Asahi Linux to become a Fedora remix

Posted Aug 3, 2023 15:40 UTC (Thu) by jzb (editor, #7867)
In reply to: Asahi Linux to become a Fedora remix by mps
Parent article: Asahi Linux to become a Fedora remix

How is the experience so far?

Asahi Linux to become a Fedora remix

Posted Aug 3, 2023 16:49 UTC (Thu) by mps (guest, #32594) [Link] (7 responses)

For me very fine. I start to use it nearly two years ago (November 2021) as daily driver workstation for user tasks and for development and didn't went back to anything else. (Actually I bought M1 with intention to install linux from the day one).
Before that I used mostly arm64 chromebooks 'converted' to boot linux natively (removed chromes) and I switched to M1 by simply copying my Alpine aarch64 root and home FS from chromebook to M1 macbook and added asahi kernel. All worked faster except chromium (but I don't use it much, just for some tests) but also it is fixed.
Even with simpledrm driver it was very fast playing videos, browsing net with firefox. Compiling is about 10 times faster than on arm64 chromebooks.
And when GPU driver is added interactive response is very good.
Yes, still some things doesn't works but I'm very satisfied (though I don't like apple machines much, this is first one I use daily).
Somewhere around beginning of 2022 year I wrote small guide how to install Alpine linux on M1,
it is here: https://arvanta.net/alpine/install-alpine-m1/

Asahi Linux to become a Fedora remix

Posted Aug 3, 2023 17:34 UTC (Thu) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (6 responses)

Thanks so much for the detailed response! As used Apple Silicon machines start popping up I might pick one up for Linux.

Asahi Linux to become a Fedora remix

Posted Aug 4, 2023 5:08 UTC (Fri) by theobald (subscriber, #105387) [Link] (5 responses)

I worked daily on an M1 with OSX for more than a year and where not very happy. Not with the os nor with the the hardware.
What are the reasons to run a linux desktop on M1 instead of any of the other laptop vendors?

Asahi Linux to become a Fedora remix

Posted Aug 4, 2023 7:18 UTC (Fri) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

Because the performance to battery life ratio is the best on the market for anything with reasonable performance?

Asahi Linux to become a Fedora remix

Posted Aug 4, 2023 13:25 UTC (Fri) by mps (guest, #32594) [Link]

Main reason I decided to buy M1 macbook is very good display, which is most important 'feature' for me because I usually 'look' at it around 12 hours daily( sometimes even 14-16 hours) to save eyes. After more than 30 years work on computers I still don't need glasses and one of reasons could be that I always carefully buy monitors and/or laptops with good quality displays.
Besides that I knew for long that apple produce good hardware but I never wanted to buy anything from them because their products too much closed, but changed mind two years ago and bought M1. And their OS is not something I would use and never used it.
Probably will not buy anything from them in future, living in hope that we will have options to buy good RISCV laptop/notebook with good display

Asahi Linux to become a Fedora remix

Posted Aug 4, 2023 12:48 UTC (Fri) by cmm (guest, #81305) [Link] (2 responses)

There are reports (which I'm sure are wildly exaggerated) that you can use a modern Apple laptop for computationally-intensive tasks while it is on top of your actual lap.

Asahi Linux to become a Fedora remix

Posted Aug 4, 2023 16:23 UTC (Fri) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] (1 responses)

I think that's an accurate summary of the same 'big data' programs (conda, JupyterLab, Pandas, Seaborn, MatPlotLib, Python) running on my XPS13 (with Fedora) and my son's Macbook Air M1 (with MacOS, all programs compiled for Apple Silicon) about a year ago. It was a weird physical experience as the XPS13 fan noise was an indication that some work was going on, whereas the Air just sat there silently for ten minutes (some minutes less than the XPS13).

Both laptops shipped with power supplies which were too small to run the system at full rate and simultaneously charge the battery. So if you do have 'big data' tasks you occasionally want to run overnight on the same thin laptop you are taking to university tomorrow, then it is time for a heftier power brick (for the Air M1, a 96W supply is enough to service the peak requirements of the laptop).

Asahi Linux to become a Fedora remix

Posted Aug 5, 2023 7:33 UTC (Sat) by cmm (guest, #81305) [Link]

I was rather referring to the rumor that an M1/M2 won't fry your balls for the sin of actually making some use of the CPU cores while keeping laptop on top of lap. If true, that would be a big difference in user experience, compared to the Thinkpads and Latitudes out there.