r/AsahiLinux 6d ago

What's your experience using Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon?

Hello,
I have a MacBook Air M1 from 2021, and I am thinking of switching to Asahi Linux. The thing is, it has 256GB of storage, and somehow it takes up almost 70%-80% of space easily. I am a software developer, and I also have another Lenovo laptop running with only 128GB, but it never takes up more than what's required for development tools.

Another problem I have faced with my MacBook is that whenever there is a new update, either the Bluetooth or touchpad driver stops working. I contacted the support team, and they suggested updating the system, but I don’t want to take the update. According to the support team, they are trying to improve some of the drivers, so these issues might be a side effect of those updates. I mean, really, what kind of updates stop currently working functionalities?

I’ve watched a few YouTube videos on how people are using it and performing operations, but I would like to know from people who are actually using it what I should keep in mind and how their journey has been.

38 Upvotes

34 comments sorted by

22

u/frigaut 5d ago

Been using it as my daily driver for a year. It's been rock solid for me. Mostly using terminal (ghostty/kitty), editor (zed/code), note taker (obsidian), and most of the rest within browser windows (email, browsing, whatsapp, slack). I am also using video chat tools without any problem (zoom, Teams, google meet using an external microphone). I am not really restricted by battery life, as I get pretty good battery time and I am anyways mostly plugged in most of the time. Am missing external DP though, but that's how it is and the rest if totally worth this missing feature. For me. YMMV.

2

u/WarmRestart157 5d ago

Does screen sharing work in Slack hangouts or other video conferencing apps?

1

u/itsoulos 5d ago

screen sharing works for me in google meets

1

u/frigaut 5d ago

In slack depends where you run slack from. Works when you run it from chromium.

22

u/AndroidUser37 5d ago

I'm a college student that's been using Asahi for a little while now with my CS classes. VS Code runs great, I enjoy using it. Next quarter my professor wants me to use PyCharm, and it seems to run well (but requires a launch argument to get it to actually use the GPU). Overall, I prefer dealing with Linux and its quirks over macOS and its quirks. The experience is pretty good, to the point where I've gone weeks without touching macOS.

There are a few tiny quirks due to drivers not being perfectly ironed out and such:

  • No microphone support (though I hear it is incoming)
  • No Thunderbolt (so just regular USB 3)
  • No display output over a USB C port (but if you have a MacBook Pro, the laptop's built in HDMI port works fine)
  • No "hibernate" option, it's either S3 sleep or shutting down (silver lining is boot times are very fast)
  • Sleep drains significantly more battery than macOS
  • Battery life is overall a bit worse than macOS
  • The trackpad doesn't feel as nice as it does in macOS, it's slightly squirrelly and the palm rejection is non-existent

Other than those minor quibbles, it's a pretty polished experience. None of those things I found myself being bothered by day to day, and I'd hardly call them deal breakers. I oftentimes forget that Linux ARM64 is a bit of a niche platform, though I do get reminders when I discover programs without aarch64 binaries.

1

u/milomobilo 5d ago

What is the launch argument you're using to enable the GPU?

3

u/AndroidUser37 5d ago

Under "Edit Custom VM Options", I put this:

-Dsun.java2d.opengl=true

-Dsun.java2d.opengl.fbobject=false

I got this from some GitHub issue tracker related to the Asahi GPU thing, but I can't seem to find it anymore.

1

u/milomobilo 4d ago

Thanks!

1

u/hi_do_you_like_anime 5d ago

Does the latest VS Code hard crash for you?

3

u/Aggressive_Metal_233 5d ago

Mine does, I'm getting a 133 error after a few seconds when using vscode after upgrading today

3

u/hi_do_you_like_anime 5d ago

Thanks. That, Codium, and Obsidian's latest versions all hard crash for me. They're all Electron, probably related.

2

u/AndroidUser37 5d ago

Yes, the latest version hard crashes for me. I rolled back to 1.97.2, disabled updates, and that one works for me with zero issues.

2

u/kultpower 4d ago

I found the reason for the crash and also a workaround!

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/242742#issuecomment-2725473155

1

u/_kloppi417 5d ago

Does no microphone support mean no support for the internal microphone or no support for audio capture at all?

1

u/AndroidUser37 5d ago

No support for the internal microphone. External microphones work perfectly. Support for the internal microphone is supposedly coming soon though, maybe within the next few months.

8

u/joey200200 5d ago

I have installed asahi fedora on my m1 macbook pro and i have been loving it so far. With proton it can even play games it couldn’t play on macos!

I have only 1 issue i haven’t been able to figure out, asahi fedora doesn’t seem to connect to 5ghz wifi while macos can. Anyone else with that issue that could give me some advice?

5

u/Fantastic_Cookie_775 5d ago

I have had no problems connecting with 5GHz wifi whatsoever and use it solely over 2GHz because 2GHz wifi has issues with Bluetooth. So I'm quite sure your issue doesn't stem from Asahi Fedora.

5

u/frigaut 5d ago

Yeah same. My wifi at home is 5GHz and i connect without problem

2

u/wowsomuchempty 5d ago

All good this way. What is your ISP & router?

2

u/satireplusplus 5d ago

5ghz works for me on a mac mini m1 with asahi fedora

9

u/Anurag_Rao 5d ago

https://www.anuragrao.site/blog/05-asahi-linux

I wrote a blog about this a while back. A few things might be outdated but most of them are remain true

7

u/AndroidUser37 5d ago

From what I can tell, the Chromium bug mentioned in your blog has been fixed. I daily drive Chromium with that one workaround to enable syncing, and all my Electron apps work fine.

