hi, I’ve been pretty happy with macOS recently on my m1 MacBook, really only because I’ve been paying for software from awesome devs who make great apps (plenty are open source, so most I use are not paid) and I’ve found my productivity increase like a lot.
It’s like I’m fighting less with the computer and the OS, and sorta working together with it. Since it’s a mac though it’s still a pain. When I install things with brew or software straight from the dev I need to do this dance to be able to use it (since it’s from an ‘unidentified’ developer).
I wanted to try out Asahi, I saw that there was a new version released recently, any folks here who daily drive it and could share their experience? This is currently my main machine so I’m a bit hesitant in swapping over (I guess I could dual boot?) and school is out atm so I have a bit of time to troubleshoot and feel comfortable in a new environment.
thanks in advance~
EDIT: I am mostly familiar with Debian/ubuntu, I run stuff headless and SSH into it, like at the moment I have a proxmox 8 server and some raspberry pi’s that I use to host stuff. I have a windows 11 pc which I use for playing some games and to run certain kinds of software.
Late to the party, but we’re talking long-term feedback, right? My point of comparison is a 2017 8th gen i5 dell 7385 with 8gb of ram, running Arch/Gnome.
I’m just out of a huge project involving Ardour, Audacity, kdenlive, Jack, Wireplumber and many gigs of media files on my 2023, brand new, M2 Pro, 16gb Ram 14inch mbp.
I installed Asahi Fedora Remix straight out of the box after updating the mac side (mandatory!). Install is indeed super-smooth. I choose to conform to defaults, and installed the KDE desktop variant ; as expected, I didn’t enjoy it and installed Gnome almost immediately. I’m a long time Gnome
userfanatic tbh.It Just Works, plain and simple.
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I was expecting to be blown away by the performance, but it just feels "normal’, launching Firefox or whatnot isn’t that different from Linux on an old i5. It is snappy, but it’s not like Linux doesn’t work very well on average hardware.
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Rendering video was admittedly faster, but I only worked on 1080p 45s to 4min stuff, so not a scientific measure here.
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Battery life is good while running the Ardour multitrack DAW for instance. I noticed on macos, gaming on steam, that I can drain it pretty fast if I just play obliviously in the middle of the day. So not a bad battery, really usable work hours out of it - within workloads limits.
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Sleep battery consumption is bad, about 50℅ a day. Better turn it off between things, and reboot.
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…Which is what I do to my other laptop, it being plagued by S3 sleep issues. But booting the i5 is fast, so it’s OK. Boot times of the mbp isn’t that fast tho, again I was expecting more from the hardware.
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Some software isn’t available on the Fedora repos or flatpak/flathub for the 64bits Arm architecture, but there’s much much that is available, including for me the latest wireplumber / jack stack which I do need IRL for work.
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You will have to learn Fedora’s dnf package manager tool, but it’s “the same” as anything .deb, or about.
So there are minor annoyances pertaining to my use case, but it is more than bearable. I’d never have bought such device without the Asahi project, it is a great daily driver to live (and puzzle coworkers) with.
Now, 3 fingers swipe up, and Spin The Cube, Dude!
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I don’t currently use it as a daily driver, but I tried. The basic, core experience is fine. Depending on what you need, it could be great. In the end I went back to using macOS (though I did ask myself what was working so well for me with GNOME that I wanted to try the experiment to begin with, and that has resulted in a leaner, simpler macOS setup).
The stoppers for me were webcam support (it kind of worked, but with bad image quality issues), and a number of Flatpaks quietly failing at launch. Non-stoppers but papercuts included that you can find ARM packages for some things but they’re direct downloads instead of dnf sources you can set up (e.g. 1Password, Sublime Text), and there are a few weird glitches with some fonts that work fine on x86 setups.
It’s trivial to set up dual-boot, and pretty easy to back out if it doesn’t work for you, provided you read a few paragraphs of documentation. I’ve done it twice on two different machines.
The Linux Experiment covered Asahi (I believe it was Debian) and he said he’ll review the Fedora’s version too. It was a month or two ago and there were some things still in the works. But as a Fedora user and it being Asahi’s flagship which has been fine tuned according to them, I’d bet Nick will post a video soon. If you’re an early adopter, I’d say give Fedora a go now, otherwise just wait for Nick to cover it in his usual detail on his channel. Nick’s the man and will cover it very well. This will probably be the best conformation unless an early adopteradopter or Dev can chime in here.
If you find that macOS and the software for it lead to good productivity, I’d advise against ditching it solely for having to allow unsigned applications to run. It’s a few clicks once per app.
I didn’t use Asahi myself. I’d imagine it works for quite a few people, but I personally wouldn’t use it as a daily driver, because the community support is much smaller compared to popular distributions. I’d get a non-Apple computer for using Linux. You could just try it out though, obviously.
I did dual boot and I can recommend trying it if u have the space. The way the boot menu on mac works, you won’t notice anything if you continue using macOS. Most of the hardware does work but there are some minor issues. By default I think it uses KDE which is fine but compared to windows or MacOS window manager it sometimes does funny stuff. At least on my system
