Asahi Linux with Sway on the MacBook Air M2 (2024)
daniel.lawrence.lu
daniel.lawrence.lu
Two minor issues- it’s HEAVY compared to T models.
Because of the weight try not to walk around with the lid up and holding it from one of front corners. I’ve noticed one of them is kind of warped from walking around the office holding it that way.
Are you running windows?
That’s not at all reassuring.
Am growing tired of Ubuntu though. Just not sure where I should turn. I want a .deb based system. Ubuntu is pushing snaps too heavily for my liking.
The problem with Ubuntu, as other mentioned, is that you get ancient version of some packages. Fedora is nicely up to date.
I've also only used Debian based stuff my whole life and even moving from apt to dnf or whatever it was causes too much friction for me haha, though it's not that bad obviously, if I really would see the positives.
Modern desktop Linux relies on software that's being fixed and improving at a high velocity, and ironically, can be more stable than relying on a distro's fixed release cycles.
KDE Plasma, Wayland support, Pipewire, etc all have had recent fixes and improvements that you will not get to enjoy for another X months/years until Canonical pulls in those changes and freezes them for release.
Similarly, newer kernels are a must when using relatively recent hardware. Fixes and support for new hardware lands in new kernels, LTS releases might not have the best support for your newer hardware.
Stability for a distro means “doesn’t change” not “doesn’t crash”.
Debian/ubuntu are stable because they freeze versions so you can even create scripts to work around bugs and stuff and be sure that it will keep working throughout that entire release.
Arch Linux is not stable because you get updates every day or whatever. Maybe you had some script or patch to work around a bug and tomorrow it won’t work anymore.
This does not say _anything_ about crashing or bugs, except that if you find a bug/crash on a stable system then it is likely you can rely on this behaviour.
It's a tradeoff that I'm happy with. I get to have a very up to date system.
That's a wild statement!
* x86 chips can surpass the M series cpus in multithreaded performance, but are still lagging in singlethreaded performance and power efficiency
* Qualcomm kinda fumbled the Snapdragon X Elite launch with nonexistent Linux support and shoddy Windows stability, but here's to hoping that they "turn over a new leaf" with the X2.
Actually, some Snapdragon X Elite laptops do run Linux now, but performance is not great as there were some weird regressions and anyway newer chips have caught up [1].
On the build quality side, basically all the PCs are still lagging behind Apple, e.g. yesterday's rant post about the Framework laptop [2] touched on a lot of important points. Of course, there are the Thinkpads, which are still built decently but are quite expensive. Some of the Chinese laptops like the Honor MagicBooks could be attractive and some reddit threads confirm getting Linux working on them, but they are hard to get in the US. That said, at least many non-Apple laptops have decent trackpads and really nice screens nowadays.
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/review/snapdragon-x-elite-linux-eoy...
Installed arch, setup some commands to underclock the processor on login and easily boost it when I'm compiling.
Battery life is great but I'm not running a GUI either. Good machine for when I want to avoid distractions and just code.
I'm on the other side where I've been buying Thinkpads partly because of the display. Thinkpads have for a long time been one of the few laptop options on the market where you could get a decent matte non-glare display. I value that, battery life and performance above moar pixels. Sure I want just one step above FHD so I can remote 1080p VMs and view vids in less than fullscreen at native resolution but 4K on a 14" is absolute overkill.
I think most legit motivations for wanting very high-res screens (e.g. photo and video editing, publishing, graphics design) also come with wanting or needing better quality and colors etc too, which makes very-highly-scaled mid-range monitors a pretty niche market.
> I got too spoiled by retina screens, and I can’t comfortably use anything with lower DPI.
Did you make a serious effort while having an extended break from retina screens? I'd think you would get used to it pretty quickly if you allow yourself to readjust. Many people do multi-DPI setups without issues - a 720p and a 4k side-by-side for example. It just takes acclimatizing.
All I want is an easy way to install Linux on one of the numerous Snapdragon laptops. I think the Snapdragon Thinkpad might work, but none of the other really do.
A 400$ Arm laptop with good Linux support would be great, but it's never ever going to happen.
Google folks pop up here and there and say it’s actively worked on. Unless you have more recent information, I believe the project is still alive.
Things have definitely changed, a lot.
Can you please let me know if there is an ISO to get any mainstream Linux distro working on this Snapdragon laptop ?
ASUS - Vivobook 14 14" FHD+ Laptop - Copilot+ PC - Snapdragon X
It's on sale for $350 at Best buy and if I can get Linux working on it it would definitely be an awesome gift for myself.
Even if there's some progress being made, it's still nearly impossible to install a typical Linux distro on one of these. I've been watching this space since the snapdragon laptops were announced. Tuxedo giving up and canceling their Snapdragon Linux laptop doesn't instill much confidence
This includes Vivobook S15, not sure about the 14.
I've followed that thread for almost a year. It's a maze of hardware issues and poor compatibility.
From your other response.
>but vendors usually require a firmware binary to be signed with their keys, which are burned into the SoC. As a result you cannot use Qualcomm's vanilla firmware and need to extract the original firmware as provided by the vendor, otherwise it won't load.
This makes the install process impossible without an existing Windows install. It's easier to say it doesn't work and move on.
It's going to be significantly easier to buy run Linux in an X86 laptop.
Not to mention no out of the box Linux Snapdragon Elite laptop exists. It's a shame because it would probably be an amazing product.
I get the hate on Qualcomm, but you're really one LLM question away from understanding why they do this. I should know, I was also getting frustrated before I read up on this.
Then it turned out this was the usual. Nothing had changed. It was just that people online have this desire to express that “the underdog” is actually better. Not clear why because it’s never true.
AMD is still hot garbage on Linux. Geohot primarily sells “green boxes”. And the MI300x didn’t replace H100s en masse.
