Announced in early August and initially planned for the end of the month, the Fedora Asahi Remix distribution is finally here for those who want to install the Fedora Linux operating system on their Apple Silicon Macs.
The distro is based on the latest Fedora Linux 39 release and ships with the KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS desktop environment by default, using Wayland.
Been daily driving Asahi (first ALARM then Fedora when they transitioned) and it’s been exciting to experience in real time how far the project has come. When I first installed, audio didn’t work, the graphics driver was incomplete, and battery life left a lot to be desired. Skip to today and it’s evident how committed marcan and other contributors are to not just porting, but making everything feel right. Highly suggest following him or Lina on Mastodon.
This is awesome. What hardware are you running (m1 or m2)? Also, is there anything that isn’t working?
I’ve been eyeing to buy a m* silicon based mac, but I’m not into tinkering into fixing things.
Sorry a bit let to reply, but I’m running on M1 Air and Mini. Off the top of my head, built-in microphone doesn’t work and external displays don’t work through USB/Thunderbolt. Was also having trouble getting my audio interface to work even in class compliant mode. Otherwise it’s a very polished and easy experience.
How is battery life compared to Mac os?
Bad, but marcan has mentioned elsewhere that there’s a lot of room for improvement in this space, both active and idle
Great news
This is great!! I use macOS for work but I’m sure I can get 90% of the work done on Linux now! Just wondering about GPU perfomance? Video editing is crazy fast on macOS, anyone tried on Asahi?
I know that they only recently got opengl support and it was pretty primitive so I would imagine they have some work to do on the GPU side
They have full vulkan now too, but it’s not quite mature enough to be enabled by default rn (afaik)
If they can get full vulkan, maybe Zink can take care of the rest
Unfortunately, the custom graphics driver only supports OpenGL 3.3 (from 2010) and OpenGL ES (embedded systems) 3.2 (via Zink, via Mesa)
Edit: Just realized i forgot to actually answer the question. I don’t believe they’ve yet added support for the video encoding/decoding engine, but once that arrives i believe it should be comparable to MacOS
I mean this is what a proper distro loooks like. Tailoring another distro for a true, specific purpose. Kudos to the team.
Yes, it’s not just a DE and default package set but actual system improvements other distros aren’t offering. Kudos to the Asahi team for making this possible!
Most are talking about the laptops. I have my eyes on a Mac mini to run asahi on. The biggest downsides with Mac hardware is reperability and upgrades. Some issues the Mac mini doesn’t have Vs laptops is ofc is no battery replacement , screen and keyboard webcam, mouse to use. and there are hubs for installing more storage. Ram is ofc a big minus. Looking at m2 16 GB 512 mb. And extend storage with something like this https://www.macworld.com/article/1677460/mac-mini-upgrade-hub-storage-ethernet-sd-card-ports.html 40 Gbs thunderbolt would make it easy to extend storage at least.
As long as it doesn’t break I would take this over any alternative minipc . I use my ThinkPad today but 99% of use is at home anyway so no need for portability. Need to wait some time to get the extra funds for it but something like that…
As long as it doesn’t break I would take this over any alternative minipc
May I ask why though? One of the biggest advantages of using a MacBook is the performance-battery efficiency. If you’re going to get a Mac mini and loading Linux, you lose that advantage.
Unless you’re looking specifically for an ARM64 machine for whatever reason, I think an AMD mini PC, say something like the Minisforum EliteMini UM780 XTX would be technically a better option - you get dual NVMe, dual 2.5G network ports, USB 4.0, Oculink for even more b/w than Thunderbolt, and far more I/O options in general. Not to mention, excellent Linux support.
I will have to look into it , but all reviews/comparisons I have seen has been always that the Mac beats the others. I do not game , I want audio and some video editing besides code.
Power consumption is a point as well as I am planning on going off the powergrid eventually.
I would install this if I had made the objectively wrong decision to buy an apple computer.
It makes a second hand mac viable for me. The hardware is nice, it was always the OS that made me avoid it.
I really wouldn’t touch secondhand Ms. No upgrades, no repairs, horrible components (CPU is ok, everything else is straight from the dumpster in order to cover costs).
So when something dies on your device from a company that has a long history of terrible design and QA (I’m betting on storage) you have to pay another $1000+ to replace the whole motherboard. On top of that, I’m guessing that they’re also ripping off customers when selling those replacement boards, as having usable ram and storage costs an extra $1000+ when buying new.
This, I’ve tried to look up spare ssd and ram chips for apple arm laptops to reball and resolder them and couldn’t find any
Inb4 apple locked down components to motherboard serial number
But seriously, I guess the only hope is to wait for the Chinese second hand market takes off.
I know that iPhones do that but about MacBook i didn’t know until your message
It was a joke. But you can see why I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out true in the end.
