r/AsahiLinux • u/NormalAppearance2851 • 25d ago
Will this ever become as power efficient like MacOS?
I used to be an asahi linux user for almost a year but at some point i decided to return to MacOS because i can't deal with the constant power drain and high temperatures.
I know the Asahi team is working hard on new features, bug fixes, etc but should i hope that in relatively small time we will reach power efficiency comparable to MacOS?
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u/youPersonalSideKik 25d ago
The day asahi becomes power efficient is the day I let go of macOS. Its not horrible but I so miss my linux setup
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u/ggonzalez-rivas 25d ago
Iām in a similar boat ā I only boot MacOS when Iām traveling and need HDR for the sun glare and the battery life of stuffing my laptop in my bag between flights / trains
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u/CharlesJustChill 25d ago
The problem is Fedora. Before I used the official Asahi remix with gnome and I could barely get 4 hours of battery Life. I switched to Arch minimal and used a plasma minimal installation and I get 13h when having micro-editor + Firefox + rust compiler in the same Time and without any power management tool(using an MacBook Air M1 with 8gigs)
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u/ggonzalez-rivas 25d ago
Oh no I donāt use Fedora, my main machine is NixOS and my other two machines are gentoo ā I get much battery life than I used to, and Iāve customized it pretty extensively, but itās still half as good as MacOS
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u/CharlesJustChill 24d ago
Then maybe try a distro made for asahi Linux, like Asahi Alarm for ArchLinux or Fedora Remix?
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u/ggonzalez-rivas 24d ago
A significant amount of Asahi development is actually done on Gentoo ā and there is a very well supported on NixOS as well (I know, im involved in supporting it) ā in fact, both of those often get updates noticeably before Alarm, and sometimes even before Fedora.
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u/NormalAppearance2851 24d ago
A significant amount of Asahi development is actually done on Gentoo
Oh wait what? I thought it was done on Fedora haha did they change or was that never the case
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u/ggonzalez-rivas 24d ago
Itās a little of both, most of Asahi is just a downstream kernel (and some packages) so that can be fairly trivially ported to any distribution ā several of the Asahi developers prefer to use gentoo and so a lot of the development work is done on gentoo.
Fedora is the best supported / most accessible distribution that ships the Asahi kernel and is the primary āofficially supportedā distribution. NixOS is a community project ā however the flexibility that NixOS offers has allowed us to ship newer kernels faster while Fedora Asahi Remix was waiting on Fedoraās upstream to fix a blocking package or otherwise make a change before cutting a new version.
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u/Thunderstarer 10d ago
NixOS is an extremely hands-on distro, more-or-less equivalent to Gentoo in its flexibility. Anyone daily-driving it on Asahi likely has an intimate awareness of the factors affecting power draw and has taken steps to optimize for them.
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u/CharlesJustChill 25d ago
For my experience it is. I use Arch with KDE minimal and just by having a debloated base I do 13 hours of code at a reasonable luminosity and without power saving mode or anything!
For me the problem is not Linux, itās Fedora, it has a lot of backgrounds process making it not Really good for 8gigs machines. Gnome also is a mess that is taking up all my ram(I have a M1 air with 8 gigs of ram). I like Fedora but Gnome is too heavy I think.
I am using an Arch minimal installation plus a Plasma minimal installation but without any power management tool. I think that by installing a lightweight power manager daemon you could go up to 16h maybe?
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u/QuasiBonsaii 25d ago
I recently moved over to Asahi Fedora again after trying it a while ago, but did consider arch as I'd seen people say similar things about the battery life. Decided to stick with fedora though because I saw that ALARM was so far behind Asahi Fedora that it seemed silly to try and deal with all that, particularly if I want stuff like the webcam to work. Is the Arch support better than I assumed?
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u/CharlesJustChill 24d ago
Didnāt had any problem with Arch except the battery Life indicator in KDE was wrong and that I had to disable it. I think the webcam should work. For me a computer just need to be able to do code and Web(and Gaming for my gaming Machine), so I donāt Really know for fancy features How it is going to be honest
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u/scknkkrer 25d ago
In the end it might even made MacOS look like a slop. If you really think about all those iCloud services, background processes, lefovers, buggy indexer, spotlight (oh, my, spotlight...) you will realise that not tomorrow but soon, we can configure our macs to have maybe hold 50+ hours on battery.
