Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

May I ask something, I want an apple silicone MacBook Air and I am probably just be running Linux on it, what are pros and cons of getting an m1 vs m2? Except for more ram or so. Thx

What is this, quora ?

The short answer is that it's just a stupid idea (and a waste of money). Asahi only works somewhat ok on M1.

m2 has magsafe

Agreed, it is not that stable/usable. I tested it on M1 Pro and was hopeful, but after some years I realized it is not viable for daily use. Many things still don't work and I doubt that they will any time soon. Last year I was given M4 Pro at work and it is not supported at all.

Looking at the drama and people stepping down, I don't think MacBooks will be properly supported on Linux in this decade.

Are you coming from Windows? MacOS is a BSD descendant so it’s quite Unix-y. I never miss Linux on it and I used to only use Linux. Just learn how to get around the minor annoyances (eg the file explorer sucks , I use eMacs for that) and it’s a fine OS. It’s really not worthwhile trying to install anything else on the Mac.

My M1 Pro has MagSafe.

On the other hand, I have an M2 Air and it's stable, fast, and I haven't thrown anything at it that it doesn't handle perfectly. But the fingerprint reader doesn't work.

(The M3/M4 are in progress but not supported. That's public on the project's compatibility chart.)

GGP was asking about the air though.

M2 Air has magsafe. M1 Air does not.

Sorry but I just can let it, I bought a Microsoft dev kit 2023 just to test hundreds of gigabytes of windows software I’m responsible for would deploy on it with the system center :D If that software would also Work ofcourse is another thing. :D

The biggest deal breaker for me was no support for external displays (through DP alt mode/thunderbolt).

Also the infrequent random OS crashes were annoying. And sometimes WiFi would stop working after sleep (wold not show any access points) and would require a reboot.

M1 is 5 years old already and is still not fully stable and lacks features. It seems like the overall development effort started slowing down a couple years ago and while we did get the amazing audio daemon and graphics driver, development of other things seem to be stuck.

If I remember correctly, there were also some comments from Marcan (?) on social media about issues with supporting newer chips (M3/M4), hinting that M3 and M4 are vastly different and require significant effort to add Linux support.

So if M3, M4 and other future versions are too different to get supported in decent time frame, then that means that Asahi is all about supporting years old hardware. That reduces interest by Linux users looking to buy a laptop now, and thus potentially reducing available donations, developer pool, interest, etc.

I love what Marcan, Alyssa, James and others have achieved and how they have pushed Linux further. I think that their contributions will stay relevant and be useful for other hardware for many years to come.

macOS as UNIX is pretty fine for anyone that is happy with UNIX, and isn't looking for yet another Linux distribution.

Now anyone that treats it with the attitude that whatever Linux distros do is UNIX, there are enough surprises in there.

Ah, my mistake.

yes, that's spelt out in the context above.