Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How Good Is Asahi Now? (2024)

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.

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.

It’s a shame they we can’t buy better hardware for Linux. Lenovo seemed good but I’m not so sure the quality is there anymore.

It makes me consider a Mac again but I just love Linux too much.

The ThinkPad X1 line is of great quality. I've been using it with Linux for the past 8 years and never really had any issues.

Unlike Apple, Lenovo also has very cheap quality laptops, so when you hear people say that their Lenovo laptop is bad, make sure to figure out which one.

I bought a Lenovo Ideapad Pro 5, 7840HS.

First order, it had coil whine, rattling touchpad and a corrupted edid.

Second order, it also had coil whine, rattling and non-working touchpad.

I'm truly puzzled.

Dell sales ubuntu preinstalled on some of their laptops. I have used Inspiron and Latitude for a decade without any issues.

Meanwhile my macbook pro had decided not to boot anymore third time. It will go to dust bin now.

My Lenovos have been fairly good, better than the Dells or HPs I've had to use.

What about Framework?

I’m not in the USA, so warranty on these alternate brands is a nightmare.

My Lenovo is ok, but I don’t see it continuing forever. I’d say they’re riding on the fact they were part of IBM.

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.

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.

Please don't post in the flamewar style. We want curious conversation here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> especially for a performance/watt standpoint, which for a laptop is somewhat important

I think it is more important to have a working OS with common functionalities working.

Sure I'd love my thinkpad to have 15hours of battery life. But then I am not living in a tent either so I'd rather be able to use the onboard webcam, plug an external monitor, sound working without having to plug an external card and stable wifi. And I'd throw a 500gr powerbank in the backpack the handful of times I really need longer battery life.

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.

The MBA is the best in performance per watt but there are better ultrabooks if you ignore the energy consumption.

> the lowest end MBA blows the highest end "ultrabook" out of the water

That's untrue

And remember the screen cracks?

https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/30/m1-macbook-screen-cracks/

Portable doesn't necessarily mean it needs to last as long as it takes you to hike accross a continent.

I use a laptop because I can move it from one room to another without shutting it down. While it would be nice to not have to plug it more than once a day, I'm fine with a 4-5hours autonomy.

But having more battery life definitely do not beat having functionalities such as external monitor, working internal webcam and sound.

> thermals

Apple has been consistently terrible at cooling design, the only reason m1/m2 systems don't have thermal issues is because they sidestepped the problem entirely by building a very thermally efficient chip.

Not having the problem in the first place is the best way to solve it. We are discussing finished products. My M2 air lasts a million hours and doesn't get hot. My XPS lasts 4 or 5 and burns the top of my legs.

I'm not sure yours is the criticism you think it is.

Ultimately, heat is waste, and the less of it you generate, the better. When I said "thermals" I meant chip design, not cooling system design. This is obviously one of the huge benefits of their vertical integration.

Actually Apples cooking has been pretty rock solid. What let apple down was Intel.

Intels mobile CPUs have been, and still are absolute trash.

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.

I’ve read that battery life for Linux on M-series is still a good deal better than on quite a few other laptops despite it being non-optimal.

There are also those using macOS on their MacBooks until Linux gets good enough to daily drive.

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.

In laptops, Dell has been officially making Linux compatible models for years.

There are also smaller, specialist manufacturers that do Linux laptops. System76 is one that springs to mind, though other people have mentioned various others before.

specific models? yes.

in general? no.

hell, there are more models of laptop made by the linux-only laptop manufacturers than officially supported by dell

The intel drivers are mostly written by intel engineers, same for AMD drivers.

I just checked on my works laptop, the only non intel component appearing via lspci is a realtek express card reader whose driver is copyrighted by Realtek Semiconductor Corp:https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/misc/c...

Have Apple engineers written a single line of code for linux drivers supporting apple silicium ?

Linux support by manufacturers, even when it exists doesn’t really exist so don’t overstate that.

How is ios related here? Should one settle for a worse laptop based on a completely different division of said company? OSX is reasonably open and you can mostly use it as a regular linux due to its UNIX-isms.

The question started with: "As a linux user"...

Linux doesn't seem like a nice to have for Linux users.

I've used linux for a decade now and still use it on my desktop. But it's not a strict requirement for me. On my laptop I just need something that has a super good battery life and is performant. And the macbook is so far ahead of the rest that it wins for me.

I didn't buy the macbook expecting to install linux on it, but if I can later, that's just an extra win.

> I didn't buy the macbook expecting to install linux on it, but if I can later, that's just an extra win.

