO HOME HERE sign in your front yard, and it’s not a lie, because technically hate is not the same thing as smoldering resentment, all-consuming envy, quiet hostility, and vindictive plotting to use subterfuge, fraud, or witchcraft to destroy the life of that stuck-up bitch in the charming Cape Cod across the street.

Letters to Cleo: You’re living a life less ordinary. (You have one kid or three kids instead of two kids.)

Dave Matthews Band: Your regular family is about to leave you because you won’t shut the fuck up about your Cross Fit family.

Radiohead: Every minor challenge of your life has been a warmup for this ongoing crisis: going through perimenopause while your kid is going through puberty.

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What Your Favorite ’90s Rock Band Says About the Type of Bored Suburban Dad You Are Today

Invading aliens transform a bustling New York City into a silent wasteland in the latest trailer for A Quiet Place: Day One, a prequel to the first two films in the hugely successful horror franchise.

(Mild spoilers for A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place: Part II below.)

As reported previously, the original film began in medias res over a month after an alien invasion set in early 2020. Sightless extraterrestrial creatures wiped out most of the humans and animals on Earth. They hunt by sound thanks to their hypersensitive hearing and are difficult to kill because they sport tough armored skin. The film centered on the Abbott family, struggling to survive a few months after the initial invasion. Dad Lee (John Krasinski) was an engineer focused on keeping his family alive each day. Wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt) was a doctor, pregnant with their fourth child.

Krasinski originally intended A Quiet Place to be a one-off standalone film, but it was a critical and box office hit, ultimately grossing $340 million globally against its modest $17 million budget. So naturally, there was a sequel featuring the surviving family members as they processed their loss and encountered other survivors.

Written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, Day One is designed to be a standalone spinoff set in the same universe but following a different cast of characters, although Djimon Hounsou reprises his Part II role as the Man on the Island, whose name turns out to be Henri. There isn't a longer official synopsis, just a single logline: “Experience the day the world went quiet.” Lupita Nyong'o stars as Sam, while Joseph Quinn—who stole our hearts as Eddie Munson in Stranger Things S4—plays Eric, a clean-shaven young businessman. The cast also includes Alex Wolff and Denis O'Hare in as-yet-undisclosed roles.

The first trailer dropped in February and opened by briefly reminding us of what came before: the Abbott family on Day 471, before tragedy struck, followed by the survivors on Day 477, including a brief glimpse of Cillian Murphy's Emmett from Part II. Then the clock wound back to Day 1 as Sam walked down the streets of Manhattan holding her cat. Naturally, all hell broke loose as the creatures crashed to Earth and promptly began devouring any readily available humans.

This latest trailer builds on that earlier footage to give us a better idea of the premise: It's basically Escape from New York with invading ravenous aliens gobbling up any noisy human in sight. We see Sam buying a candy bar in a Manhattan bodega and claiming her cat is a service animal when the clerk objects to its presence. Then the aliens arrive, and she quickly teams up with Eric to find a way out of the city, which is on lockdown. That's not going to be easy since the US military blows up all the bridges leading out of Manhattan, having ostensibly chosen to sacrifice everyone on the island in hopes of containing the invading species. We know how well that strategy worked out.

I like the way this trailer shifts constantly between the usual urban noise and utter silence, driving home just how much the world is about to change. Survivors quickly realize the importance of staying silent and exploit that aspect, like when Eric tosses a brick through a deserted car's window to distract the creatures so he and Sam can make a break for it. And we get a couple of decent jump scares when a sudden loud noise brings the alien hordes. (RIP nameless old man who turns off a loud generator a few seconds too late.)

Verdict: The film looks worth seeing, but prequels are always tricky. At least Day One isn't trying to recapture elements that made the first film so uniquely compelling—e.g., starting in the middle of the story and letting the audience discover the secret of this silent world, as well as rarely actually showing the creatures. The big question is, will they save the poor cat?

A Quiet Place: Day One hits theaters on June 28, 2024.

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Conservative MP Lianne Rood says she has no time for Tims after the fast food chain began testing new fibre lids in certain locations.

China’s new aircraft carrier just completed her first round of sea trials:

China’s third aircraft carrier Fujian (18) left Shanghai on Wednesday morning to conduct its first sea trial, according to a report by People’s Liberation Army News. Meanwhile, the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLAN) first batch of female naval aviators carried out their first solo flight on Apr. 25.
Fujian left Jiangnan Shipyard at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, according to PLA News, with the sea trial being conducted to test and verify the reliability and stability of the carrier’s power, electrical and other systems. No details were given as to the location or duration of the sea trials, but the China Maritime Safety Administration issued a navigational hazard safety notice for an area 80 miles away from Shanghai starting from Wednesday and concluding on May 9. The PLA News report stated that since the carrier was launched in 2022, its construction has been on schedule and it had completed its mooring trials, equipment adjustment and met the technical requirements to sail for sea trials.

I answered some questions for RFA, but honestly it’s mostly guesswork at this point. Pretty nice ship, tho; just from an aesthetic point of view I love the island.

I think that Fujian will be the most formidable (in terms relative to contemporary US capabilities) adversarial surface warship to enter service since… maybe HIJMS Taiho in 1944? That’s a very rough and I’m open to being demonstrably wrong, but she looks like an impressive ship. It will take the Chinese a while to master CATOBAR (Catapult Assisted Take-Off Barrier Arrested Recover) operations but Fujian is large enough to generate a sufficient number of sorties to make a serious impression.

The post Say Hello to the Fujian appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.