[HN Gopher] Fedora Asahi Remix first impressions
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Fedora Asahi Remix first impressions
Author : jasoneckert
Score : 112 points
Date : 2023-08-12 14:24 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jasoneckert.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (jasoneckert.github.io)
| znpy wrote:
| Fedora has been really doing an incredible job at creating a
| great distro for everyday use.
|
| I kinda regret going back and forth between debian and ubuntu
| when ubuntu started getting shitty, should have moved to fedora
| eons ago.
| Octabrain wrote:
| Fedora is definitely a great distro that I've used a lot in the
| past. However, there are two main caveats from my POV:
|
| 1. The release of a version every six months. (I would prefer
| at least a yearly release for being sure that things are gonna
| be matured enough)
|
| 2. The fact that Red Hat is behind. (At this point, having seen
| the CentOS debacle, I don't trust them long term that much)
| andrewmutz wrote:
| Would Asahi linux on an apple laptop be the best Linux laptop
| experience these days for someone who prioritizes fanlessness?
|
| It seems the other ARM option is the ThinkPad X13s, which
| presumably has lower performance.
|
| Anyone have experience running linux on these machines and can
| compare the experience and hardware compatibility?
| zdragnar wrote:
| If you don't mind skimping on speaker quality or, depending on
| model, screen resolution, I will again recommend lg gram
| laptops. I never heard the fan on my first, and my second only
| comes on if it is charging a low battery while on a video call,
| and even that is quiet compared to the helicopter noise of the
| last MacBook pro I had through my last employer.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > even that is quiet compared to the helicopter noise of the
| last MacBook pro I had through my last employer.
|
| It's worth noting that this MBP was almost certainly an Intel
| model. The new ARM-based Apple laptops rarely have audible
| fans. This isn't to discount your recommendation, however.
| fweimer wrote:
| Does it have to be a laptop? For desktop systems, there are
| many more options.
| lijok wrote:
| Haha, classic
| jasoneckert wrote:
| I believe so, but I would stick to the M1 models currently as
| they have a larger set of supported features complete at this
| time: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
| hbbio wrote:
| I think so, X13s can become extremely hot and are slower.
|
| Only things still lacking for single machine use is speakers,
| microphone and webcam:
| https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
| bergkvist wrote:
| Also the ability to connect to external displays is missing -
| which is a pretty big one.
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| Although I would bet USB OTG HDMI works
| photonbeam wrote:
| That font is difficult, had to force it to change in the browser
| yborg wrote:
| Page completely unreadable in dark mode. Very Web 1.0 website,
| in the worst sense.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Nice post.
|
| Wondering if/when dependence on macOS will be eliminated? I don't
| mind a small recovery partition on disk for... what, firmware
| updates? But otherwise would prefer macOS get completely out of
| the way.
|
| Is that a thing that is possible, or will we always be reliant on
| an "activated" macOS?
| jasoneckert wrote:
| It is technically possible to remove macOS after installing
| Fedora Asahi Remix, leaving Linux as the sole OS, but this is
| not recommended to ensure that you can always update the
| firmware and recover the system.
|
| To install Fedora Asahi Remix, however, you must have macOS to
| run the installer script and prepare the system for use.
|
| So, the best solution is to shrink macOS to the minimum
| possible size during installation and use the remaining space
| for Fedora Asahi Remix should you wish to forget about macOS
| altogether.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Thanks. How does Apple bootstrap the system in the first
| place when inserting a blank SSD? Or perhaps you bought a
| replacement part?
|
| I don't see how that could be done if it is true--that the
| system is bricked/unrecoverable if the macos partition is
| lost. Surely it can boot from USB or something?
|
| Perhaps not, this wiki page linked above implies the iboot
| can't handle usb or external storage:
|
| https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/M1-vs.-PC-Boot
| nullindividual wrote:
| Read further down. DFU prevents bricking.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Yes, just got to that part, thanks.
|
| Investigating DFU, apparently it needs a second laptop to
| bootstrap it, like a mobile device. I don't like the
| idea, but it won't happen often, hmm.
| CharlesW wrote:
| If I understand it correctly, that partition is not loading
| macOS, and is necessary for loading _any_ OS -- Asahi Remix,
| macOS, etc.
