OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

Its been more than a year I'm running asahi on my macbook air and I can't stress how grateful I feel for enjoying such wonderful freedom.

I don't feel like ever going back to x86 to be honest, at this point there is nothing lacking or unable to run and when the neural engine drivers come online now that the GPU is starting to mature people will be able to juice out every last bit of computation this machine is capable of.

For the record, I've switched to the edge branch a couple of months ago and honestly I noticed no actual difference in my day-to-day tasks which is really telling about how powerful even the M1 is when it can handle software rendering in such an effortless manner coupled with anything else running.

Really thank god for asahi being a thing.

> at this point there is nothing lacking or unable to run

Sure there is. You just haven't run into it yourself.

Faster, cooler and more power efficient hardware is great. I just don't think that it makes up for depending on a small team of volunteers to resolve all hardware issues in an ecosystem hostile to OSS, which might break at any point Apple decides to do so.

And the incompatibilities with ARM are not negligible. If all your software runs on it, great. If not, good luck depending on yet another translation layer.

I'm sticking with my slow, hot and power-hungry x86 machines with worse build quality for the foreseeable future. The new AMD mobile chips are certainly in the ballpark of what Apple silicon can do, so I won't be missing much.

I have an AMD Linux laptop I’ve been using for work.

It’s great. The battery life is great, it’s quite fast with a lot of cores, when I need to do my genetics runs (plugged in). Build quality isn’t bad, plus affordable and lots of ports. After my initial transition away, not missing my 2015 Mac book pro.

Linux is the way to go. I don’t blame people with apple hardware for wanting it. I just don’t feel the x86 side is as bad as the everyone makes it out to be. We’ve come along way since my first Linux laptop and it’s not so great battery life.

Two years ago or so I bought a ThinkPad with an AMD Ryzen CPU, there was a lot of hype about them. How Linux laptops were finally competitive, speed, driver, and battery-wise.

The machine was quite a bit slower than an M1 Air, would have loud fans during video meetings, and on Linux the battery would typically last 3 hours (6-7 on Windows, yes I did all the usual power optimizations). In S3 sleep it would discharge overnight and the next day it would refuse to charge with Lenovo’s included USB-C adapter. When waking up the machine from sleep the track point or trackpad wouldn’t come up 1/3rd of the time on Linux.

I used the laptop for work and the question ‘does the laptop work’ when having a meeting or having to teach became so stressful, that one day after another Linux hardware episode I immediately went to a store after work and picked up an M1 Air and never looked back (well, got an M1 Max after that).

There is no way I am going to touch Linux on laptops within 5 years.

(I use a headless Linux GPU machine daily, first used Linux in 1994, and was paid to work on a Linux distribution in the past.)

Was the laptop advertised as supporting Linux, or, if not, did you at least do your research ahead of time to ensure that everything worked properly? Because clearly it didn't, so I expect Linux support was already known to not be in a great place before you bought it.

And yes, that sucks. We should have first-class support. It's no wonder macOS gained popularity among developers. But I've been running Linux on laptops for 15+ years now (even on Macs), and I've seen how it's changed from barely-working and having to futz with things at every kernel upgrade, to pretty much seamless (and these days I really have little patience for futzing around with things; I want something that works so I can do useful things on it). But, again: you need to choose your hardware carefully.

For reference, I had a 2016-model Razer Blade Stealth, which had no issues with Linux. Then in early 2019 I bought a 2018-model Dell XPS 13 that worked flawlessly (except for the fingerprint reader, which I knew ahead of time and accepted as ok). For the past yearish I've been using a Framework Laptop, which has had some problems (unrelated to Linux; Windows users have the same problems), but the hardware support on Linux has been solid.

Meanwhile, I'd constantly hear problems from my friends with Macs about how it could never stay connected to a wireless network after a couple hours (requiring a reboot to fix), or would frequently "beachball" under not that much load, or how the yearly major OS update would usually break their development setup. I used macOS on and off between 2005 and 2017 or so, and ran into plenty of issues as well.

While I certainly agree there's some laptop hardware that you just shouldn't run Linux on, the still-kicking Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field somehow causes people to ignore or explain away all the issues macOS has.