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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFx6R26aRHw

by sys_64738 • 3 years ago

153 115 3 years ago

bestouff• 3 years ago

I got my MacBook Pro M1 exactly 1 year ago. At the time I thought the Linux state was incredible - so much things were usable, the remaining missing bits would be quick to come. Fast forward to now. From a pure user point of view nothing has changed. No sound/webcam/microphone, no hdmi, no thunderbolt, battery draining when running and on suspend, wifi/bluetooth need a periodic reboot, etc. Only a (quite good) 3D driver has been added. I wouldn't do it again.

extr• 3 years ago

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.

tourmalinetaco2• 3 years ago

One major problem is in the fact that Hector/Asahi has very little experience with distribution maintenance, and is mainly suited to the role of reverse engineering the M1 chip and implementing the driver. It would be far better if he put all of his focus into the M1 driver itself and let others handle the surrounding distro variants. In fact this recently came up when he misconfigured GRUB during updates and soft-locked Macs until they ran a list of sudo commands to fix the error.

pleb_nz• 3 years ago

Those are all fairly critical things for me. Thanks for the comment.

dylan604• 3 years ago

does the original Apple recovery partition remain so that you could return it back to the original OS if one was to try this but prefer to go back?

rowanG0773• 3 years ago

You can just run OSX beside Asahi. You don't need to uninstall OSX if you don't want to.

wtallis5• 3 years ago

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...

zamadatix9• 3 years ago

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.

rowanG0773• 3 years ago

This is my feeling as well. I guess that's just the way it goes once low-hanging fruit has been picked. But I would at the very least have expected one of: External displays, audio or stable bluetooth/WiFi.

heavyset_go• 3 years ago

And Apple is always releasing a moving target. This was the same case even back when they were running on PC architecture with Intel hardware.

wtallis5• 3 years ago

I'm not sure the "moving target" argument holds up to much scrutiny. Asahi has been able to re-use the UART driver from the Samsung SoCs that went into the earliest iPhones, the I2C driver from PA Semi's PowerPC chips, and the GPU reverse engineering was greatly helped by the PowerVR heritage. There's clearly a fair bit of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" in Apple's hardware design strategy. Meanwhile, on the Wintel side the past ~decade has seen a complete overhaul in how systems sleep, and CPU features like TSX and SGX and MPX have come and gone, presenting OS developers with plenty of churn to deal with.

prmoustache5• 3 years ago

As a linux user why would you buy hardware from a company that do not provide any modicum of support for it?

OJFord• 3 years ago

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.

sneak2• 3 years ago

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.

jwells892• 3 years ago

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.

Asdrubalini• 3 years ago

Because the hardware is really good. Better than any other hardware you can find (especially for a performance/watt standpoint, which for a laptop is somewhat important). Touchpad and keyboard are also top tier, screen is really nice, speakers are good and I ran out of adjectives.

Wowfunhappy• 3 years ago

Hasn't "zero manufacturer support" been the normal state of Linux since forever? It's only recently that some level of official support has emerged in limited cases.

alphanullmeric• 3 years ago

Because absolutely nothing else is as good in all aspects. Not having a 100wh battery alone would disqualify the vast majority of other laptops.

Gigachad2• 3 years ago

Because I primarily care about having the best computer. And then Linux is a nice to have.

edwcross• 3 years ago

Because Framework does not work with resellers (so my company cannot buy it), Dell keeps doing stupid Linux-hostile things (like re-releasing accessory revisions that break Linux features), and Lenovo has no high-end laptops available (at least not on the business side). And because managers all love their Macs, they always find a way to get company policy to allow for them.

kaba07• 3 years ago

Which serious hardware company has any modicum of support for linux? It’s not like the thinkpad runs on 100% open hardware, most of that was reverse engineered the same way.

evolve2k• 3 years ago

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

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

nelox• 3 years ago

This is reminiscent of the state of Linux 20 years ago in the PC world.

