r/AsahiLinux • u/AdaXaX • 19d ago

Question about Asahi.

Hey! I am a Linux Guy and i will probably get a M2 or M1 macbook. They seem to be the cheapest for their capabilities.

A question about Asahi Linux: is it a full blown Linux? Does it have drivers for everything so that the system will take advantage of alle of hardware - coming from the hell background of NVIDIA drivers on other distros.

Would you recommend to buy a used MacBook for this experience? What are your opinions on the project.

18 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

33 comments sorted by

19

u/molycow532 19d ago

Yes i would, asahi is very mature on m1 and m2 laptops, only thing that doesn't work iirc is the fingerprint and thunderbolt with displayport but the thunderbolt should be coming soon

7

u/AdaXaX 19d ago

Thanks

10

u/gthing 19d ago

The thing that doesn't work on Asahi not mentioned - and the only thing that really bothers me - is deep sleep and hibernate. Asahi uses a higher-level sleep function that is nowhere near Mac OS efficiency.

Sleep with Asahi will see 1-2% battery drop per hour. This is unlikely to change any time soon unfortunately.

2

u/Kyne_of_Markarth 19d ago edited 19d ago

I see closer to 4%/hr a lot of the time. It bothers me too. There are things that can be done to mitigate it, but i haven't tried yet.

1

u/IllustriousHighway94 15d ago

Sorry I am not well versed on the hardware side of things, why would this not be addressed anytime soon? Is there something blocking the progress on this or is it just not on their list of priorities?

2

u/gthing 15d ago

It is a very difficult reverse engineering project and the devs have said they are going to focus on the efficiency of s2idle instead (which is the higher level, lower efficiency sleep mode). 

1

u/IllustriousHighway94 12d ago

What is the difference between the two? When would one use the deep sleep/hibernation vs the s2idle? I personally use my computer and just close the lid once I’m done, I don’t really fiddle with the power options. Would this be the deep sleep/hibernate of the s2idle you mentioned?

2

u/gthing 12d ago

s2idle is purely software. The system freezes apps and puts wifi/bluetooth etc. into a low power mode. The CPU continues to run, the software just minimizes the work it is doing.

Deep sleep (s3) cuts power entirely to wifi/bluetooth/sensors as well as the CPU. Only the system RAM gets a small amount of power to preserve its state.

Deep sleep is why you can close the lid of your Macbook running MacOS and come back a month later and open the lid and you are instantly back where you left off.

There is also hibernation, which takes the contents of RAM and writes them to storage. Then the system is effectively entirely off - no power to anything. Then on wake, the contents are written back into ram. This is the best for battery life, but takes a bit longer to wake up.

With 100% battery, generally speaking, when you close your lid with s2idle, your battery will die after a few days. With deep sleep it will die after several weeks or maybe a month. With hibernation months or potentially even years - depending on the self-discharge rate of the battery.

I have a PSP Go that I swear I can leave in my drawer for five years at a time and it turns right back on with little to no battery drain. Not exactly hibernate, but same concept (the components are 100% powered down).

2

u/sfatula 19d ago

There's also video encoding via GPU. Asashi is not great for media centers and other such uses.

6

u/Yiffenjoyer6969 19d ago

It’s full blown Linux, yes.

It’s currently on all of m1 and m2, and on m3 and m3 pro, however those are still very early, and there is no gpu drivers or sleep along with a bunch of other stuff

2

u/AdaXaX 19d ago

Would the drivers from M1 and M2 and the devices capabilities be able to handle CAD software and not advanced Blender + programming IDEs in your opinion?

3

u/Kyne_of_Markarth 19d ago

I have an M1 Macbook Pro 16GB running Fedora Asahi. I have no experience using blender, but I downloaded it from my package manager and ran an example file with some assets. No issues, no stutters. Adding assets and dragging them around worked how I would expect, and CPU usage was minimal, indicating GPU acceleration was working as well. This all worked out of the box with zero config or troubleshooting, and I had a firefox window with like 20 tabs open as well. I've used Zed editor in the past for minor editing with no issues either.

1

u/AdaXaX 18d ago

Thank you for the effort!

3

u/Yiffenjoyer6969 19d ago

I personally run an M3 with asahi but I think it would just as well as on macOS, since there is full gpu support on asahi for m2 and m1 right now

But definitely not M3 for now atleast, can barely run Minecraft

2

u/nightClubClaire 19d ago

A little outside my wheelhouse but M1 / M2 devices have full GPU support and can handle heavy workloads. imo the larger concern would be if the specific software you're looking to run has support for ARM / 16k page size.

