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Comment by michaelcampbell | Hacker News Reader

I'm keeping an eye on Asahi Linux for M[12]. Other than the CPU, I don't much care for the entirety of the Apple experience, but that's me. This M1's absolute silence with all the cores running and its battery life are wonderful.

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What makes you think a reverse engineered driver set, with no official docs, on a custom and closed platform - is going to offer anything close to M1 MacOS experience ?

If you want a quiet device with low battery consumption and don't care about performance you can downclock/disable turbo boost and get that on other devices, with better Linux support.

Probably with a performance penalty in comparison to the M1 though, and the Apple chassis quality/design is something else, you just don't get it elsewhere.

Considering what the Asahi team has been doing so far and their reports I'm positive the CPU isn't a problem (since it's ARM). If they can get decent GPU performance (power consumption mostly) I'll be all over them.

I wonder if we 3-D scanned a PC laptop chassis and then machined a copy from an aluminum block using a CNC would give us a macbook-like chassis for a PC.

Or design one from the ground up, which would probably be cheaper. Since designing a motherboard to fit the cramped space in the macbooks is very hard. They're really cramped in there.

Is there a Linux laptop like that without a fan at all like the M1 Macbook Air?

If you're fine with the performance of a 2-core Kaby Lake and rather big bezels around the display, the Google Pixelbook is pretty awesome otherwise.

> What makes you think a reverse engineered driver set, with no official docs, on a custom and closed platform - is going to offer anything close to M1 MacOS experience ?

My hopeless optimism, and the fact I don't consider Apple "magic".

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