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Comment by laweijfmvo | Hacker News Reader

i hope some day a used M1/M2 macbook air will be the greatest linux laptop around

I would hope not. That would mean that no other vendor has shipped working ARM hardware support for Linux or has upstream support in the kernel. Forget the hostile nature Apple has proven to possess when consumers dare treat their hardware as if paying for it makes it their own.

Qualcomm has been beating the marketing drum on this instead of delivering. Ampere has delivered excellent hardware but does not seem interested in the desktop segment. The "greatest Linux laptop around" can not be some unmaintained relic from a hostile hardware company.

As somebody that has worked in a company that did Qualcomm devices in the past - Qualcomm just cares about money grabbing, and is not any less hostile to developers than Apple.

If you want to do a device, and your only chip option is Qualcomm I'd recommend not doing a device at all.

FLOSS stacks for Qualcomm-based devices are actually a lot more feature complete than some other brands like MediaTek or Exynos. Still nowhere near any kind of "daily driver" status but at least getting somewhere, whilst others have yet to even get started.

> I would hope not. That would mean that no other vendor has shipped working ARM hardware support for Linux or has upstream support in the kernel.

Can you see any other machine coming close to a Mac in terms of hardware quality and performance? Obviously the cost is silly, but while I agree with your sentiment, it seems optimistic to hope.

Networking is going to be another major issue. Even on the Intel MacBook Pro this is still a problem. The instructions for getting it to work are so bizarre that I ended up with a network dongle with a supported chipset instead.

Good news for you: Networking (ethernet/wifi/bluetooth) on M1/M2 have been working perfectly fine for a while and don't require any special tinkering.

Oh that is good news. I'm almost tempted to try that out.

I can recommend it! I've been daily driving M1 for a few months now, it's working really well. Parent poster is raving about a potential "greatest linux laptop", but depending on your use case it's already there.

IME the Asahi support page is spot-on: There are a couple of yet-unsupported features (DP-alt mode being a big one), but any feature listed as supported will just work without hidden gotchas. I find this a big contrast to other devices, which will often "work" but have annoying little quirks here and there that are workable but can feel like a downgrade compared to Windows.

How is battery life?

On macOS, I never worried about battery life when leaving the house even when doing compute-heavy work. On Asahi, that is equally much true. I couldn't tell you how many hours it lasts because I never have to carry a charger unless I'm out for more than a regular workday.

There's some room for improvement, but that is purely relative to macOS. Asahi still solidly beats other x86 devices (other than the low end ones you wouldn't do development work on).

One issue is that idle battery consumption is higher than on macOS (an active area of improvement though [1]), which you'll notice by an M1 laptop discharging by about 12% overnight when macos would've eaten maybe 2-3%. Not a big issue normally, but can be inconvenient if the device shuts down due to empty battery overnight.

During more passive uses at daytime (e.g. playing music), the display tends to be the biggest power hog. Not really Linux-specific, but I actively turn off the screen when not needed hence (KDE lets you configure the power button to do so).

[1] https://social.treehouse.systems/@chaos_princess/11498433865...

Ok. Will definitely look into this, thank you for all the time you put into the reply.

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