Is anyone using Asahi Linux?

Linux@lemmy.ml – 128 points – 12 months ago

If so how is it? I'm heavily considering grabbing an M1 and trying it out if it's in a state where I can be productive.

For context, I use an M1 for work and it's awful only thanks to macOS. The hardware is excellent though. I can run an army of containers for hours, I can have OBS running in the background if I need to quickly record something, and I can have 2-3 JetBrains IDEs running without skipping a beat.

But I truly cannot comfortably use macOS in my personal space. I don't really want to go into my gripes with macOs; suffice to say it's not a route I'm willing to explore any further.

That said, I've tried to keep up with Asahi Linux but have not seen very much feedback from those who are using it.

If you are using it I'd love to hear some feedback on what you like or dislike about it. Does all your hardware work? Do all your standard linux applications work?

Edit: I dont really know how crossposting works in the Fediverse. Sorry if this thread shows up twice

It works alright but there are still issues. My biggest gripe with it is that sleeping doesn't really work. I will often close my laptop and then come back to a dead laptop the next day because the battery drained all night.

Is that all? I can live with that! A few months ago that I checked there were a lot more open issues.

I guess my biggest difficulty will be that the Macbook is my wife's new laptop and she'll kill me if I change the OS... again!

It's not worth dying over.

That happens to me with macOS too so 🤷

Ah yeah that's pretty inconvenient. Does suspend work with a button push/shortcut, or is it broken altogether?

I’ve been using it for the last week and really enjoy it - I’m on an m1 air and asahi is so much snappier than macOS, which is saying something because it still sings!

There’s a few key hardware features still missing - mic, speaker, and the thunderbolt port (so hdmi and external displays) that are preventing me from driving it fully because I do a lot of presentations at work, but it’s quick enough to boot into mac when I need to.

Occasionally there’s something that doesn’t want to run on arm architecture, but there’s usually an alternative - and it sounds like 4k paging is close.

Give it a shot! I’m invested cos I wanna hear more people’s take on it 😅

While I am eagerly looking towards the day Linux just works on the M1 / M2 myself and I can plop Arch Linux into a shiny new Macbook Pro, I would caution that if this is a work laptop you should not be wiping the OS without careful consideration and perhaps approval from your IT department. I don't know how chill your work environment is but a lot of companies have data security measures in place that prevent confidential info from leaking out if your laptop ever gets stolen. You should also consider whether it will impact your ability to work with other people when they're using software or other work pipelines that aren't compatible with Linux.

Sorry if I wasn't clear in the post, this is strictly a personal use notebook.

I have a Mac Mini M1 and Asahi Linux works very well on it. Pretty much everything I use already has an aarch64 version. The IDE I was using doesn't, so I switched to the JetBrains equivalent, which does work on ARM.

The one big letdown is that displayport doesn't work. Only HDMI does. But going by your other comments you're using a macbook rather than a mac mini, so that might not matter to you.

It's been a few months since I tried it on my Mac Mini M1, but HDMI audio didn't work last I tried. It was kind of a big deal since I use it as a TV PC.

I installed it on a M1 MacBook and everything seemed to work fine except I think it had trouble resuming from sleep and I had to force restart it every time. This was over a year ago so I'm not sure if this may still be an issue with Asahi, and I no longer have it to test further.

I purchased an M1 MBP with the intention of eventually installing Asahi on it, but honestly I'm satisfied with macOS when it comes to my work needs. I primarily use my laptop to write code and watch occasionally watch anime, and it does that great. Still have a lot of complaints about how locked-down macOS is, but it is what it is

That's what Apple is all about "Good hardware very bad software"

As an Apple fan I disagree. Before M1 Macs had bad hardware (bad intel chips, the butterfly keyboard controversy, the touch screen and build and trackpad and logo was good though), and they’ve always had good software, as long as you don’t mind the download size

As an Apple fan who’s used Macintosh’s since the Mac Plus, no. Apple’s software choices have gone downhill over the years and they’re now firmly entrenched in their “Our way or the highway” mentality. Remember when Apple’s marketing was “Think Different?”.

Even today, opening a Finder window (which infuriatingly still doesn’t have a shortcut) using the shortcut for search (Option-Command-Space) brought up the window BENEATH other apps ON A DIFFERENT MONITOR. I mean, what the actual F?

And I don’t want to get started on their impossible window management without Rectangle or the hideous text unless you’re using a HiDPI monitor the way Apple wants you too. Why would I pay for a 4K monitor to get 1080P resolution?

You’re right about the software downloads though. You did forget to mention the ages it takes to install. Somehow Apple makes Windows updates looking speedy in comparison.

Rant over.

I want the hardware, not the software. At least Apple isn’t locking that.

For computers I've never had multi monitors so I don't know about the Finder issue nor if it went below everything else, nor what you mean by the rectangle. Maybe that's because I got stuck on Catalina due to not being able to afford the download size.

Rectangle is a window snapping app, that should just be a feature in the OS at this point.

Ah, window snapping. I never complained about that but only because my MacBook had a small monitor (so only left and right with the fullscreen thing sufficed) and I can see why people would want it. I’d really like it if someone made it combined with the green fullscreen mode because of how easy it is to switch between workspaces

Butterfly keys were gone before the switch to M1, and those Intel chips could run all the software: still waiting for M1 compatibility on a lot of audio/visual production software.

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