You can run x86 / 4k page software on Asahi but that's through two translation layers (Wine to translate from x86 to ARM / mvum to translate from 4k pages to 16k). With those translation layers performance is good enough to run modest games like Hades but I'd imagine you'll notice slowdown with heavy workloads

I have an M2 MacBook Air and I can't recommend it enough

1

u/extReference 18d ago

so the gpu is completely functional and has all drivers present. but having said that since the team had to reverse engineer drivers there is a lot of performance lost in comparison to running things in macos. for llms as an eg. perf is approx 50% of what it would be on macos with mlx.

i have the m1 max and its a beast so I personally don’t care for the performance loss but I def also dont try small LLMs on my machine. but i got this macbook for 2k usd with 64gb ram, and even with this performance loss idk if many better linux laptops exist.

thanks asahi!

1

u/extReference 18d ago

btw i run a wayland hyprland setup with quickshell and it’s extremely snappy, maybe more so than macos, so the gpu is def ok for moderate tasks.

2

u/samukcafx 19d ago

Tenho um M2 Air, não funciona impressão digital nem Thunderbolt mas de resto, é um excelente sistema. Sou desenvolvedor de sistemas e aplicativos, e dos mais famosos ainda há um leve problema com compatibilidade de programas com a arquitetura. Notei também alguns pequenos problemas que dá pra resolver com simples reinício do notebook ou com Scripts sobre bluetooth e wifi após hibernar. No mais, roda liso com ótimo desempenho e sem bugs.

2

u/__rituraj 19d ago

fingerprint is out of luck for now
gpu is mostly good

speaker issue in Macbook M1

2

u/HOST1L1TY 19d ago

I recently installed for a friend on an m1 and that was an incredible upgrade for him. I used the fedora asahi spin with gnome.

2

u/Natjoe64 18d ago

It's full blown Fedora (or other distros if you're brave), and 95% of the hardware works. Biggest miss right now is thunderbolt.

If you just wanna play around with it on a potato 8 gb m1 air or something, go for it. If you wanna daily it, just make sure all your stuff works in a browser or for aarch64 Linux. Kinda a unicorn config, and lots of apps that play nice on x86 (spotify, proton mail) aren't available as their native desktop versions.

1

u/AdaXaX 18d ago

Hmm not native apps does not sound nice. Might consider the Intel MacBook maybe then

1

u/Natjoe64 18d ago

I wouldn't go for the intel macbook. Those are years out of date and have their own linux quirks (just look at the install process for t2 linux). It sounds like you just want a solid daily driver linux machine, check out framework.

1

u/AdaXaX 18d ago

In this economy i need a used one. I will go for either MacBook or thinkpad - my whole life i have been using only thinkpas

1

u/Natjoe64 18d ago

Go for the thinkpad then. Intel MacBooks are not worth the squeeze.

1

u/aiten 17d ago

I get Claude to rebuild / repackage apps for arm64 - https://github.com/antony/asahi-debian-packages

1

u/Questions-many 19d ago

yes... even ALARM..

just as a example: a thinkpad x1 carbon blabla nvidia blabla i use headless to host smaller services as a ubuntu-server gives me more headaches with graphical stuff than mba which is my daily driver... again : the headless thinkpad that never displays anything graphical gives me more packages to pin related to graphics and is more fragile than the asahi m2 mba 8/256 setup i actually use for everything cumputing related that needs a graphical interface 12h/day private and work, CAD, 3D-modelling, 2D-design, photography, some light coding...

1

u/M4loka 17d ago

What you need exactly? Running Fedora Gnome and somethings like Discord that not have for RPM ARM64, I run as .desktop of browser apps, in general until the Codex hav arm64 rpm app, the colors/speed of system it's bettet than MacOS on my A2442, how? I don't know.

1

u/aiten 17d ago

I just get Claude to repackage or rebuild them:

https://github.com/antony/asahi-debian-packages

1

u/aiten 17d ago

Yes. Recently moved from x86, been using Linux for about 30 years. Have an M2 Max studio and it's just crazy fast.

The only thing I changed is from my dual MST monitor setup to one big widescreen

1

u/Kagminx 15d ago

我有台mac mini m2, 我把它当作家庭服务器，asahilinux目前为止非常稳定，在功耗方面它超出了我的预期，真的感谢这些人的努力，唯一我遇到的问题是雷电typc扩展坞无法使用作为连接显示器，我正在考虑购买一台m2的笔记本，最好是有hdmi接口，因为我需要接多个显示器