Was looking at getting a macbook air with an m1 chip in it and running Asahi Linux on it. My question is how viable is it for daily life? E.g. browsing, torrenting, uni notes ect. Would it be equivalent to a regular x86 laptop running Linux? Or would I be missing useful features?
Edit: Another question is how it holds up against newer AMD laptops, as it is 3-4 years old at this point.
No one should buy a laptop with every single fucking component soldered on. Fuck Apple and every company that does what they do. Get yourself a Framework laptop or one from an actual Linux vendor like System76, Tuxedo, Starlabs…etc. That way you’re able to upgrade your shit down the road when you need to. Apple shit is you get what you get.
While I generally agree, the OP is asking about an M1, so they’re probably considering a used laptop. No profits to Apple, and better for the environment.
Of course apple profita from used laptops. If noone buys used apple laptops some of those who are replacing cannot afford the new one and there is a crowding out effect. Moreover, the higher the demand for other vendors, the higher the support for them.
Don’t ever buy apple devices. It’s not a good company
I do not like Apple as a company and would never buy direct. This one is second-hand and much cheaper than a framework. I would definitely buy a framework if that was an option.
Understandable. You can still find other laptops second hand and cheaper, that are upgradable. I think the market of used windows laptops is even bigger than the apple one. At the end of the day, it’s your money. Do what you please pf course :)
You’d be making a few concessions, specifically Microphone, and HDMI
outin: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/M1-Series-Feature-SupportThat being said, those wouldn’t deter me personally, especially if I got a good deal on one.
Do not buy an M-series mac just for asahi linux. It’s a cool project. It is not daily driveable (yet). However, for using it as a regular laptop with MacOS… Agh, I’m gonna get hate for this, but it’s amazing. I’m a firm believer that you cannot get a better laptop experience than this. Great battery life, great performance, great screen, great touchpad. And as for MacOS, it’s like worse GNOME with KDE settings, really nothing to write home about. Install homebrew and it functions like you’re used to with linux distros…
Ik apple bad and all, but the way I see it, they are just as bad as other manufacturers like DELL, just that their products are actually good while they work…
As for the actual performance, it completely obliterates X86 counterparts around it’s price range, unless you need to game or do graphically intensive stuff.
While I’m definitely on the same page as you with regards to performance, battery, and a great touchpad, I do think that given we are on Lemmy and a lot of us are what you would call “power-users”, it is worth pointing out that MacOS is terrible to navigate with the keyboard.
As a small example (amongst many others), Macbooks do not come with dedicated home, page up, page down, end keys, and I’ve been using my wife’s M2 Macbook Air for quite a while (over a year), and STILL feel as though I can’t get the same snappy behaviour I can by using a keyboard for most of my navigation.
Once again, of course if people tend to navigate the OS using the touchpad this isn’t as much of a problem, but for folks who swear by the keyboard, you do feel it.
I’m hoping that the second iteration of the snapdragon x elites will be good enough to replace the Macbooks for what I do.
Mac comes built in with those shortcuts just by holding command. Command left and right is home and end. Command up and down is page up page down.
And yeah there are definitely some holes? But Karabiner-Elements closes them up better than anything on windows does.
For navigation by keyboard you need to turn off a bunch of the animations and it’s very very snappy. I use Hammerspoon and can jump between apps faster than on Linux and windows.
I am aware that command left and command right is home and end. However, I still prefer to use shift + end to highlight from my cursor to the end of the line as opposed to shift + command + right. There’s also switching between tabs, it’s a similar thing, 3 keys instead of 2.
However, the most important part of this is I cannot even have ALT+Q behave as ALT+F4. I cannot have F11 act as fullscreen EVERYWHERE.
“Global” mappings are the biggest issue for me, but I do strongly prefer having dedicated home, page up, page down, end keys.
Currently typing this on a Microsoft Surface without dedicated home, page up, page down and end keys, and I am heavily noticing the difference, despite using fn + down to behave as page down.
Yeah, I swear by touchpad navigation, so the lack of PgUp, PgDown or the as described by you - terrible keyboard navigation doesn’t really bother me.
I was hoping that the snapdragon X Elite laptops were gonna be as good as advertised, but alas, they are not.
It helps that Apple makes the best touchpads out there, and they are integrated into the OS really well. The haptics are almost magic.
My other laptop is a crappy 13 inch Dell with a spongy touchpad with uneven feedback and it makes me want to throw it into the wall.
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the whole apple-bad thing aside, you’re getting a non-expandable 8 GB laptop, of which a significant portion goes to graphics. that’s pretty low today, and it’s gonna be worse down the road. speaking of graphics, although Asahi has basic functionality, the driver isn’t 100% yet.
I hope you don’t plan on torrenting a buncha stuff, as the SSD is small and non-replaceable and after years of use has an insane TBW number.
the battery longevity is a solid argument but you are buying a 4 year old battery that will show signs of aging.
