Asahi is getting closer and closer to "daily driver" usability at an amazing pace.

Anyone have an idea how soon we should expect GPU support to be in mainline?

i'm using it as a daily driver for a couple months easily, but my daily driving happens to not require the not-quite-perfect device drivers. i shutdown for sleep, for instance, which works just fine, since boot and login is super fast and restores everything.

Possibly stupid q: Why buy a mac if you are just going to run Linux on it? I suspect any comparable PC would be more economical (w/ exception of power draw).

The hardware is pretty good. Utterly unmaintainable, unserviceable and unapgradeable, extremely overpriced tiering (e.g. adding storage or RAM which you have to do at purchase time), with limited options (e.g. i cannot stand glossy screens with shitty reflections everywhere causing eye strain), but still very good. However the software (macOS) is pretty shit and IMO hard to adapt to coming from any other OS.

Raw performance per watt, and per weight/dimensions is best in class. For pure performance (e.g. an Asus ROG Zephyrus) or lightness (e.g. LG Gram) there are better options, but if you want all three it's hard to beat.

I personally think the hardware is so good, even with the caveats, but the software so bad that I'm honestly tempted to get an Air for portability or a Pro as a daily driver when Asahi Linux is good enough for me and the prices are right (so some sale or something, sticker prices are ridiculous if you max everything, and you kind of have to due to the impossibility of upgrades).

Serviceability is improved (though still not amazing) in all the machines with chassises redesigned during the "M" era — the "notched" MBP 14/16 and Air have easily accessible bottom screws (no need to remove rubber feet first) and don't have batteries glued in. Keyboards can be changed independently from the top case too. Notably, many Windows laptops fail on both of those counts (like the LG Gram which hides screws under adhesive-attached feet).

But yes, it's difficult to find laptops as well-rounded as MacBooks are. Generally laptops will require you to make significant sacrifices in multiple categories to be good at one or two things, which is less true of MacBooks (particularly the 14"/16" Pro models), especially if you want good performance without the laptop being huge and bulky and/or have horrible battery life with constantly-screaming fans. The 14"/16" models get you performance in the ballpark of a desktop Ryzen 5800X while unplugged and still getting great battery life while also being silent and still reasonably portable, along with a killer screen, great speakers, decent keyboard and great trackpad.

Macs, for me, are the software. This is something that became pretty evident during the Intel era. And I bought Macs exclusively when the hardware was both much slower and pricier than PCs (68k and PPC), because I loved the software so much.

Funny to read such an opposite opinion.

I don’t mind the pretty casing, but it’s icing on the cake.

I'm quite sure it's just a question of what you are used to. It is for me, anyway.

My first PC (~year 2000) came with Windows but I wanted to use some software that only existed for Unix at the time and I was used to work in Unix anyway, so I heard about Linux and installed it. Great, I got an OS I was used to and the software I needed for my project.

When finally I had to use Windows for work a couple of years later it took time to adapt and, even to this day, I just find it easier to use Linux. It's just a metter of what you are used to.

Last year I bought a MacBook, because of the M1, and I can't get used to the "weirdness" of MacOS, specially the keyboard and the window management. Every other machine I use (Linux, Windows or ChromeOS) uses the same keybindings but in MacOS the same software I use everywhere else (e.g. Chrome) has been forced to change the standard keybindings to something else and and it's even not configurable. Programs just don't implement stuff as C-c to copy and C-v to paste. Programs link that functionality to S-c and S-v, instead. WTF? This means there is no remapping of the keyboard that can fix this, since the software itself is broken.

For me, this makes the machine pretty unusable. I'm a keyboard guy and quite fast at it. But when I'm in MacOS I waste a lot of time finding the right keybindings even for switching Windows. Example: S-w to close a tab but C-TAB to switch tabs %~(

> Last year I bought a MacBook, because of the M1, and I can't get used to the "weirdness" of MacOS, specially the keyboard and the window management.

For what it's worth, long time Mac users feel that *nix desktops and Windows have the same kind of "weirdness" you describe here. The majority of modern macOS conventions can be traced back to the original 1985 Mac or the 5-10 years following its introduction.

I started on macOS but can switch between control schemes pretty fluidly these days, thanks to having regularly used all three major OSes for several years. That said I wish there were at least one Linux DE that cloned macOS conventions as faithfully as the rest have cloned Windows conventions (with the exception of GNOME, which is more like what you'd get if you turned iPadOS into a desktop OS with Windows keyboard shortcuts).