|
| https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/M1-vs.-PC-Boot
| pacifika wrote:
| You'll need it for firmware updates.
| pxc wrote:
| Can you not do that from recovery on external media, just
| like installing the OS?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Nope. iBoot doesn't support USB at all (including for OS
| installation), presumably to reduce the vulnerability
| surface area. While annoying, this makes sense, as the USB
| stack is quite complex.
|
| Apple Silicon Macs can boot from USB, kind of, depending on
| your definition of "boot"--they have to _first_ boot an OS
| from the internal hard drive and _then_ boot the OS on the
| USB.
| honeybadger1 wrote:
| I have been playing with Asahi since the day it became available
| but it does take much away from the hardware purchase not having
| internal audio support. Work in progress as expected and perhaps
| one day I can daily drive it.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| What does "container" mean in this context? It is used often and
| it seems to mean partition, but perhaps not exactly. Is this new
| overloaded APFS terminology?
| jasoneckert wrote:
| Here's an explanation with graphics:
| https://bombich.com/kb/ccc5/working-apfs-volume-groups
|
| However, if you've used ZFS, APFS containers are essentially
| identical to the concept of a ZFS dataset.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Thanks. As far as I can tell, a "container" is simply a GPT
| partition and APFS allows logical volumes to be created
| within. Not unlike LVM, ZFS, BTRFS, etc.
| pxc wrote:
| > seems to mean partition
|
| > Is this new overloaded APFS terminology?
|
| Yes and yes. It's like a PV in LVM, or a partition in ZFS or
| BTRFS. What Apple calls an APFS volume is like a logical volume
| in LVM, or a BTRFS subvolume.
|
| Edit: Had this backwards, at first.
| h4x0rr wrote:
| RIP stability for Asahi
| solomatov wrote:
| Is anyone aware of plans to port Asahi changes to make other
| linux distros, i.e. Ubuntu, and others, to be able to run without
| additional setup on M1 Macs?
| fragmede wrote:
| Asahi changes are being done in such a way as to be
| upstreamable, at which point any kernel derived off of mainline
| will pick up their fixes, so _eventually_ detault Ubuntu will
| run on Apple Silicon. Expect a custom kernel that can be setup
| with a bit of work before then though.
| throwawaykk4 wrote:
| Why help Red Hat at all when they are becoming more like IBM each
| day?
| jasoneckert wrote:
| Because I'm evil ( ** )w
|
| Just kidding - I understand the recent hate directed at Red Hat
| and IBM, but there are always two sides to every story:
| https://www.lpi.org/blog/2023/07/30/ibm-red-hat-and-free-sof...
|
| Fedora is an excellent distribution, my second favourite
| F-word, and a sage choice for providing a polished long-term
| experience on Apple Silicon.
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| Fedora contributors are the ones maintaining the packages and
| they might have more work now if something breaks on the M1.
| This only "helps" Red Hat in that they can get more testing on
| ARM.
| throwawaykk4 wrote:
| Exactly. And users help them by testing and submitting bug
| reports, posting on forums/lists, etc. So my question stands,
| why help IBM at all in any way when you know what that is
| feeding into?
| dralley wrote:
| From TFA
|
| "But the main reason is that there have been many issues
| surrounding the maintenance of ARM packages for Arch Linux,
| and that the Fedora team is both capable and willing to
| provide provide the support needed to provide a truly
| polished Linux experience on modern Macs (the main goal of
| the Asahi Linux project). By moving to Fedora, the Asahi
| team can focus on reverse engineering Apple hardware while
| the Fedora team can focus on maintaining the distribution
| itself on the Apple Silicon platform. This combination of
| Fedora with the Asahi boot components and drivers for Apple
| Silicon is called Fedora Asahi Remix."
|
| This is a bidirectional relationship, the Asahi linux
| developers also benefit from the people and infrastructure
| in Fedora.
| throwawaykk4 wrote:
| I'd rather help Debian and not see my work help IBM sell
| RHEL based on Fedora in the future.
| jamespo wrote:
| Do you help Debian then?
| olliej wrote:
| I'm guessing not, unless they consider using it and
| _possibly_ complaining "helping".
