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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Battery life would be the big thing, I think. There's not a single person I know who wouldn't like having Linux on their M1/M2 Macbooks--they're beautiful devices--but if you're not getting something approaching MacOS's battery life, then there's not that much separating it from another similarly-specced ultrabook.

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I've been running Asahi for a full year on my m2 air. The battery life is quite good. Yes, I think macOS has batter battery optimizations than linux, but compared to other laptops running linux it really is quite good.

It's good, but not amazing. With these laptops, you expect amazing.

Its better than any Dell or HP laptop that I've owned.

Talk with numbers. My cheap 6800H 14 inch laptop can do 12 hours.

They achieved 23 hours. https://social.treehouse.systems/@AsahiLinux/110548137464042...

Curious what they had it do.

The linked post says “sitting idle on the KDE desktop”

I'm perfectly content not having Linux on my M1 MacBook.

That said, I don't want that to stop someone else from having it!

I should probably have clarified, there's not a single person I know who uses Linux as their daily driver that wouldn't want the option of having it run on an M1 MacBook. I'll grant that the vast majority of Apple users probably don't care about running Linux on it.

Yeah, all I want for Christmas is just Linux on hardware with good battery life.

I don't own one so Im not speaking from a place of experience, but system76 machines meet that bill.

That makes sense, apologies for the misunderstanding. I feel like that goes without saying, though. I'm having a hard time imagining someone who is a happy fedora user saying they want to run something else on an M1 Mac

>There's not a single person I know who wouldn't like having Linux on their M1/M2 Macbooks

Well… OP probably doesn’t know you… /s

I doubt there would ever be parity but it could be good enough.

Have to hand it Apple OS team, they know how to squeeze a lot out of there hardware.

A while back I was trying to get an old G5 running and looking at the various OS options, many said just go with MacOS 10.4 - it was the most optimized OS for the system even today. When software and hardware work together, it can be pretty cool.

I mean, for a kind of museum piece, to get the true experience of using the computer I’d agree for sure just use original OS. But if one wanted to be able to use it for most functional purposes, it’s sad how the complete lack of backcompat in MacOS makes using an old MacOS tough — which is sad because new Linux often can work surprisingly fine on the same hardware. Like, current Debian on a 2008 Core 2 Duo is a fine computer that you can browse the Web and do basic office tasks on. It was shocking to me!

I want to run native containers without the orders of magnitude worse io performance than any other platform

As a Quad G5 owner, might I recommend OS X "Sorbet" It's an unofficial merging of OS X 10.5 with PowerPC builds of 10.6 components. Even on ancient G3's it out-performs both 10.4 and 10.5 in benchmarks

Wait... how'd you get it working on G3 machines? As far as I know, 10.4 was the last release for G3s.

Apple is pretty famous for dropping machines before they absolutely have to.

Yup get ready for the Mac Pro that was on sale at full price until a few weeks ago at $7000 to be removed from the compatibility list for whatever comes after Sonoma.

Lucky someone will make an installer that works for quite awhile until they change their processor again :)

Retro computing enthusiast "Action Retro" has demoed Sorbet Leopard on his G3 laptops [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7Ponlb4QPY

His Pismo has a G4 upgrade card in it. So nope.

Yes but to be fair there haven't been a lot of ppc64 machines apart from Apple's G5 desktops.

And the same is true for Apple Silicon.

If you are basically the only one to use some piece of hardware (and you are the one who designed it) your software will be the most optimized out there almost by definition.

This is to say that the focus is on the decision to customize heavily your hardware. Once you decide that it's a pretty low bar to say that your software is the best there is for running on that hardware.

From anecdotes I've heard, battery life on Asahi Linux is already great

Annecdotaly, it'll last you through an entire work day, but probably not into double digits.

My m1 pro has never has into double digits. 6 to 8 hours is all I get. So if be happy if it stays that with Linux.

I'd love to see some benchmarks! I have an M1 device and don't really love macOS, but the battery life is just sooo good.

I'd be super happy if I could just run Arch on this thing instead.

The fact that my M2 has an effectively double size battery from my Fedora based Thinkpad (M2 has a 100Wh battery, while the Thinkpad has a 57Wh) means it just needs to be not terribly less efficient than x86 Fedora laptop for me to be happy, which from the sounds of it is already the case.

I imagine a repurposed MacMini M1 will also be like raspberry pi on steroids.

Being like 20x more expensive helps ;)

It's only 3x the price currently, as raspberry pis are very expensive (and need accessories to work, like good power supply, the good SD card and something to ventilate it, plus a case).

Even if Linux kills 50% of battery life compared to macOS you’re still looking at a system that’s in the top tier of longevity compared to x86 Ultrabooks.

I don't care about battery life. By macbook is connected 99% of the time.

That said, I'm satisfied with Linux in VM. Especially with Rosetta. It's actually funny that I'd get degraded experience because of the lack of the Rosetta in native Linux.

My main gripe with macOS is awful window management and missing apis to enable improvement (eg managing desktop/screens/workspaces). And no proper sloppy focus/focus follows mouse.

Why would battery life be impacted?

The main reason for bad battery life is hardware acceleration for certain tasks. Once that's settled, the computer shouldn't start producing more heat out of the blue.

Hardware acceleration is not some binary state these days, there are a ton of specialized bits of hardware under the Apple M chip umbrella.

Additionally, Apple's always¹ been insanely great at power management even pre-Apple Silicon by virtue of (1) prioritizing it more highly than other vendors, and (2) implementing it in a way that takes advantage of the complete hardware and software stack.

¹ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-does-windows-have-terrible...

>The main reason for bad battery life is hardware acceleration for certain tasks.

I guess this was a typo. MacOS/Apple Silicon (and other CPU architectures) save a lot of power via hardware acceleration. For instance, there are dedicated hardware video decoding blocks that use much less power than implementing video decoding with software.

The MacOS kernel takes advantage of all of these hardware specifics. MacOS also uses a number of other techniques like process wakeup coalescing, dedicated hardware for memory compression, process specific efficiency/performance core choices, ...

Apple is getting a lot of power improvements via codesign of the processor and the OS.

To do the same set of tasks with a similar power profile, Asahi will have to include system hooks that take advantage of all the dedicated lower power hardware functions and do a similar set of optimizations. They have done great work so far and will likely continue, but it isn't the simple tradeoff you are suggesting.

> codesign of the processor

Was very confused for a moment.

Because the linux drivers might not support all the power saving states for all the hardware in the device.

For example: I bought a Dell XPS 9 months ago. With the earlier Fedora 37 kernels, it didn't put the Nvidia card into power saving mode, causing battery life to be less than an hour. Now it seems to work correctly and battery life is 3-4 hours for me.

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