I bought a MacBook Air M2.
As of writing, it's very affordable with the 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, 13.6" model available for $750.
As of writing, also Asahi Linux doesn't support anything newer than M2.
It’s not an apples to apples comparison because the architecture is so different. Notice his observation in the article:
I am very impressed with how smooth and problem-free Asahi Linux is. It is incredibly responsive and feels even smoother than my Arch Linux desktop with a 16 core AMD Ryzen 7945HX and 64GB of RAM.
M1 architecture has a huge advantage being a SoC and having shared memory between the CPU and the GPU which avoids the need for a bus. I’m still using M1 macbook with 8gb of RAM that I got to keep at one of my jobs a few years ago, and it’s incredibly snappy. I’ve tried x86 laptops with way better specs on paper, and they don’t come anywhere close in practice.
macs always feel smooth and snappy; they’re well polished compared to the core/libreboot clevos i had previously and i really like my macbook m2.
the price tag always get me with macs and they were the primary reason why i bought those clevos: i had the dubious pleasure of carnally getting to know a quartet of very highly placed engineers/directors/managers while i lived in silicon valley and what i learned during the pillow talk about both the company and about the employees makes me refuse to ever buy from them.
so, instead of spending the $$$ on mac hardware; i spent it on core/libreboot as my feeble and almost infinitesimally small middle finger to apple as well as my equally feeble & small (plus lazy) attempt to leave this world slightly better that i found it. lol
i haven’t yet figured out if it’s the institution or the employees that makes apple the biggest display of labor aristocracy i’ve ever seen and i doubt i ever will since not even most of their employees are aware of oniony layers of palace intrigue that goes on at the top. (no wonder why the forced chinese had to sell off grindr; that’s the only other way you can find this shit out). lol
My view is that all corps are slimy, some are just more blatant about it than others. I do agree that Apple stuff tends to be overpriced, and I’ve love to see somebody else offer a similar architecture using RISCV that would target Linux. I’m kind of hoping some Chinese vendors will start doing that at some point. What Apple did with their architecture is pretty clever, but it’s not magic and now that we know how and why it works, seems like it would make sense for somebody else to do something similar.
The big roadblock in the west is the fact that Windows has a huge market share, and the market for Linux users is just too small for a hardware vendor to target without having Windows support. But in China, there’s an active push to get off US tech stack, and that means Windows doesn’t have the same relevance there.
Also the article says that in the context of paying for the apple physical laptop experience, which is really top notch (so everything other than the mobo and is immediate bits).
Eg my use-case - I only ever need my laptop for extremely light work, so experience in handling it is way more important than the computing hardware.
Actually I would still want a MacBook with like an Intel Pentium in it - but I can’t buy a good frame with a shitty CPU, I need to buy a better overall laptop.
I still don’t own anything Apple, but with Linux I just might, that’s why I keep tabs on this project.
If an old CPU would work for, I highly recommend and older Intel based Mac. They run amazingly well with Linux and, as you say, the “experience” is excellent.
The MacBooks with T2 chips are a bit less ideal as they require a special kernel. And the 2020 MacBook Air has crappy thermals and runs up the fan. There is a version of EndeavourOS that installs everything ou-of-the box through. The WiFi in these old Macs is out of tree but many of them require the Broadcom wl driver which Arch Linux distros ship by default. Depending on model, the out-of-tree FaceTimeHD camera module may be required but it ships in Arch distros as a DKMS packages. So, again, everything just works.
They really are a joy to use. I bought a 2013 MacBook Air a few years ago for less than $100. I bought it to go on backpacking trip because it was light and I did not worry about breaking it or having it stolen. I love it so much I still use it several times a week and it still amazes me what it can do.
I really hope the project doesn’t die, they had some people leave recently and there was some drama over that. Apple hardware is really nice, and with Linux it would be strictly superior to macos which is just bloated garbage at this point. I’m also hoping we’ll see somebody else make a similar architecture to M series using ARM or RISCV targeting Linux. Maybe we’ll see some Chinese vendors go RISCV route in the future.
Yeah, I never though the project would cover apple silicon tbh, it’s amazing what they are doing.
I too really hope RISC-V becomes a thing, slowly getting them foss PCs would be such a nice thing for humanity.
