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Comment by NeverFade | Hacker News Reader

Linus himself uses Asahi over an M2 Macbook Air: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/linus-torvalds-uses-...

I mean to be fair he is the Linux power user.

You'd think so, but from his own account he's not. Pre Asahi he used Fedora because it was easy to get working and he found Debian too hard to install. Could just be dry Finnish humour.

For me personally it's much easier to install and maintain Arch based distros than Debian based ones. It is very simple and doesn't try to do everything in your place. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora and others are great if they work out of the box. As soon as some proprietary GPU or other driver gets involved it can get painful. I recently installed Fedora on latest Thinkpad with dedicated Nvidia GPU and could not get it to work properly on Fedora. Driver crashed and did not load during startup. After trying a bit I switched to Arch and while the initial setup took longer, everything works and I can actually update it without requiring to add some shady 3rd party repos or compiling essential packages after each update manually myself.

It's probably in his interest to run on the least stable environment possible to better identify kinks for prioritization.

He actually believes the opposite. He wants to work from a reliable system so he can focus on the important work, not fiddling with drivers for touchpads or dealing with bugs that are secondary.

I believe he also runs it in console mode and doesn't use graphics, X.org, Wayland, etc. So, keep that in mind.

Sounds like if you want to be a true Linux fanboy that’s the route you should be taking anyway..

I've never read that about Torvolds, who I believe uses fairly standard GNOME. Could you be confusing him with Stallman who does things like use wget for browsing the internet?

They may be referring to how he uses that specific laptop.

> uses fairly standard GNOME.

Last I heard he is(was?) a Fedora user

>Last I heard he is(was?) a Fedora user

Which uses GNOME.

>>Last I heard he is(was?) a Fedora user

>Which uses GNOME.

Fedora's primary distribution may have Gnome, but there are many other desktop environments that are available "out of the box", as I'm sure you know. I've been running Fedora on dozens of systems over the last decade and I've never used Gnome -- because it's annoying and supremely unintuitive.

XFCE FTW.

Literally THE Gnome distro lol...

Linus' announcement is here:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wgrz5BBk=rCz7W28Fj_o02s0X...

And more context (I am not sure if it's accurate):

https://twitter.com/asahilinux/status/1553968394734813184

Driver support for bare metal use on the M2 Air was really, really poor at the time. Linus mentions Asahi Linux, so he probably wasn't running virtualized Linux under macOS. Maybe he SSHed into the box, or it wasn't an M2 model after all.

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