Was looking at getting a macbook air with an m1 chip in it and running Asahi Linux on it. My question is how viable is it for daily life? E.g. browsing, torrenting, uni notes ect. Would it be equivalent to a regular x86 laptop running Linux? Or would I be missing useful features?
Edit: Another question is how it holds up against newer AMD laptops, as it is 3-4 years old at this point.
Do not buy an M-series mac just for asahi linux. It’s a cool project. It is not daily driveable (yet). However, for using it as a regular laptop with MacOS… Agh, I’m gonna get hate for this, but it’s amazing. I’m a firm believer that you cannot get a better laptop experience than this. Great battery life, great performance, great screen, great touchpad. And as for MacOS, it’s like worse GNOME with KDE settings, really nothing to write home about. Install homebrew and it functions like you’re used to with linux distros…
Ik apple bad and all, but the way I see it, they are just as bad as other manufacturers like DELL, just that their products are actually good while they work…
As for the actual performance, it completely obliterates X86 counterparts around it’s price range, unless you need to game or do graphically intensive stuff.
While I’m definitely on the same page as you with regards to performance, battery, and a great touchpad, I do think that given we are on Lemmy and a lot of us are what you would call “power-users”, it is worth pointing out that MacOS is terrible to navigate with the keyboard.
As a small example (amongst many others), Macbooks do not come with dedicated home, page up, page down, end keys, and I’ve been using my wife’s M2 Macbook Air for quite a while (over a year), and STILL feel as though I can’t get the same snappy behaviour I can by using a keyboard for most of my navigation.
Once again, of course if people tend to navigate the OS using the touchpad this isn’t as much of a problem, but for folks who swear by the keyboard, you do feel it.
I’m hoping that the second iteration of the snapdragon x elites will be good enough to replace the Macbooks for what I do.
Mac comes built in with those shortcuts just by holding command. Command left and right is home and end. Command up and down is page up page down.
And yeah there are definitely some holes? But Karabiner-Elements closes them up better than anything on windows does.
For navigation by keyboard you need to turn off a bunch of the animations and it’s very very snappy. I use Hammerspoon and can jump between apps faster than on Linux and windows.
I am aware that command left and command right is home and end. However, I still prefer to use shift + end to highlight from my cursor to the end of the line as opposed to shift + command + right. There’s also switching between tabs, it’s a similar thing, 3 keys instead of 2.
However, the most important part of this is I cannot even have ALT+Q behave as ALT+F4. I cannot have F11 act as fullscreen EVERYWHERE.
“Global” mappings are the biggest issue for me, but I do strongly prefer having dedicated home, page up, page down, end keys.
Currently typing this on a Microsoft Surface without dedicated home, page up, page down and end keys, and I am heavily noticing the difference, despite using fn + down to behave as page down.
Yeah, I swear by touchpad navigation, so the lack of PgUp, PgDown or the as described by you - terrible keyboard navigation doesn’t really bother me.
I was hoping that the snapdragon X Elite laptops were gonna be as good as advertised, but alas, they are not.
It helps that Apple makes the best touchpads out there, and they are integrated into the OS really well. The haptics are almost magic.
My other laptop is a crappy 13 inch Dell with a spongy touchpad with uneven feedback and it makes me want to throw it into the wall.
Demonstrably false. Dell does not pair components, does not have agreements with component providers prohibiting them from selling to anyone else, doesn’t prevent you from installing storage they haven’t rubber stamped, etc., and you can buy at least some of them with repairable and upgradeable components.