Ask HN: How usable is Asahi Linux
I’ve read a lot of good things about Apple Silicon, but preferably run Linux. What are the experiences here on running Asahi Linux? Or maybe a related question, are any laptop manufacturers getting close to Apple Silicon in terms of energy usage and performance?
22 comments
I'm using Asahi Linux on an M1 MBP since Oct. 2022.
It’s my personal machine that I use every now and then for programming projects and for organizing my files.
Everything I need works here. I even got suspend which consumes 5% battery in 2h. It’s not perfect but enough for my limited need.
All the software I need. Including Gimp, Darktable, and of course various command line/programming tools.
Edit: with the edge kernel I also get 3D acceleration bit I only tested this quickly in the webbrowser with WebGL.
It’s my personal machine that I use every now and then for programming projects and for organizing my files.
Everything I need works here. I even got suspend which consumes 5% battery in 2h. It’s not perfect but enough for my limited need.
All the software I need. Including Gimp, Darktable, and of course various command line/programming tools.
Edit: with the edge kernel I also get 3D acceleration bit I only tested this quickly in the webbrowser with WebGL.
It's great that suspend works, but 5% for two hours is abysmal performance compared to the M1 Apple default performance. That's 60% battery over 12 hours, whereas I'd expect to lose 5% total over that entire timespan otherwise.
How is audio? Can you use the speakers/headphone jack?
2020 M1 Air Asahi edge user here. 3.5mm headphone jack audio does indeed work! Everything is buttery smooth for me. Video, trackpad, battery life, Bluetooth mouse... they all work swimmingly. Biggest downsides at the moment:
- no HDMI out
- no built-in speakers
- bluetooth audio wonkiness
KDE Plasma really shines on this machine. Much love and gratitude to the Asahi team.
- no HDMI out
- no built-in speakers
- bluetooth audio wonkiness
KDE Plasma really shines on this machine. Much love and gratitude to the Asahi team.
You cannot, not without hacking (speakers) Bluetooth audio is fine though, and I've not tried the headphone jack
I'd be curious to hear anyone report how many hours of battery life they get with Asahi under typical web browsing conditions (no video). I've seen plenty of folks use words like "decent" to describe it under Asahi, but very few precise numbers. I'd love to hear "I was able to use my MacBook for 9 hours in Asahi before it died", even if it's purely anecdotal.
I currently get about 5ish hours SoT on full brightness and a million browser tabs open, which is quite bad compared to what I've heard from other people (and honestly a bit disappointing since battery was supposed to be one of the greatest improvements for the M1). I've recently heard though that screen and keyboard brightness has an enormous impact on battery, so I need to remember to try lowering it and see if it improves. Standby has a slight drain, but I've found it to be the least of my problems since it's not much and I plug it in every night. If anyone has any tips to make my battery last longer, I am very interested to hear them.
One of the things about energy usage is that it requires your drivers to be all really behaving and in sync. Apple has probably spent many hours optimizing and organizing everything so that the power states all behave as they expect in order for the whole thing to deliver nice perf and power usage. Switching to Linux changes everything. I'm not saying it's going to be worse, but remember that every single driver will be different.
> are any laptop manufacturers getting close to Apple Silicon in terms of energy usage and performance?
Framework recently showed off their newer models hitting 11+ hours of runtime in a video playback test: https://youtu.be/tuw-YpbFkkM
Framework recently showed off their newer models hitting 11+ hours of runtime in a video playback test: https://youtu.be/tuw-YpbFkkM
That's with Windows I think. With distros like Ubuntu they're not hitting those numbers.
I don't see why it wouldn't. Ubuntu has Intel's Thread Director driver in the latest updates, you should be able to park cores like you do on Windows and recoup a significant amount of the TDP.
I have the Framework 12th-gen, and have never gotten anything near 9+ hours while running Linux (Debian bookworm + 6.3.x kernel) as in the video. I don't even think I've gotten 5 hours.
If there was an obvious reason, it would have been solved long ago.
It's probably a collection of messy issues in software from all layers of the typical Linux desktop stack.
It's solvable for sure, but requires the manpower equivalent of what apple has working on Macos.
Linux companies typically have other low hanging fruits to focus their efforts on.
It's probably a collection of messy issues in software from all layers of the typical Linux desktop stack.
It's solvable for sure, but requires the manpower equivalent of what apple has working on Macos.
Linux companies typically have other low hanging fruits to focus their efforts on.
Keep in mind that M2 has lackluster support. Specifically the Mac Mini has no display output (either via HDMI or USB-C DisplayPort).
I wouldn't want to buy such a modern computer and then use it without full graphics acceleration, just out of principle. But maybe my info on Asahi is out of date and they do have that.
> energy usage and performance
Define close. I'd say they've been close for awhile. Close enough for me anyway.
Define close. I'd say they've been close for awhile. Close enough for me anyway.
I daily drive Asahi Linux on my M1 MBA for CS in college. Currently, it's usable enough for that, coding, and casual web browsing, but for other use cases it still has a ways to go.
Right now, the area that needs the most improvement is software support. x86 Linux is already not ideal in that it isn't supported for a lot of commercial software and games, but ARM Linux is even worse in that regard, since even a lot of open source software isn't supported, at least not on the AUR. Along with that, the M1 doesn't support 32-bit software, so AFAIK there is no good way to use WINE to run Windows software currently.
