Happy paying 3x more?
The M2 MacBook Pros are about as close as you can get to a perfect laptop. Really, I wish it wasn't so. It would arguably be better for everyone (except Apple) if there was some serious competition at the top end of the market. But there just isn't.
I've still yet to see another laptop that has even passable handling of sleep states / other parts of power management. (A lot of this is an OS integration problem, so Apple is playing on easy mode here.)
I've still yet to see another laptop with an even passable trackpad. (Again, OS integration, plus a stupid amount of heuristics built into the hardware itself to interpret what you actually meant when you touched the trackpad in an awkward way.)
I've still yet to see a laptop with a keyboard as nice as the current generation MacBooks. (The first generation of M1 MacBook laptops was awful, but they fixed it. Also this point isn't really fair because I haven't really seriously looked.)
I've still yet to see a laptop with as slick of a chassis and display.
I've still yet to see another laptop that can chew through demanding workloads, remain snappy the whole time, and not simultaneously sounds like a jet engine and throttle itself to a near halt.
But really, just give me proper power management and a decent trackpad and I'll call it a serious competitor.
Apple’s silicon helps here but I wonder if part of the problem isn’t x86 laptop manufacturers trying too hard to juice perf numbers at the cost of all else, as well as penny pinching on heatsink and fan.
It feels like nobody* else is even _trying_.
(*Except Framework. Those guys are awesome.)
They are obviously doing a great job at what they set out to do but besides reparability and customization I don't think they are really ahead in anything compared to some premium Windows laptops.
AMD laptops seem to be pretty decent at that. You can get something on par or even ahead of MBPs in battery life and performance and just a bit louder fans (IMHO the Air is till unbeatable if it works for your use case though)
I'd trade lower build quality and performance per watt for software freedom any day of the week. No, Asahi Linux is not a serious option.
My reasons for not considering it:
- As skilled as the Asahi team is, they're a small team going against one of the world's largest corporations. Not only does it take immense effort to reverse engineer every single hardware component, the project will always be at the mercy of Apple, who may break the support at any time with a software or hardware update, whether willing or unwillingly.
- The Linux software ecosystem is sufficiently unstable on its own, but also running it on ARM, _and_ an alien hardware environment, presents even more challenges. As much as the Asahi team has made progress here, expecting them to support all variations of software in this landscape is unreasonable. I definitely don't want to have additional issues to troubleshoot, which I'm tired of doing with Linux to begin with. Cue the replies claiming how Asahi works flawlessly...
That's a whole lot of shaky ground to base my computing on, and I wouldn't consider it even for personal, let alone professional, use. Maybe if Apple started opening up and officially supporting Linux on their hardware, I _might_ consider a project like Asahi, but until then, it's a non-starter for me.
They don't support variations of software at all. They support the hardware. If the drivers work then the software just works. Software is built on APIs. Asahi does not need to support applications.
> always be at the mercy of Apple, who may break the support at any time
Same deal for any other hardware manufacturer. The x86 PC manufacturers are still using proprietary undocumented hardware components to this day, even the ones who you believe are "officially" supporting Linux. It only works because devs are reverse engineering devices without support from the manufacturers.
> but also running it on ARM, _and_ an alien hardware environment, presents even more challenges
ARM is a stable well supported platform for Linux, so the CPU is less of an issue for Asahi devs. Graphics hardware is somewhat "Alien" but is also stable now on Asahi.
From their FAQ page[1]:
> We will eventually release a remix of Arch Linux ARM, packaged for installation by end-users, as a distribution of the same name. The majority of the work resides in hardware support, drivers, and tools, and it will be upstreamed to the relevant projects. The distribution will be a convenient package for easy installation by end-users and give them access to bleeding-edge versions of the software we develop.
As distro maintainers, it is their job to make sure the applications they package work on the hardware they support. This includes submitting patches upstream when that is not the case, as application maintainers likely wouldn't want to support such a niche environment directly. So, yes, they rely on volunteers to fix issues, but they will likely have to support many applications themselves.
There is still a lot of broken software, as this list[2] is surely not exhaustive.
Regardless, all this amounts to less choice of software for the user. The Asahi team has already decided to stop supporting Xorg, and say what you will about Xorg, there will be many applications they realistically can't or won't support for whatever reason.
> Same deal for any other hardware manufacturer. [...] Really not much different to other hardware manufacturers since Linux started.
No, it's very different. First of all, the amount of Linux hackers who volunteered to reverse engineer the wide variety of hardware was orders of magnitude larger than the Asahi team. Even if they limit the amount of devices they support, modern computers are far more complex than in the early days of Linux. Regardless of how talented the Asahi team is, maintaining all the hardware of a modern computer is a sisyphean task for a small group of volunteers.
Secondly, hardware manufacturers could see the benefit of getting their hardware to run in Linux, and many eventually took over support from volunteers. Apple has shown no interest in doing so, and has historically been hostile to open source.
> Asahi devs have made it clear that Apple has chosen to avoid blocking installation of other operating systems.
The fact they allow installation of other operating systems today, doesn't mean that this decision couldn't change in the future. Services are a large part of their business, and allowing a group of hackers to use their hardware without being part of their software ecosystem may seem like a non-issue today, but if this group grows larger assuming projects like Asahi are successful, this might become a considerable loss of income which wouldn't be in their best interest.
> Apple has no issue with it.
Can you point me to an official ackgnowledgment of Asahi Linux by Apple? Or any indication that leaving this door open was a sign of good will, instead of a lack of interest in closing it? What makes you think they wouldn't eventually lock down Macs in the same way they do iPhones and iPads?