Except that was exactly the point of the discussion. People who buy an Apple laptop with the expectation of having a perfectly functionnal linux on it.

This project seems to be progressing the audio, activity from last month.

https://github.com/chadmed/asahi-audio

Maybe I'm that lucky. Or maybe I do my homework before buying a computer for Linux.

I don't think a single laptop I owned (7+) ever booted Ubuntu without everything just working.

Sound, screen brightness, wifi, touchpad, sleep/suspend.

I did have problems with gentoo but those were evidently self-inflicted, and solvable by installing Ubuntu.

I have Asahi Fedora Remix, at M1 Air with USB-C adapter, that has connected:

- Power

- Ethernet

- USB-C adapter, that has wireless dongles for external mouse, keyboard and headset

With Chromium Snap and Chromecast, I cast fullscreen or browser tab to 43" LG LED TV. A little laggy, but better than no HDMI at all. Some wired remote desktop could be less laggy.

I like that M1 Air is silent and compiles fast.

I wouldn't say Apple is any less a moving target rather they've only released 2 generations of the M series so far. As an example it's looking like the 3rd generation will swap the GPU architecture you mentioned for something completely new.

Sure, there are plenty of things that don't change much, and that I2C driver is a good example, but that doesn't really mean the target as a whole is particularly stable it just means they don't feel the need to rewrite I2C every chip revision. Meanwhile many of the things churning on the x86 side, like memory encryption, don't really matter for projects like this.

That the first updated version didn't just boot automatically is 100% evidence it's more unstable than your typical system family. It partially comes down to Apple putting absolutely nothing into Linux, even Nvidia does better than that these days, but even then you can at least expect to boot year old Linux on a new PC even if it doesn't support the latest CPU scheduling optimizations for it or whatever.

I'm also not sure I'd even agree M2 is even at parity with M1 in Asahi yet, let alone the first week. They did get a lot of things working quickly but I think that's far overselling what happened.

> but even then you can at least expect to boot year old Linux on a new PC even if it doesn't support the latest CPU scheduling optimizations for it or whatever.

It's still extremely common that booting a year-old distro on brand new hardware leaves you with a blank screen due to missing GPU drivers, or leaves you with unaccelerated graphics on par with what Asahi currently offers by default. And it's hardly unheard of to have issues with power management and even audio with new x86 platforms in recent years. Going a bit further back, Intel has been known to break NVMe and not require OEMs to offer a BIOS option to put the chipset in the standards-compliant mode.

And yet if all that happened it would still be a better state than the M2 support in Asahi at launch. When the GPU acceleration doesn't work at least the display output can. When a certain chipset has an issue with NVMe at least you can still boot other ways than the internal NVMe drive.

When the M2 launched you couldn't boot the kernel. When you could boot the kernel you couldn't handle displays. When you could handle displays you couldn't connect to Wi-Fi. All this in the first minor update to the SoC, one where nothing major even changed yet. This is why, despite my love and regular use of Asahi, I'll never believe a claim new Apple systems are a remotely stable target. Certainly not more than x86, where I can boot a decade old distributor and still at least get video output.

You're not being particularly fair. You seem be be wanting to hold Asahi Linux to a standard of having day-1 support for all the critical subsystems of new Apple hardware, while excusing or ignoring all the historical instances of Linux not having usable support for corresponding components in the Wintel ecosystem by the time new hardware is in the hands of end users.

> When a certain chipset has an issue with NVMe at least you can still boot other ways than the internal NVMe drive.

A laptop that cannot boot off its internal storage is pretty much useless as a laptop. The theoretical capability to work around this with external USB storage is a pathetic workaround that does not strengthen your argument.

> When the GPU acceleration doesn't work at least the display output can.

Except when it doesn't. Sure, a sufficiently skilled user can usually figure out a working configuration, but let's not pretend like a black screen early in the boot process is unheard-of, and a showstopper for many users.

> Certainly not more than x86, where I can boot a decade old distributor and still at least get video output.

As long as your decade-old distro had UEFI support (which most did, by then). But otherwise, it is possible to run into issues with a BIOS CSM no longer being an option (eg. on the last three years of Intel integrated graphics).

And again, I'm not trying to say Apple's hardware platform is unusually stable and backwards-compatible. I'm trying to refute an unwarranted claim that after only two generations it's already proven significantly unstable—a claim you seem to agree with based on a selective memory of the history of Linux on x86. The conventional wisdom still is that running an x86 Linux distro older than your hardware is asking for trouble, especially for laptops. Hardware vendors in the x86 ecosystem ship breaking changes fairly often; only a few of them even try to get Linux driver support in place before the hardware launches, and those drivers still frequently miss the deadlines for making it into major distro releases prior to the hardware shipping.

