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Asahi Linux with Sway on the MacBook Air M2 (2024)
- gsora 11mo agoPutting swaybar at the top behind the notch is a great idea!
- zozbot234 11mo agoA new Wayland protocol is in the works that should support screen cutout information out of the box: https://phosh.mobi/posts/xdg-cutouts/ https://phosh.mobi/posts/xdg-cutouts/ Hopefully this will be extended to include color information whenever applicable, so that "hiding" the screen cutout (by coloring the surrounding area deep black) can also be a standard feature and maybe even be active by default.
- gsora 11mo agoWayland modularity is the gift that keeps on giving.
- imiric 11mo agoYou can't be serious. Wayland is the opposite of modular, and the concept of an extensible protocol only creates fragmentation. Every compositor needs to implement the giant core spec, or, realistically, rely on a shared library to implement it for them. Then every compositor can propose and implement arbitrary protocols of their own, which should also be supported by all client applications. It's insanity. This thing is nearly two decades old, and I still have basic clipboard issues[1]. This esoteric cutouts feature has no chances of seeing stable real-world use in at least a decade from now. [1]: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=466041 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=466041
- MarsIronPI 11mo agoYou can see the same problem in the XMPP world, with a lot of the extensions implemented only by a few applications. But at least most XMPP extensions are designed to be backwards-compatible with clients that don't support them.
- samiv 11mo agoShh...you're not supposed to mention these things alas you be down voted to death. I also have tremendous issues with Plasma. Things such as graphics glitching in the alt+tab task switcher or Firefox choking the whole system when opening a single 4k PNG image. This is pre-alpha software... So back to X11 it is. Try again in another decade or two.
- imiric 11mo agoThe thing is that I'm not experiencing this clipboard issue on Plasma, but on a fresh installation of Void Linux with niri. There are reports of this issue all over[1][2][3], so it's clearly not an isolated problem. The frustrating thing is that I wouldn't even know which project to report it to. What a clusterfuck. I can't go back to X11 since the community is deliberately killing it. And relying on a fork maintained by a single person is insane to me. [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/hyprland/comments/1d4s9bw/ctrlc_ctrlv_issues_anyone/ https://old.reddit.com/r/hyprland/comments/1d4s9bw/ctrlc_ctr... [2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/tuxedocomputers/comments/1i9v0n7/copy_paste_only_works_on_second_try/ https://old.reddit.com/r/tuxedocomputers/comments/1i9v0n7/co... [3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1jl6zv7/why_does_copypaste_not_work_all_the_time_when_i/ https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1jl6zv7/why_does_copyp...
- samiv 11mo agoRe X11 maintenance... I think it's mostly "done" and doesn't really need a lot of work. So not sure I see a problem there.
- imiric 11mo agoFar from it. The recent XLibre release[1] has a long list of bugfixes and new features. Besides, isn't the main complaint from the Wayland folks that X11 is insecure and broken? That means there's still a lot of work to be done. They just refuse to do it. To be fair, X11 has worked great for me for the past ~20 years, but there are obvious improvements that can be made. [1]: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/releases/tag/xlibre-xserver-25.1.0 https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/releases/tag/xlibre-xser...
- cevn 11mo agoYou know what OS doesn’t handle the notch? OSX. It happily throws the system tray icons right back there, with an obscure work around to bring them back. Software quality at Apple these days…
- ErneX 11mo agoNitpick: it’s called macOS since 2016.
- OutOfHere 11mo agoWhat is the prospect for newer M support, e.g. M3, M4? I am hesitant to adopt something that doesn't work with current and future models.
- markus_zhang 11mo agoWithout official support, the Asahi team needs to RE a lot of stuffs. I’d expect it to lag behind a couple of generations at least. I blame Apple on pushing out new models every year. I don’t get why it does that. A M1 is perfectly fine after a few years but Apple treats it like an iPhone. I think one new model every 2-3 years is good enough.
- lagniappe 11mo ago>I don’t get why it does that. I've got a few ideas
- stetrain 11mo agoIf you want the latest and greatest you can get it. If an M1 is fine you can get a great deal on one and they’re still great machines and supported by Apple.
- cosmic_cheese 11mo agoM1 is indeed quite adequate for most, but each generation has brought substantial boosts in performance in single-threaded, multi-threaded, and with the M5 generation in particular GPU-bound tasks. These advancements are required to keep pace with the industry and in a few aspects stay ahead of competitors, plus there exist high end users whose workloads greatly benefit from these performance improvements.
