Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, the end

Sorry to hijack, but since the topic is related: is the development of Asahi Linux still actively ongoing, or has slowed down a lot? The progress for M1 and M2 was steady and now almost everything is done, but the M3+ work still seems to not have started. And with major contributors leaving the project I'm kind of worried for the future of Asahi (on newer Apple hardware).

Found out from some Reddit discussions that the developers aim to first upstream everything for M1/M2 to the kernel, and as of https://asahilinux.org/2025/08/progress-report-6-16/:

> 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

i hope some day a used M1/M2 macbook air will be the greatest linux laptop around

Networking is going to be another major issue. Even on the Intel MacBook Pro this is still a problem. The instructions for getting it to work are so bizarre that I ended up with a network dongle with a supported chipset instead.

Good news for you: Networking (ethernet/wifi/bluetooth) on M1/M2 have been working perfectly fine for a while and don't require any special tinkering.

Oh that is good news. I'm almost tempted to try that out.

I can recommend it! I've been daily driving M1 for a few months now, it's working really well. Parent poster is raving about a potential "greatest linux laptop", but depending on your use case it's already there.

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.

How is battery life?

On macOS, I never worried about battery life when leaving the house even when doing compute-heavy work. On Asahi, that is equally much true. I couldn't tell you how many hours it lasts because I never have to carry a charger unless I'm out for more than a regular workday.

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...