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.
Keep in mind that asahi cut out X11 support and went straight for wayland. It can support xwayland, just know that some things may or may not play nicely if the software doesn’t support wayland. As Wayland is the future of compositors, most popular Linux software should support it eventually.
Linux on arm is good, however as it is not nearly as popular in the desktop space as x86, common binaries for certain applications may not exist on arm if it closed source. You may or may not need those, you can make that judgement call.
Battery life is better than I expected but still not nearly as good as Macos. At least until they can come up with a proper solution for low power usage. Which currently a logistical problem of making something Linux kernel upstream compatible instead of applying a functional dirty solution now.
Linux on M1 is noticeably snappier than anything else I have ever used. It has a great future ahead of it. If your workloads don’t rely on heavy gpu usage and all your software can be found or compiled there. It is a pleasant experience. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask. I think some of the other users talked about the common things well enough.
Also yes, dual booting is currently the only supported option. They still need macos for firmware upgrades.
fwiw I’ve been on Wayland for a few years now and the amount of times I’ve had to think “oh, I’m on Wayland” are in the single digits. not to pretend it you don’t run into things you have to solve or alternatives you have to find, you definitely do, but I’ve been very happy especially over the last year or so.
I do not use asahi though so I can’t comment on that specifically.
I am new to Wayland, but on asahi it is mandatory. So I am having to get used to it. Which is more noticeable as I had to change from i3 to sway. They are functionally identical but different in how you configure it with the wayland compositor.
yes, I’m using sway as well. i was lucky that my old i3 config mostly worked without modification, although it took a while to find good replacements for many of the little apps I’d come to rely on. I settled on bemenu, waybar, and then a dozen little glue apps like clipboard managers eventually fell into place. the archlinux wiki pages on sway and wayland are a great resource.
That firmware part isn’t new. Back in the day when we were dual-booting Linux on PowerPC Macs, macOS was still needed for firmware updates.