> With Linux 6.16, we also hit a pretty cool milestone. In our first progress report, we mentioned that we were carrying over 1200 patches downstream. After doing a little housekeeping on our branch and upstreaming what we have so far, that number is now below 1000 for the first time in many years, meaning we have managed to upstream a little over 20% of our entire patch set in just under five months. If we discount the DCP and GPU/Rust patches from both figures, that proportion jumps to just under half!
So if the discussions are true, it can take years for the developers to finish M1/M2 upstreaming with all the Linux kernel bureaucracy. That is, unless they decide to start working on M3 before finishing the upstreaming
Qualcomm has been beating the marketing drum on this instead of delivering. Ampere has delivered excellent hardware but does not seem interested in the desktop segment. The "greatest Linux laptop around" can not be some unmaintained relic from a hostile hardware company.
If you want to do a device, and your only chip option is Qualcomm I'd recommend not doing a device at all.
Can you see any other machine coming close to a Mac in terms of hardware quality and performance? Obviously the cost is silly, but while I agree with your sentiment, it seems optimistic to hope.
IME the Asahi support page is spot-on: There are a couple of yet-unsupported features (DP-alt mode being a big one), but any feature listed as supported will just work without hidden gotchas. I find this a big contrast to other devices, which will often "work" but have annoying little quirks here and there that are workable but can feel like a downgrade compared to Windows.
There's some room for improvement, but that is purely relative to macOS. Asahi still solidly beats other x86 devices (other than the low end ones you wouldn't do development work on).
One issue is that idle battery consumption is higher than on macOS (an active area of improvement though [1]), which you'll notice by an M1 laptop discharging by about 12% overnight when macos would've eaten maybe 2-3%. Not a big issue normally, but can be inconvenient if the device shuts down due to empty battery overnight.
During more passive uses at daytime (e.g. playing music), the display tends to be the biggest power hog. Not really Linux-specific, but I actively turn off the screen when not needed hence (KDE lets you configure the power button to do so).
[1] https://social.treehouse.systems/@chaos_princess/11498433865...