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Much-awaited Linux 5.19 is here, released from an M2 MacBook Air
Much-awaited Linux 5.19 is here, released from an M2 MacBook Air

Much-awaited Linux 5.19 is here, released from an M2 MacBook Air

Linus Torvalds releases Linux 5.19 through a project called Asahi Linux, which was dedicated to supporting Apple’s Arm-based Silicon Macbooks.

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Key takeaways

  • Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.19 from an ARM64 laptop, marking a significant development for Apple’s Silicon Macbooks.
  • The announcement was made through the Asahi Linux project, which focuses on supporting Apple hardware.
  • Torvalds expressed excitement about using an ARM64 laptop for development, a long-awaited reality for him.
  • Although he hasn't used the laptop for extensive work yet, he plans to travel with it soon.
  • Torvalds suggested renaming the version to 6.0 to avoid confusion with version numbers.
5 min

Finnish computer scientist Linus Torvalds came out with the latest version of Linux kernel from an ARM64 laptop on Monday. Good news to many, the announcement was made by Asahi on Twitter, where the developer says that he used Apple for the third time for Linux development.

“On a personal note, the most interesting part here is that I did the release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop. It's something I've been waiting for for a _loong_ time, and it's finally reality, thanks to the Asahi team. We've had arm64 hardware around running Linux for a long time, but none of it has really been usable as a development platform until now..”

Torvalds also says that he hasn’t used it for any real work, but to only perform test builds and boots. 

He shared about how he will take the Apple-powered Mac when he hits the road, ‘But I'm trying to make sure that the next time I travel, I can travel with this as a laptop and finally dogfooding the arm64 side too. Anyway, regardless of all that, this obviously means that the merge window (*) will open tomorrow. But please give this a good test run before you get all excited about a new development kernel’.

He also prefers to call it 6.0 since he’s ‘starting to worry about getting confused by big numbers again’.

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