Been daily driving Asahi (first ALARM then Fedora when they transitioned) and it’s been exciting to experience in real time how far the project has come. When I first installed, audio didn’t work, the graphics driver was incomplete, and battery life left a lot to be desired. Skip to today and it’s evident how committed marcan and other contributors are to not just porting, but making everything feel right. Highly suggest following him or Lina on Mastodon.
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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This is awesome. What hardware are you running (m1 or m2)? Also, is there anything that isn't working?
I've been eyeing to buy a m* silicon based mac, but I'm not into tinkering into fixing things.
Sorry a bit let to reply, but I’m running on M1 Air and Mini. Off the top of my head, built-in microphone doesn’t work and external displays don’t work through USB/Thunderbolt. Was also having trouble getting my audio interface to work even in class compliant mode. Otherwise it’s a very polished and easy experience.
How is battery life compared to Mac os?
Bad, but marcan has mentioned elsewhere that there's a lot of room for improvement in this space, both active and idle
This is great!! I use macOS for work but I'm sure I can get 90% of the work done on Linux now! Just wondering about GPU perfomance? Video editing is crazy fast on macOS, anyone tried on Asahi?
I know that they only recently got opengl support and it was pretty primitive so I would imagine they have some work to do on the GPU side
They have full vulkan now too, but it's not quite mature enough to be enabled by default rn (afaik)
If they can get full vulkan, maybe Zink can take care of the rest
Unfortunately, the custom graphics driver only supports OpenGL 3.3 (from 2010) and OpenGL ES (embedded systems) 3.2 (via Zink, via Mesa)
Edit: Just realized i forgot to actually answer the question. I don’t believe they’ve yet added support for the video encoding/decoding engine, but once that arrives i believe it should be comparable to MacOS
Great news
I mean this is what a proper distro loooks like. Tailoring another distro for a true, specific purpose. Kudos to the team.
Yes, it’s not just a DE and default package set but actual system improvements other distros aren’t offering. Kudos to the Asahi team for making this possible!
I promise I'm not a troll, but I just don't understand the appeal. That's a crazy expensive piece of hardware to run a currently only mostly working distro.
Even when the hardware is 100% working, it's still ARM, so anything that's not open source won't run because it'll be x86_64.
Definitely a chicken and egg problem on availability of ARM software.
I'm asking in good faith - am I missing something?
I have an MBA, from a failed experiment with the Apple ecosystem. I love that it's passively cooled, and will probably use it as a couch laptop with Asahi until the ARM market heats up in 2025 to 2026.
Most are talking about the laptops. I have my eyes on a Mac mini to run asahi on. The biggest downsides with Mac hardware is reperability and upgrades. Some issues the Mac mini doesn't have Vs laptops is ofc is no battery replacement , screen and keyboard webcam, mouse to use. and there are hubs for installing more storage. Ram is ofc a big minus. Looking at m2 16 GB 512 mb. And extend storage with something like this https://www.macworld.com/article/1677460/mac-mini-upgrade-hub-storage-ethernet-sd-card-ports.html 40 Gbs thunderbolt would make it easy to extend storage at least.
As long as it doesn't break I would take this over any alternative minipc . I use my ThinkPad today but 99% of use is at home anyway so no need for portability. Need to wait some time to get the extra funds for it but something like that..
As long as it doesn't break I would take this over any alternative minipc
May I ask why though? One of the biggest advantages of using a MacBook is the performance-battery efficiency. If you're going to get a Mac mini and loading Linux, you lose that advantage.
Unless you're looking specifically for an ARM64 machine for whatever reason, I think an AMD mini PC, say something like the Minisforum EliteMini UM780 XTX would be technically a better option - you get dual NVMe, dual 2.5G network ports, USB 4.0, Oculink for even more b/w than Thunderbolt, and far more I/O options in general. Not to mention, excellent Linux support.
I will have to look into it , but all reviews/comparisons I have seen has been always that the Mac beats the others. I do not game , I want audio and some video editing besides code.
Power consumption is a point as well as I am planning on going off the powergrid eventually.
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