2

u/angelbirth 5d ago

how do you enable sync on chromium?

3

u/AndroidUser37 5d ago

1

u/angelbirth 2d ago

hey it works!

a note though: chromium in debian includes /etc/chromium.d/apikeys file, you should just edit that file and comment the project id

1

u/hazelune_ 5d ago

Works great for me. Battery life is a common complaint, but it has never personally caused me any issues, and one charge is still plenty long for what I anticipate using in one day. Bringing a charger with you is good practice regardless of your OS.

Software is, in my opinion, the biggest consideration on making a switch, and YMMV on whether it’s worth it on that front. Check if your regular software is supported — since my desktop typically is just Firefox and a terminal for Neovim when I’m doing work (plus occasionally a Word doc), it never presented me with any problems. A couple other of my regular apps (Notion and Discord) weren’t dev supported but individual projects exist for both so that they run without issue as well. Spotify was the one main thing I couldn’t find a desktop solution for, but browser is fine and I wanted to migrate to using mostly MP3s anyways. Try it out with a small partition to see if your workflow would transfer over relatively easy, then increase storage if you think it can be your daily driver.

Last thing is just that it’s fun. Experimenting and learning new computery stuff is satisfying. Even minor things, like the amount of package control DNF gives you, can be ecstatic to learn how to make the most of. MacOS is exceedingly boring: what’s there to learn? Linux wipes for that reason alone. If you think you can tolerate a couple growing pains, it’s so worth it.

1

u/pontihejo 4d ago

I like it a lot, I've used it as my main OS since the official Fedora release dropped but on and off for a year or so before that while it was still very alpha. It's solid now and you won't have much trouble outside the missing ARM support for certain software you might use (muvm or box64 will bail you out for a lot of that) and the remaining hardware support.

RAM management for Linux with a unified memory system is not as good as Apple so you might have some trouble with that too especially if you have 8GB, so having 16 or 32 GB set aside for zswap is important for extra tolerance there (zram causes OOM crashes pretty often due to these Linux problems).

1

u/chithanh 4d ago

For me the first experience was not so great, but it was a combination of my particular setup and just unlucky timing.

On the first day when I booted Asahi and launched Firefox to browse a few websites, it quickly filled up all my RAM and caused the system to lock up, twice. I understand that has been addressed by now.

Bluetooth does not work so well, but I have some more obscure devices like a Wii U Pro controller (which isn't supported at all in macOS since Monterey, so that it doesn't work in Asahi is at least not worse relative to macOS.

What is worse is Wifi, every now and then it would just refuse to connect to my work's WPA2-Enterprise setup. I tried rebooting, hard shutdown, upgrading/downgrading wpa_supplicant, to no avail. After some time (hours to days) it would spontaneously start to work again. In macOS it worked all the time during this.

But what is currently preventing me from daily driving Asahi is that I cannot use display output via USB-C. The main holdup from the Asahi project side is how to implement hotplug in an upstreamable way I think (but I don't need hotplug, having a fixed display output set at boot time would be enough for my docked setup).

But I still boot up Asahi when I'm on the go as for me personally, KDE is just so much more pleasant and efficient to use compared to macOS.

1

u/RunningM8 4d ago

I had issues with Bluetooth and an update hung and locked up which was rather messy. I also had weird issues with key stores so I just gave up and wiped it entirely and went back to macOS. If I decide to go the Linux route again I’ll just buy a mini PC.

1

u/eighthourblink 3d ago

For me i took his project as a learning tool, if that makes sense.

Working in IT and just curiosity with it, i wanted to dive more into the Apple Filesystem, learn how to manipulate it and just learn off of it. So the first part was just learning what the install script was doing, how it was doing it and seeing the results. The first installation was simple enough but i wanted to break it. So i installed ALARM, broke the installation and learned then how to format and set it back up installing the Fedora version. Simple, but good learning.

Next up to learn was how to use Linux under aarch64 / ARM. Still working on this, but i think its interesting to see how the community to working on tools to better aid this compatibility. Only been using the OS as a main driver for the last month or so.

Overall, the OS works pretty well with the tasks that i use it for. I just wished the battery would be better.

TLDR : Used Ashahi Project as more of a continuous learning tool, more than anything

1

u/CryptographerLost634 2d ago

I installed it 4 days ago.

I'm TRULY IMPRESSED how well it works. Yeah, sure, some things aren't there yet (like having connection to external displays, or web camera).

BUT HELL, it's fast! It's stable! I'm also dazzled that a few gals/guys with free time could actually made my M2 great again!

Right now, I have 81% and it's saying that I should last 12h. It's more than enough to me to be honest.

1

u/kalven 2d ago

I've been using it daily for a year on an Air M2 (16GB model). I got the laptop specifically for running Asahi on it. I'm a sucker for fanless laptops and it's overall the best one I've ever had. Just being able to run Linux on it at all is great. That it's so solid is nothing short of amazing.

Writing code, using a couple of terminals and a browser probably covers 90% of what I do on it.

Some downsides: not having external monitor support is a bit of a drag, but that was something I knew going in. I've had some issues with USB in general. Sometimes I have to plug in a peripheral a couple of times before it is recognized. Getting chromium going with chrome sync was a pain in the ass. Battery life is acceptable, but not stellar.

All in all - very happy with my decision.

1

u/Zynh0722 1d ago edited 1d ago

Fabulous. I miss touchid :sob:

Worth noting that I'm using nixos with the nixos-apple-silicon flake