Asahi Linux - serious alternative for macOS M-machines very soon

Off-Topic
1

This is interesting, there was a speech at CCC a week ago or so, that one of the main devs of asahi linux is about to add USB4/thunderbolt support, for M1/M2 series, and soon also M3/M4. Then it’s almost feature complete support (maybe except some coprocessors like AIAIAIAI or video encoding). It’s a real OS alternative then, if macOS will be soon completely messed up by Apple, adding nonsense AI bloatware, killing RAM, SSD and CPU for this bs. And it already performs better in some tests. Might be great for development. I will consider switching.

Just very sad again how Apple does not provide any hardware information or base drivers at all. Typical Apple stupidity, since you can’t make a lot of profit in a short time with a free OS. What a shortsighted perspective. But this seems to be a general problem these days, big corp decisions are made by not very smart and very greedy people.

3

I am actually testing Asahi Remix (44 now) with KDE Fedora on a used M1 Pro Macbook Pro 14 that I’ve bought for around 600 Euro.

So I now can tell about real life experience: First of all, Fedora KDE is a so much better desktop environment than macOS in many regards, you can configure every detail, so nice. No waste of pixels, nonsense-sized window bars, butter smooth 120Hz all the time on the internal screen (macOS only gives you adaptive framerate), HDR brightness all the time, much finer light controls…. Of course much much better than Windows, too.

It almost is good, but it still hasn’t proper power management support yet, because this is all closed source and very complicated. This might be better with the upcoming Remix 45, which also will include the v7 Linux kernel. In the end, you only get nearly-as-it-should performance and framerates, if you set power management to “desktop/full throttle”, but then it will clearly suck out all live of the battery quickly. Even with “medium” energy settings, Firefox animations and scrolling will already are stuttering - not because GPU is on the limit, but because power management is affecting the system in a wrong way. I’ve sent some reports, I hope those were comprehensible. Those hardcore nerds of the asahi crew won’t look at a constant framerate as their first goal certainly, or might not even realize that there is a problem.

Regarding audio, it runs Renoise, however configuring the system so it provides a low latency driver wasn’t that easy, because Asahi uses a very specific way to handle audio currently. So they use a software layer scrupt to control the speakers volume. If you mess with the config, it can result in maximum possible volume/lost volume control, which - stupid enough from Apple side - will completely destroy the internal speaker.

So I would conclude, if your M1/M1Pro/M2/M2Pro machine is a desktop machine anyway, or it is a MacMini M1x/M2x, then yes you can install Asahi, even for web dev, graphics and/or animation, and Renoise. However you should keep macOS, since some aspects are still not at all supported, e.g. the video exporter, AI part etc. Nothing can beat the speed of Final Cut Pro for example.

You also still can’t install Asahi onto an external drive, because after sleepmode, the USB tree has to be conpletely renumberated for some reason, which can then change the drive path of external USB drives, resulting in a lost main volume.

So I would leave a minimalistic macOS installation, and use all the rest of space for asahi. And then also install a proper macOS installation onto an external thunderbolt drive.