I had been curious for a while to try installing Asahi on an M1. There are some nice things about the “M#s.” Long battery life, run cool, quiet.
Other than that it’s about the same as the Intel macbook 13 that I ran Fedora on for about a year before upgrading to a Dell for more standard Linux support, larger screen and easier to upgrade.
Now I have a 2 part dilemma:
1. Do I go back to the MBP as the daily drive and move past the Dell?
Main reasons for this, in addition to benefits mentioned above are that the Dell battery isn’t great (but relatively easy to improve), it’s heavy, and perhaps a bit slower than the M1. Actually I’m not sure how they compare on specs. Pretty similar on paper aside from the CPU, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD. The big bulky weight of the Dell is tempting to move on. I also don’t love how it types or feels.
One thing I’m not excited about is the migration process. Although to be fair, I used the program SaveDesktop, and it made it surprisingly easy to move a lot of the settings over.
I need to migrate files and set up a few accounts, and I should be good to go (hah).
2. Asahi has a few limitations that prevent it from being rock solid. For me those are:
A. No video out support (yet).
B. No internal microphone (yet).
They just released support for internal mic on a different M*. That makes me think it gets supported later or sooner.
External monitor support I’d say is probably 1+ year away. So I might not even be using this laptop by then. There’s always a chance it comes out sooner than later.
There was some recent drama with the project, with the founder stepping away. So it’s to see if the project will be better off, or won’t have the same level of progress.
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In terms of what tweaks I’ve made with Asahi on this macbook:
1. I messed up the install the first time (Little Snitch network monitor in macos prevented the download, the process failed and then it required me to delete partitions, but I wasn’t sure which to delete, so I have a few redundant ones. The take away is that it would make sense to:
A. Clean up MacOS. Probably a full reinstall to shift it from a work to personal laptop
B. Reinstall Asahi — perhaps once 42 is out, any day now, and I’ve had time to ensure I don’t need the work laptop, I can have the double fresh start
2. tiny-dfr
Copy the config file from ``/usr/share/tiny-dfr`` to ``/etc/tiny-dfr/`` and then change the media default option from ``false`` to ``true``.
3. Adjust speaker audio
For some reason, this didn’t play nicely. It was just staying on, no way to lower or mute.
I read a suggestion to boot into macos, turn the volume all the way down and then boot back into Fedora. For the moment, it seems to have worked. But no idea if it’s a final solution, or an intermittent issue.
4. On the initial software update, it failed from the GUI. ‘‘sudo dnf update’‘ worked fine.
5. Webcam
It doesn’t seem to work in the default app, but I tested it in Mozilla for web based calls, and seemed to work there, which matches what I read online.
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Software installed
I’ve switched back from Betterbird to Evolution. Why? I guess Betterbird feels clunky and ugly. Mainly ugly. But let’s see if Evolution is actually good enough. I recall there was something that wasn’t ideal when I used it last time. Maybe search?
SaveDesktop
It copied over all of my flatpaks data. This then caused Gnome to install the missing flatpak apps. Some seem to launch, some don’t. It’d probably be nice to just remove the ones that I don’t feel I need.
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Takeaway.
At the moment I guess I’m leaning towards seeing if I can make this laptop a daily driver. It might turn out to be a big mistake. Perhaps the reason to switch back to a macbook from the Dell is not exactly clear. I would just prefer to not have so many devices to maintain.
It’s possible I could just leave this dualboot for my better half and continue using the Dell. I guess part of trying to use it as a daily driver is to see if I prefer the pros of this: battery, cooler, lighter, smaller;
Or prefer the Dell benefits, standard hardware, already up and running, larger screen.