Serious questions. How is Asahi these days? Is it ready as a daily driver? Is it getting support from Apple or are they hostile to it? Are there missing features? And can I run KDE on it?
Much less active than it used to be when it was run by Hector Martin. The core development is a lot slower. Although the graphics stack, for instance, has reached a very mature state recently.
> Is it ready as a daily driver?
It depends. Only M1 and M2 devices are reasonably well-supported. There is no support for power-efficient sleep, Display Port, Thunderbolt, video decoding or encoding, touch ID. The speakers overheat and turn off momentarily when playing loud for a longer period of time. The audio stack in general had to be built from ground up and it seems to me like there are bits and pieces still missing or configured sub-optimally.
> Is it getting support from Apple?
Not that I am aware of.
> are they (Apple) hostile to it?
Not to my knowledge.
> Are there missing features?
Plenty, as described above. There has been some work done recently on Thunderbolt / Display Port. Quite a few other features are listed as WIP on their feature support page.
> Can I run KDE on it?
Of course. KDE Plasma on Fedora is Asahi Linux's "flagship" desktop environment.
"power-efficient sleep" refers to discharging 1-2% battery over night rather than 10-20%. I.e. there's room for improvement, but the device can still be used without worrying much about battery life regardless (especially given how far a full charge gets you even without sleep).
> Display Port, Thunderbolt
Big item indeed, but it's actively worked on and getting there (as you mentioned).
> video decoding or encoding
Hurts battery performance, but otherwise I never noticed any other effect. YMMV for 4K content.
> touch ID
Annoying indeed, and no one has worked on this AFAIK.
> The speakers overheat and turn off momentarily when playing loud for a longer period of time. The audio stack in general had to be built from ground up and it seems to me like there are bits and pieces still missing or configured sub-optimally.
Sad to hear since I thought the audio heat model was robust enough to handle all supported devices. On my M1 Air I've never seen anything like this, but perhaps devices with more powerful speakers are more prone to it?
My experience is also based on a M1 Macbook Air. I have repeatedly experienced sudden muting of the speakers for a second or two while playing conversations on a high volume.
I only assume it is caused by thermal management of the speakers but I did not actually verify it.
Perhaps check if there are any log files in /var/lib/speakersafetyd/blackbox. The fdr files in particular contain human-readable error reasons. If there are no log files, it's probably something else.
Am I misrepresenting the situation or did the whole project seemingly fall apart over an argument between Hector and Linus Torvalds in the mailing list about getting some driver merged?
I would consider that to be a misinterpretation. The whole project did not fall apart because Hector Martin left. But as with any project where the leaders depart, it definitely got slower.
The argument was originally about merging some Rust code into some parts of the Linux kernel if I remember correctly. It did not involve Linus Torvalds directly. Rather, the respective maintainers of those specific parts were unwilling to merge some Rust code, mostly because they did not know Rust well and they did not want to acquire the responsibility to maintain such code.
Asahi will probably only ever be feasible for years-old hardware. macOS is a total non-starter for me, so maybe one day I’ll end up with one of these, but only as some kind of tertiary / retro machine.
Not the OP, but its a non starter for me because, I _was_ a mac guy for 10 years or so, but I changed job to one that required I use windows for game dev, and I discovered how locked in I was, and how painful it was to change. I'm not going back, no matter how nice the hardware is.
Yeah, given all the people with passion/ability for low-level reverse engineering have left the project, I don’t think we should ever expect to get greater than M2 support from Asahi. Maybe one day another project will pick up the ideas, but for anyone not wanting to use years old hardware, the dream of Linux almost natively existing on modern Apple silicon remains just that: a dream.
On macbook air M1 Asahi is pretty usable when it comes to hardware support. And been usable for at least 1 year.
Though either Fedora itself, how it built with Asahi or just running it with little disk space end up with freeze on boot after random updates. Twice, once without even rpmfusion enabled. Either some weird btrfs issue or I dont know what.
Like I'm Linux dude for two decades and dont do anything fancy, so this is weird. Switched to Asahi Ubuntu on ext4 and it working great so far.