I remember having to fight with fglrx, AMDs proprietary Linux driver, for hours on end. Just to get hardware-acceleration for my desktop going! That driver was so unbearable I bought Nvidia just because I wanted their proprietary driver. Cut the fiddling time from many hours to maybe 1 or 2!
Nowadays, I run AMD because their open-source amdgpu driver means I just plonk the card into the system, and that's it. I've had to fiddle with the driver exactly zero times. The last time I used Nvidia is the distant past for me. So - for me, their drivers are indeed "so much better". But my usecase is sysadmin work and occasional gaming through Steam / Proton. I ran LMStudio through ROCm, too, a few times. Worked fine, but I guess that's very much not representative for whatever people do with MI300 / H100.
And how does that work on AMD? I know the Steam Deck is AMD but Valve could have tweaked the driver or proton for that particular GPU.
Probably something hasn't run at some point but I can't remember what, more likely to be a Proton "issue". Your main problem will be some configuration of anti-cheat for some games.
My experience has been basically fantastic and no stress. Just check that games aren't installing some Linux build which are inevitably extremely out of date and probably wont run. Ex: human fall flat (very old, wont run), deus ex mankind divided (can't recall why but I elected to install the proton version, I think performance was poor or mouse control was funky).
I guess I don't play super-new games so YMMV there. Quick stuff I can recall, NMS, Dark Souls 1&2&3, Sekiro, Deep Rock Galactic, Halo MCC, Snow runner & Expeditions, Eurotruck, RDR1 (afaik 2 runs fine, just not got it yet), hard space ship breaker, vrising, Tombraider remaster (the first one and the new one), pacific drive, factorio, blue prince, ball x pit, dishonored uhhh - basically any kind of "small game" you could think of: exapunks, balatro, slay the spire, gwent rougemage, whatever. I know there were a bunch more I have forgotten that I played this year.
I actually can't think of a game that didn't work... Oh this is on Arch Linux, I imagine Debian etc would have issues with older Mesa, etc.
Finally, now I have 6x4090 on one machine. Just works. 1x5090 on other. Just works. And everyone I know prefers N to A. Drivers proprietary. Result great. GPU responds well.
I said "LLM lens" because you were talking about hardware typically used for number crunching, not graphics displays, like the MI300. So I was suggesting that the difference between what you hear online about the driver and your own experience might result from people like me mostly talking about the 2d / 3d acceleration side of things while the experience for ROCm and stuff is probably another story altogether.
Nodding along with the rest but isn't this backwards? Are M series actually outperforming an Intel i9 P-core or Ryzen 9X in raw single-threaded performance?
Have a look at Geekbench's results.[1] Ignore the top ones, since they're invalid and almost certainly cheated (click to check). The iPads and such lower down are all legit, but the same goes for some of the i9s inbetween.
And honestly, the fact that you have to go up to power hungry desktop processors to even find something to compete with the chip that goes in an (admittedly high-end) iPad, is somewhat embarrassing on its face, and not for Apple.
However, the M2 in the blog post is from 2022 and isn't quite as blazingly fast in single thread performance.
[1] https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m4-8-cores-vs-am...
> Actually, some Snapdragon X Elite laptops do run Linux now, but performance is not great as there were some weird regressions and anyway newer chips have caught up [1].
As to x86, Zen 6 will be AMD's first major architecture rework since Apple demonstrated what is possible with wide decode. ( Well more accurately it should be since the world take notice because it happened long before M1 ). It still likely wont be close to M5 or even M4 with Single Threaded Performance / Watt, but hopefully it will be close.
This is an oft-repeated meme, but not really true. Thinkpads, high-end lightweight gaming laptops like the Asus G14... There are many x86 laptops with excellent build quality.
The machine quality is pretty damn good, but Huawei machines are still better. Apple level of quality. And Huawei releases their machines with Linux preinstalled
The company to watch is Wiko. Its their French spin off to sidestep their chip ban. They might put out some very nice laptops, but a bit tbd
I have a Honor 200 pro, and the software is buggy and constantly replaces user configurations with their defaults every 3 or 4 days.
I would avoid anything Honor in the future at any cost.
Performance is still very high so if they don't need the current top tier AMD horsepower, Intel is the way to go. It's also quieter, cooler and doesn't throttle. Not to mention the ability to use SRIOV GPU for running Windows software in a VM.
Also, Lenovo tends to limit HiDPI displays to Intel CPUs, for some ekhm unknown reason.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Panther-Lake-NPU-Firmwar...
It really depends what you mean by "quality". To me first and foremost quality I look for in a laptop is for it to not break. As I'm a heavy desktop user, my laptop is typically with me on the couch or on vacation. Enter my MacBook Air M1: after 13 months, and sadly no extended warranty, the screen broke for no reason overnight. I literally closed it before going to bed and when I opened the lid the next day: screen broken. Some refer to that phenomenon as the "bendgate".
And every time I see a Mac laptop I can't help but think "slick and good looking but brittle". There's a feeling of brittleness with Mac laptops that you don't have with, say, a Thinkpad.
My absolute best laptop is a MIL-SPEC (I know, I know, there are many different types of military specs) LG Gram. Lighter than a MacBook too. And every single time I demo it to people I take the screen, I bent it left and right. This thing is rock solid.
I happen to have this laptop (not my vid) and look at 34 seconds in the vid:
The guy literally throws my laptop (well, the same) down concrete stairs and the thing still just works fine.
The friend who sold it to me (I bought it used) one day stepped on it when he woke up. No problemo.
To me that is quality: something you can buy used and that is rock solid.
Where are the vids of someone throwing a MacBook Air down the stairs and the thing keeps working?
I'm trading a retina display any day for a display that doesn't break when it accidentally falls on the ground.
Now I love the look and the incredible speed of the MacBook Air laptops (I still have my M1 but has its screen broke, I turned it into a desktop) but I really wish they were not desk queens: we've got desktops for that.
