Any developer who installed linux such as Asahi on their device and uses it daily?
I'd be interested in the current status & progress of the project. What are the downsides and upsides and why / what for did you use it? I'm fairly invested in the apple eco system and would probably just get another machine running linux only before installing it on my main device but would be interest to hear what other people are doing.
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 15.0
I've just recently installed both the UbuntuAsahi and Fedora Asahi Remix. Both installed quickly & easily. The only two issues I encountered during the installation were minor (one was self induced). I had trouble when the Asahi install script resized the partitions since I was trying this on two MBAirs with just 120GB SSDs. The Linux installer has a bare minimum needed for the process and it barely had room to resize the Apple partition. When it failed on the one laptop (the other one did not have this issue) I just used Disk Utility to create a new partition, then launched the Asahi installer again & it was now able to just select the newly created partition.
The other install issue was when I rebooted after the Asahi installer finished phase 1 and powered off the laptop. I was not paying close enough attention and instead booted back into macOS. When I went to use the Startup Options to manually select the Linux boot volume, I had to step through a couple of steps so that Linux phase 2 installer could reprogram the NVRAM to boot to the correct bootloader to finish phase 2 of the Linux installation. Even with my mistake, it was very easy to correct & resume phase 2 of the installation process.
WiFi is available, but the built-in Camera is currently not functional. I've read there are still other areas where things are not fully functional, but I don't recall specifics. I have not really done anything with Linux since I was only using it so I could try some tests on the hardware as I wanted to recompile one of the Kernel modules....I have been unable to compile a Kernel module so far. With Ubuntu I don't believe I have the full correct source code for the currently installed Kernel (at least I'm guessing this is why). The Kernel revision & packaging names do not match up and I see two different kernel modules listed for the same exact version, but with different naming conventions for the package names. With Fedora, I have not found out how to get the Kernel source for the currently installed Kernel as I have never used Fedora & their packaging system before. I do not want to recompile the whole Kernel since it is much more difficult than on a standard Intel system do to all the bootloader hacks needed which may need to align with the kernel version.
I have read that sometimes a macOS update can sometimes break the Linux side where you may need to re-run the Linux installer to repair the Linux bootloader. I also have read that USB may be problematic when sleeping USB devices which is one of the main reasons the Linux installer won't select an external drive as a destination (plus there must be Linux bootloader code on the internal SSD....it also means macOS must remain installed as well because of the new "Ownership" concept.
Otherwise I was impressed with it so far.
I haven't tried to remove the Linux installation yet. There is a possibility you may need to erase the Mac in order to fully remove Linux (or a DFU firmware Restore)...more of macOS issue in not performing the necessary steps correctly since Disk Utility is not very good at re-merging partitions. There is no uninstaller app so Linux must be removed manually.
I've just recently installed both the UbuntuAsahi and Fedora Asahi Remix. Both installed quickly & easily. The only two issues I encountered during the installation were minor (one was self induced). I had trouble when the Asahi install script resized the partitions since I was trying this on two MBAirs with just 120GB SSDs. The Linux installer has a bare minimum needed for the process and it barely had room to resize the Apple partition. When it failed on the one laptop (the other one did not have this issue) I just used Disk Utility to create a new partition, then launched the Asahi installer again & it was now able to just select the newly created partition.
The other install issue was when I rebooted after the Asahi installer finished phase 1 and powered off the laptop. I was not paying close enough attention and instead booted back into macOS. When I went to use the Startup Options to manually select the Linux boot volume, I had to step through a couple of steps so that Linux phase 2 installer could reprogram the NVRAM to boot to the correct bootloader to finish phase 2 of the Linux installation. Even with my mistake, it was very easy to correct & resume phase 2 of the installation process.
WiFi is available, but the built-in Camera is currently not functional. I've read there are still other areas where things are not fully functional, but I don't recall specifics. I have not really done anything with Linux since I was only using it so I could try some tests on the hardware as I wanted to recompile one of the Kernel modules....I have been unable to compile a Kernel module so far. With Ubuntu I don't believe I have the full correct source code for the currently installed Kernel (at least I'm guessing this is why). The Kernel revision & packaging names do not match up and I see two different kernel modules listed for the same exact version, but with different naming conventions for the package names. With Fedora, I have not found out how to get the Kernel source for the currently installed Kernel as I have never used Fedora & their packaging system before. I do not want to recompile the whole Kernel since it is much more difficult than on a standard Intel system do to all the bootloader hacks needed which may need to align with the kernel version.
I have read that sometimes a macOS update can sometimes break the Linux side where you may need to re-run the Linux installer to repair the Linux bootloader. I also have read that USB may be problematic when sleeping USB devices which is one of the main reasons the Linux installer won't select an external drive as a destination (plus there must be Linux bootloader code on the internal SSD....it also means macOS must remain installed as well because of the new "Ownership" concept.
Otherwise I was impressed with it so far.
I haven't tried to remove the Linux installation yet. There is a possibility you may need to erase the Mac in order to fully remove Linux (or a DFU firmware Restore)...more of macOS issue in not performing the necessary steps correctly since Disk Utility is not very good at re-merging partitions. There is no uninstaller app so Linux must be removed manually.
FWIW, if it were my Mac I would only run Linux as a guest in Parallels Desktop, VMWare Fusion, VirtualBox, UTM, etc. The least problematic way to run Linux on a Mac.
M1 MacBook run Linux as OS in dual boot?
