[Compliment] Asahi Linux on a M2 MacBook Air is great

Our Neighbors Asahi Linux Asahi General
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I got a M2 MacBook Air today to run Asahi and am pretty impressed with how well it works, especially for something with completely reverse engineered drivers.

I have the 8GB RAM version, and yet it’s snappier than Fedora and GNOME on a 13th Gen i7 HP Spectre x360 with 16GB RAM. GNOME is snappier, YouTube seems smoother. As of now I don’t really need more RAM since all I do on a laptop is run Firefox and SSH terminals.

I know not everything is working yet, but I’m impressed with it so far. Battery life is amazing, it lives on and on. I think I’m going to stick with Apple hardware. I just hope HP or Lenovo or Dell doesn’t hire me and I’m forced to go back to x86 hardware.

I work at Microsoft (not on Windows), but don’t use their products at home. We have all the talent in the world, guaranteed talent that is because we’re a Big Tech company, thousands of partners, and a partnership with OpenAI. Out stock is the highest it’s ever been.

Yet our products are nowhere nearly as impressive as what Asahi Linux has done with only a few engineers and a Patreon. In fact, I get frustrated with .NET every weekday it’s ridiculous.

There’s a reason why I kept using FOSS at home and when I gave up on FreeBSD I went to Linux and not Windows.

However, I’ll have to get used to a Mac keyboard after using x86 PCs for as long as I can remember.

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I’ll have to get used to a Mac keyboard after using x86 PCs for as long as I can remember.

Well, you don’t have to. I use gnome tweaks to swap the windows (command) key with the alt (option) key and I feel right at home again :slight_smile:

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The hid_apple module has ways of fixing these natively so they work everywhere in your install: Apple Keyboard - ArchWiki

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To make this permanent across any desktop environment, you could run the following command and then reboot:

sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="hid_apple.swap_opt_cmd=1"

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TIL “grubby” :heart_eyes:

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In fact, I get frustrated with .NET every weekday it’s ridiculous.

TBF, .Net Core (now just called .Net) is pretty damn good, and version 8 comes with significant performance benefits (and memory) and AOT compilation goodness, solid packaging for most distros, good dockerhub, it’s difficult for me to fault it compared to JVM. Or are you working with the legacy .Net (4.5.2 etc…) that would be painful, but then anything 10+ years old generally is

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I’m working on an old codebase. We have to use VS2019 because the code can’t compile in VS2022. I’m importing an updated package, which took 3 months and many reverts.

I only just got a Windows 365 virtual desktop. Before then, I had used a remote desktop PC with tons of latency due to a TCP VPN.

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Yikes, that does sound painful. It’s a lot nicer on a modern app, on dotnet core, with say for example Rider as an IDE, no need for Windows or bloated VS. You can basic kestrel based web server running with 28mb memory in a docker container even on dotnet core 7, but 8 improves that further, even a vanilla node/express.js struggles to compete at this point. Still I prefer the JVM but the modern dotnet story is pretty decent nowadays on greenfield…

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Just curious, was this one of the new 15" Macbook airs?