I know for a fact they’re making it impossible to make small repairs like changing the screen closed sensor. It requires a proprietary calibration tool they won’t sell, and so MacBooks can’t go to sleep when closing the screen.
On top of changing it from a sub $ hall sensor to some proprietary bs that’s far more expensive.
Yeah you’re right, we’ll all wait till Chinese spare parts market will kick in again, they usually do this after few years from launch
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I would never buy something new from Apple as I don’t like them, but I have to admit that their hardware feels great to use. I’m not tech savvy enough to know where that would be coming from, but it makes me wonder how people could say that the components are so bad.
My girlfriend has a 2012 MacBook Pro and I put Fedora on it and it feels like such a great machine. The ram and the hard drive have been upgraded, but it feels incredible for an old machine.
If in 10 years you can get an old MacBook Pro for 200$, I might jump on it even if upgradeability has been lowered.
their hardware feels great to use
I tried using a friend’s m1 MacBook pro, and it’s the worst laptop I’ve touched in a while. Like my oldest budget core2duo laptop has a better keyboard than a brand new $2000+ device. There’s a very good reason it’s permanently docked.
it makes me wonder how people could say that the components are so bad.
I’ve mentioned a few reasons in this thread. They basically used subpar components to offset the cost of developing their own CPU.
If in 10 years you can get an old MacBook Pro for 200$, I might jump on it even if upgradeability has been lowered.
It’s not lowered, it’s absolutely removed, unless you count replacing the entire motherboard as upgradeability.
16gb ram is too small? New motherboard.
Crappy SSD is dying? New motherboard.
Legitimate repairability and pricing concerns aside, what parts exactly are you accusing of being straight from the dumpster? The GPU is insane for a low-power laptop, screen, speakers, trackpad are best in class. Keyboard is a matter of preference but by any objective measure it’s not bad, much improved from butterfly switches.
Haven’t dug into it yet, but if that’s right then not great. Then again if something doesn’t break quickly in electronics it usually works fine for years, except maybe overheated GPUs, random RAM and HDDs.
I’m still unsure if I want to replace my 2016 Asus zenbook. Other than the aged CPU/AGPU from Intel, and unusable from the start touchpad it’s fine.
When m1 came out, some tech guy on twitter did a review of MacBook Pro and studio storage. Apple literally used components that are so bad they had to disable data safety protocols to go above HDD speeds. The end result was that losing power is likely to corrupt your data.
Besides that apple was cutting out “unnecessary” parts of the arm specification in order to cut costs. The result is that the first 2(?) generations have hardware level exploit “m1racles” on top of others like “pacman”.
I really wouldn’t trust them to last
Funnily enough, that person you mentioned who discovered that was marcan, one of the Asahi lead developers.
I would if the particular hardware had no inherent or user caused issues and the price was reasonable compared to other purchase candidates, but it rarely is. It would also need to be Linux compatible too because the os has always been insufferable and praised by insufferable people that need something to feel superior about with zero justification.
The PowerPC days were pretty crap though even though the hardware was visually pleasing. Nobody made PowerPC compatible software. This time I guess apple is paying fees to arm and at least has arm compatibility. x86 is irritating in its own right too. Man, tech has gone in all sorts of shitty directions.
they are downvoting you, but you’re absolutely right.
they can’t hardly be repaired and it’s impossible to upgrade them at all, even something as basic as swapping the SSD needs desoldering. They are still sold with 8 GB of RAM as the base and they can’t be upgraded.
it isn’t worth it at all.
The 8GB models are manufactured e-waste but the usable lineup are great machines. They’re practically unrepairable, but they’re built not to need repairs. Not having replaceable parts isn’t just a way to drain customers’ wallets, it also reduces complexity and ways in which their product can be damaged.
If you care about swapping out the SSD or replacing the RAM, you shouldn’t buy Apple. I promise you, though, that 99% of laptop users don’t, and that includes a significant part of Linux users.
Macs are expensive as balls but there simply aren’t any competitors for them. They’re the “overkill everything” segment that’s too small to target for other manufacturers. There are maybe one or two series of laptops that come close in speaker quality, and one of those consists of gaming laptops designed after 80s scifi spaceships, and the other comes with terrible battery and even worse Linux support, and both of them lack the battery life+performance quality Apple managed to squeeze out of their CPU.
I wish someone would produce Macbooks other than Apple. It’s an awful company that produces great hardware for a competitive price, it you care about all the Macbook has to offer. And to be honest, that’s not because Apple is such an amazing manufacturer, it’s because AMD and Intel are behind the curve (Qualcom even more), and the laptop manufacturers that try to compete with Apple always try to squeeze just that little bit of extra cost cutting out of their models so their shit doesn’t cost more, and preload their top of the line hardware with Windows 11 Home (the one with candy crush pinned to the start menu) and their stupid GAMER software suite that works on three models and stops being maintained after two updates.
We just need better laptops.
