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Comment by RMPR | Hacker News Reader

This is great and might actually prompt me to get a Mac, as much as I like ThinkPads, this battery life is simply on another level.

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Don't get your expectations up too high.

My ThinkPad X1E has horrible battery life under Linux, and has a boatload of issues with thunderbolt, the external dock, HDMI port, audio and WiFi. For example: when my Thinkpad goes standby with an external monitor attached via TB, some ACPI interrupt goes insane and starts burning 100% CPU resources. USB ports regularly don't work after stand-by. BMC support seems problematic as well, my battery status is often 'unknown' with the Lenovo ACPI kernel modules.

And this is even with 'official' support from Lenovo for Linux. I can only imagine how bad the experience will be for running Linux on Apple products for the coming years.

Judging from the enthusiasm radiating from Asahi Linux I am optimistic in this regard. It seems to be interesting enough to attract a lot of talents, which is the key to succeeding for OSS projects.

The ThinkPad seems a boring challenge in comparison. It won't surprise me if the Linux support will be better for Macs than it is for Lenovo "officially supported" PCs.

Don't forget that Thinkpads have a huge Linux fan base as well.

Don't get me wrong though, I am hoping that this project succeeds, I'd love to have a Mac with Linux as my daily work machine.

I guess time will tell how well this unfolds.

> My ThinkPad X1E has horrible battery life under Linux

I ran the M1 Pro for a whole day during early testing without charging (because we hadn't initialized the USB-C port yet) and didn't even run out of battery. And I didn't even have the power management driver running yet.

> has a boatload of issues with thunderbolt

We'll see how that goes, but I get the feeling Apple's Thunderbolt controllers are going to be a lot less insane than Intel's...

> HDMI port

That's just a DP-HDMI converter and whatever needs managing is managed by DCP firmware; it'll work once DP works.

> audio

WIP, already working on some machines; we just need to write a couple codec drivers to get it working across the board.

> WiFi

That's my TODO for this week, and I have it all planned out already :-)

> when my Thinkpad goes standby with an external monitor attached via TB, some ACPI interrupt goes insane and starts burning 100% CPU resources.

Good thing these machines don't have ACPI then! :-)

> USB ports regularly don't work after stand-by.

We actually already have a workaround in Linux for USB lockups that affect macOS on these machines, so we're already doing better on that front.

> BMC support seems problematic as well, my battery status is often 'unknown' with the Lenovo ACPI kernel modules.

That goes via SMC on these machines, which has a very simple interface. That's my TODO right after WiFi :-)

> And this is even with 'official' support from Lenovo for Linux.

Turns out "official" support sometimes is horrible... we can do better than that.

> I can only imagine how bad the experience will be for running Linux on Apple products for the coming years.

Some people are already using them as their daily driver; I don't see it taking more than another year to be in a very good place.

Hi Marcan! Amazing to get a response from the man himself :) This is why I love HN.

Please don't take my post too cynical, I understand how much work has already gone into getting this far, but also how hard it is to get the last 1% functionality working 'just right'. So, I am just trying to tame expectations here :-)

Thanks for the great work! I enjoyed reading the progress reports, and watching the Youtube live streams on the bring-up.

Keep in mind that "the last 1%" does not mean "horrible pain points". Will we ever get the last 1% of functionality running? Probably not; there's certainly stuff in these machines that nobody will care about enough to be worth making work (there's also stuff we already support that macOS doesn't yet, so it goes both ways!). But our goal isn't to make 100% of the features of the hardware work; it is to make all the features people expect to work work, and make them stable. We can't do everything - e.g. proper notch support depends on, well, downstream projects supporting that - but we can make it a good experience (e.g. by excluding the strip of screen containing the notch by default).

Will there be bugs? Absolutely. But hey, that's why I'm here, isn't it? Report away, I'll get it fixed :-)

Love the work! One request though, could future progress reports include a little bit about the work being done for OpenBSD also? I know there is someone on the team who is working on the porting effort to Linux, but is also working on OpenBSD concurrently. Thank you!

Request noted! I'll try to loop in Kettenis to write a section for the next one :)

Thanks! I would be really interested in knowing how Asahi Linux is not only benefiting the Linux ecosystem, but the broader FOSS ecosystem!

Your work, and even your answers here are really awesome. We can feel your passion for the project: the M1s are fantastic hardware and you and the Asahi team will enable all of us to tweak them as we wish.

Just joined the Patreon and hope many others will do it too!

Oh wow, this sounds quite painful. I almost bought the X1E, but now I'm glad I didn't.

I'm on a X1 Carbon Gen 9 at the moment. I've had no issues with anything at all, besides having to change some settings on the WiFi chip to prevent the connection from dropping. In fact, Linux has been more reliable with external monitors than my old Intel MacBook.

(FWIW, I have a Dell 4k monitor that has documented compatibility issues with some MacBook Pro models, so that's probably on Dell.)

FWIW my new Lenovo P1 Gen 4 runs Ubuntu perfectly, and with external monitors. Everything works out of the box with the latest Ubuntu but I run 20.04 which requires a wireless driver install. Super easy. And nvidia graphics drivers with on-demand support is great.

That said, I still miss Apple hardware so I’m still donating to Marcan’s project.

I have the exact same experience with Linux (Fedora) on X1 Carbon Gen 9 (everything works great), and with the Intel Macbook, where falling asleep connected to the monitor almost always results in a crash.

You simply cannot beat the MacBook touchpad though. Feels amazing. The X1 Carbon trackpad and click buttons feel downright cheap in comparison, and it's the flagship laptop.

To be honest, I have been burned way too many times with intel CPUs so I am not sure it is a linux problem at this point.

Both my thinkpad t480 and t14 has cpu throttling, and the quite expensive t14 has it so seriously that it will lock to ~500 MHz and will become barely usable.

> This is great and might actually prompt me to get a Mac

Before you jump in, be aware that actually installing a Linux distro on one of these is not exactly trivial (and many "guides" out there are outdated).

[EDIT]: as a matter of fact, I've been browsing the Asahi site for a "howto install asahi", and there's basically no such thing.

There's no HOWTO because the experience isn't up to end user standards; I haven't even gotten around to settling on the precise U-Boot config/boot chain yet, and I don't really encourage non-kernel-developers to try to install things at this point (though we have some folks doing it anyway). Right now the focus is very much on kernel developers doing tethered boots via USB. That will change rather soon, as enough core drivers are getting merged or usable to make this actually useful for people without very high standards (e.g. we just merged in proper keyboard/touchpad support), so now it's worth spending more time on the installer, to get it to the point where the stand-alone boot flow is where it needs to be.

(If you're a developer and you want to do tethered boot and you know what you are doing, the guide is simple: make sure you have macOS 12.0.1 or newer, use diskutil to resize macOS to leave at least 3GB of unpartitioned space, boot holding down power / options / terminal, curl -L mrcn.st/alxsh | sh and follow the prompts, once you're booted into m1n1 you can use m1n1.git/proxyclient/tools/linux.py from another machine connected via USB to run a kernel / initramfs).

Same here. Might be good travel laptop with Linux on board.

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