beanjuiceII• 3 years ago

Honestly it's still the state of Linux today in the PC world for most people

xet7• 3 years ago

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.

mixmastamyk• 3 years ago

This is a well done video but doesn’t bring any new info if you have already been paying attention. That’s ok, but also has all the annoyances of youtube, poor information density with semi-frequent “hit like/check out my sponsor.”

djhope99• 3 years ago

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.

psanford• 3 years ago

Development hasn't stalled. There's a bunch of features that they have been making a lot of progress on. I'd expect to see quite a few of them before the end of the year.

kaba07• 3 years ago

Also, I guess it is an 80-20 thing - as they progress, a unit amount of change will be less user-noticeable.

chaxor• 3 years ago

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.

zamadatix9• 3 years ago

Adjustable brightness has been available for M1 devices for about a year now and I forget how long for M2. Before you go and install I'd wait for this Arch Linux ARM -> Fedora switch to finalize in the next couple of weeks though.

ranguna2• 3 years ago

I know fedora will inherit the kernel changes the Asahi team is doing, but will the Asahi team fully switch to fedora?

SamuelAdams• 3 years ago

You might need to use Ashai-edge to get the latest features. Backlight control is one of them.

baz002• 3 years ago

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.

xwowsersx• 3 years ago

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.

LeFantome• 3 years ago

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.

rcme• 3 years ago

I agree. There’s a certain freedom in the speakers working correctly, you know?

dan-robertson2• 3 years ago

One thing I was curious about but couldn’t work out from reading online is whether hardware-assisted tracing is supported. (see https://www.linaro.org/blog/coresight-perf-and-the-opencsd-l... or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm2ZXIB18PQ for descriptions. This uses the ARM CoreSight/Embedded Trace Macrocells feature. The Intel equivalent is something called Intel Processor Trace. MacOS doesn’t seem to expose this tracing functionality in the way that perf on linux may, and the publically released Darwin source code seems to barely mention it). Has anyone here installed Linux on an M1/2 computer and checked if the hwtracing support works?

zamadatix9• 3 years ago

If you know of a quick and easy way to test I'd be glad to report the result. I have an M2 running the Fedora version of Asahi.

dan-robertson2• 3 years ago

I realise now that I’m not sure the hwtracing stuff was upstreamed. But you could try poking around with some of the ls commands from the linked blog post above. If you’re feeling ambitious I guess you could try recreating the demo from the video (the blog post seems to be lacking an easy to copy perf record command).

tiffanyh• 3 years ago

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.

rawsta• 3 years ago

I had written a long text about this... But than i remembered it's about Mac... So my opinion is irrelevant as long it isnt positive...

POiNTx• 3 years ago

Anyone with a Macbook Air 15 inch M2 running asahi? What has your experience been like?

anArbitraryOne• 3 years ago

Made the mistake of installing this on my work computer because I find MacOS unusable for work tasks. A new bootloader password is set every time it boots into MacOS and connects to the internet, which I then have to ask my company for. Now I'm basically out half of the disk space and hours of frustration

ChatGTP4• 3 years ago

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.

happymellon2• 3 years ago

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

What about Framework?

Moldoteck2• 3 years ago

Terrible battery. Maybe amd would change this but these are not shipped yet

ChatGTP4• 3 years ago

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.

butterNaN• 3 years ago

Have you tried any of System76's laptops? I've been curious and would like to hear experiences

ChatGTP4• 3 years ago

No I’m too afraid of the warranty situation as I live outside the USA. I would love too try though.

fragmede• 3 years ago

All ThinkPads ThinkPads are made by Lenovo, but not all Lenovos are ThinkPads.

ttarr• 3 years ago

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.

inparen• 3 years ago

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.

ChatGTP4• 3 years ago

I’ve got a graveyard of XPS, YMMV

consoomer• 3 years ago

I just hit one year with a system76 laptop. The hardware isn't super, but I have had zero complaints in the last year.

yoavm• 3 years ago

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.

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

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