Hacker News Reader

Comment by linmob | Hacker News Reader

I used my M1 MacBook Air last weekend with Asahi and GNOME on train ride for roughly 4 hours (browsing the web, fiddling with a server over ssh, writing a blog post) and when shutting it down, it was still at 78%.

This used to be different when I first installed Asahi, but the GPU driver and other improvements have made battery life something I don't really worry about anymore.

View on HN

thank you for that report. This convinced me to install it now.

The only thing holding me back from running Asahi is lack of HDMI output (at least on M1 Airs). Has anyone heard about progress (or its likelihood) recently?

I tried it just now on M1 14'': nothing...

Actually it works quite nicely on a M1 14''. Even battery life is quite good. Compared to my Dell XPS 15 7590 it has twice the battery life, easily if not even more.

One thing which bothers me a lot as it makes the laptop hardly useable for me at night: display brightness cannot be adjusted, it is either off or 100%. Some user claim this can be accomplished by installing the asahi-edge kernel, which does not even boot for me.

And this also bothers me lot: why are things checked in/distributed which do not work at all in Asahi Arch?!?! If you install e.g. a dev kernel which does not boot because the NVME driver is broken and you do not have a fallback kernel you are doomed. You cannot mount the partition in macOS to fix this manually.

Also the whole things seems somewhat un-deterministic. This morning I booted and the the Login screen nothing works. No keyboard input, touchpad won't move the cursor. Powerbutton works and will power off the machine. Then, u-boot starts and it stopped with some inputs, like it seems those keys I entered at the login scree, which shouldn't be at all NEVER....a few reboots and then it works normal. Very strange...

Okay, one step further, and one step back: installing the asahi-edge kernel requires the mesa-asahi-egde package otherwise you won't see a thing. This isn't been done automatically. Now brightness works which is fine, but working e.g. with raylib which will create a GLX context fails now with mesa-edge...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com