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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Announced in early August and initially planned for the end of the month, the Fedora Asahi Remix distribution is finally here for those who want to install the Fedora Linux operating system on their Apple Silicon Macs.
The distro is based on the latest Fedora Linux 39 release and ships with the KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop environment by default, using Wayland.
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Been daily driving Asahi (first ALARM then Fedora when they transitioned) and it’s been exciting to experience in real time how far the project has come. When I first installed, audio didn’t work, the graphics driver was incomplete, and battery life left a lot to be desired. Skip to today and it’s evident how committed marcan and other contributors are to not just porting, but making everything feel right. Highly suggest following him or Lina on Mastodon.
This is awesome. What hardware are you running (m1 or m2)? Also, is there anything that isn’t working?
I’ve been eyeing to buy a m* silicon based mac, but I’m not into tinkering into fixing things.
Sorry a bit let to reply, but I’m running on M1 Air and Mini. Off the top of my head, built-in microphone doesn’t work and external displays don’t work through USB/Thunderbolt. Was also having trouble getting my audio interface to work even in class compliant mode. Otherwise it’s a very polished and easy experience.
How is battery life compared to Mac os?
Bad, but marcan has mentioned elsewhere that there’s a lot of room for improvement in this space, both active and idle
Great news
This is great!! I use macOS for work but I’m sure I can get 90% of the work done on Linux now! Just wondering about GPU perfomance? Video editing is crazy fast on macOS, anyone tried on Asahi?
I know that they only recently got opengl support and it was pretty primitive so I would imagine they have some work to do on the GPU side
They have full vulkan now too, but it’s not quite mature enough to be enabled by default rn (afaik)
If they can get full vulkan, maybe Zink can take care of the rest
Unfortunately, the custom graphics driver only supports OpenGL 3.3 (from 2010) and OpenGL ES (embedded systems) 3.2 (via Zink, via Mesa)
Edit: Just realized i forgot to actually answer the question. I don’t believe they’ve yet added support for the video encoding/decoding engine, but once that arrives i believe it should be comparable to MacOS
I mean this is what a proper distro loooks like. Tailoring another distro for a true, specific purpose. Kudos to the team.
Yes, it’s not just a DE and default package set but actual system improvements other distros aren’t offering. Kudos to the Asahi team for making this possible!
I promise I’m not a troll, but I just don’t understand the appeal. That’s a crazy expensive piece of hardware to run a currently only mostly working distro.
Even when the hardware is 100% working, it’s still ARM, so anything that’s not open source won’t run because it’ll be x86_64.
Definitely a chicken and egg problem on availability of ARM software.
I’m asking in good faith - am I missing something?
I have an MBA, from a failed experiment with the Apple ecosystem. I love that it’s passively cooled, and will probably use it as a couch laptop with Asahi until the ARM market heats up in 2025 to 2026.
Most are talking about the laptops. I have my eyes on a Mac mini to run asahi on. The biggest downsides with Mac hardware is reperability and upgrades. Some issues the Mac mini doesn’t have Vs laptops is ofc is no battery replacement , screen and keyboard webcam, mouse to use. and there are hubs for installing more storage. Ram is ofc a big minus. Looking at m2 16 GB 512 mb. And extend storage with something like this https://www.macworld.com/article/1677460/mac-mini-upgrade-hub-storage-ethernet-sd-card-ports.html 40 Gbs thunderbolt would make it easy to extend storage at least.
As long as it doesn’t break I would take this over any alternative minipc . I use my ThinkPad today but 99% of use is at home anyway so no need for portability. Need to wait some time to get the extra funds for it but something like that…
As long as it doesn’t break I would take this over any alternative minipc
May I ask why though? One of the biggest advantages of using a MacBook is the performance-battery efficiency. If you’re going to get a Mac mini and loading Linux, you lose that advantage.
Unless you’re looking specifically for an ARM64 machine for whatever reason, I think an AMD mini PC, say something like the Minisforum EliteMini UM780 XTX would be technically a better option - you get dual NVMe, dual 2.5G network ports, USB 4.0, Oculink for even more b/w than Thunderbolt, and far more I/O options in general. Not to mention, excellent Linux support.