(With EU curiously looking into it’s own independence maybe we could invest into our own RISC-V production …)
Exactly, and there is already some work happening in that regard. This project is focusing on making a high performance RISCV architecture https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan
It’s not an apples to apples comparison because the architecture is so different. Notice his observation in the article:
M1 architecture has a huge advantage being a SoC and having shared memory between the CPU and the GPU which avoids the need for a bus. I’m still using M1 macbook with 8gb of RAM that I got to keep at one of my jobs a few years ago, and it’s incredibly snappy. I’ve tried x86 laptops with way better specs on paper, and they don’t come anywhere close in practice.
macs always feel smooth and snappy; they’re well polished compared to the core/libreboot clevos i had previously and i really like my macbook m2.
the price tag always get me with macs and they were the primary reason why i bought those clevos: i had the dubious pleasure of carnally getting to know a quartet of very highly placed engineers/directors/managers while i lived in silicon valley and what i learned during the pillow talk about both the company and about the employees makes me refuse to ever buy from them.
so, instead of spending the $$$ on mac hardware; i spent it on core/libreboot as my feeble and almost infinitesimally small middle finger to apple as well as my equally feeble & small (plus lazy) attempt to leave this world slightly better that i found it. lol
i haven’t yet figured out if it’s the institution or the employees that makes apple the biggest display of labor aristocracy i’ve ever seen and i doubt i ever will since not even most of their employees are aware of oniony layers of palace intrigue that goes on at the top. (no wonder why the forced chinese had to sell off grindr; that’s the only other way you can find this shit out). lol
My view is that all corps are slimy, some are just more blatant about it than others. I do agree that Apple stuff tends to be overpriced, and I’ve love to see somebody else offer a similar architecture using RISCV that would target Linux. I’m kind of hoping some Chinese vendors will start doing that at some point. What Apple did with their architecture is pretty clever, but it’s not magic and now that we know how and why it works, seems like it would make sense for somebody else to do something similar.
The big roadblock in the west is the fact that Windows has a huge market share, and the market for Linux users is just too small for a hardware vendor to target without having Windows support. But in China, there’s an active push to get off US tech stack, and that means Windows doesn’t have the same relevance there.
Also the article says that in the context of paying for the apple physical laptop experience, which is really top notch (so everything other than the mobo and is immediate bits).
Eg my use-case - I only ever need my laptop for extremely light work, so experience in handling it is way more important than the computing hardware.
Actually I would still want a MacBook with like an Intel Pentium in it - but I can’t buy a good frame with a shitty CPU, I need to buy a better overall laptop.
I still don’t own anything Apple, but with Linux I just might, that’s why I keep tabs on this project.
If an old CPU would work for, I highly recommend and older Intel based Mac. They run amazingly well with Linux and, as you say, the “experience” is excellent.
The MacBooks with T2 chips are a bit less ideal as they require a special kernel. And the 2020 MacBook Air has crappy thermals and runs up the fan. There is a version of EndeavourOS that installs everything ou-of-the box through. The WiFi in these old Macs is out of tree but many of them require the Broadcom wl driver which Arch Linux distros ship by default. Depending on model, the out-of-tree FaceTimeHD camera module may be required but it ships in Arch distros as a DKMS packages. So, again, everything just works.
They really are a joy to use. I bought a 2013 MacBook Air a few years ago for less than $100. I bought it to go on backpacking trip because it was light and I did not worry about breaking it or having it stolen. I love it so much I still use it several times a week and it still amazes me what it can do.
I really hope the project doesn’t die, they had some people leave recently and there was some drama over that. Apple hardware is really nice, and with Linux it would be strictly superior to macos which is just bloated garbage at this point. I’m also hoping we’ll see somebody else make a similar architecture to M series using ARM or RISCV targeting Linux. Maybe we’ll see some Chinese vendors go RISCV route in the future.
Yeah, I never though the project would cover apple silicon tbh, it’s amazing what they are doing.
I too really hope RISC-V becomes a thing, slowly getting them foss PCs would be such a nice thing for humanity.
(With EU curiously looking into it’s own independence maybe we could invest into our own RISC-V production …)
Exactly, and there is already some work happening in that regard. This project is focusing on making a high performance RISCV architecture https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan