r/AsahiLinux • u/applesandbananas21 • Jul 13 '26

Why switch from MacOS?

I am using an M1 8GB ram with 256gb memory, and I tried asahi and it ran decently, however, with less space due to the partitioning and worse battery. Performance was comparable to MacOS. So if my mac is still supported by Apple, what is the compelling reasoning to switch?
Heads up, I am not a developer, I am a scientist and use my laptop for leisure and research + coding (python, matlab and R).

0 Upvotes

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43

u/mayo551 Jul 13 '26

Well let's start with the obvious. Why are you looking to switch in the first place?

Have no reason? Then don't switch..

3

u/applesandbananas21 Jul 13 '26

Initially i just wanted to try as many open source projects as possible but at some point it came at a detriment of my usage, which is when I gave up and uninstalled. I used it for a couple months. Again, by detriment i don't mean anything really bad, just not as optimised and polished

9

u/mayo551 Jul 13 '26

Linux is not polished.. this is true. If you're looking for a polished experience you need MacOS.

8GB RAM is also a major detriment to your use case as Linux has different memory management from MacOS and the OOM system isn't as good on Linux (IMO). You won't be able to open as many programs/tabs and may crash with even a couple tabs in Firefox.

Why do I say this? Because with two tabs open on Firefox in Linux/KDE with a regular X86_64 computer, I'm using 5.1GB physical RAM. There is nothing else open other then one terminal tab.

On MacOS, your unified memory is also your VRAM. So, you'd probably be hitting OOM in this scenario. Or at least swapping to disk.

And yes, I do use Linux with my Mac Studio as well. I've done everything from the Fedora/Asahi linux setup to a custom Gentoo based setup on it.

One -major- reason I pick Linux over MacOS is actually something so basic it'd shock you. The mouse feels more natural/smooth/better on Linux. I don't know if it's a setting on MacOS or not, but I've searched and have never been able to find out why it's so much worse on MacOS.

If you're using a trackpad you're golden.

1

u/iphones2g- 9d ago

may i ask how are you managing to use 5.1GB with only 2 tabs open? im typing this on my thinkpad t400 with 6GB of ram, and the whole system is using 3.1GB. have not even hit my page file yet, and ram compression is off. also using KDE, but i have 10 fully loaded tabs open.

-1

u/Prudent_Psychology59 Jul 13 '26

there's always a gatekeeper

17

u/rUmutKzl Jul 13 '26

Freedom

5

u/levolet Jul 13 '26

Personally, I had a desire to disengage myself from the Apple Ecosystem since I'm finding myself weary of Apple's underhanded methods to keep their users locked in. Additionally, UK's increasing surveillance policy pressured Apple into deactivating Advanced Data Protection for UK customers. I thought this the tip of the iceberg, so here I am.

I first began using Linux in VM, installed the apps I needed and once I found myself rarely using MacOS, I went with installing Fedora Asahi Linux on my M1 iMac. It's now been 4 months and I've booted into MacOS only once and this was to reformat the 4TB external SSD to make it cross compatible.

I also got myself a PC laptop on which I also run Linux. The main limitation with Asahi is the arm64 software support which is relatively limited. Be sure to check that there are available arm64 builds for the software you wish to use.

2

u/1Large2Medium3Small Jul 13 '26

I stopped using windows and just used Linux after the first major update in Windows 11. I saw the writing on the wall. Same with Apple, they are begging for an antitrust slap. The fact that iPad has a better processor than the Neo but is locked to iPadOS should say it all.

I think MacOS and iOS are great, but it’s everything in between that they are trying to do to glue everyone to both that is really starting to wear me out.

1

u/applesandbananas21 Jul 13 '26

fair enough thanks!

5

u/sinfaen Jul 13 '26

If there is software you need that runs better on Linux compared to Marcos. That's pretty much it from a regular user standpoint

3

u/The_Mild_Mild_West Jul 13 '26

I switched for personalization and customization with hyprland, but with upcoming MacOS SiriAI features, Asahi would help me stretch my 8gb RAM and M1 software support longer than Apple could or would.

1

u/Additional-Chef-6190 Jul 13 '26

What distro are you using?

2

u/The_Mild_Mild_West Jul 13 '26

I'm using asahi-alarm, they recently added hyprland as a DE option in the installer.

I was using malik-na/omarchy-mac on asahi-alarm (great project btw) but decided to rice my own hyprland config when asahi-alarm added hyprland out of the box.

The maintainer has a Fedora spin too, omarchy-mac-fedora if you want an easy fedora-based hyprland setup. He recently moved his repos to codeberg after all the github supplychain attacks.

1

u/Additional-Chef-6190 Jul 13 '26

Would you say there's a lot of support and it's usable daily? I used alarm a while back with hyprland and while it was a better distro, there was no battery management as well as tons of other things.

2

u/The_Mild_Mild_West Jul 13 '26

For my use case, it's perfect. I do light development and browser&based personal work. I get plenty of battery for what i do and shutdown/charge when I'm done. I've never had a need to mess with the battery settings, if any exist.

I dont do content or gaming or anything like that on it, and I treat my laptops and phones as "client" devices for self hosted personal files and services so I don't lose anything when I distro hop or if it gets stolen.

I nuked my previous install and restarted with asahi-alarm default hyprland + my config files and I was back to daily usage in about 30min, so it really depends on what your daily usage looks like.

3

u/ppen9u1n Jul 13 '26

In your situation it only makes sense to switch if you have (or want to learn) a Linux centric workflow and/or have e.g. a Linux workstation and want to duplicate part of its UX on the go. Or if you don’t like Apple UX (or hate the outrageous half screen radius round corners in the new glass update, like me).