> ARM is a stable well supported platform for Linux
It's really not. A lot of software works, but when it doesn't, the user is SOL. As you can see on their Broken Software page[2], the major issue is precisely with AArch64 support. This should improve eventually, and Asahi is certainly a torchbearer in this scenario, but today it's yet another hurdle of using Apple hardware.
[1]: https://asahilinux.org/about/#is-this-a-linux-distribution
[2]: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Broken-Software
No but there is this:
"Does Apple allow this? Don’t you need a jailbreak? Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon Macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices. That means that, unlike iOS devices, Apple does not intend to lock down what OS you can use on Macs (though they probably won’t help with the development)."
> A lot of software works, but when it doesn't, the user is SOL.
Talking about the Kernel (Linux itself). Applications are another story.
You are looking at it all from a very conservative enterprise perspective. Worried about long term support etc for a mission critical system. Asahi is not pretending to be an enterprise solution.
For someone just using it on their laptop, none of this is much of an issue.
If Asahi works today on your M1 Pro, and its good enough for your daily work, then it's fine. If support disappears in a few years, then simply switch to another device at that time. At least you will have had a few years of use out of a decent machine. Life is too short to worry too much about these things as an individual just using their laptop as a workstation or for personal use. Worst case in five years just buy another laptop that works for you, and move on.
Also, how do they know that "Apple does not intend to lock down what OS you can use on Macs"? Again, I would like to see some official confirmation from Apple.
> Worried about long term support etc for a mission critical system. Asahi is not pretending to be an enterprise solution.
No, I'm looking at it from the perspective of a single user for personal, and potentially professional, use. I _really_ don't want to go back to the user experience of Linux in the 90s, when barely anything worked, and the user had to spend hours tinkering to get basic features working, if they were supported at all. If that sounds fun for you, go ahead and enjoy the Apple hardware, but I'd like my machines to work. I'm annoyed by mainstream Linux enough as it is; I really don't need more reasons to dislike it.
> If Asahi works today on your M1 Pro, and its good enough for your daily work, then it's fine.
Buying a $2k machine to realize it doesn't support my workflow seems like a risky investment. As well as being at the mercy of a small group of volunteers and a trillion dollar corporation that it will continue to work for at least a few years.
[1]: https://asahilinux.org/2021/03/progress-report-january-febru...
They don't. And it really doesn't matter to some people. The current hardware is not locked down, therefore it can always run Linux. Future devices are not guaranteed to work, but those do not exist today.
> Buying a $2k machine to realize it doesn't support my workflow
You're simply not the target user. The people who are enthusiastically using Asahi know what to expect and are happy with it as it runs the software they need to use today. Of course it is not a mainstream option that every Linux user can use.
> that it will continue to work for at least a few years.
Once the hardware in your device is reverse engineered and drivers developed for it, that is done and will continue to work for a long time. The risk is future devices (Apple M6, M7, etc).
> I've still yet to see another laptop that has even passable handling of sleep states / other parts of power management.
That's the advantage of Apple where they control both hardware and software. It's hard to replicate, so yeah, they have an edge here.
> I've still yet to see another laptop with an even passable trackpad.
Never understood this comment, if you use keyboards instead for shortcuts the trackpad is hardly something you care about. this seems like a comment from Apple users who justify the trackpad as the key differentiator to not even consider anything else, even though the rest of the world has no problem not using Apple trackpads.
> I've still yet to see a laptop with a keyboard as nice as the current generation MacBooks.
Lenovo Thinkpad line has world-class keyboards that put the Macbook's to shame.
> laptop with as slick of a chassis and display.
display, they certainly have good ones, but most of them are not matte. As for the chassis, there's really nothing special in having a uniform grey chassis - it's a matter of taste rather than anything else.
> I've still yet to see another laptop that can chew through demanding workloads, remain snappy the whole time,
Recent AMD CPUs equipped PC, running Linux, fit that description - they are formidable machines with great performance for a variety of workloads and while you will hear the fan now and then, it's still much better than what you had a few years ago.
Or as shockingly as it seems other people might have preferences which are different to yours and which are not somehow inherent inferior to yours.
> else, even though the rest of the world has no problem not using Apple trackpads.
If you go few years back same could've been said about appalling battery life, poor screen and build quality and a dozen other things. I had not problem using computers back then because I didn't know it could be better so just had to deal with it. Going back to something objectively inferior is not that easy (e.g. I almost always used an external mouse until the first retina MBP, I haven't really felt the need to since then except occasionally for gaming).
Never heard the fan on my M1 Pro in a year of ownership, and temperature is never uncomfortably high.
I'll pay double just to never hear a shitty laptop fan.
> but most of them are not matte
It is a matter of preference. Matte reduces contrast, saturation, and sharpness. I noticed Apple uses a higher quality anti-reflective coating than my other (cheap non-Apple branded) glossy desktop LCD. No distracting reflections on the laptop, but the desktop monitor looks like a mirror sometimes.
It's like a mattress: you spend enough time on it that it's worth paying the money and moving on.
That's a very first world comment
At a moderate $80k USD developer salary, the laptop costs only 0.5% of that. And this is the main tool you depend on to earn an income. For an underpaid junior developer earning $40k it's still only 1% of their income.
10% of an average developer salary is something like $8k per year. What laptop costs $8k per year? That's $40k after five years. Are you confusing a laptop with a new Mercedes or what?
Laptops are a business expense for a developer. This is how you need to think about it.
I live in one and my salary is a little less than 30k and I'm not a junior. My junior colleagues are at around 20k, so for them it's actually 10%.
So apparently first world is not the same as "high income". In that case I would buy something from Taiwan.