I don't want a laptop that require exceptional care and mad packaging skills when putting it inside a backpack (and which then requires the backpack to be manipulated with extreme care).
So: bring me the raw power and why not the nice look of a MacBook Air, but make it sturdy (really the most important for me) and have it support Linux. That I'd buy.
As for light and sturdy, the Netbook era had it all. A shame the world moved on from that.
My wife is the bane of electronic devices.
Phones simply won't survive a week without an industrial case. Screen projectors last as short as a single day.
The only computers that survived her JerryRigEverything levels of abuse are MacBooks+ who routinely fall off tables, stairs, or simply hands.
One even fell off open 90 degrees and rotationally fell right on the far edge at what would be the maximum torque position; there was massive deformation of the lid aluminum but the lid was still flat, the glass had no cracks, and the whole thing perfectly functional.
(note: these are the older designs from the first unibody to the last Intel laptop, not the newer Mx ones)
+ Well, except one, which had an entire pint toppled towards and sloshed right upon the screen which had the liquid slide straight into the exhaust vents. There was an audible poof as the screen went black)
For some anecdata, I have:
Stood on mine Poured water on it. Been hit by a car while cycling and fallen on it. Dropped it.
It’s fine. Has a few scratches and a small dent. The predecessor is a 2013 Air which has had a hard life. It’s going great.
A colleague put a piece of a4 paper between keyboard and screen then closed it, squeezed it and cracked the screen. Don’t do that.
Closest I've found to an MBP 16" replacement.
Have been running Dell Precision laptops for many years on Linux, not sure about Lenovo build quality and battery life, but hoping it will be decent enough.
Would run Asahi if it supported M4 but looks it's a long ways away...
I’ve had issues with T14s for a couple of gens where the machine wakes up during the closed lid and runs the battery down. I’ve tried the usual troubleshooting.
This has been a non issue on Dell machines for almost 20 years.
Kernel params
## Seems to be needed for suspend to S0 (s2idle) without hanging (only needed on p16s)
acpi_osi="Windows 2022"
# Prevent spurious wakeups from a firmware bug where the EC or SMU generates spurious "heartbeat" interrupts during sleep
acpi.ec_no_wakeup=1
# Prevents dock from waking up laptop right after suspend
usbcore.autosuspend=-1
# Disable Thunderbolt PCIe root port wakeup (RP09)
echo disabled > /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/power/wakeup || true
# Disable USB XHCI controller wakeup
echo disabled > /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/power/wakeup || true
# Disable ACPI wakeup for XHCI and RP09 (toggle if enabled)
grep -q "XHCI.*enabled" /proc/acpi/wakeup && echo XHCI > /proc/acpi/wakeup || true
grep -q "RP09.*enabled" /proc/acpi/wakeup && echo RP09 > /proc/acpi/wakeup || trueBad keyboard, bad aluminium body, soldered ram...
Is it just the Apple Silicon that somehow makes it worth it? It's ARM, most software is still written and optimized for x86.
The number one benefit is the Apple Silicon processors, which are incredibly efficient.
Then it’s the trackpad, keyboard and overall build quality for me. Windows laptops often just feel cheap by comparison.
Or they’ll have perplexing design problems, like whatever is going on with Dell laptops these days with the capacitive function row and borderless trackpad.
Apple's good enough for the average consumer, just like a 16-bit home computer back in the day. Everyone who looks for something bespoke/specialized (e. g. certified dual- or multi-OS support, ECC-RAM, right-to-repair, top-class flicker-free displays, size, etc.) looks elsewhere, of course.
Would you elaborate ?
I believe there are a few all-metal laptops competing in the marketplace but was unaware they were actually better than the apple laptops ... what all aluminum laptops are better and how are they better ?
it's a stylistic choice, not a logical one.
I was looking at Thinkpad Auras today. There are unaligned jutting design edges all over the thing. From a design perspective, I’ll take the smooth oblong squashed egg.
Every PC laptop I’ve touched feels terrible to hold and carry. And they run Windows, and Linux only okay. Apple MacBooks are a long mile better than everything else and so I don’t care about upgraded memory — buy enough ram at purchase time and you don’t have to think about it again.
Memory upgrades aren’t priced super well, granted, but I could never buy HP Dell Lenovo ever again. They’re terrible. I’ve had all of them. Ironically the best device I’ve had from the other side was a Surface Laptop. But I don’t do Microsoft anymore. And I don’t want to carry squeaky squishy bendy plastic.
Most of all, I’m never getting on a customer support call with the outsourced vendors that do the support for those companies ever ever ever again. I’ll take a visit to an Apple store every day of the week.
Not sure about anything else, have ONLY used those.
That alone is already very compelling for me (no noise, no fan to wear out). Then on top of that it has:
* Amazing battery life
* Great performance
* The best trackpad in the world
* Bright, crisp screen
The only downsides are the lack of upgradability and the annoying OS, but at least it's UNIX.
"...It's just a flesh wound..."
My arms rest on the body, the last thing I want is for it to be a material that leeches heat out of my body or that is likely to react with my hands' sweat and oils.
(unfortunately in the EU they only provide the 3-prong plug in the long-tail variant, which is kind of a bummer)
I am very much a Linux person. But the battery life with macOS on the Apple Silicon is absolutely insane.
I've been a reluctant MacBook user for 15 years now thanks to it being the de-facto hardware of tech, but for the first time ever since adopting first the M1 Pro and then an M2 Pro I find myself thinking: I could not possibly justify buying literally any other laptop so long as this standard exists.
Being able to run serious developer workflows silently (full kubernetes clusters, compilers, VSCode, multitudes of corpo office suite products etc), for multiple days at a time on a single charge is baffling. And if I leave it closed for a week at 80% battery, not only does that percentage remain nearly the same when resumed-- it wakes instantly! No hibernation wake time shenanigans. The only class of device which even comes close to being comparable are high end e-ink readers, and an e-ink reader STILL loses on wake time by comparison.
