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Comment by jzer0cool | Hacker News Reader

Could someone the typical benefits of replacing MacOS with Asahi Linux — what are use cases people are desiring here? Is it mostly for server performance?

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Well for one you no longer need to use macOS… which is a bonus in some folks mind.

Yeah, this really. I've no idea why someone wouldn't consider choice of OS to be a net positive for everyone.

Only thing stopping me getting one of these (through work) is the OS.

Why give your money to a manufacturer who explicitly wants you to run MacOS on their hardware, and not to its Linux-friendlier competitors?

Because I like the hardware but despise the software. I haven't found another laptop that comes close, although I don't have the money to try many.

Not only that, but in the F500 companies I've worked for it's not uncommon for employees to get the latest shiny new thing when their existing machine still has lots of life left. Repurposing it with Linux means I can use it.

Because the hardware is actually good?

Because there is no comparable hardware to be had for any amount of money anywhere.

It means you get the performance and battery life of the M1 without getting stuck with the OS Apple picked out. I doubt there's reason for most, but for me at least Linux is non-negotiable.

“Picked out” is an odd way to say “the platform that they make”

A bunch of the power saving is also from the OS shutting things down quickly and moving everything to low power states, linux has not always been the best at that. Which does make sense given that the primary usage is still things like data centers where the primary purpose is having everything go as fast as possible essentially all the time.

Linux is the world's most popular OS running on mobile devices with small batteries.

I'd say x86 platforms have not always been the best at that :-)

I think there’s a meaningful difference between being able to run on low power devices, and being able to control power usage of high performance ones, but I also take your point.

However we can also point to Darwin as it runs on lightning cables, presumably apples high performance usb-c/thunderbolt/marketing-name-of-the-day, etc on super teeny tiny arm processors :)

I see what you're saying, and really I do generally think Apple gets too much hate for their walled garden. It frees them to specialize for their niche, and if you don't like it you don't have to use their products! I sure don't. There's no doubt in my mind that Asahi won't be as power efficient as MacOS on an M1. But so, so much of that efficiency comes from the hardware. If Apple could make an x86 chip that power efficient just on software alone, they presumably would have. Plus, though I'm obviously no expert, I vaguely recall reading that offloading to the smaller cores is supported on Asahi, which is a good portion of the efficiency.

Does it really get the same great battery life of the M1 running MacOS? In the case of my dell XPS laptop, for example, it gets pretty good battery life if I use the windows 10 OS that it shipped with, but when I run Ubuntu, the battery life is horrible.

It will take you a lot of work, but you can get similar or better battery life in Linux. Even for the most twisted of laptops.

However, without good GPU support, proper battery life is impossible.

Even without GPU, we're getting better battery life than many x86 laptops already.

If it's anything like my laptop, that's because the Linux nvidia driver doesn't downclock as much as it can on Windows. I believe that isn't much of an issue on Asahi because until the drivers are up and running, it just keeps the GPU powered off (though now I can't find where I saw that, so take it with a grain of salt)

My dell produces noise like a hurricane if I open a second tab in Chrome.

You will not get the battery life on Linux until GPU drivers are finished at the very least, and a bunch of other stuff.

If it's non-negotiable for you, I would suggest alternative options. There are now laptops with similar CPU performance and better GPU performance, with comparable battery life (I get 12 hours idle or browsing websites that aren't too demanding). It doesn't make sense to go with an M1 Mac as a Linux machine unless you really need it to be ARM.

Which laptop do you use?

Any laptop with latest-generation AMD processors, efficient RAM, and an efficient SSD will work. I use an Alienware m15 r5 Ryzen edition wiht an RTX 3070 - I get around 13h of battery life on idle (low screen brightness, 60hz), and around 8-10h doing work - that means Firefox, CLion, Dolphin, and a few terminal windows open. - but compiling rather infrequently, perhaps spending 2% of my time compiling. This is with 1 NVMe SSD installed - my other NVMe SSD is quite inefficient and drops battery life. I also run KDE with a lot of blur and eye-candy enabled and a bunch of extra stuff that eats battery.

If you really push battery saving to the very maximum, you can get power consumption with a similar setup at around 7W, which means a battery life of around 12 hours with a daily workload. However, as it is now, I am using between 7 and 9 watts, which results in a battery life of around 10 hours.

To get this to work on Arch Linux however, it was a serious headache, took me around 9 hours of work.

This seems comparable to what my friends with an M1 Pro MBP, 14", report, which is 8-9h on essentially the same workload.

I get better power consumption on Windows, however, unless I fully and completely disable the dedicated GPU (I use hybrid graphics).

I don't mean to be rude, but what in the parent comment lead to you believe they were looking for suggestions?

Use cases with less spying and law enforcement tentacles.

A person who wants to use Linux can use Linux.

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