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Guessing based on what, the assumption that people who
| complain never do anything useful? I won't speak for
| others, but I've submitted bug reports and patches to
| other distros and also avoid RH projects.
| olliej wrote:
| based on the person using a throwaway account to make the
| statement, coupled with the tendency for people to
| complain about things online but never actually file bug
| reports.
| valianteffort wrote:
| I have never used Fedora, I use Arch on my desktop and really
| enjoyed it on my macbook. It's kind of sad the Arch developers
| didn't want to put more effort into supporting alarm.
|
| If Arch is totally dropped by Asahi team it's unlikely I'll
| continue using linux on my macbook at all. I just have better
| things to do than manage multiple distros.
| coldtea wrote:
| Why would you have to "manage" them? Install it, then use it.
| sosodev wrote:
| Shouldn't this distro require little management?
| rekoil wrote:
| AFAIK, the main Arch Linux project isn't very interested in
| supporting the ARM architecture at all. This decision
| probably has more to do with that than anything else.
| TillE wrote:
| Arch is unusual in that it's x86-64 only, so going from 1
| to 2 is probably a lot harder than other distros just
| adding the nth new architecture.
| [deleted]
| jasoneckert wrote:
| As I mentioned in my blog post, I also really like Arch. And I
| definitely understand the benefits to sticking to a single
| distro on multiple systems.
|
| But as a long term Fedora user who used Arch as a daily driver
| for a year and a half because of Asahi, and now just switched
| back to Fedora because of Asahi, I have a solid appreciation
| for the benefits that Fedora provides over Arch.
|
| In short, I like Fedora more than Arch (and I really like
| Arch). Of course, everyone is different, but if you start using
| Fedora Asahi Remix, there's a good chance you'll put Fedora on
| everything after a few weeks... just like me, Linus Torvalds,
| and everyone else who joined the dark side ;-)
| jiripospisil wrote:
| Just curious, is there something similar to AUR on Fedora?
| It's a big selling point for me.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| The AUR and PKGBUILDs are pretty much just an Arch thing.
| But on a distro like Fedora, where the default repo is
| fairly complete and well-groomed (with the odd package
| hosted in a 3rd party repo), having something like the AUR
| is a moot point IMO.
| bdavbdav wrote:
| Having used Arch heavily in the past, "better things to do" is
| heavily at odds with "using arch"
| imdoor wrote:
| Doesn't match my experience at all. I love that packages are
| always up to date. Also, in my experience, having a rolling
| release cycle leads to significantly fewer issues than having
| to upgrade everything at once. Using Arch has been a net time
| saver for me compared to something like Ubuntu where I've
| wasted a lot of time fighting package upgrade issues and
| trying to get newer package versions than the distro
| provides.
| jwells89 wrote:
| In my limited experience, how Arch works out depends on how
| you're using Linux. If it's your daily driver and you stay
| on top of updates it's probably going to be fine, but on
| the other hand if it's a secondary OS on a multiboot system
| or a VM or something that only gets updated occasionally,
| chances of things breaking are much higher and something
| like Fedora might make more sense.
| imdoor wrote:
| There would definitely be issues with the keyring being
| outdated which you have to know/search how to work
| around. And from time to time Arch also requires some
| manual interventions in the package update process (that
| are posted on archlinux.org) - you'd have to deal with
| those all at once if Arch wouldn't have been updated for
| a very long time. But, other than that, I can't think of
| other reasons why having a less often used Arch
| installation would give you trouble.
|
| Then again, I haven't used Arch in such a manner, so you
| might as well be right.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| I use arch and update sporadically and this hasn't really
| failed me: sudo pacman -Sy archlinux-
| keyring && sudo pacman -Syu
|
| There were two times something went wrong:
|
| - when Arch moved plymouth to their main repos
|
| - when switching from a 1070 to a 4070 I needed to
| recompile my nvidia drivers
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| I dug some old computers out of the attic recently. The
| one that had not been updated since 2021 only took around
| half an hour to get up to speed, and that was with a
| metric ton of packages installed.
