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i want to buy a used apple m1 machine just to use asahi. (coming from a linux guy who has never owned an apple mac machine) i have seen all the "tables showing

i want to buy a used apple m1 machine just to use asahi. (coming from a linux guy who has never owned an apple mac machine) i have seen all the "tables showing compatibility" but how is it in real life? i should i buy a machine solely to daily drive asahi?

Aeolos 3y ago
I've been using Asahi on the M1 Air for >1 year now for my personal / non-work laptop, and it works decently. With sound & webcam support now enabled, this can now now be used fine as a daily driver. Battery life during use is excellent, up there with the best of any linux laptop, and GPU acceleration is good and getting better every day. Missing features, so you can decide if those matter to you: - improved external monitor support - hardware video decoding - mainly for better battery life, because the CPU is more than fast enough for real-time software decoding. (This is work-in-progress.) - fingerprint sensor
- toomim 3y ago
  And sleep.
rowanG077 3y ago
As someone who daily drives a Linux M2 MBP: It depends if you can live with some caveats. The main ones are - No sound from the speakers (unless you have an M1 as can be seen from this post). But headphones work. - No external screen support - No Thunderbolt - No Fingerprint sensor - No Video decoding/encoding acceleration. But the CPU is strong enough to easily keep up with 4k 60FPS. So you "just" pay for it with shorter battery life. - No support for some important GPU APIs (Vulkan, OpenCL, newer openGL) which some application you use might need. The above list is the current state and even a few months from now will probably look different.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  What about the microphone? IMO that's a really big one, something you just expect all laptops to have in 2023. I suppose if you're using headphones anyway (since the M2 doesn't have speaker support) they may come with a microphone, but they may not...
  - rowanG077 3y ago
    No microphone unfortunately.

Aeolos 3y ago

I've been using Asahi on the M1 Air for >1 year now for my personal / non-work laptop, and it works decently. With sound & webcam support now enabled, this can now now be used fine as a daily driver. Battery life during use is excellent, up there with the best of any linux laptop, and GPU acceleration is good and getting better every day. Missing features, so you can decide if those matter to you: - improved external monitor support - hardware video decoding - mainly for better battery life, because the CPU is more than fast enough for real-time software decoding. (This is work-in-progress.) - fingerprint sensor

toomim 3y ago
And sleep.

rowanG077 3y ago

As someone who daily drives a Linux M2 MBP: It depends if you can live with some caveats. The main ones are - No sound from the speakers (unless you have an M1 as can be seen from this post). But headphones work. - No external screen support - No Thunderbolt - No Fingerprint sensor - No Video decoding/encoding acceleration. But the CPU is strong enough to easily keep up with 4k 60FPS. So you "just" pay for it with shorter battery life. - No support for some important GPU APIs (Vulkan, OpenCL, newer openGL) which some application you use might need. The above list is the current state and even a few months from now will probably look different.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago
What about the microphone? IMO that's a really big one, something you just expect all laptops to have in 2023. I suppose if you're using headphones anyway (since the M2 doesn't have speaker support) they may come with a microphone, but they may not...
- rowanG077 3y ago
  No microphone unfortunately.