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Comment by ulimn | Hacker News Reader

I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints. Even doing heavy workload, it manages surprisingly well.

What I don't like is the direction MacOS is heading to. In my opinion, it always catered to the "casual" people UX-wise, but somehow I feel more and more that I, as a developer am just an afterthought.

On the other hand, I replaced Windows on my gaming PC and I keep thinking about buying a Laptop for Linux. I always had a sweet spot for KDE, but the amount of configuration it allows, while having nice defaults is such a nice experience after the Mac...

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I feel like Apple is always pushing the dev side forward in pretty awesome but small ways.

I’m super excited for containers. Yes they exist without Apple recreating them, but built in container runtime for the OS is developer forward thinking

One step forward two steps back. Containers are cute. Used to be able to boot into another OS entirely just a few years ago.

I highly recommend Asahi Linux. It runs pretty well on MacBooks with the M1 chip.

Unless you want to use external monitors

HDMI out works great on M1 and M2 chips, and DP alt mode output is nearly ready, and works if you compile an experimental kernel. I daily drive an Asahi Linux ALARM M1 Pro macbook, and I have almost zero complaints.

Does the experimental kernel finally support connecting to a Studio Display?

Yes, it does work with Fairydust, but you do need to use a USB-C cable in place of the included thunderbolt cable at the moment.

Hell yeah. I’ll be giving that a shot again this weekend.

I got tired of having to haul a separate HDMI display out for Asahi use.

There's the experimental Fairydust Branch which lets you connect a monitor via USB-C. However if you want to use more than one external monitor DisplayLink is currently the only option that works reasonably well. Unless you have a Mac with an HDMI port in which case you can use it.

There's work being done on that front: https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1w2e946/thunder...

> I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints.

Ah, but see, I'm rocking a vanilla Ubuntu install on a vanilla[1] Raptor Lake Dell I got used on eBay last summer for $220, and I too have no complaints.

"No complaints" is a great way to celebrate worthwhile hardware's value in the age of consumerism. It's death to a business who needs to sell stuff to survive. That M1 Air isn't booking revenue, and to be blunt Apple would have preferred its lifespan to be lower.

[1] Still has 16G though for VM and docker tinkering, something that is hard to get on Apple hardware without springing for a MBP.

Sorry I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. I'm happy you also found yourself a good machine! :)

And btw my Air has 16 GB of RAM.

> Sorry I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

Just that "Apple customers use old MacOS devices" is in fact of a piece with "Let's monetize our users" (by stuffing ads into the Settings app in this case). They can't rely on you for upgrade revenue and need to squeeze you in other ways.

No free lunch, basically, unless your software vendor really cooks for free.

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