Daily driving Asahi Fedora Remix

Why?

I have had my MacbookPro 14" since 2021 but have been a macOS user since 2019. Through the years I have come to like the Apple ecosystem, precisely because it's an ecosystem. Nothing else comes close to delivering the vision of seamlessly integrating devices, and more importantly experiences. In Todd Howard's words, "It just works".

With that out of the way, I can't stress enough how much I have hated the dev aspect of it. An OS update breaks XCode, which breaks my toolchain for some reason, which breaks git for some reason sometimes. And when I am compiling something, it's not able to find headers because the paths have changed or XCode was installed the wrong way(what?).

And when I try to have best of both worlds by sshing into my linux machine, I get random latency spikes reaching 100ms on my LOCAL 5Ghz WiFi. Why? Because fuck you, that's why.

And over time, I have come to realize that these machines are meant to target a wide enough audience. They have amazing sound-stack, amazing displays, amazing track-pad. But wander off that path a little, do something other than web-dev(not a dig) and well, you are on your own.

Setup must've been hard?

I just ran curl https://alx.sh | sh, it guided me well enough that I didn't have engage much and 30 mins later, it was done.

Results?

I will start with the ugly parts first:

Battery life is bad(as you must've already heard), I am getting 5hrs with semi-regular usage on full-charge at 81% battery health. Whereas with macOS this was easily doubled, if not more.

Mic, internal or external, does not work.

Trackpad is ... not good.

And that covers everything bad I have experienced with asahi.

The good parts though:

Refresh rate is locked at 60hz, and yet everything feels snappier.

I use helix, zellij and ghostty for work, and this could very well be placebo, but I swear things are just faster in this land.

I was working on a toy in-memory database where the whole shtick is to be as cache-friendly as possible. I ran benchmarks on asahi and found it be working a tiny bit faster(~3ns)!

I thought I would lose performance and would have to come back to macOS, but I think I will stay.

This is a dual-boot situation, I do go back to macOS sometimes to deal with banking sites or some other personal stuff that's just easier to do on safari(OTP auto fill etc).

Conclusion

Now I know this is situational, but I have been eyeing framework, thinkpad, new XPS to move away from my MacBook. And now I don't, I have nothing to buy, nothing to replace, I just run linux on my MacBook.

It has excellent screen, I like its keyboard, I like its speakers and I like it for the machine it is and want to keep using it for at least 5 more years.

In that way, Asahi Linux has saved me money, more importantly saved my sanity.