I've installed Asahi on my mac. Altough I had to recreate some utilities, it's so much worth it. With macOS you have to accept the good and the bad, and the bad are really annoying. It work great for task focused usage, but for personal computing, it's a pain.
How's your experience? I'm tempted but have so many questions:
- Which mac are you using?
- Any missing hardware support?
- Dual booting?
- How's Bluetooth?
- Anything else that was surprising, scary, or disappointing?
Not OP but I use Asahi on my M1 Pro MBP. Hardware support is incomplete (Thunderbolt doesn't work for example) but I don't need it. One surprising thing is the battery life while sleeping but I learned to do a shutdown instead of sleeping on it.
It's both on my Mac Mini and my MBA (both M1). It work great on the Mini. I think bluetooth work, but I have no use for it and have never checked. Everything works great as far as I know (even virtualization with qemu). I don't game on it, so can't say anything about that.
As for the MBA, suspend is still a miss (I read that the asahi team can't get certain devices to go to deep sleep, so they chose a safer low power mode instead). The lack of DP over usb-c is a bit annoying, but I mostly use the laptop display on macOS too, so I don't really mind. I think thunderbolt is not there too, but I have no thunderbolt devices (dock or storage). It boots very fast, but I'd recommend against KDE as the MBA gets hot with it. I'm using Sway. I heard about microphone issue, but I've never used it for calls as I have a usb one on my desktop.
The installation process is as easy as something done in the terminal can be. It's pretty much guided (just make sure you have enough space for the installation). If I had to redo it, I'd choose the minimal installation as I don't like KDE that much and it was some pain to remove it.
Personally if I'm going Linux, I'm out on Mac hardware.
Don't get me wrong, Mac hardware is nice hardware. But there's no reason to own it if you're using alternative operating systems.
The bang for your buck on computing is wildly better on something like a Beelink mini PC than a Mac Mini. Windows laptop hardware has also most definitely caught up to the M1.
And I think we all know you listed off everything that's gonna be broken with Asahi Linux like Bluetooth and microphone as something you "don't use" just because you know it's broken.
Yeah, the macs were all I had, so there was no other option. I'm waiting for my new PCs to arrive and once they get here, I'm going to wipe the Asahi installation and revert to stock macOS (I will still need them as work computers and for XCode)
And I genuinely don't use Bluetooth. Everything is wired, although I use WiFi on the MBA. Neither do I like to use the laptop microphone (noisy environment, so I use a headset or the usb microphone). The only thing I care in a laptop is WiFi, a good enough keyboard, a good enough screen, low temperature and noise, and a battery that last at least 4 hours. My default workstation is the desktop.
But yeah, I do agree with you that it's better to go with PC if you're planning to stick with Linux long term.
The lack of support for the built in microphone is a bit of a catch you don't see mentioned too often. It feels like one of those things that would have come early on and it's not necessarily the first thing you're going to reach for but it can be a bit surprising when you find out it's just not there.
