I tried Asahi Linux
It's great.
This is largely going to be non-technical and describe my day-to-day use of Asahi this week. Rather than go into details which I frankly do not feel equipped to accurately describe compared to the incredibly competent dev team, I'm going to articulate what it's like to daily drive the operating system for a week.
Everything ran on my M1 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM.
OK, but what the hell IS Asahi?
Asahi Linux is a project led by talented Hector Martin and Alyssa Rosenzweig that aims to get Linux running on Apple silicon Macs. There's a challenge in dealing with new hardware conventions and paradigms as well as Apple not openly providing schematics and information around their firmware.
They currently have a working implementation running on Fedora, which is what I decided to go with. What makes the project incredible is the insane progress they've been making and slowly overvoming the gargantuan task of reverse engineering a complex piece of hardware.
My laptop workload
I'm not picky when it comes to what runs on my laptop. At the end of the day, I just need the ability to work in a UNIX-y environment so I can spin up Nix and various tools I need to do my day-to-day work. It's also important that I use a browser.
Occasionally, I'll do various creative projects. On my Mac, that generally involves working with DaVinci Resolve, Affinity Photo, and Logic Pro. Two of which aren't present on Linux. However, I didn't really find any issues trying to replicate my small laptop creative workload on tools like GIMP and Reaper.
Ulitmately, my laptop is not a desktop replacement and that's just not how I view them. Instead, it's largely a thin client to access more powerful machines, write code, and general productivity.
This is why I never even needed to turn on Rosetta when using macOS. These days, there's a healthy ecosystem around arm64 that doesn't require it.
Experience with Linux
I'm no stranger to using Linux; even on other laptops. I come from ThinkPad land and am used to fiddling around with things that might not work out of the box. Keep that in mind when I describe my experience here, maybe some things that were obvious to me as an advanced user aren't the case for you.
Installation
was a piece of cake. Rather than using a traditional installer, Asahi has you run a shell script that partitions your Mac's APFS volumes, resizes them, and makes room for Linux on top. You've given adequate warnings and interactivity throughout the script -- it's not running silently but somebody clearly cared about providing a decent user experience. You're prompted to shut down your computer, wait 25 seconds, and then hold down the "power"/Touch ID button on your Mac until startup options appear. It throws you into a recovery mode, provides a security profile for the Linux install, and boots straight into Asahi. All of this is very railroaded and hard to screw up, but I wish they better warned the user about the need to know their username and password when prompted within the recovery settings.
Out of box
After a smooth installation, I was prompted with Fedora's well-made out of box experience prompt. Since I went with GNOME, it had defaulted to a fairly large 200% scaling. GNOME's fractional scaling support is iffy, compared to KDE, which is the more recommended and supported desktop environment on Asahi. However, getting a more comfortable 175% scaling was trivial and while a few applications look a little blurred as a whole it wasn't a big deal.
Power management and battery life
It's good. You're never going to straight up beat Apple in their home team, but I'm hoping the team gets close. It's more than enough to last me through a whole work day, and often times at work my laptop is docked anyway. It's also way better than any x86 laptop I've owned in the past. I don't feel any hit in battery life compared to macOS in my daily usage.
One of the frustrating quirks, however, is that the battery does drain way faster when the lid's closed. Apple silicon Macs are notorious for being able to handle weeks in sleep mode without much battery depletion at all, but on Linux it's a little more noticeable. This is something to keep in mind if there are big gaps between using your laptop.
Hardware support
Touch ID/fingerprint scanner doesn't work, which is unfortunate. Linux as a whole is kinda behind on biometric authentication support, though. This, in my opinion, isn't too big of a deal and was something I worked around easily by having an easy to type password.
Speakers work GREAT. No issues.
Hardware acceleration and various kinds of GPU-rendered tools work fine. Firefox requires you to append a couple environment variables, so it's not quite an out-of-box experience.
Internal audio works fine.
Backlight, function keys, and trackpad work great. Similar to macOS, when I'm typing, the trackpad doesn't move from my hands resting on it. This is one of the things that's important to nail with such a large and responsive trackpad.
The main thing for me that drove a wrench in my plans is that Displays over Thunderbolt don't seem to be supported. When I connect my Mac to a dock, external displays don't work. This was a huge bummer and I couldn't find any workarounds.
Minor software annoyances
I couldn't get Spotify, Netflix, or any web-based software that expects WideVine DRM because there is no official support for desktop Linux. Here's what seems like an official installer to get this working. I didn't bother as I don't use any of the services in question seriously and was moreso just thrown off at how entrenched DRM is with menial tasks like music and TV/movies.
It also took me a little while to realize I couldn't get a lot of popular applications on Linux because they weren't compiled for ARM. I was upset at being unable to find stuff like Steam within Fedora's software store, sneering about how discoverability is still terrible. This is also something that can't really be "fixed" outside of just ARM becoming a more popular architecture for desktop use.
Do I recommend?
Hell yeah. Things are good, and they'll only get better. If you can work around the external display headache, you can enjoy a competent Linux experience. x86 emulation isn't too hard to do either if that's a concern of yours.
I would not necessarily buy an Apple silicon laptop FOR Linux yet unless you have very specific desires in laptop design like quietness, thermals,battery life, display, etc. However, if you have one lying around, try it out! Worst case scenario, if Asahi doesn't work for you, dual booting into macOS is still an option and it's even seamless to get rid of Asahi altogether.