Bob Smith

I’m lucky I manually ran a few jobs before I started using rsync in scripts. When I didn’t think things through, I saw the output in real-time. After that, I got very careful about testing any scripts and accounting for minor changes in setup.

For me, it was getting a handle on rsync for a better method of updating backup drives. I was tired of pushing incremental changes manually, but I decided to do a bit of extra reading before making the leap. Learning about the -n option for testing prior to a sync has saved me more headaches than I’d care to enumerate. There’s a big difference between changing a handful of files and copying several TB of files into the wrong subfolder!

I’ve never tried anything beyond DOS or the SNES/Genesis era, honestly.

I’m typing this reply on an M1 Macbook Air running Asahi. My experience is very positive, but with some caveats. Some positives, some background to contextualize the positives, and some negatives.

Positives: Great screen, nice battery life when in use, fast, runs the programs that I use on a daily basis for work. Good support for the specific hardware that I have. I enjoy using it as my go-to laptop. Fedora isn’t something that I use on any of my other linux boxes, but I didn’t have much trouble setting it up and it works well with my other devices. Libreoffice, Firefox, Chromium, every DE and window manager that I’ve bothered to test - they work fine. I’m currently running Sway with no issues, KDE worked fine too. Sound, bluetooth, camera all work. Again, my 9-to-5 day job is fully doable from this computer and I enjoy using it.

Background: I’ve been tinkering with Raspberry Pi devices for years and I made do with a PI 4 as a daily driver for a few months once. That experience helped me to focus on native linux solutions that didn’t depend on WINE or x86-specific programs. I can’t remember every decision that I made during that time, but I definitely changed my workflow a bit, started doing more in the terminal, and started using programs that were less resource-heavy. That carried over to how I use other devices. I also don’t game much.

Negatives: Gaming is limited on this hardware. I can play minetest, tuxkart, and some light emulation. That’s about it, but I don’t mind. If you’re trying to run windows programs, you’ll be out of luck. My linux experience on this laptop prior to the Asahi shift to Fedora was a bit buggy because it was a beta version and sound wasn’t supported(other than bluetooth). Everything works fine now, but my understanding is that this is very model-specific. I would probably be having a bad time on newer mac hardware. Power management is so-so and it depends heavily on your choice of desktop environment. If you close your lid and don’t plug in the laptop, you might find out that the battery is dead when you try to use it a day later. No multimonitor support - the USB-C ports are more limited in function than they are when running MacOS.

Also, my only experience is with a niche distribution, so bear that in mind. For me, Asahi has been excellent but don’t expect to be able to run your favorite distro on the hardware. Time will tell if the progress made by Asahi will lead to greater support for Apple Silicon by other distributions, and time will tell how long Asahi will exist as an active project. I preferred the Arch version, but I had no real choice but to jump to Fedora when the developers did. Not a big deal for me.