Anybody here use Asahi Linux?
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L [email protected] shared this topic
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I want it for the build quality. My Lenovo Thinkpad just broke… again.
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I've got an m1 Mac mini running Asahi and its great. Just make note, not all of the hardware features are 100% supported. I'm fine with what's missing on my m1, but before you pull the trigger on an m2 Mac check the Asahi page and know exactly what machine you plan to install on. Do not buy it if you want or have to have hardware features that Asahi doesn't support on the machine you're planning to buy.
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Plenty of great build quality brands out there aside from Apple. I'd even say theirs is pretty low.
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I'm running Asahi on a Mac mini. There's no battery. It's a desktop
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Not as good as on macos currently. Killing feature is "sleep" eats about 4~6% per hour
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Asahi doesn't wipe macos by default (you can do it but it is an extra step) ; the Asahi install splits your system in two, and you can choose how much space to allocate to each
As an everyday distro, it's pretty much stock fedora with possibly a few missing niche software - think Bitwig if you're into that, you will have Ardour / Pipewire etc but not (yet) Bitwig, which is proprietary and would need them to compile for aarm64.
So it depends on your use case. For "general computing" it absolutely works, for more specialised stuff you should check beforehand. I use it as a DAW mostly, with the occasional Kdenlive bout of editing now and then. Oh, and Steam ! We have gaming now it works great. The install process is so smooth, trying it out is a 30 minute affair, tops.
I'd ask the question of why a mac tho : I can't do without because of one macos soft I need IRL (QLab), and the very existence of Asahi allowed me to overcome my repulsion for apple products and buy the thing, heavily discounted. I'm 90% on the Asahi side, only rebooting on macos for live performances.
They are competitively priced for what they are, but I don't trust them to be particularly solid nowadays, I hate the keyboard and the coldness of the case. Also eal-life use make them feel like a snappy i7, not some crazy supercomputer.
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Well allow me to retort:
"Works" is not the same as "works well". As you mentioned, the bare minimum of it working has been achieved...kudos I guess.
The hardware is proprietary, and without someone devoting a LOT of time to reverse engineering the drivers to a point of, let's say, 90% functionality, there is literally no point except to say "I can run a Linux kernel on this thing".
The point of even having the hardware to begin with is the battery lifetime with the power draw from the SoC. As you noted, you don't get that benefit from Asahi. Not the full GPU power, or the audio hardware, or the networking, or the onboard security features, or the network offloading...I can go on.
Why would anyone buy a machine that is designed to run a specific OS, just to run a different OS on it and lose all the benefits of running that hardware in the first place? Bragging rights?
It's a stupid purchase if you just want a good Linux machine. Framework is a much better buy.
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I actually switched back to Asahi on my M1 Macbook Air this weekend, and while it works well enough for me to stick to it for now, I would definitely not buy Apple Silicon hardware for Linux next time. I'm running Fedora Asahi Remix on Gnome with Wayland for reference. Fingerprint sensor isn't working, microphone is "WIP" according to the feature table, etc. Battery life is significantly worse, especially standby, so if you use it for traveling a lot it's not that great. I might boot back into MacOS if I bring it with me on vacation honestly. It is also not nearly as "smooth". Scrolling stutters etc. Nothing that actually impacts the speed of what you do though. This is probably not an issue for most I would think, but for the Norwegian keyboard I had to manually edit the config to get access to the apostrophe: '. In general, it is a bit annoying that it has
a different keyboard layout than every other computer I use.There can be some compatibility issues, Discord isn't or at least wasn't running on Linux Arm, but there are 3rd party clients that do. Games are probably also not great, although I can't say I have tested after the Vulkan update. Last time I went back to MacOS so I could play Balatro on vacation. Other than that I don't really use that many apps on my laptop, and haven't missed any.
Then there is a Gnome specific quirk: touchpad scrolling is way too fast, and it isn't configurable in the settings. There are some "hacky" workarounds around, but they seem to be outdated and failed on me. For now I have just adjusted the scroll speed in my browser to like 20% of the default and it seems to work okay. You do kinda get used to it I guess. You can adjust scroll speed in KDE just fine, so if you prefer KDE that isn't an issue.
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I like it, but the microphone doesn't work. They were supposed to make it work last summer, but the work hasn't began for it yet. Without it, I can't do calls to my mom, so I don't use it anymore.
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I used it for a while with an m2 macbook perhaps half a year ago, but ended up getting a PC so I wouldn't have to deal with so much jank.
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