Asahi Linux Impressions After 2 Years as a Daily Driver

I started using Arch Linux under Asahi Linux on a M1 Mac Mini in March, 2022. It was the first alpha release. I have continued to use Asahi Linux as a daily driver to produce the videos on this channel. In August of 2023, I migrated from Arch Linux over to Fedora 39 KDE. Which I am still using today. KDE is 5.27 not the 6.0.x version which has become available at the end of February. These are my thoughts on the amount of progress the Asahi Team as made in 2 years and my thoughts about using it in my daily workload.

AI Thumbnail: a Cyberpunk cityscape far into the future, something Asahi Linux will surely be present for

Chapter
00:00 - Overview
00:36 - Asahi Linux as come a long way
01:41 - August 2022 Update
02:49 - Native GPU Support
03:45 - Fedora Dev Team begins working with Asahi Linux
04:54 - Current Asahi Linux Features
07:23 - My Thoughts

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Twitter @djware55

[Vannishn]

Omg im so grateful I landed on your amazin video !¡ I recently installed Asahi and I love to learn about it !!! 😊🎉
Thank you very much 😁

[LMB]

I tested Asahi Linux last year, on the M2.

As a simple test I ran "7z b" for benchmark - and it came to over 60'000 MIPS!

For comparison, 16-core i9 gets around 38'000, 12-core i7 does 32'000, and so on.

[hamesparde]

Pls make some more BSD content. Also you should do a video on Debian with Hurd!

[Gerdoch]

I'm running Asahi Fedora Remix as my daily driver on my M2 Pro Mac Mini. It's working incredibly well, though I'll be much happier when DP over USB-C is implemented and I can use multiple monitors.

[CodyakaLamer]

I've been using Asahi Linux Fedora Remix for about 3 weeks and really love the distro. Only bug I have is if I got a external SSD plugged in the computer it won't boot at all. But other than that I've haven't had no issue from the distro to the point I'm liking my Mac Mini again. I liked my M2 Mac Mini but sometimes MacOS I felt limited sometimes. When I saw it supports the Mac Mini M2 I was really wanted to try it out.

Only once I had to boot into MacOS is because I was taking my midterm that require a lockdown browser. But it was super easy to boot back into MacOS and reboot back to Asahi. I'm planning to try out Box64 to translate x86 to arch64 and try out the translation layer. But using Linux in Arm reminds me Linux in 2016 to 2018 when I was seeing more and more programs working on Linux.

[chalybesmith]

Could you make a video explaining UKIs? (Unified Kernel Image) I think it would be a very interesting topic!

[JohnMaverick-wc]

for now the only thing holding me from using it as a daily driver is 120hz support

[CRYPTiCEXiLE]

great video dj ware as always i always share this video with friends, and all my computesr all use Linux even my steam deck :D. but this machine i bought 4 years ago call the m1 mac mini whichi regret buying over price locked down bsd system gaaah.. bu t asashi linux with fedora core would be interesting and get ALL my computers to be on only linux.... macOS is not cool if i could run freebsd would be a much better bsd system, but macOS no... lol i might just do that and i wonder how well it run games on it....

[new-lviv]

Time to time I am joking that I will buy a Macbook, install Asahi and start browsing coffeeshops.

[igordasunddas]

Hey, nice video! I am only worried about sleep modes and battery life. If it was anywhere near the MacOS one, I'd probably switch (got a M1 Pro MacBook Pro).

[LorenzoBettini]

Thanks for the video! So, can installing the new Fedora Asahi or reinstalling it not be done simply by rerunning the installer? You must first delete the existing partition? Or was it only due to the fact you first had Arch Asahi?

[catsupchutney]

I installed it a few months ago, but decided to switch my Mac Mini back to MacOS. I wanted to run a media server with it, but there isn't enough documentation to run it for anything beyond experimentation. ( I was trying to set up some custom router rules).

[ernestoditerribile]

I'm now on Fedora 40 Asahi Rawhide, just to get KDE6(till 2 weeks ago, I ran on Fedora 39 with KDE5, The only program that did work in 39 and not in 40 anymore is Blender

[maikeru]

Still haven’t tried it out on my M1 Air, but I will at some point.
I need to free up more disk space

[NikolaiCherepanov]

Im not a systems designer or an OS programmer. Theoretically could Asahi linux provide support for EGPU over thunderbolt since Apple clearly doesn't want to implement it? Someone I remember saying it'd be very hard to get GPUs working with M1 silicon however GPU support on ARM machines isn't anything new considering there are plenty of machines with ARM CPUs that use PCIE GPU's.

[michaelbouckley]

My original Asahi failed to update with pacman. dnf now? I wiped one of the small partitions, and reformatted the 100Gb as APFS Encrypted for more space on my 500Gb SSD. Prefer not rebooting, use VMware player with Debian bookworm

[RonnieRedd]

Would be interested in some videos regarding your content creation (software and hardware)

[gwojcieszczuk]

I still need to do DFU recovery on my macbook air M1, after I manually deleted incorrect drive partition. In terms of performance, I was experiencing strange intermittent performance issues (lagging) especially when playing video through web browser. I experienced that issue both in GNOME3 and KDE plasma. This problem may have something to do with wayland.

[adjusted-bunny]

Interesting since the M2s aren't that expensive.

[axlslak]

A few years back, when Meltdown and specter came out, got pissed at Intel and decided to switch to ARM. That's how it all started :))

Today, everything runs on arm. And at the center of it all its a mac mini running gentoo/asahi mix... I guess you would call it. Lots of other gentoo running on various other arms. I still have my X86 systems. They are gathering dust now :))

I only needed ONE strong arm machine to compile crap for all the other machines. And one apple mini is plenty enough for that. honestly does a superb job at it. Pi5 are getting good at it now too. But m1 still rules.

My electric bill has gone down. My noise level in the house has gone down. Processing power remains strong. :)