I am all for repurpose/reuse/recycle, but unless you get it for free, or close to it, this thing s a bad idea. get a similarly aged business-class laptop (thinkpad,
yoga, latitude, elitebook, etc.) that you can cram full of RAM and storage and replace practically every component if it fails.I would not even consider it if it was 8GB, but this one is 16GB with 512gb of storage. It is a decent deal for what it is, and I’ve been looking for a decently powerful arm machine for awhile.
that’s radically different. although the serviceability is still nonexistent, that’s a very useable machine. just be prepared to toss the thing if anything breaks.
for me, that would be a deal breaker but I understand the itch to try it out. just make sure it’s not icloud locked.
Well, when it comes to laptops these days lots of brands can practically only be serviced/repaired by bringing them back to the Apple Store/manufacturer’s repair shop. Especially when it comes to lightweight models.
I miss my old Sager/Clevo gaming laptop where I could replace practically everything, I even upgraded the gfx card.
Yeah, i am retiring my XPS 13 only due to it having 8GB of RAM. It is quite an old model with i7-8550U - the speed is still perfectly fine as my daily driver, but I filled the memory to the brim way too often.
If you decide to buy a MacBook (and from my recent experience with an M1 Pro I would advise against it) you should check in advance if all your daily software is available. Asahi itself is fairly stable and enjoyable to use, the software repo is still lacking in a lot of places though. As others have said, you’ll probably be better off financially and mentally with a decently specced used Thinkpad if Linux is your primary OS.
The m series really are a game changer for battery life and ease of use and weight. What the other person said about soldered on components is just completely ignoring the reality of the situation. There are plenty of arguments for and against soldered motherboards. Linus Tech Tips has a good video covering it.
The m1 isn’t as good as later chips, and the air really needs more oomph, but I literally run DaVinci Resolve, Lightroom Classic, and insta 360 studio on mine (mine is an M3) at the same time as I’ve got a thousand tabs in Firefox open and it can handle it just fine. Which is saying something as those are not lightweight programs.
I can’t compare it to an m1 air, but my dad has an m1 air and he’s never complained about it. He’s using it for just normal stuff though. Doc editing, web browsing, watching YouTube.
How much ram? I can’t imagine the 8gb model
16gb. It definitely would not be able to do all of that with only 8, but it would still be very capable.
I have a 24GB M2 and the thing dances around anything I throw at it. I’m typing on it right now with Onshape in a few tabs, orcaSlicer in a few windows, work in a few chrome tabs, a few iterm sessions, and a million other little apps in the background with very little hickups.
It’s not great. I have one, and I am able to use it, but there are some issues. Battery life is the main one. It will probably get 6 hours or so of active use, but they don’t have good idle power management, so you don’t get much more by turning it off.
Their performance isn’t bad. It wasn’t ever all that great though. It was mainly ppw that people liked, and you wouldn’t really get that benefit with asahi because of the previously mentioned power management issues. Newer AMD laptops will absolutely outperform it.
Another issue that you didn’t ask about, but I feel is worth mentioning: apple’s build quality is bad. On mine, the display flashes pink sometimes. It did this before I ever put asahi on it. There are many reports of other users with the same issue. When I fist noticed it, it only happened once a month or so. Now I notice it 5-10 times a day, and I don’t use it that much (maybe an hour or so a day).
Also, according to Louis Rossmann, there is a data line next to a power line on the motherboard that can easily be shorted out in humidity. He has pointed out many design issues, and usually they persist for quite some time before apple does anything, if they ever do.
I know I am coming across as very biased against apple, but keep in mind that I bought one. I thought that M1 was a large step forward in the quality of their products, and thought it was worth it to get one. I was wrong.
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You’ll need some active cooling if you’re gonna compile some code, so aim at pro 13, same size but without throttling in heavy tasks
Dual boot install first and make sure it’s working good for your needs. Power management and mic in asahi isn’t there.
The computer will be pretty good under asahi and blow everything else out of the water under macOS.
If you don’t already know it, go ahead and learn macOS.
If you’re worried about the ssd being slow, make an install medium and flatten and reinstall macOS with after filling the ssd with bits from dev/random.
Microphone doesn’t work yet, if you’re doing lots of facebook calls, it won’t work.
Not M1 but I tried installing Mint in my touch bar 2021 MBP and zero components worked. No track pad, no keyboard, wifi, Bluetooth etc.
Apple doesn’t provide the drivers.
While that is likely true, Asahi is a bespoke Linux distribution for Apple hardware. It’s what it was made for. At this point most of the stuff in the M1 is working fine on Asahi, as far as I’ve read. They even got 3D graphics working recently.
Oh right on! Maybe I’ll try that then, that MBP is collecting dust so I’d love to put it to good use. Thanks for the info.
Ah sorry I misinterpreted your comment. I see it’s specifically for Silicon Macs. Mine’s Intel :( I got too excited.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Apple https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mac/Troubleshooting https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mac Here you go homie, for your first time use not arch but arch based distro with gui preinstalled
