partial_accumenAsahi Linux after 24 hours of use
Asahi Linux after 24 hours of use - Lemmy.World
TLDR; So far so good! I’m not seeing any dealbreakers yet, and the prospects look good for a permanent solution for me. I have never been a Mac owner prior to this (but have used them for work numerous times). My (new to me) used Macbook Air M2 arrive in the mail yesterday. After making sure all the hardware was functional in OSX, I used the curl based Asahi Linux installer, choosing Asahi Fedora Remix with KDE. The install: Very VERY easy! The installer was probably the best Linux installation experience I’ve ever had. Of the 2TB storage I reserved 500GB for OSX, allocated 1TB for Asahi, and leaving 500GB unallocated (plans for later). The good: - The desktop experience is fast and responsive. - I was worried now that I was in ARM (aarch64) architecture, applications I wanted to use would have issues with compatibility. I have zero issues installing and running from simple “dnf install” commands. So far all have aarch64 native builds. - I have a functional external display - The macbook hardware is high performing, low weight, and great build quality. - Battery life looks decent enough for my needs The bad: - External Display: While I mentioned I have a working display, its via an old DL-165 based USB 2.0 Displaylink adapter. It appears to be very finicky with which DVI to HDMI adapter it will work with. Additionally, on first use it doesn’t appear to set up the display properly for the 1920x1080 resolution (the limit of this adapter) but instead defaults to 1650x1080. I’ve been able to fix this with a kscreen-doctor command on the CLI though. I may have to do more to automate this in the future, though. - Power management/hibernation: I learned that Asahi not only doesn’t support S4 hibernation (my ACHI sleep profile of choice), but its not even on the development roadmap. I’ve seen a couple of the developer notes as to the difficulties, and it makes sense with the limited resources, so I agree with their path. However, that leaves me with concerns for the life of the hardware. In the days ahead, I’ll explore what I can do from userland to reduce impact on the hardware and cycles on the battery. - USB port behavior: The Macboook air only has 2 USB-C/Thunderbolt ports. I understand Thunderbolt isn’t supported yet, and I’m just fine with that. USB3 is plenty for all of my needs at this point. However, the two ports on the unit don’t seem to behave the same. The USB-C port closer to the charging port works with my USB-C hub, USB2 DisplayLink adaptor, and USB2 100Mb/s NIC, and even my USB2 headset/mic. None of these work on the second USB-C port on the Macbook. I would have written this off as bad hardware, but USB-C charging works fine on this port. I need to do more checks from OSX to validate hardware functionality, and more investigation on /var/log/messages to see if I can find a reason for this difference. I did see a developer note that one USB-C port on the Mac is more functional for development, but I don’t know what that means yet. - Community: I haven’t found THE PLACE where Asahi users congregate to talk about issues or solutions. I see there’s a Reddit subreddit which has the most (but I have chosen to not post to Reddit anymore, and avoid it as much as possible). There is a Fedora community with some Asahi posts. Lastly, today I found this Lemmy community with a handful of users. I hope to find THE PLACE to best be able to learn from others and share what I’ve learned.
James Calligeros
Sven Peter
cavebear
Earndil
Thor A. Hopland
Alex Seibz
Alex