Anybody here use Asahi Linux?
Anybody here use Asahi Linux?
What do you like about it?
What do you not like about it?
Is it a completely bonkers proposition to buy a refurbished M2 Mac only to wipe it and put Asahi on it?
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36 comments
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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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Your recommendations?
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I'd be looking at a Framework Refurb. Affordable, upgradeable, and reconfigurable if you're really looking to get the most bang for your buck.
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Before I bought that mbp m2pro with 16g of ram (discounted because of M3 being all the rage at the time), I did my homework and compared: nothing framework / thinkpad comes close in price with that processing power, battery life and screen
I don't especially like them, I certainly despise the company, it's branding and ethos, but these are competitively priced actually
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Well the question is specifically about Asahi though. It's a Linux distro that runs on the hardware, but almost none of the actual features work to the user's benefit since only the basics of the SoC drivers have been reverse engineered.
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We're a bit further than that I'd say : https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support yes battery life not as good, sleep eats through battery a bit much and stuff, but as hardware (and everyday life) goes, it's running pretty well: if you get all outputs, WiFi, BT, keyboard backlighting, sleep and resume, excellent sound output (thanks adahi-audio and its crazy good DSP's), correct screen def with scaling, what exactly are you missing?
Even my cheapo rj45-to-usbc adapter works.
Some months ago I was missing a particular piece of CAD software, but that just popped up a few weeks ago (QCad).
As hardware goes, beside not being able to rely much on sleep, everything else works (for me).
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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, USB-C, external displays, Thunderbolt, 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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36 comments