I will have to look into it , but all reviews/comparisons I have seen has been always that the Mac beats the others. I do not game , I want audio and some video editing besides code.
Power consumption is a point as well as I am planning on going off the powergrid eventually.
I would install this if I had made the objectively wrong decision to buy an apple computer.
It makes a second hand mac viable for me. The hardware is nice, it was always the OS that made me avoid it.
I really wouldn’t touch secondhand Ms. No upgrades, no repairs, horrible components (CPU is ok, everything else is straight from the dumpster in order to cover costs).
So when something dies on your device from a company that has a long history of terrible design and QA (I’m betting on storage) you have to pay another $1000+ to replace the whole motherboard. On top of that, I’m guessing that they’re also ripping off customers when selling those replacement boards, as having usable ram and storage costs an extra $1000+ when buying new.
This, I’ve tried to look up spare ssd and ram chips for apple arm laptops to reball and resolder them and couldn’t find any
Inb4 apple locked down components to motherboard serial number
But seriously, I guess the only hope is to wait for the Chinese second hand market takes off.
I know that iPhones do that but about MacBook i didn’t know until your message
It was a joke. But you can see why I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out true in the end.
I know for a fact they’re making it impossible to make small repairs like changing the screen closed sensor. It requires a proprietary calibration tool they won’t sell, and so MacBooks can’t go to sleep when closing the screen.
On top of changing it from a sub $ hall sensor to some proprietary bs that’s far more expensive.
Yeah you’re right, we’ll all wait till Chinese spare parts market will kick in again, they usually do this after few years from launch
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Legitimate repairability and pricing concerns aside, what parts exactly are you accusing of being straight from the dumpster? The GPU is insane for a low-power laptop, screen, speakers, trackpad are best in class. Keyboard is a matter of preference but by any objective measure it’s not bad, much improved from butterfly switches.
I would never buy something new from Apple as I don’t like them, but I have to admit that their hardware feels great to use. I’m not tech savvy enough to know where that would be coming from, but it makes me wonder how people could say that the components are so bad.
My girlfriend has a 2012 MacBook Pro and I put Fedora on it and it feels like such a great machine. The ram and the hard drive have been upgraded, but it feels incredible for an old machine.
If in 10 years you can get an old MacBook Pro for 200$, I might jump on it even if upgradeability has been lowered.
their hardware feels great to use
I tried using a friend’s m1 MacBook pro, and it’s the worst laptop I’ve touched in a while. Like my oldest budget core2duo laptop has a better keyboard than a brand new $2000+ device. There’s a very good reason it’s permanently docked.
it makes me wonder how people could say that the components are so bad.
I’ve mentioned a few reasons in this thread. They basically used subpar components to offset the cost of developing their own CPU.
If in 10 years you can get an old MacBook Pro for 200$, I might jump on it even if upgradeability has been lowered.
It’s not lowered, it’s absolutely removed, unless you count replacing the entire motherboard as upgradeability.
16gb ram is too small? New motherboard.
Crappy SSD is dying? New motherboard.
Haven’t dug into it yet, but if that’s right then not great. Then again if something doesn’t break quickly in electronics it usually works fine for years, except maybe overheated GPUs, random RAM and HDDs.
I’m still unsure if I want to replace my 2016 Asus zenbook. Other than the aged CPU/AGPU from Intel, and unusable from the start touchpad it’s fine.
When m1 came out, some tech guy on twitter did a review of MacBook Pro and studio storage. Apple literally used components that are so bad they had to disable data safety protocols to go above HDD speeds. The end result was that losing power is likely to corrupt your data.
Besides that apple was cutting out “unnecessary” parts of the arm specification in order to cut costs. The result is that the first 2(?) generations have hardware level exploit “m1racles” on top of others like “pacman”.
I really wouldn’t trust them to last
Funnily enough, that person you mentioned who discovered that was marcan, one of the Asahi lead developers.
