On 2024-10-31 14:58 +0530, Nilesh Patra wrote: > I found a wiki page[1] for M1 Mac, but I’d love to hear if anyone has personal experience with it. > > [1] https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1 I have had Asahi installed on my M1 macbook air for 2.5 years now (since shortly after it was released) and overall I've been very impressed with how well it has worked. I really only used it when travelling to start with because it's small and in theory has very low pwer management, but for the first 1.5 years sleep/hibernate didn't work so it wasn't that much use as a daily machine because it went flat when you weren't using it. Also there was no JOSM in arm64 debian stable which is the main reason I have a laptop on holiday so I had to resort to macOS quite a lot for real work. I used it as my daily driver for about a month this year between giving back my work Thinkpad and getting the M1 stolen (boo!). Once I got the audio working (by moving to Testing) it became way more useful, and the sleep/hibernate thing was fixed too so it worked very well. Also for a long time there was no audio, which was the most obvious omission. The only things I didn't get working were: 1) Bluetooth (missing firmware, but even putting it in so the chip was recognised I still couldn't connect to anything) 2) Keyboard. Various keys like pipe and tilde in the wrong places. No Pound sign at all, and how the hell do mac people survive with no pageup/pagedown or 'insert' keys? and the really strange set of modifier keys? This was very frustrating. These things could obviously be fixed (except the missing keys), but I lost the machine before getting to the bottom of them. It's nice hardware, especially for travel, but I'm not going to replace it - I'm going to get another thinkpad mostly because I get a proper bloody keyboard and 3 buttons (And I can get way more RAM and drive in an ex-corporate Thinkpad for much less money than in a macbook)! Also that machine had only 8GB RAM and 256GB drive which is just not enough for my main machine. Useable, but annoying - it was way too easy to open one too many firefox pages and it started thrashing and the desktop usually died after a bit. That was the only 'unstable' aspect. Other than that things seemed very solid. Overall, I'd say Asahi/Debian is very impressive. You have to discover that the codename is 'banana' to find the right wiki page and Matrix/IRC channels for info and support. Which seems a bit perverse- we don't use the wrong name to refer to any other company's computers. But if you can live with the keyboard/mouse and buy a machine with enough welly for your purposes then yes it's a viable setup. A bit of nerding is still required, although I expect the next debian stable release will have pretty good out-of-the-box support for these machines with minimal faffing. My experience is with the M1. I don't know how well things work with the M2 and M3. Probably not as solid yet. HTH Wookey -- Principal hats: Debian, Wookware http://wookware.org/
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