I'm at the point now where I'm desperately in need of an upgrade for my 8 year old personal laptop, but I'm holding off indefinitely until I discover something with a similar level of battery performance that can run Linux. As I understand it, the firmware that supports that insane battery life and specifically the suspend functionality that allows it to draw nearly zero power when closed isn't supported by any Linux distro or I would have already purchased another MacBook for personal use.
Run a lightweight DE like i3wm with any modern thinkpad and you will get similar usable battery life of around 6-8 hours.
Generally though, battery life isn't an issue anymore considering fast charging is everywhere.
> you will get similar usable battery life of around 6-8 hours
My macbook M3 gives me way more than 6-8 hours, it's simply insane. It literallly lasts for multiple days.
> Generally though, battery life isn't an issue anymore considering fast charging is everywhere.
Not an issue indeed, I got used to always charging my X1 carbon. But then I got an M3 for work, and... well it feels like I don't have to charge it ever :-).
As I said: very much a Linux person, but the M3 battery life is absolutely insane.
I prefer the aluminium to the plastic found on most Windows machines. The Framework is made from some aluminium alloy from what I know, and I see that as a good thing.
The soldered RAM sucks, but it's a trade-off I'm willing to make for a touchpad that actually works, a pretty good screen, and battery life that doesn't suck.
But through all the Dells, Thinkpads and Asus laptops I've had (~10), none were remotely close to a full package that MBP M1 Pro was.
- Performance - outstanding
- Fan noise - non-existent 99% of the time, cannot compare to any other laptop I had
- Battery - not as amazing as people claim for my usage, but still at least 30% better
- Screen, touchpad, speakers, chassis - all highest tier; some PC laptops do screen (Asus OLED), keyboard and chassis (Thinkpad) better, but nothing groundbreaking...
It's the only laptop I've ever had that gave me a feeling that there is nothing that could come my way, and I wouldn't be able to do on it, without any drama whatsoever.
It's just too bad that I can't run multiple external displays on Asahi...
(For posterity, currently using Asus Zenbook S16, Ryzen HX370, 32GB RAM, OLED screen, was $1700 - looks and feels amazing, screen is great, performance is solid - but I'm driving it hard, so fan noise is constant, battery lasts shorter, and it's just a bit more "drama" than with MBP)
A modern M4 should tho
I've moved completely to EliteBooks and am very happy with my decision. The build quality is superb, they're upgradeable, everything is replaceable and there's an excellent market and after market for parts, and HP has codepaths in their firmware for Linux support, meaning even Modern Standby works well.
Price points for refurb and used hardware are great, too.
It has no fans.
It's temperature never changes unless you really push it. I've never used any other laptop where I could feel at least some warmth when it was turned on.
My m1 air still has enough battery to run for a full day of usage, here several years after I bought it. Basically never loses power while the lid is closed either, but that is less of an issue.
This is indeed a problem. My Macbook Pro (with active cooling!) would commonly come within 5c of junction temp when compiling, mdworker_shared was running, or Docker was working.
It was an issue with the Intel Macs too, just much more readily apparent since they throttled faster. I wish Apple backed down from this hill, for the sake of my damned gonads.
It throttes and stuff, but it still outperforms the t14 i7 with 32gb ram I've got from my company. Granted, that one has a lot of enterprice stuff running, but still...
I do hope someone will make a pc that is as close to an air as possible though. I like Apple, but I'm not a fan of being bound to an US tech company these days. I'm not important enough to be targeted personally, but what if the US government decides to ban all Danes from US tech in the war for Greenland? Or the more likely scenario, what if Apple decides to go full Microsoft with AI and what not?
Hmmm still have issue with the battery in sleep mode on the m1. It drains a lot battery when it is in sleep mode compare to mac sleep mode.
> higher battery drainage during sleep, so I usually just shut it down entirely when not using it
> no hardware acceleration for video decoding
> some USB port quirks and external display quirks
I just don't understand why people go through all these lengths to be such sycophants for Apple.
For those curious about the Alkeria line-scan camera, he wrote a blog about 3d printing a lens mount etc. https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2024-08-31-customizing-my-li...
Seems like a crazy hobby to me though! Photography is inconvenient enough without having to make your own mounts and use an sdk to do it! History is filled with inconvenient hobbies though.
I would agree with the sentiment about the lack of good bright screens for lenovo's hacker laptops like the X1 carbon.
Realistically, it is reasonable to expect 2TB drives, based on normal progression https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/05/13/coughlin-associates-hd...
But from a demand perspective, there are a lot of PC users for whom 256GB is plenty of capacity and performance. Most computers sold aren't gaming PCs or professional workstations; mainstream consumer storage requirements (aside from gaming) have been nearly stagnant for years due to the popularity of cloud computing and streaming video.
Honestly, I suspect there are a whole lot of people that could be perfectly happy with 256GB storage on an Air. I mean, sure, I got 2TB for my MBP 5 years ago, but my father-in-law is likely never going to need even close to 256GB on his, which is basically being a Chromebook for him.
I just bought a 2TB drive over the holidays and it was $250, so it's not like they're an insignificant percentage of a <$1K laptop.
But I'm probably more picky about drives than you are as well, if you're ordering $208 16TB externals. I just ordered a 14TB spinning for $350, but it's a Ultrastar. The SSD I got is the Samsung 9100 Pro, at $190 before tax.
10 hour battery life, 15 inch screen, not bulky, $200. A bit more money will get you better specs, screen or battery life from this or another brand, but it hits all the spots for someone who doesn't need downloaded software.
Imagine for a second that you don't know much about computers. You buy something crap like that and turn it on. Windows is of course already installed. Along with 18 antivirus programs and who knows what other junk. The computer will run dog slow. Even if you get rid of all the preinstalled programs, it'll run horribly slowly.
