11–20 of 169 posts
Battery life would be the big thing, I think. There's not a single person I know who wouldn't like having Linux on their M1/M2 Macbooks--they're beautiful devices--but if you're not getting something approaching MacOS's battery life, then there's not that much separating it from another similarly-specced ultrabook.
That said, I don't want that to stop someone else from having it!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would battery life be impacted? The main reason for bad battery life is hardware acceleration for certain tasks. Once that's settled, the computer shouldn't start producing more heat out of the blue.
Hardware acceleration is not some binary state these days, there are a ton of specialized bits of hardware under the Apple M chip umbrella.
¹ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-does-windows-have-terrible...
Would something like KVM work?
Battery life would be the big thing, I think. There's not a single person I know who wouldn't like having Linux on their M1/M2 Macbooks--they're beautiful devices--but if you're not getting something approaching MacOS's battery life, then there's not that much separating it from another similarly-specced ultrabook.
Why would battery life be impacted? The main reason for bad battery life is hardware acceleration for certain tasks. Once that's settled, the computer shouldn't start producing more heat out of the blue.
I guess this was a typo. MacOS/Apple Silicon (and other CPU architectures) save a lot of power via hardware acceleration. For instance, there are dedicated hardware video decoding blocks that use much less power than implementing video decoding with software.
The MacOS kernel takes advantage of all of these hardware specifics. MacOS also uses a number of other techniques like process wakeup coalescing, dedicated hardware for memory compression, process specific efficiency/performance core choices, ...
Apple is getting a lot of power improvements via codesign of the processor and the OS.
To do the same set of tasks with a similar power profile, Asahi will have to include system hooks that take advantage of all the dedicated lower power hardware functions and do a similar set of optimizations. They have done great work so far and will likely continue, but it isn't the simple tradeoff you are suggesting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From anecdotes I've heard, battery life on Asahi Linux is already great
Annecdotaly, it'll last you through an entire work day, but probably not into double digits.
I used to hate on Macs until I was given one by my employer. Then I realized that despite how awful macOS is, the laptop itself is completely unrivalled. There is no Lenovo/xps/framework/tuxbook/tongfang/clevo/whatever that comes close to the overall package of a MacBook. It has the stiffest body, the quietest fans, the biggest battery, the best screen and trackpad, etc. Even worse is the fact that a framework 16 is…
I used to hate on Macs until I was given one by my employer. Then I realized that despite how awful macOS is, the laptop itself is completely unrivalled. There is no Lenovo/xps/framework/tuxbook/tongfang/clevo/whatever that comes close to the overall package of a MacBook. It has the stiffest body, the quietest fans, the biggest battery, the best screen and trackpad, etc. Even worse is the fact that a framework 16 is…
Also, because there are so many PC laptops, it's really hard to get a good review of a PC laptop. There are so many configurations and PC makers often make small (but meaningful) changes to designs during a product's lifecycle. All of a sudden, the one you bought has a less bright display or the cooling system isn't as good or whatever. It makes it hard to reward companies for creating good products. There are premium PC laptops, but they still suffer from some of these decisions and they often cost about the same.
I've looked for alternatives to the Mac, but at this point I've stopped. I'm sick of doing research on junk to try and save a few bucks, I'm sick of trackpads that are unusable, and with the new M-series processors I simply never want to go back to a high-wattage processor.
I actually like macOS, but I'm really glad happy to see Linux advancing on Apple hardware. The Asahi Linux developers are amazing and I love reading their write-ups.
Battery life would be the big thing, I think. There's not a single person I know who wouldn't like having Linux on their M1/M2 Macbooks--they're beautiful devices--but if you're not getting something approaching MacOS's battery life, then there's not that much separating it from another similarly-specced ultrabook.
I'm perfectly content not having Linux on my M1 MacBook. That said, I don't want that to stop someone else from having it!