A lot of open source software like LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, Firefox/LibreWolf/Brave (only release version for FF), Webcord, and Signal can simply be installed using an AUR helper like paru. However, a good chunk of open source software isn't supported for aarch64 on the AUR, like Logseq, Joplin, Element, Sonixd, Bitwarden, Tor browser, Mullvad browser, just to name a few, so you'll need to figure out how to compile and update them yourself (I personally haven't bothered since I can live without them for now, and I couldn't get the "-git" packages to work either). Widevine can be installed (to use Spotify in a web browser), but the process is very hacky. Jetbrains IDEs can be installed, but Toolbox is not supported and a lot of the AUR packages don't support aarch64, so you'll need to install a lot of them manually. It is also possible to emulate x86 machines with QEMU (I used it to run Kali Linux for a cybersecurity course), but the performance is extremely bad and I don't recommend it. I also have not been able to install Blender or Unity, so for software like that you'll probably need to boot into macOS. And don't even think about running games yet, except for maybe Minecraft, Minetest, and SuperTuxKart.
Fortunately, the Asahi devs are aware that the software support is terrible, and they are making a lot of progress toward fixing it. Asahi Lina posted a video recently demonstrating running a variety of Windows games using her custom kernel (which I am currently super excited for), and Martin says that the main distro is going to be changed from Arch Linux ARM to one that actually has good aarch64 package support (which is rumored to be Fedora). So it looks like this situation will improve in the not-too-distant future.
There's also currently a variety of other quirks from it being alpha WIP software, such as no speaker support (which is currently being worked on), no external displays, no microphone, no camera, no fingerprint, worse battery life/sleep, and random crashes/lockups (although this has been a problem on every Linux laptop I've used).
So based on this, whether I'd recommend it depends on how much you love Linux and FOSS and whether it is compatible with your workflow. I personally hate relying on proprietary software for everyday personal use, so I am willing to put up with the quirks to have a system that I have full control over (and considering how amazing the Asahi devs are, I am confident that it will eventually get to a more usable state). If you're in the same boat, I'd recommend giving it a shot. If you just want a computer that works well, on the other hand, or you use a lot of graphical creation-related software, you'll probably want to stick with macOS instead for now, or get an x86 laptop like a ThinkPad.
(If you use it, make sure to use the edge kernel since it has all of the latest interesting features like GPU support. The installer also comes with a preconfigured setup with KDE, although you can also install bare bones ALARM like I did and install everything through the command line.)
Right now, the area that needs the most improvement is software support. x86 Linux is already not ideal in that it isn't supported for a lot of commercial software and games, but ARM Linux is even worse in that regard, since even a lot of open source software isn't supported, at least not on the AUR. Along with that, the M1 doesn't support 32-bit software, so AFAIK there is no good way to use WINE to run Windows software currently.
A lot of open source software like LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, Firefox/LibreWolf/Brave (only release version for FF), Webcord, and Signal can simply be installed using an AUR helper like paru. However, a good chunk of open source software isn't supported for aarch64 on the AUR, like Logseq, Joplin, Element, Sonixd, Bitwarden, Tor browser, Mullvad browser, just to name a few, so you'll need to figure out how to compile and update them yourself (I personally haven't bothered since I can live without them for now, and I couldn't get the "-git" packages to work either). Widevine can be installed (to use Spotify in a web browser), but the process is very hacky. Jetbrains IDEs can be installed, but Toolbox is not supported and a lot of the AUR packages don't support aarch64, so you'll need to install a lot of them manually. It is also possible to emulate x86 machines with QEMU (I used it to run Kali Linux for a cybersecurity course), but the performance is extremely bad and I don't recommend it. I also have not been able to install Blender or Unity, so for software like that you'll probably need to boot into macOS. And don't even think about running games yet, except for maybe Minecraft, Minetest, and SuperTuxKart.
Fortunately, the Asahi devs are aware that the software support is terrible, and they are making a lot of progress toward fixing it. Asahi Lina posted a video recently demonstrating running a variety of Windows games using her custom kernel (which I am currently super excited for), and Martin says that the main distro is going to be changed from Arch Linux ARM to one that actually has good aarch64 package support (which is rumored to be Fedora). So it looks like this situation will improve in the not-too-distant future.
There's also currently a variety of other quirks from it being alpha WIP software, such as no speaker support (which is currently being worked on), no external displays, no microphone, no camera, no fingerprint, worse battery life/sleep, and random crashes/lockups (although this has been a problem on every Linux laptop I've used).
So based on this, whether I'd recommend it depends on how much you love Linux and FOSS and whether it is compatible with your workflow. I personally hate relying on proprietary software for everyday personal use, so I am willing to put up with the quirks to have a system that I have full control over (and considering how amazing the Asahi devs are, I am confident that it will eventually get to a more usable state). If you're in the same boat, I'd recommend giving it a shot. If you just want a computer that works well, on the other hand, or you use a lot of graphical creation-related software, you'll probably want to stick with macOS instead for now, or get an x86 laptop like a ThinkPad.
(If you use it, make sure to use the edge kernel since it has all of the latest interesting features like GPU support. The installer also comes with a preconfigured setup with KDE, although you can also install bare bones ALARM like I did and install everything through the command line.)