My mum has a computer from her work. Its pretty recent - worth way more than $100. It takes about 5-10 seconds for zoom or google chrome to start. And about 15 seconds for outlook to open. Its an utterly horrible experience.
If you can afford it, you'll have a way better experience on a macbook air from the last few years. In comparison, everything starts instantly. The experience is fantastic. Premium, even.
Personally I think its criminal that cheap laptops run modern software so poorly. Its just laziness. There's no reason for the experience to be so horrible. But the world being what it is, there is plenty of reasons to spring for a $1000 macbook air over a $100 second hand windows crapbook if you can afford it. Even if you don't do much with the computer.
Plus you can pick up a used M1 MacBook Air for as little as $300 these days. Despite being 5 years old, it'll still smoke anything on the PC side much under a grand, in terms of responsiveness.
Where are you getting those prices? Here it's either $700+ or a sketchy deal with a locked activation.
Who talked about using Windows ? Many of my family/relatives (most of which have zero knowledge about computers, and little money to invest) use ~100$ laptops, with Debian+XFCE, Firefox+ublock origin, Libreoffice, vlc, thunderbird... I just put the maximum RAM I could, and installed a SATA SSD, which makes the machine fast and completely usable. I now live on the other side of the planet yet I get very little complains from them or demands for remote support as it works very reliably and fast.
And those were 100$ machines 8-10 years ago. Today's 100$ machines will give you a decently recent core i5 or i7, nvme, 8G RAM...
I agree that many people use them as glorified internet machines but even then when they occasionally decide to back up some photos or edit a few videos the 256GB non-upgradable storage quickly becomes a limitation.
Price matters. 256GB is fine on a $500 web browsing laptop, but on a $1000+ one it's just a bad deal in 2025, even ignoring the fact that you cannot upgrade it later (it's soldered in place).
Apple's pricing is one of the reasons I am not going to buy their laptops. Expensive, and with no upgradeable or replaceable parts. And closed-source OS with telemetry.
> Lots of people more or less use their computer as a glorified web browser
For this purpose they can buy $350 laptop with larger screen.
I think you can improve your power settings.
Most of those components are proprietary and don't use the standard drivers available in Linux kernel.
So someone needs to go and reverse engineer them, upstream the drivers and pray that Apple doesn't change them in next revision (which they did) or the whole process needs to start again.
In other words: get an actually Linux supported laptop for Linux.
For a lot of people the point is to extend the life of their already-purchased hardware.
2. If your priority is system lifespan, you are already using OEM macOS.
Every thread about Linux inevitably someone says “it gave new life to my [older computer model].” We’ve all seen it countless times.
This post is about the MacBook Air M2. The discussion has been about silicon MacBooks - laptops - from the start.
2. By all means start with macOS, but eventually Apple will stop supporting your machine. And y'know what will still work and get updates then? Linux.
Which old hardware? You're circling around to the grandparent's point again; Linux support is hardware dependent.
> And y'know what will still work and get updates then?
No, I don't. Depreciated iPads lay dead in piles, and they don't run Linux for shit. You want me to believe the M4 will graduate to the big leagues?
It's getting very tiresome to hear complaints about things that don't work on Linux, only to find that they're trying to run it on hardware that's poorly supported, and that's something they could have figured out by doing a little research beforehand.
Sometimes old hardware just isn't going to be well-supported by any OS. (Though, of course, with Linux, older hardware is more likely to be supported than bleeding-edge kit.)
This is very true. I've been asked by lots of people "how do I start with Linux" and, despite being 99.9% Linux user for everything everyday, my advice was always:
1. Use VirtualBox. Seriously, it won't look cool, but it will 100% work after maybe 5 mins mucking around with installing guest additions. Also snapshots. Also no messing with WiFi drivers or graphics card drivers or such.
2. Get a used beaten down old Thinkpad that people on Reddit confirm to be working with Linux without any drivers. Then play there. If it breaks, reinstall.
3. If the above didn't make you yet disinterested, THEN dual boot.
Also, if you don't care about GUI, then use the best blessing Microsoft ever created - WSL, and look no further.
I'd probably recommend against dual booting, but I understand it's controversial. I like to equate it to having two computers, but having to fully power one off to do anything* on the other one. Torrents stop, music collection may be inaccessible depending on how you stored it, familiar programs may not be around anymore. I dual booted for a few years in the past and I found it miserable. People who expected me to reboot to play a game with them didn't seem to understand how big of an ask that really was. Eventually things boiled over and I took the Windows HDD out of that PC entirely. Much more peaceful. (Proton solves that particular issue these days also)
That being said, I've had at least two friends who had a dual boot due to my influence (pushing GNU/Linux) who ended up with some sort of broken Windows install later on and were happy to already have Ubuntu as an emergency backup to keep the machine usable.
*Too old might be a problem these days with major distros not having 32bit ISOs anymore
If your vendor is hostile like Apple, it will be hard to make it keep on working.
For the boot process, apple went out of its way to support booting alternative OSs without compromising on security.
And mind you, most other laptops are no friends either. E.g. the often beloved ThinkPads have a bunch throttling issues on non-windows OSs.
Yes. The existence of a proprietary escape hatch is not evidence of goodwill.
> ThinkPads have a bunch throttling issues on non-windows OSs.
That is an ACPI issue. Intel Macbooks also exhibit this behavior on Linux and BSD, and it's not even close to how incomplete power management is on Asahi.
Why are some of y'all so hostile to this idea?
Intel Macs supported Linux because they used Intel's Linux drivers and supported bog-standard UEFI. There are no preexisting drivers or DeviceTree files published by Apple for Linux. There is no UEFI implimentation, just a proprietary bootloader that can be updated post-hoc to deny booting into third-party OSes.
> Why are some of y'all so hostile to this idea?