- markus_zhang 11mo agoI agree. But Apple doesn’t sell new M1 chip laptops anymore AFAIK. There are some refurbished ones but most likely I need to go into a random store to find one. I only saw M4 and M5 laptops online. That’s why I don’t like it as a consumer. If they keep producing M1 and M2 I’d assume we can get better prices because the total quantity would be much larger. Sure it is probably better for Apple to move forward quickly though.
- rubymamis 11mo agoDid someone do a deep dive on why battery life is so awful on Linux? Or is it some Ashai's driver's inefficiencies that causing this?
- temp0826 11mo agoThis is the case with most (all?) laptops running Linux regardless of hardware unfortunately.
- fsh 11mo agoThis doesn't match my experience. My previous three laptops (two AMD Lenovo Thinkpads, one Intel Sony VAIO) had essentially the same battery life running Linux as running Windows.
- martini333 11mo agoI think MacOS was implied...
- olyjohn 11mo agoHave you ever put MacOS on a PC laptop? Terrible hardware support and the worst battery life of any OS.
- functionmouse 11mo agoI used to hackintosh every laptop I could get my hands on that could do it, and always saw better battery life on OS X vs. Windows.
- sincerely 11mo agoI have an AMD thinkpad and get maybe 1/4 the battery life on Linux as I do when I boot inti Windows, did you have to do any tweaking to achieve that?
- SG- 11mo agoauthor mentions he paid $750 for a MacBook Air M2 with 16GB while on Amazon a M4 Air with 16GB is usually $750-800. I get it that M4/M3 aren't supported to boot Asahi yet, but still.
- chocochunks 11mo agoIt's a year old article.
- SG- 11mo agothe point still stands as last year the M4 was released and was already seeing those deals especially with the M3 earlier too.
- chocochunks 11mo agoNo, because the M4 Air wasn't even out until March of this year. It was only in the iPad and MBP last year.
- ezfe 11mo agoI mean for most purposes should be very similar so makes sense the price is similar
- codepoet80 11mo agoI really wanted this to work, and it WAS remarkably good, but palm rejection on the (ginormous) Apple trackpad didn't work at all, rendering the whole thing unusable if you ever typed anything. That was a month ago, this article is a year old. I'd love to be wrong, but I don't think this problem has been solved.
- mort96 11mo agoYeah what is up with that? When I've tried to look into it I've just been met with statements that palm rejection should pretty much just work, but it absolutely doesn't and accidental inputs are so bad it's unusable without a disable/enable trackpad hotkey.
- commandersaki 11mo ago256gb ssd as the minimum spec is criminal in my opinion.
- linsomniac 11mo agoIs it possibly because 256GB is the minimum spec of the MacBook Air M2?
- downrightmike 11mo agoI think they mean that is 2025, 256GB is unreasonably small. Which is true, Apple wants to up-charge hundreds of dollars just to get to the otherwise standard 1TB drive. Realistically, it is reasonable to expect 2TB drives, based on normal progression https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/05/13/coughlin-associates-hdd/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/05/13/coughlin-associates-hd...
- wtallis 11mo agoFrom a supply perspective, 256GB seems ridiculous because you can get way more capacity for not very much money, and because 256GB is now nowhere close to enough flash chips operating in parallel to reach what is now considered high performance. But from a demand perspective, there are a lot of PC users for whom 256GB is plenty of capacity and performance. Most computers sold aren't gaming PCs or professional workstations; mainstream consumer storage requirements (aside from gaming) have been nearly stagnant for years due to the popularity of cloud computing and streaming video.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- linsomniac 11mo agoThat could be, it totally wasn't clear to me that they meant that was unreasonably small hardware vs that's unreasonable for Asahi to say was the minimum you could run on. Honestly, I suspect there are a whole lot of people that could be perfectly happy with 256GB storage on an Air. I mean, sure, I got 2TB for my MBP 5 years ago, but my father-in-law is likely never going to need even close to 256GB on his, which is basically being a Chromebook for him. I just bought a 2TB drive over the holidays and it was $250, so it's not like they're an insignificant percentage of a <$1K laptop.
- zenmac 11mo ago>I am very impressed with how smooth and problem-free Asahi Linux is. It is incredibly responsive and feels even smoother than my Arch Linux desktop with a 16 core AMD Ryzen 7945HX and 64GB of RAM. Hmmm still have issue with the battery in sleep mode on the m1. It drains a lot battery when it is in sleep mode compare to mac sleep mode.
- whitehexagon 11mo agoTwice my battery was flat. Now I just do a complete shutdown, since Asahi boots in ~30s (M1 Pro).
- kristianp 11mo agoWhy does battery get drained in sleep at different rates? Is it a connected standby mode?
- volemo 11mo agoAfaiu, there are different levels of sleep and Linux doesn’t support all of them fully on Macs at the moment.