I'm not trying to hold Asahi Linux to any standard - I'm trying to find a single standard in which Apple's platform could be viewed as generationally stable.

If we look at M1->M2:

- It doesn't have backwards compatibility even with the manufacturer's own OS. The gap here is 2 years yet I can get farther in support than that just booting a 10 year old stock installer on my 13900k system.

- You can't natively boot launch-day Linux at all, by any means or know-how.

- Getting the kernel to boot, display output is flat impossible. The keyboard and external input doesn't work. Hardly anything just works really.

- Once you get past those kinds of base things the Wi-Fi doesn't work, any type of backlight is not adjustable, the GPU doesn't work, the speakers don't work. Some of these do just need minor tweaks to make as functional as they were on the M1, others still aren't as functionally equal to this day. Anything that might sometimes be broken on x86 is broken but it's not "some new chipsets have broken that before" or "some basic users may get a black screen and get stuck not knowing what to do" they just plain do not work at all. To get it to do so again someone needs to do 100% of the programming work needed with zero no participation from the manufacturer.

Meanwhile the basis a traditional x86 system is supposed to be no different:

- When the many year old Linux release boots, non-advanced users can sometimes end up with a black screen and not know what to do

- Certain examples of chipsets have had broken day 0 support for one of their storage protocols

- Not every operating system from 10 years ago had native support for UEFI boot

- Despite booting, lease day versions of your Linux distro may not have e.g. working graphics hardware acceleration

Next to me I have my M2 running Asahi. It's been a little over a year since the release and it's still not up to support parity of my M1 at the time of launch. Next to me I've also got a few Intel and AMD boxes, they all boot many years old Linux with more working hardware than the M2 has in Asahi to this day.

I haven't been selective on the history of x86 support but even if I was to do so and intentionally only pick every bad thing that happened in a single generation x86 upgrade, over a 5x longer period than we're looking at Apple, and put it in context of a single release to compare to the M1->M2 transition... it would arguably still have been in better shape and, at worst, have been the same. From that I cannot conclude the new Apple hardware has shown itself to be any more stable a target, if anything it's looking even worse these days.

The other responses are answering everything but the actual question: You can NOT remove the recovery partition when installing Asahi. It's required to boot Asahi.

In regards to the comment about not needing to uninstall OSX (actually macOS 13 at this point) if you don't want to: you almost definitely do want a side-by-side install. macOS is the only way to get firmware updates right now and there are certain scenarios you could run into on the Asahi side that may require you to install macOS to be able to fix them. If you really really wanted, it is technically correct that you could uninstall the non-recovery macOS though.

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...

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.

I feel exactly the same way, sadly.

I sometimes sense in people a degree of enjoyment in the process of tinkering with Linux on a Mac (or any other hardware) to make it function properly. This mirrors the satisfaction programmers often find when grappling with a compiler or achieving the ideal abstraction. However, it seems that this sense of accomplishment, while valuable in its own right, shouldn't be derived from the tools I use for my primary tasks. I prefer my machine to just work, so I can focus on addressing higher-level, more significant challenges.

I say this as someone who would be absolutely delighted if a few distros just worked 100% seamlessly on an MBP or similar. That would be a dream honestly.

They will work. It will just take a while.

Someday, I will buy a used M2 MBP, run Linux on it, and it will be awesome.

That may be a few years from now though.

I think that's a little hopeful on the basis you can't really buy a used PC laptop and it'll be awesome. I've been trying to do that for 25 years and it has never been awesome. There was an inflection point around 2006 where a Linux desktop machine was usable and comparable to a windows or mac machine but they have since left it in the dust.

Linux didn't do a whole lot other than keep changing the UI and never finish it since 2006.

Have been doing the secondhand laptop+Linux for 15 years and I have never felt like I was missing out on OS features.

And while true circa 2006 (these Broadcom wifi cards...), I have not experienced compatibility/lack of drivers in ages.

I kind of did that with PowerBooks back in the days.

The hard truth was that used Thinkpads were a better option.

For the same price you could get 3 years old ThinkPads which were more powerful and in better condition than 6 years old PowerBooks.

But I did installed Gentoo on my PowerBooks G3 and G4 (it just took 2 days to compile Firefox). And ironically, this knowledge proved useful in my first job when I repurposed old IBM Power servers with it.

I see people complaining that not much has improved in the last 6-12 months with Asahi.

But isn’t this the normal pattern with software development …

That the last 10% of functionality takes 90% of the development time.