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Comment by steelframe

15 hours ago

I switched entirely over to Asahi Linux on my M1 Macbook Air and installed a third-party 55Wh battery, as the original battery had fallen below 80% capacity. That machine is good to go for another 5 years.

There are no features or performance characteristics of any of the subsequent M[2-6] Macbook Air or Pro models that I care about. I'm not really sold on running models on the hardware I have right in front of me. So long as I can rent an RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell at about half a buck per hour through a European provider, I'm fine using that with Qwen3.8-27B UD-Q4_K_M for the few things I consider more privacy-sensitive.

21 comments

steelframe

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passivepinetree  13 hours ago

How is Asahi Linux from a reliability perspective? Last I checked there were some issues with docking and HDMI out that would've made it tough for me to use as a daily driver.

  • evanreichard  43 minutes ago

    It's quite stable. Been running NixOS on my M2 Max with basically no issues (HDMI working fine as well). However the lack of adequate sleep / no support for suspend to disk led to me buying a Framework 13 Pro, and I'm now selling the M2.

  • cyberclimb  11 hours ago

    100% stable for me at the level of any other linux machine. True the USB-C display doesn't (officially) work yet but I have 0 issues with the HDMI.

    I've been daily driving it for months with no blockers. You can tell Linux uses the battery less efficiently than MacOS though so that's good to know.

    • andreash  2 hours ago

      Also really happy with Omarchy on Macbook. I installed the nightly kernel that has usb-c and it works really well. Connects fine to both LG Ultrafine 5k, and Studio Display. https://x.com/AGTPinsights/status/2106564829532328331

      Still some tiny issues with waking from sleep lid closed, but I'm expecting to get that fixed myself with some prompting this week. The people working on Linux on Mac are really impressive (and have access to unlimited tokens), so I expect all issues to be fixed very soon.

      Being able combine agents, linux software and Apple hardware is so much fun.

  • zamalek  13 hours ago

    Not a Mac user. I assume HDMI might be improving soon as AMD finally got the HDMI consortium to wind their necks in and full HDMI support was recently merged.

  • gedy  5 hours ago

    It's great aside from no usb-c display, mine has an HDMI port though.

    It's been my primary dev machine for 2 years

isatty  2 hours ago

How is using an external provider any better for privacy sensitive issues? European provider does not automatically mean they aren’t logging everything or that they’d nor share that with a bidder?