shvarr

If we overlook battery life and DP alt mode being funky, crucial for laptop use, it becomes essentially a desktop tethered to the desk.

Do you actually use dp alt mode and not HDMI for external displays? What DE/WM are you using your mac with?

M1 support is barely usable, at least on m1 air last time I checked idle battery drain was about 7-8% per hour (in macos battery health is still at 96%). Alt DP mode doesn't operate under kde wayland plasma due to inherent incompatability between implementation design and kwin, everything else is surprisingly good, albeit battery was really hard to ignore to fully switch.

Hopefully, they will manage to get it done someday.

Asahi could be a viable alternative, however, with this amount of funding, small manpower pool pace of development is doomed to be too slow.

There's groundwork that's already been done, as mentioned in the article, which brings some dividends, but, ultimately, there is a new mac every year that comes with a new chip, a plethora of microcontrollers and gpu changes, impossible to keep up with, that is why asahi team is focused more on m1 and m2 models. Even so, to this day both of them have issues with idle power management and alt-dp implementation, preventing many to switch, by the time they will have been ironed out the value of machines would be significantly diminished.

It is a miracle how much so few can do, but in the end, despite ubiquitous media coverage it looks like team's enthusiasm and passion have dwindled to the point that even m1 air will never be ready.