[HN Gopher] Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now?
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Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now?
Author : sys_64738
Score : 61 points
Date : 2023-09-16 20:40 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| djhope99 wrote:
| I run Asahi Linux on my M2 MacBook, initially I was quite
| impressed but agree with other comments here that development
| seems to have stalled. Nothing really impacting my daily life has
| changed for 6-12 months. I don't use it as my main os but I
| occasionally boot into it, update it and see if anything has
| changed.
|
| Lack of external monitor support and built in speaker support are
| by far the most needed features imo.
| chaxor wrote:
| The battery life (i.e. the backlight being either ON or OFF,
| without anything in between) is one of the biggest points that
| hinder moving to asahi for me.
|
| Every time I open it up to try it out again, it's so bright that
| I try to reduce the brightness, which turns off the screen
| _completely_ , which then has to be fixed by _imagining_ what the
| screen state is and using hotkeys and typing out commands to get
| it back to full on blasting the sun out from the screen.
|
| The selling point for this when usable IMO is having a laptop
| that will last 4x the (already insane) battery lifetime of macos,
| by having just a basic terminal and no default background
| processes that macos has.
| bestouff wrote:
| I got my MacBook Pro M1 exactly 1 year ago. At the time I thought
| the Linux state was incredible - so much things were usable, the
| remaining missing bits would be quick to come. Fast forward to
| now. From a pure user point of view nothing has changed. No
| sound/webcam/microphone, no hdmi, no thunderbolt, battery
| draining when running and on suspend, wifi/bluetooth need a
| periodic reboot, etc. Only a (quite good) 3D driver has been
| added. I wouldn't do it again.
| prmoustache wrote:
| As a linux user why would you buy hardware from a company that
| do not provide any modicum of support for it?
| jwells89 wrote:
| There's very little comparable in the non-Mac world when it
| comes to battery life, no performance penalty for not being
| tethered, and heat/fan noise, mainly.
|
| I've looked. There's a couple that are kinda in the same
| realm if you squint but come with tradeoffs like having to
| keep the CPU throttled to get anywhere near the advertised
| battery life.
| Asdrubalini wrote:
| Because the hardware is really good. Better than any other
| hardware you can find (especially for a performance/watt
| standpoint, which for a laptop is somewhat important).
| Touchpad and keyboard are also top tier, screen is really
| nice, speakers are good and I ran out of adjectives.
| OJFord wrote:
| I am a Linux user and not a MacBook owner, but I do really
| like (having used it myself in the past - 2013 Air, 2016 MBP
| - and seen others' recent stuff) Mac hardware. If my
| preferred Linux distro (Arch btw) just worked out of the box
| on Macs I would love one (though I do have a Framework now
| and the repairability etc. certainly would make me
| reluctant).
|
| Also though, I have a Windows desktop pretty much just for
| Fusion 360. I really dislike Windows, macOS as a BSD
| derivative is obviously a bit more
| comfortable/familiar/usable, I would love to (legitimately)
| dual-boot macOS and Linux, the former to allow me to run
| software that's not available on the latter. WINE (even with
| Lutris etc. recent work) is too fragile and difficult to get
| working and _keep_ working.
| sneak wrote:
| To not end up with a PC laptop, the likes of which haven't
| been meaningfully redesigned save for spec bumps for 15
| years.
|
| Trackpad, speakers, case, thermals, cpu - the lowest end MBA
| blows the highest end "ultrabook" out of the water.
| evolve2k wrote:
| This project seems to be progressing the audio, activity from
| last month.
|
| https://github.com/chadmed/asahi-audio
| extr wrote:
| Yeah, I think people were overly optimistic given the initial
| progress. The Asahi team has done incredible work to be sure
| with just getting it running and the GPU driver. But there is a
| long tail of things to fix to make it truly usable as a daily
| driver.
