I've installed Asahi Fedora remix on my 2021 M1 last week. Most things works fine now: speakers, HDMi (no video output with usbc yet), wifi, bluetooth, etc. It comes with KDE, it's great but requires a lot of tweaks compare to Gnome imo. Overall it's really stable, install was easy, and switching from MacOs to Linux is a little long but works fine. For me, the only issue so far is that it cant fully use the power of the GPU. I got a 32 core GPU so video editing is crazy fast on macOS. I know they are working on updating the driver. If I could get like 80% of the power I get on macOs, I probably would be using Linux 95% of the time.
this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Keep in mind that asahi cut out X11 support and went straight for wayland. It can support xwayland, just know that some things may or may not play nicely if the software doesn't support wayland. As Wayland is the future of compositors, most popular Linux software should support it eventually.
Linux on arm is good, however as it is not nearly as popular in the desktop space as x86, common binaries for certain applications may not exist on arm if it closed source. You may or may not need those, you can make that judgement call.
Battery life is better than I expected but still not nearly as good as Macos. At least until they can come up with a proper solution for low power usage. Which currently a logistical problem of making something Linux kernel upstream compatible instead of applying a functional dirty solution now.
Linux on M1 is noticeably snappier than anything else I have ever used. It has a great future ahead of it. If your workloads don't rely on heavy gpu usage and all your software can be found or compiled there. It is a pleasant experience. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask. I think some of the other users talked about the common things well enough.
Also yes, dual booting is currently the only supported option. They still need macos for firmware upgrades.
fwiw I've been on Wayland for a few years now and the amount of times I've had to think "oh, I'm on Wayland" are in the single digits. not to pretend it you don't run into things you have to solve or alternatives you have to find, you definitely do, but I've been very happy especially over the last year or so.
I do not use asahi though so I can't comment on that specifically.
I am new to Wayland, but on asahi it is mandatory. So I am having to get used to it. Which is more noticeable as I had to change from i3 to sway. They are functionally identical but different in how you configure it with the wayland compositor.
yes, I'm using sway as well. i was lucky that my old i3 config mostly worked without modification, although it took a while to find good replacements for many of the little apps I'd come to rely on. I settled on bemenu, waybar, and then a dozen little glue apps like clipboard managers eventually fell into place. the archlinux wiki pages on sway and wayland are a great resource.
I don't currently use it as a daily driver, but I tried. The basic, core experience is fine. Depending on what you need, it could be great. In the end I went back to using macOS (though I did ask myself what was working so well for me with GNOME that I wanted to try the experiment to begin with, and that has resulted in a leaner, simpler macOS setup).
The stoppers for me were webcam support (it kind of worked, but with bad image quality issues), and a number of Flatpaks quietly failing at launch. Non-stoppers but papercuts included that you can find ARM packages for some things but they're direct downloads instead of dnf sources you can set up (e.g. 1Password, Sublime Text), and there are a few weird glitches with some fonts that work fine on x86 setups.
It's trivial to set up dual-boot, and pretty easy to back out if it doesn't work for you, provided you read a few paragraphs of documentation. I've done it twice on two different machines.
hmm, yeah dual boot sounds like a good idea, thanks for sharing your experience!
The Linux Experiment covered Asahi (I believe it was Debian) and he said he'll review the Fedora's version too. It was a month or two ago and there were some things still in the works. But as a Fedora user and it being Asahi's flagship which has been fine tuned according to them, I'd bet Nick will post a video soon. If you're an early adopter, I'd say give Fedora a go now, otherwise just wait for Nick to cover it in his usual detail on his channel. Nick's the man and will cover it very well. This will probably be the best conformation unless an early adopteradopter or Dev can chime in here.
True, yeah I think I saw that mentioned somewhere, thanks for the heads up!
I believe it was Debian
Arch.
If you find that macOS and the software for it lead to good productivity, I'd advise against ditching it solely for having to allow unsigned applications to run. It's a few clicks once per app.
I didn't use Asahi myself. I'd imagine it works for quite a few people, but I personally wouldn't use it as a daily driver, because the community support is much smaller compared to popular distributions. I'd get a non-Apple computer for using Linux. You could just try it out though, obviously.