I would love for Linux to support as many ARM devices as possible. Unfortunately, it requires continuous effort from the OEM to be viable. I've bought Qualcomm, Rockchip and Broadcom boards before, none of them have been supported for half as long as my x86 machines are. Nevermind how fast ARM architectures become obsolete.
It feels like Apple is really the only hostile party here, and they coincidentally decide whether or not you get to use third-party OSes.
Apple is very hostile to it. It won’t stop everyone though. It’ll continue to be niche but it’s happening.
Except, you can't. The bootloader is the same iBoot process that your Apple Silicon machine uses, with mitigations to prevent unsigned OSes or persistent coldboot. All the Cydia exploits in the world won't put Linux back on the menu for iPhone or iPad users. And the same thing could happen to your Mac with an OTA update.
It is entirely possible for Apple to lock down the devices further. There's no guarantee they won't.
Apple cannot lockdown the Mac. You can’t have a development machine that is incapable of running arbitrary code. Back when they still did WWDC live they said that software development was the biggest professional bloc of Mac users. I’m certain that these days development is the biggest driver of the expensive Macs. No one has ever made a decent argument as to why Apple would lock down the Mac that would also explain why they haven’t done it yet.
Passivity isn’t hostility. There isn’t any evidence that Apple is considering locking down the Mac. They could have easily done that with the transition to their own silicon but they didn’t despite the endless conspiracy theories.
> They could have easily done that with the transition to their own silicon
They already did, that's what my last comment just outlined. Macs do not ship with UEFI anymore, you are wholly at the mercy of a proprietary bootloader that can be changed at any time.
Why people continue to think Apple will treat the Mac like the iPhone I have no idea. Will Microsoft take the same approach with Windows as they did with Xbox? Different product, different strategy.
There is literally an apple-developed way to boot securely into alternative OSs. How would asahi work otherwise?
Also, if only apple is hostile, where is my Xbox/ps/switch/any random Android tablet/million other device's running Linux?
This is not a good thing! You do not want a proprietary bootloader as your only way to launch Linux, it's not a safe or permanent solution. Apple Silicon could have implemented UEFI like the previous Macs did, but Apple chose to lock users into a bootloader they controlled. This is markedly different from most ARM device bootloaders which aren't changed by an OTA update in another OS partition.
> if only apple is hostile
I did not say that at any point in my comment. Forgeties original claim was that Apple Silicon would eventually have support comparable to Intel Macbooks on Linux. I am telling them point-blank that it is impossible, because Apple and Intel have fundamentally different attitudes towards Linux.
> where is my Xbox/ps/switch/any random Android tablet/million other device's running Linux?
Your Switch and Android tablet is already running the Linux kernel. The past 2 generations of Xbox and PS chipsets have upstream support from AMD in the Linux kernel, so you really only need a working bootloader to get everything working.
Ironically, this does mean that the Nintendo Switch has more comprehensive Linux support than Apple Silicon does.
My point still stands, Apple does not trust their customers.
40% battery for 4hrs of real work is better than pretty much any linux supported laptop I've ever used
The problem with Linux performance on laptops boils down to i) no energy tweaks by default and ii) poor device drivers due to the lack of manufacturer cooperation. If you pick a machine with well supported hardware and you are diligent with some udev rules, which are quite trivial to write thanks to powertop suggestions, performance can be very good.
I am getting a bit more than 10 hours from a cheap ThinkPad E14 Gen7, with a 64 Wh battery, and light coding use. That's less than a MacBook Air, where I would be getting around 13-14 hours, but it's not bad at all. The difference comes mainly from the cheap screen that is more power consuming and ARMs superior efficiency when idling.
But I prefer not to trade the convenience and openness of x86_64 plus NixOS for a bit more battery range. IMHO, the gap is not sufficiently wide to make a big difference in most usage scenarios.
It’d be a gargantuan project, but there should probably be some kind of centralized, cross-distro repository for power configuration profiles that allows users to rate them with their hardware. Once a profile has been sufficiently user-verified and is well rated, distro installers could then automatically fetch and install the profile as a post-install step, making for a much more seamless and less fiddly experience for users.
It's generally the most optimized system down to the fact that Apple controls everything about it's platform.
If that's considered baseline, then nothing but full vertical integration can compete
I agree that in case of Linux, a udev rule generator would be a fantastic step ahead in terms of usability.
Not sure what "real work" is for you, but I regularly get more than 12 hours of battery life on an old Chromebook running a Linux and the usual IDEs/dev tooling (in a Crostini VM). All the drivers just work, sleep has no detectable battery drain. It's not a workstation by any means, but dual core Intel's are great for Python/Go/TypeScript
I don't know if that would help the wider Linux laptop community, because Chromebook OEMs can only select from a small list of CPU & chipset hardware combinations blessed by Google
If we really want to get pedantic, its internal battery means the external pack is hot-swappable, so I can actually get several days on a "single charge." Good machine for camping trips.
I'm typing this from a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 running Void Linux, and UPower is reporting 99% battery with ~15h left. I do have TLP installed and running, which is supposed to help. Realistically, I won't get around 15h with my usage patterns, but I do get around 10-12 hours. It's a new laptop with a fresh battery, so that plays a big role as well.
This might not be as good as the battery life on a Macbook, but it's pretty acceptable to me. The upcoming Intel chips also promise to be more power efficient, which should help even more.
https://github.com/jasoneckert/sway-dotfiles/blob/main/Asahi...
I worked in an office with sketchy power.
The lights would flicker and the non-macs would turn off. The Macs just carried on. Mini, iMac, Mac Pro.
Yay for big caps I guess?
I blame Apple on pushing out new models every year. I don’t get why it does that. A M1 is perfectly fine after a few years but Apple treats it like an iPhone. I think one new model every 2-3 years is good enough.
I've got a few ideas
That’s why I don’t like it as a consumer. If they keep producing M1 and M2 I’d assume we can get better prices because the total quantity would be much larger. Sure it is probably better for Apple to move forward quickly though.