- ActorNightly 11mo agoAt the bottom he also says. > higher battery drainage during sleep, so I usually just shut it down entirely when not using it > no hardware acceleration for video decoding > some USB port quirks and external display quirks I just don't understand why people go through all these lengths to be such sycophants for Apple.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- puff_pastry 11mo agoAsahi is awesome! But this is also proves that laptops outside the MacBook realm really need to improve so much. I wish there were a Linux machine with the hardware quality of a MacBook
- downrightmike 11mo agoWe almost had really nice arm laptops, but they got super greedy about it having AI and no one wanted them.
- bigyabai 11mo agoARM is a capricious licensor. It's hardly surprising.
- farmin 11mo agoI am giving my MacBook Air M2 15” to my wife and bought a Lenovo E16 with 120hz screen to run Kubuntu last night. She needed a new laptop and I am had enough of macOS and just need some stuff to work that will be easier on an intel and Linux. Also I do bookwork online so bigger screen and dedicated numpad will be nice. It reviews well and seems like good value for money with current holiday sales but I don’t expect the same hardware quality or portability just a little more freedom. I hope I’m not too disappointed. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-E16-G3-Review-Affordable-office-laptop-is-even-better-with-a-120-Hz-display.1059930.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-E16-G3-Review-...
- 650REDHAIR 11mo agoI outfitted our 10 person team with the E16 g2 and it’s been great. Two minor issues- it’s HEAVY compared to T models. Because of the weight try not to walk around with the lid up and holding it from one of front corners. I’ve noticed one of them is kind of warped from walking around the office holding it that way.
- farmin 11mo ago
- gnarlouse 11mo agoAll Firefox users should switch to librewolf. In the short term it’s for telling Mozilla to go f**, in the long term it’s a browser fork with with really good anti fingerprinting.
- lugu 11mo agoNote that librewolf rely on Mozilla tech infra for account synchronization and plugin distribution. If you are truly hostile to this organization, is there another browser you can recommend?
- port11 11mo agoNot that I disagree, but why make that point here?
- gnarlouse 11mo agoThey had Firefox in their dnf for asahi
- kristianp 11mo ago(2024). For those curious about the Alkeria line-scan camera, he wrote a blog about 3d printing a lens mount etc. https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2024-08-31-customizing-my-line-scan-camera/ https://daniel.lawrence.lu/blog/2024-08-31-customizing-my-li... Seems like a crazy hobby to me though! Photography is inconvenient enough without having to make your own mounts and use an sdk to do it! History is filled with inconvenient hobbies though. I would agree with the sentiment about the lack of good bright screens for lenovo's hacker laptops like the X1 carbon.
- cakealert 11mo agoThe idea that a group of people would spend so much of their time trying to get linux to work on Apple hardware through reverse engineering always seemed absolutely crazy to me. I would never consider buying Apple hardware precisely because it doesn't support linux and the work they put in achieves nothing because the risk will always remain that they will lock the hardware further. Nevermind the fact that they will likely never fully reverse engineer all the components. It just seems like a completely pointless endeavor... perhaps some people buy into it? why would anyone buy overpriced hardware with partial support that may one day be gone? the enhanced battery life doesn't really hold much appeal to me, and the arm architecture if anything is just another signal to stay away. The only thing that makes sense to me is that they wanted the achievement on their resume, and in that given recent developments they succeeded?
- jjtheblunt 11mo agoYou overlooked the UTM app on the App Store (and open source available too), which wraps Apple Silicon virtualization excellently, or you can use Qemu (which I don't). I used to use Asahi, but the sleep modes power drain was tedious. With UTM, I install a latest Fedora ISO (declaring it a "Linux", which exposes the option to skip QEMU and use native Apple Silicon virtualization. It's fantastic. I mention this only because it's been super useful, way better than Asahi, with minimal effort.
- yupyupyups 11mo agoIt's like Hackintosh all over again but with Apple hardware rather than their cursed software.
- jojomodding 11mo agoMaybe they just needed a hobby. I for one think it's a pretty cool one.
- jama211 11mo agoThe hardware isn’t overpriced, it’s best in class. It’s just that that class isn’t what you’re looking for, and as a Linux user it’s not for you, which is valid! But the hardware for what it is is one of the absolute best price to performance ratios on the market right now and I’m tired of people pretending it isn’t. You can get a brand new m4 MacBook Air for under $800 right now, and that’s simply one of the best deals around. For an M2 for asahi Linux? Second hand the prices are even better.
- xrd 11mo agoAnyone know what the story is for running LLMs on apple hardware but using asahi?
- tarruda 11mo agoAFAIK MPS cannot be used on Asahi, so it has to be done using Vulkan which will definitely be much slower.