I would if the particular hardware had no inherent or user caused issues and the price was reasonable compared to other purchase candidates, but it rarely is. It would also need to be Linux compatible too because the os has always been insufferable and praised by insufferable people that need something to feel superior about with zero justification.
The PowerPC days were pretty crap though even though the hardware was visually pleasing. Nobody made PowerPC compatible software. This time I guess apple is paying fees to arm and at least has arm compatibility. x86 is irritating in its own right too. Man, tech has gone in all sorts of shitty directions.
they are downvoting you, but you’re absolutely right.
they can’t hardly be repaired and it’s impossible to upgrade them at all, even something as basic as swapping the SSD needs desoldering. They are still sold with 8 GB of RAM as the base and they can’t be upgraded.
it isn’t worth it at all.
Just don’t buy an 8gb model, easy fix) But seriously when you get a laptop which allows you to work 8 hours straight from battery and then have 30% capacity left at the end of a day, there is no chance you would get back to the Intel system and plug it in every 2 hours.
I have a 1½-year-old laptop AMD Ryzen 6860Z processor & get 9 hours on the regular running NixOS doing programming/browsing/chat. That’s not quite 8 hours with 30% to spare, but good enough that I don’t worry about carrying my charger (but being lightweight GaN, normally keep it in my bag just in case). Apple folks have this tendency to think all their hardware is massively better, but even if it’s ‘better’, it’s often just by a small margin that doesn’t make a big difference–especially when you factor in cost.
I did some actual measurements just to confirm it, here is minecraft in default configuration running @ 100fps and the cpu+gpu consumption is around 6w in total. If you add about 5w for display backlight and other components the total would be 9-10 hours of play time on my 100wh battery.
Can you please take the same measurements on your system? Maybe ryzen system is better than intel, never had one.
I don’t own Minecraft (nope to Microsoft-owned software) nor would I have a reason to do 3D gaming on a battery… are you gaming at a café, the library, or something?
For example when watching 1080p youtube video in Safari the power consumption is only 0.1watt because it’s using hardware decoders. (not including display backlight, I can’t measure it). But when I play the same video in firefox which is using software decoding the consumption is around 0.7w which is not as good as hw decoders, but still less than a watt
no, it’s just an easy sustained load that can be measured accurately. If you have some other application that provides sustained load but doesn’t spin all the cores to 100% please suggest it, I will try.
there is no chance you would get back to the Intel system and plug it in every 2 hours.
don’t be irrealistic. most laptops in the Macbook price range will have 8 hours of usage in low consumption mode or around 6 or 5 if you need more power.
and at that price point they come with at least 32 GB of RAM which can be upgraded, swappable SSDs with more capacity than the macbook’s, far better keyboard and more ports.
the Macbooks do have some extra performance per battery usage? yeah I guess. But after 2 years that the battery life is gone, you’ll probably be buying the newer model or wishing that you bought a laptop with a replaceable battery.
The thermals and battery life of my Apple silicon MacBooks are unlike any other laptop I’ve owned. When I first got one, I started thinking of recharging it not in hours, but in days. 3-4 days between charges was normal for typical use. Mind you that was not full workdays, but the standby time was so good that I didn’t have to consider that the battery would decrease overnight or in my bag. I’ve used multiple Dell, Thinkpad, and Intel Mac laptops over the past decade as well and none of them come within spitting distance on battery life and thermals. I really hope that Qualcomm can do for other manufacturers what Apple silicon has done for MacBooks.
there is no chance you would get back to the Intel system and plug it in every 2 hours.
don’t be irrealistic. most laptops in the Macbook price range will have 8 hours of usage in low consumption mode or around 6 or 5 if you need more power.
While I completely agree on the repairability front, which is really quite unfortunate and quite frankly a shame (at least iPhones have been getting more repairable, silver lining I guess? damned need for neverending profits), it’s just… non unrealistic.
That being said, unified memory kind of sucks but it’s still understandable due to the advantages it brings, and fixed-in-place main storage that also stores the OS is just plain shitty. It’ll render all these devices unusable once that SSD gives out.