Why would this be true? An M5 MacBook Air today costs the same as an M1 MacBook Air cost in 2020 or whenever they released it, and is substantially more performant. Your dollar per performance is already better.
If they kept selling the same old stuff, then you spread production across multiple different nodes and the pricing would be inherently worse.
In general, I don't think it's reasonable to worry that Apple's products aren't thoroughly achieving economies of scale. The less expensive consumer-oriented products are extremely popular, various components are shared across product lines (eg. the same chip being used in Macs and iPads) and across multiple generations (except for the SoC itself, obviously), and Apple rather famously has a well-run supply chain.
From a strategic perspective, it seems likely that Apple's long history of annual iteration on their processors in the iPhone and their now well-established pattern of updating the Mac chips less often but still frequently is part of how Apple's chips have been so successful. Annual(ish) chip updates with small incremental improvements compounds over the years. Compare Apple's past decade of chip progress against Intel's troubled past decade of infrequent technology updates (when you look past the incrementing of the branding), uneven improvements and some outright regressions in important performance metrics.
Also there’s nothing wrong with buying used or refurbished. Apple doesn’t have to keep making older tech for people to continue getting use out of it.
They are more common than you would think. There just is not many willing to work on a shoe string salary.
You explained it well by yourself.
https://lore.kernel.org/asahi/20251215-macsmc-subdevs-v6-4-0...
Asahi Lina, who also did tons of work on the Asahi Linux GPU development, also quit as she doesn't feel safe doing Linux GPU work anymore [1].
[0] https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-l...
I’m quite glad that those talented guys finally escaped from the pit hole of reverse engineering. It maybe fun and interesting, but its future was already capped by Apple. I wish they find another fashion, hopefully something more original and progressive. Stop chasing and push forward.
That said some of the prominent developers have left the project. As long as Apple keeps hoarding their designs it’s going to be a struggle, even more so now.
If you care about FOSS operating systems or freedom over your own hardware there isn’t a reason to choose Apple.
I’ve heard it’s mostly because there wasn’t an m3 Mac mini which is a much easier target for CI since it isn’t a portable. Also, there have been a ton of hardware changes internally between M2 and M3. M4 is a similar leap. More coprocessors, more security features, etc.
For example, PPL was replaced by SPTM and all the exclave magic.
https://randomaugustine.medium.com/on-apple-exclaves-d683a2c...
As always, opinions are my own
> I’m ashamed to say sometimes their documentation is better than the internal stuff.
The reverse engineering is a monumental effort, this Sisyphean task of trying to keep up with never-ending changes to the hardware. Meanwhile, the documentation is just sitting there in Cupertino. An enormous waste of time and effort from some of the most skilled people in the industry. Well, maybe not so much anymore since a bunch of them left.
I really hope this ends up biting Apple in the ass instead of protecting whatever market share they are guarding here.
https://lore.kernel.org/asahi/20251215-macsmc-subdevs-v6-4-0...
Stop buying Apple laptops to run Linux.
i've been doing this for maybe a year, after frustration with power draw and sleep modes (and dual boot) with Asahi.
it's been great...and Apple silicon is still super efficient, which is why i said hard disagree.
> Our priority is kernel upstreaming. Our downstream Linux tree contains over 1000 patches required for Apple Silicon that are not yet in upstream Linux. The upstream kernel moves fast, requiring us to constantly rebase our changes on top of upstream while battling merge conflicts and regressions. Janne, Neal, and marcan have rebased our tree for years, but it is laborious with so many patches. Before adding more, we need to reduce our patch stack to remain sustainable long-term.
https://asahilinux.org/2025/02/passing-the-torch/
For instance, in this month's progress report:
> Last time, we announced that the core SMC driver had finally been merged upstream after three long years. Following that success, we have started the process of merging the SMC’s subdevice drivers which integrate all of the SMC’s functionality into the various kernel subsystems. The hwmon driver has already been accepted for 6.19, meaning that the myriad voltage, current, temperature and power sensors controlled by the SMC will be readable using the standard hwmon interfaces. The SMC is also responsible for reading and setting the RTC, and the driver for this function has also been merged for 6.19! The only SMC subdevices left to merge is the driver for the power button and lid switch, which is still on the mailing list, and the battery/power supply management driver, which currently needs some tweaking to deal with changes in the SMC firmware in macOS 26.
Also finally making it upstream are the changes required to support USB3 via the USB-C ports. This too has been a long process, with our approach needing to change significantly from what we had originally developed downstream
Every compositor needs to implement the giant core spec, or, realistically, rely on a shared library to implement it for them. Then every compositor can propose and implement arbitrary protocols of their own, which should also be supported by all client applications.
It's insanity. This thing is nearly two decades old, and I still have basic clipboard issues[1]. This esoteric cutouts feature has no chances of seeing stable real-world use in at least a decade from now.
I also have tremendous issues with Plasma. Things such as graphics glitching in the alt+tab task switcher or Firefox choking the whole system when opening a single 4k PNG image. This is pre-alpha software... So back to X11 it is. Try again in another decade or two.
I can't go back to X11 since the community is deliberately killing it. And relying on a fork maintained by a single person is insane to me.
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/hyprland/comments/1d4s9bw/ctrlc_ctr...
[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/tuxedocomputers/comments/1i9v0n7/co...
[3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1jl6zv7/why_does_copyp...
Besides, isn't the main complaint from the Wayland folks that X11 is insecure and broken? That means there's still a lot of work to be done. They just refuse to do it.
To be fair, X11 has worked great for me for the past ~20 years, but there are obvious improvements that can be made.
[1]: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/releases/tag/xlibre-xser...
No one is killing it. No one willing to work on it is a very very different thing, and it's very bad faith and needlessly emotional to attribute malice to a lack of support.
It's very clear from their actions[2][3] that they have been actively working to "kill" X11.