I was gonna say the same. It’s going for the nuclear option for a relatively small problem (unsigned apps warning). Why run something that emulates an OS when you already have the legit one that’s proven to work well with your productivity. Also, the best OS that runs on mac hardware is macOS. It’s definitely worth trying on a non-apple computer for sure.
that's fair, i'll definitely have to see what the changes to my workflow are
The guided installer will resize your disk volume and set it up for dual boot by default. It's Fedora based and uses KDE Plasma which is a great user experience IMO. Admittedly, I only booted into it to briefly kick the tires but the install was a pretty smooth process. This page details what features are still missing so I'd suggest looking there first to ensure you're not missing anything critical. For me, missing USB-C monitor support is a deal breaker.
hmm.. HMM, could i ask do you prefer USB-C because of power delivery?
Anyone with experance with a latter M2 air? last time I tried it just wouldn't
According to their feature support page for M2, it appears it works now.
https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/M2-Series-Feature-Support
using it on an M2 Mini now, they recently updated for support on M2 devices, the Air looked to have more marked as compatible than the Mini.
Late to the party, but we're talking long-term feedback, right? My point of comparison is a 2017 8th gen i5 dell 7385 with 8gb of ram, running Arch/Gnome.
I'm just out of a huge project involving Ardour, Audacity, kdenlive, Jack, Wireplumber and many gigs of media files on my 2023, brand new, M2 Pro, 16gb Ram 14inch mbp.
I installed Asahi Fedora Remix straight out of the box after updating the mac side (mandatory!). Install is indeed super-smooth. I choose to conform to defaults, and installed the KDE desktop variant ; as expected, I didn't enjoy it and installed Gnome almost immediately. I'm a long time Gnome ~~user~~ fanatic tbh.
It Just Works, plain and simple.
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I was expecting to be blown away by the performance, but it just feels "normal', launching Firefox or whatnot isn't that different from Linux on an old i5. It is snappy, but it's not like Linux doesn't work very well on average hardware.
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Rendering video was admittedly faster, but I only worked on 1080p 45s to 4min stuff, so not a scientific measure here.
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Battery life is good while running the Ardour multitrack DAW for instance. I noticed on macos, gaming on steam, that I can drain it pretty fast if I just play obliviously in the middle of the day. So not a bad battery, really usable work hours out of it - within workloads limits.
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Sleep battery consumption is bad, about 50℅ a day. Better turn it off between things, and reboot.
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...Which is what I do to my other laptop, it being plagued by S3 sleep issues. But booting the i5 is fast, so it's OK. Boot times of the mbp isn't that fast tho, again I was expecting more from the hardware.
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Some software isn't available on the Fedora repos or flatpak/flathub for the 64bits Arm architecture, but there's much much that is available, including for me the latest wireplumber / jack stack which I do need IRL for work.
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You will have to learn Fedora's dnf package manager tool, but it's "the same" as anything .deb, or about.
So there are minor annoyances pertaining to my use case, but it is more than bearable. I'd never have bought such device without the Asahi project, it is a great daily driver to live (and puzzle coworkers) with.
Now, 3 fingers swipe up, and Spin The Cube, Dude!
I use it for moths now, it's great. What do you want to know?
when I use a windows laptop, I don't really take over my Mac habits (e.g. CMD-OPT-ESC, or using 4 finger pinch or 3 finger swipe up or down), however when using a MacBook even when remoting in to a windows computer I automatically use what I am used to on my MacBook.
do you find that you have some frustration with the user experience and interfacing with asahi linux on your MacBook? i.e. you use the gestures lets say that you would use and they don't work, or rather, you could make it work but it's too much trouble.
if it's a painless kind of switch over, then I think I would be willing to learn or relearn or customize the desktop environment to my liking even if it took a bit of time. however if it's bug-laden and 'appears' to be too much like macOS on the onset, it would probably be more trouble than it's worth at the moment to use as a daily driver (dual booting in this case would make it even more confusing to demarcate for me).
so yeah that's a lot to ask you for what your thoughts & experiences were...
Oh, I should have mentioned I never used macOS. The laptop went straight to Linux, so I can't comment on the habbits.
Now, Fedora Asahi is stable and perfectly fine as a daily driver as long as you don't need the the microphone and thunderbolt.
Installation is super easy. Just decide between KDE and GNOME.
Edit: you could also install Fedora in a virtual machine to try things out beforehand.
ah fair enough, thanks for the response!
I did dual boot and I can recommend trying it if u have the space. The way the boot menu on mac works, you won’t notice anything if you continue using macOS. Most of the hardware does work but there are some minor issues. By default I think it uses KDE which is fine but compared to windows or MacOS window manager it sometimes does funny stuff. At least on my system