Linux on a MacBook Pro (M1 Pro): How good is Asahi now?

👏 SUPPORT THE CHANNEL:
Get access to a weekly podcast, vote on the next topics I cover, and get your name in the credits:

👕 GET TLE MERCH

🎙️ LINUX AND OPEN SOURCE NEWS PODCAST:

🏆 FOLLOW ME ELSEWHERE:

#Linux #asahi #macbook

00:00 Intro
00:44 Sponsor: Stream any OS or desktop to your browser
01:40 Asahi Linux
02:58 Install
05:15 Hardware support
07:55 Performance & Battery Life
09:33 GPU & Gaming
11:57 App support
13:04 Is it ready yet?
14:45 Sponsor: Get a PC made to run Linux
15:51 Support the channel

You can't currently run any linux distro you want on Apple Silicon hardware, but thankfully, some insanely good developers have created Asahi Linux: it's Arch Linux with some super bleeding edge drivers to support the newest macbooks, and desktop macs, from M1 to M2.

Installing Asahi Linux is a simple process: you just run a single terminal command.

Asahi supports all M1 machines for now, except the mac Studio, and you'll need about 60 gigs of storage. Once the script has done its thing, you'll need to completely shut down the mac, then reboot it by pressing and holding the power button, until you see a volume list to boot on, where you can pick Asahi Linux.

So, on my macbook pro, a lot of stuff works perfectly without anything to do on my part. The keyboard is perfectly recognized. Keyboard backlight also works out of the box. The touchpad works perfectly. The display is recognized with its full resolution although it doesn't support the high refresh rate that it should have, it's locked to 60 hertz. Wifi also worked immediately, but audio didn't.

Bluetooth also works perfectly. Of course charging the laptop works, and in terms of ports, the USB C ports do work, but only as USB C, and USB 2 for now, not USB 3 and not thunderbolt either.

The SD card slot also works, but the HDMI port doesn't. Your webcam also won't work here, and the onboard mic isn't detected for me either.

What about CPU performance and battery life then? The M1 Pro under Linux got a single core score of 1718 and a multi core score of 10079.

Compare that to Geekbench 5 on macOS, where I got 1775 in single core, and 12521 in multi core. That's a difference of 3% for single core, and 24% for multi core, in favor of macOS.

In terms of battery life, though, it's WAY WORSE. With youtube videos playing in a loop in the background, Asahi barely lasted for about 5 hours.

THe Asahi Linux team managed to write a fully conformant OpenGL driver for Apple SIlicon, something APple themselves doesn't have, because they only support their own graphics API, called Metal. You CAN install these GPU drivers, optionally, with a few commands. They will replace your current version of mesa, with one including these nice openGL drivers.

And now, you DO get GPU acceleration, and it's now recommended you use Wayland, because the Asahi team said X11 wouldn't really be a supported target for their graphics drivers.

As per gaming, don't expect much here. Steam won't run, because, well, it's ARM, and Steam on Linux doesn't have an ARM version. Even if it did, there are no Vulkan drivers yet, so stuff like DXVK wouldn't work, and there is no translation layer baked in to run x86 apps in there.

And of course, we need to talk about app support. Asahi Linux is basically Arch + more drivers, so you do get the AUR and everything else Arch has access to. BUT it's also an OS running on ARM, which means some software just isn't available for that architecture.

[VektrumSimulacrum]

For where Asahi is right now as alpha software that's really impressive. All that on top of being reversed engineered... the Asahi dev are punching way above their weight class with this.

[chairman]

Asahi disabled the sound on purpose to prevent the speakers from being blown up. There is a potential issue that can cause the speakers to be ruined.

[burninorable]

I tried Asahi on my mom's macbook air. She was kind enough to allow the experiment. It was impressive but at the time, it didn't even have an audio driver for the built in speakers.

[citywitt]

As a blind and subsequently heavy audio user, I am so grateful for this video. You really have no idea how much time you just saved me.

[Ivan_]

Fedora Asahi +1 over here.

Seems like release will be ready next month and since Asahi mentioned full move to Fedora in the future - for sure it makes sense to review it.

Thanks Nick!

[chrisrgutierrez]

Sound is overated anyways. People shouldn't be able to hear.

[MnemonicCarrier]

Putting usability and design choices to one side, what Apple did with their custom M1 and M2 silicon is nothing short of astonishing. Their chips can perform well while sitting power. Hell, most of their non-pro laptop models don't even have fans, and they run just as fast on battery and they do when plugged in. Apple really knocked it out of the park with their custom CPUs.

[mentalmarvin]

For those with an M1 Mac Mini, everything works out of the box. HDMI, sound and usb ports. Only thing missing is gaming

[TheDinotz]

Issue is that Arch Asahi is gonna stop being the flagship, in the future the focus is gonna be on Fedora. The devs on Asahi mainly said that the ARM Arch branch is too small and the changes come to late from them, increasing breakage risks so Fedora shall be the focus in the future.

[joesalyers]

Well at least if this project stays active over the next 8 to 9 years we will have a viable alternative when MacOS support is over for these machines. The old Mac Intel Machines mostly became windows machines using bootcamp when their support ran out but having an open source option to use these machines is way better than Microsoft's malware OS.

[mirage]

Asahi is something I'm curiously paying attention to. It's a wonderful example of how the Linux community will run Linux on everything and I love that stuff.

[propjoe]

Pretty amazing to see the progress that open source software projects are making in this area. And this is the best Linux channel on YouTube for sure. Thanks Nic!

[FluffyPuppyKasey]

I had an M1 Air for a while and tried running Asahi when it was first announced, and everything you mentioned was accurate back then as well. Seems like most of the work has been on the GPU lately

[betterfosset]

It is absolutely insane how just basically two devs - Asahi Lina and Alyssa Rozenzweig - wrote the entire GPU stack for Asahi LInux.
Hey crazy idea: Can we use an AI model to go through an entire GPU/proprietary chip/locked down peripheral and discover undocumented instruction sets/secret commands? Of course the AI model has to be completely open source (not something like ChatGPT) and the dataset to create the AI has to be open source/ethical too. Guess it is wishful thinking.

[hyperpug]

Insanely impressive project. Really excited about its future. When it reaches beta or stable it might be the reason to buy a MacBook

[TheDevarshiShah]

accepting that this has been ~8 months since this video is published, I would like to see a followup one on Asahi Fedora 40. With that, if could check out
1) Battery life
2) how dnf installation handles app installation where the device is ARM
3) how flatpak and appImage works on ARM, or do they even work at all or not, when the specific Flatpak is not compiled for ARM
4) how linux handles RAM management of base model mac (that comes with 8GB only, yes even in 2024)

Thanks!

[Lampe]

The built-in speakers are disabled in Asahi, as their driver is not at all ready and could physically damage the speakers which apple then has to replace if they even will do that. But headphones should work.

[psychicalbularyo]

Seeing the progress being made here, I'm now hoping that they bring Asahi Linux to iPads and iPhones (especially the older models) next.

[JamieAlban]

I'm super grateful for the asahi development team - once Apple inevitably discontinues support for this machine in a few years, there will probably be a superb Linux distribution for it

[fedora]

Great video, we'd love to see your take on our Asahi Remix! 🎉