There are still people willing to work on it, hence the XLibre fork. The fact that most mainstream distros refuse to carry it is another sign that X11 is in fact being actively "killed".
[1]: https://mastodon.social/@alatiera/114661446785833161
[2]: https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/06/08/the-x11-session-...
The job of distro maintainers is to make software accessible for their users. It's not to provide support for the software, nor to fix its bugs. Choosing to not package a specific software is user hostile.
If my Ferrari has an issue with the brakes and I go to my dealer I don't care if the brakes were by Brembo.
Blaming the vendor and their drivers is just trying to shift the blame.
I think you're describing a driver error from before Nvidia really supported Wayland. My 3070 exhibited similar behavior but was fixed with the 555-series drivers.
The Vulkan drivers are still so/so in terms of performance, but the smoothness is now on-par with my Macbook and Intel GNOME machine.
Bloody Wayland.
Wayland, the protocol, may be extensible, but the implementations of it are monolithic. E.g. I can't use the xdg-shell implementation from KWin on Mutter, and so on. I'm stuck with whatever my compositor and applications support. This is the opposite of modularity.
So all this protocol extensibility creates in practice is fragmentation. When a compositor proposes a new protocol, it's only implemented by itself. Implementations by other compositors can take years, and implementations by client applications decades. This is why it's taken 18 years to get close to anything we can refer to as "stable".
Why not? It's open-source software. Depending on your architecture you may be able to reuse parts of it.
But as a more flexible choice, there is wlroots.
> and implementations by client applications decades.
Toolkits implement these stuff, so most of the time "support by client application" is a gtk/qt version bump away.
> This is why it's taken 18 years to get close to anything we can refer to as "stable".
Is it really fare to compare the first 10 years of a couple of hobby developers with the current "wide-spread" state of the platform? If it were like today for 18 years and fail to improve, sure, something must be truly problematic. But there were absolutely different phases and uptake of the project so it moved at widely different speeds.
"The system is not modular, but you can make it so."
What a ridiculous statement.
> But as a more flexible choice, there is wlroots.
Great! How do I use wlroots as a user?
> Toolkits implement these stuff, so most of the time "support by client application" is a gtk/qt version bump away.
Ah, right. Is this why Xwayland exists, because it's so easy to do? So we can tell users that all their applications will continue to work when they switch to Wayland?
> Is it really fare to compare the first 10 years of a couple of hobby developers with the current "wide-spread" state of the platform?
It's not fare, you're right. I'll wait another decade before I voice my concerns again.
Why would you want to use it as a user? That makes zero sense.
> Is this why Xwayland exists, because it's so easy to do
I don't get your point. The reason it exists is backwards compatibility. There are binaries as well where changing a library is not so easy, and not every version change is equal within a toolkit.
But it's much different to go from X to Wayland then from Wayland to Wayland with one more protocol.
Is it giant or modular now?
It just seems like a completely pointless endeavor... perhaps some people buy into it? why would anyone buy overpriced hardware with partial support that may one day be gone? the enhanced battery life doesn't really hold much appeal to me, and the arm architecture if anything is just another signal to stay away.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that they wanted the achievement on their resume, and in that given recent developments they succeeded?
I used to use Asahi, but the sleep modes power drain was tedious.
With UTM, I install a latest Fedora ISO (declaring it a "Linux", which exposes the option to skip QEMU and use native Apple Silicon virtualization.
It's fantastic. I mention this only because it's been super useful, way better than Asahi, with minimal effort.
Not much to add to the topic of having a MacBook Air M2 with Linux. Glad it works well, I’m eyeing an M1 one for myself. Yet my Retina (2014 model) works perfect with Arch Linux (including sleep), so I’m patiently waiting for it to break. And at the same me I hope it would work another decade, so good it is. Battery life is quite great, it’s between 3 to 4 hours with battery being at 50% of capacity. So, I expect the new battery could give me up to 8 hours, which is pretty impressive for me. In reality, I don’t need a session for over an hour or two. The only thing I miss is USB-C charging, as that way I could charge with anything when I have no charger on me. Again, in reality, it’s a pretty rare scenario.
Not going to claim it will change the world or anything, but this runs perpetually with Sway and according to System Monitor it hovers at a little less than a megabyte of RAM. You can set how often you want things to update, and add as many sections as you'd like, and it's easy to create extra modules if you are so inclined (though not as easy as the Clojure version since I haven't found an implementation of multimethods for Rust that I like as much).
I used to enjoy the X line of ThinkPads but nowadays I don’t see a point going for them anymore, as the things I appreciated about them are slowly being phased out.
If you would be happy with a M1/M2 laptop knowing full well that it is a dead end and you will never have another Mac laptop with Linux support (the default assumption at this point), then yes it is a great machine.
How confident are you in this statement? I have no particular knowledge of Asahi. But I do know this narrative emerged about Rust-for-Linux after a couple of high-profile individuals quit.
In that case it was plainly bogus but this was only obvious if you were somewhat adjacent to the relevant community. So now I'm curious if it could be the same thing.
(Hopefully by now it's clear to everyone that R4L is a healthy project, since the official announcement that Rust is no longer "experimental" in the kernel tree).
I know Asahi is a much smaller project than R4L so it's naturally at higher risk of losing momentum.
I would really love Asahi to succeed. I recently bought a Framework and, while I am pretty happy with it in isolation... when I use my partner's M4 Macbook Air I just think... damn. The quality of this thing is head and shoulders above the rest of the field. And it doesn't even cost more than the competition. If you could run Linux on it, it would be completely insane to use anything else.
Most of current development is focused on reducing that pile to zero to get things into a tractable state again. So things continue to be active, but the progress has become much less visible.
The project is still active and working to upstream the work of these devs. But as far as I know, no NEW reverse engineering is being done. Ergo, it’s a dead end.
Would be happy to be proven wrong.