|
| The other one seemed to have been updated last time in
| 2015. It didn't even have updated certificates for https,
| so it couldn't sync the keyring. After trying for a while
| I just gave up and reinstalled Arch from a USB stick.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| good on you (or anyone) having a clean and efficient
| process on Arch - but really, this is not the same YMMV for
| everyone with all software stacks. can someone whose entire
| worklife came to a halt gradually over weeks on Arch,
| please add here?
| kaba0 wrote:
| These two are not the only two options: the nix model is
| clearly superior and is not as error prone as each.
| imdoor wrote:
| I use Nix on an ARM single-board computer to host a
| personal Matrix homeserver (and a bunch of bridges), and
| I absolutely love it. It's invaluable to have a
| reproducible specification of the whole system, including
| custom software to build, in a single place.
|
| That being said, for day to day stuff Arch (and Nix
| standalone) works well enough for me, to be weary of
| switching my daily driver PC to Nix, out of the fear of
| dealing with unforeseen issues and maybe encountering
| less well maintained packages (there's always something
| broken on Nix unstable, but maybe it's not an issue for
| more popular stuff). So I'm sticking to Arch for non-
| servers for now.
| starlevel003 wrote:
| nix is so clearly superior and yet nobody uses it.
| curious!
| petemir wrote:
| I think that the learning curve for the nix ecosystem is
| a lot steeper compared to other distros.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Well, arch is no ubuntu either.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Sometimes the better solution takes time to reach the
| masses.
|
| Here we talk about a tiny percent of the tiny 3% of
| desktop users.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > nix is so clearly superior and yet nobody uses it.
| curious!
|
| If you're going to be snide, you should at least be
| correct - or are the 6300 users in the main matrix chat
| room just hanging out for fun?
|
| (sent from my nixos daily driver)
| coldtea wrote:
| It's not like 6300 is anything but statistical noise
| compared to the number of Linux users out there.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| The number of Arch Linux users is nothing but statistical
| noise compared to the number of Windows users; would you
| say that nobody uses Arch?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| As far as I'm concerned, "better things to do" is heavily at
| odds with "using Linux".
|
| Seriously, I spend more time when using Linux trying to get
| the computer to work instead of actually doing anything on
| it.
| totallywrong wrote:
| I love Arch, don't even know how many years I used it. But
| Fedora really is more polished, if only because it's the
| distribution with more paid contributors, by far. I suggest you
| give it a go. Also, in practical terms, Fedora has better ARM
| support.
| rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote:
| >my peripheral devices work
|
| I would live a little more detail on this.
| pacifika wrote:
| Also which year of Mac Studio are we talking about here.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| The answer you seek is in the output of neofetch in the
| screenshot ;-)
| jasoneckert wrote:
| I use a Lenovo TrackPoint II Bluetooth keyboard and Logitech MX
| Master 3 Bluetooth mouse, as well as a massive Bose sound
| system.
| extr wrote:
| What's the status of sleep mode/battery life/trackpad feel on
| Asahi at this point? Last time I tried it those were the biggest
| blockers.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| You can find all that information here:
| https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
|
| I will say the the battery life on my Mac Studio sucks - as
| soon as I unplug it from power, it turns off.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It doesn't really say if the trackpad works properly there
| and I didn't see anything about battery life.
|
| Frankly I find this statement from the blog post _extremely_
| hard to believe:
|
| > All the hardware works
|
| Really? The webcam? Touchpad gestures? Fingerprint reader?
| Bluetooth? Thunderbolt?
| jasoneckert wrote:
| I'm using a Mac Studio... and yes, all the hardware works
| (10G Ethernet, Bluetooth, WiFi, HDMI, USB, sound, etc.)
|
| Battery life on the Mac Studio sucks though ;-)
| slekker wrote:
| Does the Mac Studio have an internal battery?
| wtallis wrote:
| A coin cell, presumably for the clock and not much else:
| https://youtu.be/TYF527DqnwY?t=139
| jasoneckert wrote:
| To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: "No."
| airstrike wrote:
| bahaha that's hilarious, thanks for sharing
| veave wrote:
| I checked: that particular line really says "no"
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(page generated 2023-08-12 23:00 UTC)