Anyhow, off the tangent again: I have Stats installed for general system monitoring, as well as AlDente to limit charge to 80% of maximum battery capacity. All that to say, by now after around 1.5 years of owning the M2 MacBook Air (which I’ve been waiting for to buy/to release since late 2019, btw), I know pretty well which wattages to expect and can gauge its power usage pretty well.
I’ll try to give a generalized rundown:
- High-intensity workloads (mostly in shorter bursts for me): typically around 10W. I’ve installed Minecraft before once just to test it, and I get reasonable frames (both modded and unmodded), where it seemed to draw maybe 15W, thus still being able to charge (!) the battery off a 30W power supply. It doesn’t ever really go above 20W as a rule of thumb, and the CPU/GPU will be capable enough for easily 80-90% of the general population.
- Idle/suspended: unnoticeable. I use my machine every day with maybe an exception or three per month, but from what I’ve read from others, battery will dip slightly after a month of standby, but that’s mostly due to battery chemistry I’d assume, not actually background usage.
- Idle/running, light usage (yes it’s the same category*): It actually depends on the screen
sizeedit: whoops, brightness. Energy consumption due to CPU usage is by far the minority portion. I’d say 2-4W, maybe. Screen usage when really bright makes it jump to 8-9W, darker-but-not-minimum screen brightnesses leave it at… 5W maybe.
Given the spec sheet’s 52 Wh battery, you can draw your own conclusions about the actual runtime of this thing by simple division. I leave it mostly plugged in to preserve the battery for when it becomes a couch laptop in around 5-8 years, so I can’t actually testify on that yet, I just know the numbers.
I didn’t mean for this to come off as fanboi-y as it did now. I also really want to support Framework, but recommending it universally from my great-aunt to my colleagues is not as easy as it is with the MacBook. Given they’re a company probably 1,000 times smaller than Apple, what they’re doing is still tremendously impressive, but in all honesty, I don’t see myself leaving ARM architecture anytime soon. It’s just too damn efficient.
*At least for my typical usage, which will be browser with far too many tabs and windows open + a few shell sessions + a (may or may not be shell) text editor, sometimes full-fledged IDE, but mostly just text editors with plugins.
I did some actual measurements just to confirm it, here is minecraft in default configuration running @ 100fps and the cpu+gpu consumption is around 6w in total. If you add about 5w for display backlight and other components the total would be 9-10 hours of play time on my 100wh battery.
Can you please take the same measurements on your system? I’d like to see how good is the alternative.
My system is 7 years old, it wouldn’t be an appropriate comparison. Maybe others can help
The 8GB models are manufactured e-waste but the usable lineup are great machines. They’re practically unrepairable, but they’re built not to need repairs. Not having replaceable parts isn’t just a way to drain customers’ wallets, it also reduces complexity and ways in which their product can be damaged.
If you care about swapping out the SSD or replacing the RAM, you shouldn’t buy Apple. I promise you, though, that 99% of laptop users don’t, and that includes a significant part of Linux users.
Macs are expensive as balls but there simply aren’t any competitors for them. They’re the “overkill everything” segment that’s too small to target for other manufacturers. There are maybe one or two series of laptops that come close in speaker quality, and one of those consists of gaming laptops designed after 80s scifi spaceships, and the other comes with terrible battery and even worse Linux support, and both of them lack the battery life+performance quality Apple managed to squeeze out of their CPU.
I wish someone would produce Macbooks other than Apple. It’s an awful company that produces great hardware for a competitive price, it you care about all the Macbook has to offer. And to be honest, that’s not because Apple is such an amazing manufacturer, it’s because AMD and Intel are behind the curve (Qualcom even more), and the laptop manufacturers that try to compete with Apple always try to squeeze just that little bit of extra cost cutting out of their models so their shit doesn’t cost more, and preload their top of the line hardware with Windows 11 Home (the one with candy crush pinned to the start menu) and their stupid GAMER software suite that works on three models and stops being maintained after two updates.
