Nothing against the Asahi team, it sounds like they're doing fantastic work. But I'm a little surprised at the talk (which I've seen before) which indicates theirs is the first approach allowing you to use Linux on ARM Macs. A few months ago I used UTM Virtual Machines (which itself uses QEMU) to get ARM Linux up and running on my M1 Mini, and it worked brilliantly. Admittedly I only use the command line interface for working on Linux -- maybe the GUI is lacking? -- but I effortlessly got G++, Perl 5, and Raku working on it, and used that to get a full build of my $work up and running. It was actually easier than getting the same setup working on the MacOS side of things, with great performance.
I guess working on bare metal was implied. Virtualization have always been useful but it's another use case. Asahi enable user to bypass MacOS entirely which I guess is the only satisfying way to use apple silicone for Linus Torvalds.
Why would he be stuck? Many people are pragmatists over purists, wouldn't be far out if Linus was as well. I've written many tools myself that were better than anything I could find, but at a later point I found a "competitor" that did something better than me, and subsequently dumped my tool in favor of the better one. I for one don't care who writes the software, if it's better it's better.