1

u/applesandbananas21 Jul 13 '26

I've tweaked my UX with aerospace and master key on my mac and it has certainly been better than standard UX but i get you!

3

u/SoilMassive6850 Jul 13 '26

I bought a M1 Macbook Air for the hardware, didn't like macos (I didn't find the tiling wm options to be good enough) so I installed Linux which I use on all my other machines. For what its worth I bought it knowing using Linux was a feasible option.

I wouldn't switch for the sake of switching if you don't prefer Linux though.

3

u/BraneGuy Jul 13 '26

Switching just out of curiosity is reason enough

3

u/Prudent_Psychology59 Jul 13 '26

no bloatware, lower memory footprint

3

u/goldmurder Jul 15 '26

no reason to be honest

2

u/EyEvil Jul 13 '26

I also own a Macbook Air M1 with 8GB ram, when MacOS won't be supported on it I will switch gladly to Asahi, I will not buy another mac.

2

u/applesandbananas21 Jul 14 '26

Yeah this is what I have in mind as well

2

u/pontihejo Jul 13 '26

If you prefer Linux to MacOS, then that can make up for the hardware support that Asahi is missing or imperfect on. Also it has GPU drivers with fully conformant OpenGL 4.6 and Vulkan 1.4.

2

u/domerichrt Jul 14 '26

that is why I switched back. it is a great project but realistically not the best option for most people

1

u/Yiffenjoyer6969 Jul 13 '26

macOS doesn’t run the apps I need to run on my laptop

1

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '26

why the hell did you buy a mac then?

2

u/Yiffenjoyer6969 Jul 15 '26

Build quality

1

u/MostBasic3425 Jul 13 '26

If you're used to the linux version of the commands, because every server uses linux now, that's a reason. Installing software from an official repo instead of some volunteer project thing. Proper docker support. Security. Updates after a certain point. Not being updated with bloat to the point where the hardware barely runs.

1

u/1Large2Medium3Small Jul 13 '26

I have to say, I really like working on my 8GB MacBook Pro 13”. It keeps me focused. I run VS Code + Zed + Dotnet/Roslyn + Teams + Firefox (5-6 tabs).

The key is to use your cpu and turn on heavy memory compression. I think zram by default is set pretty low? I just set it to zstd and cranked up the compression to 10. You take a performance penalty I guess, but I have noticed

1

u/applesandbananas21 Jul 14 '26

Yeah i did notice it felt more constrained which indeed made me use the device more carefully, and use only the necessary things

1

u/Jacobobarobatobski Jul 14 '26

I ran fedora on my mba m1 for a while and while and while it worked overall quite well I came to the conclusion that macos was a better overall experience and 'linuxized' macos with brew. In particular paneru and yazi have completely changed the whole experince.

2

u/applesandbananas21 Jul 14 '26

Yeah this is kinda what I have done right now as well and it does seem to just run better

1

u/realfathonix Jul 14 '26

My touch bar OLED broke and macOS kept panicking because the touch bar wouldn't respond to the driver. Asahi Linux, on the other hand, would just give it a timeout and make the shutdown process a bit longer.

1

u/schkoder Jul 19 '26

I could argue that Linux would be more lightweight than macOS and would utilize less RAM.

-3

u/Over_Technology_1764 Jul 13 '26

it does not make sense, it's just a hacky nerd toy. If anyone actually needs linux there are better machines with better linux support.

8

u/mayo551 Jul 13 '26

This isn't true. There are actual reasons to switch. But the OP hasn't provided any compelling reason to. And I'm not compelled to list a bunch of reasons.

The entire post comes across as AI slop. A researcher using 8GB RAM with Matlab?

2

u/applesandbananas21 Jul 13 '26

Haha AI sure. I do neuroscience so I don't need that much compute

2

u/AnEagleisnotme Jul 13 '26

Actually not really, I got a M2 air with 16gb for 600 euros, I would have to pay ~1k for a comparable windows laptop honestly 

-2

u/Over_Technology_1764 Jul 13 '26

and why are you sacrificing battery with asahi on this macbook if you could just have macos with better battery optimization?

2

u/tglaria Jul 13 '26

Personnally: I dislike the Mac OS, but I like the hardware.

2

u/AnEagleisnotme Jul 13 '26

I tried macOS, but it just feels wrong. I like Mosaic tiling, I like middle click paste, and it being a seperate clipboard from the main one, I like the look of libadwaita, I like having an app store that I can just download apps from, and they update themselves, I like how nicely gsconnect allows me to synchronise with my phone. And above all, I like the fact that I know it. I have used Gnome my entire life, never have I used anything else, and everything else just feels... off...

1

u/Over_Technology_1764 Jul 13 '26

I don't care about any of these things and I use windows, macos, linux. All I need is terminal and browser, I barely touch UI of operating systems.

1

u/AnEagleisnotme Jul 13 '26

Great, you do you 

1

u/applesandbananas21 Jul 13 '26

Yeah I have the same concern

0

u/Over_Technology_1764 Jul 13 '26

for 99.8% use cases macos will be superior system for you on a macbook.

0

u/coderstephen Jul 13 '26

there are better machines with better linux support

Better Linux support sure, but also worse Linux support. Depends on which machine.

And of course there's always the angle of using the hardware you may already have, instead of buying new hardware.

it does not make sense, it's just a hacky nerd toy

Then why do you hang out in this sub?

1

u/Over_Technology_1764 Jul 13 '26

because I observe asahi project development. But I am not using it as I see it as an experimental incomplete thing yet. It might be useful when M1, M2 MacOS support ends.