We just need better laptops.
Current apple systems are objectively superior. The display image quality is better than competition, the touchpad hardware is better, CPU is top 1 in the world in single thread performance and the battery life is unrivaled.
If you talk about the repairability it only matters in case it breaks and it only happens to a small % of the owners. Most people won’t need to repair it. However you do use your device every day, so why would you give up the better user experience? Because of a small chance you would need to pay for repairs later, or even at all? It doesn’t make sense.
The same argument applies to upgrades as well. If you think you’ll need an upgrade just buy a bigger version from the start. It may be more expensive but once again you get a better experience overall.
Exactly the drivel they want you to believe. I’m sorry but even if 8gb of ram performs like 16gb on other computers, which is a load of hot shit, it shouldn’t cost more than 32gb on other computers. The markup on parts for basic specs config is utterly insane. I highly doubt the average apple used actually benefits from the top single thread performance, and all of humanity’s battery tech is still awful at it’s best both in capability and environmental impact, not to mention capability per dollar.
I have used apple hardware and software from the beige plastic days until the first laptops, and tried out Mac os and ios every major update, and found it to be entirely unenjoyable even when ignoring what is essentially DRM for hardware components on the phones forcing you to pay for repairs when it’s an easy diy otherwise.
Really the apple elitism is bizarre beyond belief. You get to be in the cool dude club for getting scammed into paying 3-5 times the cost of each individual component you can choose higher version of in there config before buying. It’s like the million dollar gold bar app on early app store, except apple wants to be the only one making that kind of easy money off of their users.
Overpriced for what they are? Agreed. Weird elitism from some of the user base? Absolutely.
You sound almost as zealous when you say:
tried out Mac os and ios every major update, and found it to be entirely unenjoyable
I get that it’s not for you which is fine, but you tried every release of MacOS and iOS and hated them all? Okay bud.
I wouldn’t say hated, but definitely possessing of many ui/UX choices that were about as well thought out as how windows had old/new control panel plus the new new settings app and yet everything was still counterintuitive. I merely gave it a chance repeatedly because I ran a computer business up until covid hit and needed basic familiarity, and people kept telling me it was better than everything else and really if you don’t game it mostly is for many workloads, but I still found things to be rather clunky especially system navigation on iOS. Not saying android is better or anything either because while it suits me more, there is so much infuriating dumb shit.
Basically because of every other offering feeling like it’s ripping me off, Linux being free and having tons of customization beyond simply cosmetic and several people making different solutions to each problem most of the time and also free, coming back to anything else with any combination of hardware, software, and money entry barriers just feels like the worst value proposition possible. Maybe if I was born into wealth and a social media addict I would have been an apple fanboy.
You talk about high prices however there is no actual competition. High end systems like Dell XPS and others cost the same as M3. You do get some benefits like touch screen or whatever but you get shitty touchpad and 3 hours of battery life.
In regards to the software I agree macOS is not the best, but maybe you noticed the topic is about Fedora Linux so you do have options now.
Their prices for RAM and storage upgrades are dogshit, but Macbooks do have objectively superior audio quality, and some of the best screens available. You just need to pretend the 256GB/8GB models don’t exist and the lineup suddenly makes a lot of sense.
Apple Silicon showed up to wipe the floor with Intel and AMD. Both now have CPUs that beat the M1/2/3, at the cost of huge power consumption and heat generation. With every non-Apple Macbook competitor, you can pick two out of “screen quality, audio quality, battery life, CPU performance” that perform well, and the rest plain doesn’t compete.
You won’t see me buy one of those things, the price is just soo goddamn high, but if you have the money to waste on these things, they’re excellent products. Especially when you’re a normal consumer and don’t plan on running Linux anyway; macOS may be janky as hell (“what’s window snapping?”) but your alternatives are Windows 11 and ChromeOS.
This is in contrast to the Intel Macbooks, which still had great screens and speakers, but were gimped by awful CPUs, comically insufficient cooling, self destructing keyboards, and so many other design flaws.
Hard agree.