|
| For me personally, I thought the project was awesome, installed
| it, booted it, and realized the trackpad felt really janky. I
| start playing with the acceleration settings and then caught
| myself and remembered that not having to deal with that exact
| thing was why I bought a Mac to begin with.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| One major problem is in the fact that Hector/Asahi has very
| little experience with distribution maintenance, and is
| mainly suited to the role of reverse engineering the M1 chip
| and implementing the driver. It would be far better if he put
| all of his focus into the M1 driver itself and let others
| handle the surrounding distro variants. In fact this recently
| came up when he misconfigured GRUB during updates and soft-
| locked Macs until they ran a list of sudo commands to fix the
| error.
| NoahKAndrews wrote:
| That's the whole point of their new partnership with Fedora
| mort96 wrote:
| To their credit, this is a more challenging than your
| standard Linux distro. Lots of software just has a bunch of
| subtle bugs on arm which don't exist on x86_64. Other
| software has a bunch of subtle bugs on 16k page sizes.
| Those problems aren't ones you'll face as a distro
| maintainer for some x86_64 Linux distro. Then there's the
| issue that Arch Linux ARM is itself not always super
| competently managed, so it's not a solid foundation to
| build on top of.
|
| I think it'll be very good for them to leave all the distro
| responsibilities to Fedora and focus on the hardware
| specific stuff. But I don't think they'll stop facing weird
| issues related to not being part of the 4k page size x86_64
| monoculture.
| pleb_nz wrote:
| Those are all fairly critical things for me. Thanks for the
| comment.
| dylan604 wrote:
| does the original Apple recovery partition remain so that you
| could return it back to the original OS if one was to try this
| but prefer to go back?
| wtallis wrote:
| If you have access to a second Mac, you can restore macOS
| even after a complete disk wipe, no recovery partition
| needed:
|
| > Will this break my machine? How safe is it?
|
| [...]
|
| > Apple Silicon machines are almost completely unbrickable:
| you can boot them in a special burned-in recovery mode and
| recover them, using another machine connected via a USB
| cable. For those who don't have another macOS machine to act
| as a host, we have open source tools that work on Windows and
| Linux too.
|
| https://asahilinux.org/2022/03/asahi-linux-alpha-release/
|
| https://support.apple.com/guide/apple-configurator-
| mac/reviv...
| [deleted]
| rowanG077 wrote:
| You can just run OSX beside Asahi. You don't need to
| uninstall OSX if you don't want to.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| This is my feeling as well. I guess that's just the way it goes
| once low-hanging fruit has been picked. But I would at the very
| least have expected one of: External displays, audio or stable
| bluetooth/WiFi.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| And Apple is always releasing a moving target. This was the
| same case even back when they were running on PC architecture
| with Intel hardware.
| [deleted]
| baz00 wrote:
| While I appreciate the efforts here which will no doubt extend
| the life of some of this hardware, I will never use Linux on my
| M1 Pro MBP if I'm honest. I'm not really a big fan of macOS from
| a development perspective. But honestly the whole system
| integration thing is where it wins over everything else and that
| will never be replicated by Linux based on the last 20 years of
| experience. It'll be persistent problems and regressions. I don't
| have the time, energy or motivation left in me to deal with that
| sort of stuff now. It only ever gets to 80% done. The last 20% is
| too hard for people to nail down.
|
| My supposed freedom I trade for friction. I'm not sure that's a
| freedom I want really.
|
| Again though I appreciate the efforts and the skills of the
| engineers working on this project.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| One thing I was curious about but couldn't work out from reading
| online is whether hardware-assisted tracing is supported. (see
| https://www.linaro.org/blog/coresight-perf-and-the-opencsd-l...
| or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm2ZXIB18PQ for descriptions.
| This uses the ARM CoreSight/Embedded Trace Macrocells feature.
| The Intel equivalent is something called Intel Processor Trace.
| MacOS doesn't seem to expose this tracing functionality in the
| way that perf on linux may, and the publically released Darwin
| source code seems to barely mention it). Has anyone here
| installed Linux on an M1/2 computer and checked if the hwtracing
| support works?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| This is a well done video but doesn't bring any new info if you
| have already been paying attention. That's ok, but also has all
| the annoyances of youtube, poor information density with semi-
| frequent "hit like/check out my sponsor."
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(page generated 2023-09-16 23:00 UTC)