- mendelmaleh 11mo agoI had a pretty similar setup with sway too, idle power usage was pretty bad, but no external display became a deal breaker at some point.
- jasoneckert 11mo agoI've been an Asahi user since the early stages of the project when it used Arch. Today, I run Fedora Asahi Remix on a Mac Studio M1 Ultra with the Sway desktop, and it truly has been the perfect Linux workstation in every way. https://github.com/jasoneckert/sway-dotfiles/blob/main/AsahiSwayM1Ultra.png https://github.com/jasoneckert/sway-dotfiles/blob/main/Asahi...
- greazy 11mo agoHow's the battery life?
- jasoneckert 11mo agoThe battery life is terrible - as soon as I unplug my Mac Studio, it basically just shuts down.
- lostlogin 11mo agoI laughed. I worked in an office with sketchy power. The lights would flicker and the non-macs would turn off. The Macs just carried on. Mini, iMac, Mac Pro. Yay for big caps I guess?
- asimovDev 11mo agohey have you ever tried compiling the linux kernel on it? It's often difficult in my experience to find compile benchmarks for Apple Silicon that aren't Xcode
- tombert 11mo agoHey! I actually wrote a thing to make the Swaybar a little more "complete" (e.g. battery status, currently selected program, clock, inspirational quote from ChatGPT, etc): https://git.sr.ht/~tombert/swaybar3 https://git.sr.ht/~tombert/swaybar3 Not going to claim it will change the world or anything, but this runs perpetually with Sway and according to System Monitor it hovers at a little less than a megabyte of RAM. You can set how often you want things to update, and add as many sections as you'd like, and it's easy to create extra modules if you are so inclined (though not as easy as the Clojure version since I haven't found an implementation of multimethods for Rust that I like as much).
- jwrallie 11mo agoIs there a difference from 2024? Is the M2 still a good choice for Linux? I don’t mind older generations, I’m used to be a bit behind in terms of hardware as a tradeoff for good Linux support. I used to enjoy the X line of ThinkPads but nowadays I don’t see a point going for them anymore, as the things I appreciated about them are slowly being phased out.
- adastra22 11mo agoThere is no support really for Linux on the M3+, nor should anyone expect the situation to change now that the main devs have moved on. If you would be happy with a M1/M2 laptop knowing full well that it is a dead end and you will never have another Mac laptop with Linux support (the default assumption at this point), then yes it is a great machine.
- bjackman 11mo ago> main devs have moved on How confident are you in this statement? I have no particular knowledge of Asahi. But I do know this narrative emerged about Rust-for-Linux after a couple of high-profile individuals quit. In that case it was plainly bogus but this was only obvious if you were somewhat adjacent to the relevant community. So now I'm curious if it could be the same thing. (Hopefully by now it's clear to everyone that R4L is a healthy project, since the official announcement that Rust is no longer "experimental" in the kernel tree). I know Asahi is a much smaller project than R4L so it's naturally at higher risk of losing momentum. I would really love Asahi to succeed. I recently bought a Framework and, while I am pretty happy with it in isolation... when I use my partner's M4 Macbook Air I just think... damn. The quality of this thing is head and shoulders above the rest of the field. And it doesn't even cost more than the competition. If you could run Linux on it, it would be completely insane to use anything else.
- neobrain 11mo agoIt's similarly bogus here. Early Asahi development tried to upstream as much as possible but ultimately still maintained a gigantic pile of downsteam patches, which wasn't a sustainable model. Most of current development is focused on reducing that pile to zero to get things into a tractable state again. So things continue to be active, but the progress has become much less visible.
- tobi_bsf 11mo agotoo bad they archived this level of compatibility only on hardware you cannot easily access anymore.
- wltr 11mo agoAmong other things, I quite like the blog, especially travelling photos. There’s some ‘old Internet / old blogosphere’ vibe in it. Not much to add to the topic of having a MacBook Air M2 with Linux. Glad it works well, I’m eyeing an M1 one for myself. Yet my Retina (2014 model) works perfect with Arch Linux (including sleep), so I’m patiently waiting for it to break. And at the same me I hope it would work another decade, so good it is. Battery life is quite great, it’s between 3 to 4 hours with battery being at 50% of capacity. So, I expect the new battery could give me up to 8 hours, which is pretty impressive for me. In reality, I don’t need a session for over an hour or two. The only thing I miss is USB-C charging, as that way I could charge with anything when I have no charger on me. Again, in reality, it’s a pretty rare scenario.
- faragon 11mo agoWhy Apple don't sponsor Asahi Linux? E.g., I would buy Apple computers gladly for running Linux.