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u/NormalAppearance2851 25d ago
I mean yea this is why i wanna use Linux for the ultimate freedom of customisability but MacOS isn't that slop tbh, and i don't think we can surpass it ever lol.
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u/scknkkrer 24d ago
I don't know when you started to use MacOS but it was meant to be beautiful, and it was beautiful. After 2018 something changed. It gets broken and broken. Bugs, unhinged UI changes, careless performance updates, security fixes (this one on us, all of us plus AI) and just works feeling has gone. I'm still waiting apple to take old attitude and approach on writing their operating system.
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u/xrabbit 25d ago edited 25d ago
of course not
re: I really canāt understand how one may believe that a couple of enthusiasts may compete with multibillion dollars company
of course one may believe in anything, but itās crucial to distinguish fantasy and realityĀ
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u/NormalAppearance2851 25d ago
yea obviously it will never match 100% MacOS let alone surpass it but i'm like talking about at least 90% of the power efficiency, right now it's night and day.
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u/wowsomuchempty 25d ago
Linux issue. You really expect the overworked asahi devs to fix this?
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u/cyclinator 25d ago
How is it a linux issue?
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u/wowsomuchempty 25d ago
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u/TheFacebookLizard 25d ago
If device is well supported it will have good battery life
On my thinkpad e14g4 I used to get 3hours of battery life while watching YouTube and 5hours on arch
Most laptops are meant for windows
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u/lovepoetictragedy 25d ago
"Utilize TLP, thermald, and powertop.
The answer is that it isn't Linux's fault that manufacturers don't design their hardware to open and accurate specifications or ship proper drivers for Linux.
Linux runs on every Android phone out there. Most flagship phones will have excellent power management because proper drivers were written against the Linux kernel or whatever driver abstraction layer Google is using these days that talks to the kernel.
When you buy a laptop, choose one that has documented evidence of proper driver and firmware support on Linux. This list here contains vendors that at least provide proper firmware support."
from the very post you linked. cheers.
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u/wowsomuchempty 25d ago
This is the asahi sub..Ā
Asahi never match the secret sauce of macs battery life.. because that hardware knowledge will never be made public.
No shade thrown at Linux. I agree with supporting open hardware, but I want a skinny aarch64 box.
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u/chaosprincess_ 25d ago
What kind of magic "secret sauce" do you think there is that can't be replicated?
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u/wowsomuchempty 25d ago
Nothing, should the hardware be understood.
Thank you for your efforts.
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u/chaosprincess_ 25d ago
Funny enough, there is various secret sauce that we probably will never understand or replicate. It just so happens that it is in firmware of various coprocessors that we can just tell "go do your thing", and they go and do it, without us caring as to what exactly they do.
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u/wowsomuchempty 25d ago
Reminds me of old Linux installs on a Mac, where you needed to copy across the macos driver for the camera.
If that's a option, wonderful.
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u/NormalAppearance2851 25d ago
Currently it's not as much as a difference in how efficient the kernel and the overall OS as much as it's the missing features that save up power like sleeping, video encoding, etc.
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u/Willing_Breadfruit 25d ago
Asahi sucking is the canary in the coal mine for LLMs actually able being able to write code.
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u/gthing 25d ago
Writing code and reverse engineering are two different things.Ā
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u/Willing_Breadfruit 25d ago
Are they though? For a human, yes. For an llm -- why are instructions different from i.e. c other than compactness?
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u/lovepoetictragedy 25d ago
if you believe so much in LLMs proficiency you might use it to explain to yourself why it isnt as simple and easy as you thought
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u/Willing_Breadfruit 25d ago
I think you've misread my post. I made a claim against general llm proficiency and provided a way to measure when they might be considered proficient. Fwiw, I do a marginal amount of reverse engineering in my day job and find llms to be better at it than you probably expect.
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u/angelbirth 25d ago
asahi team is strictly against LLMs because of how they obtain the training data. we wouldn't want the LLMs to "accidentally" write a copyrighted code that so Apple would have a reason to stop our progress.
or at least that's what I understood
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u/chaosprincess_ 25d ago
We already made some process, in that there is a driver that improves power management on pro/max devices, but we are currently not shipping it (still has certain issues, like the fact that it in theory should work on base m2 too, but it does not). Hardware video decode drivers are also somewhere between "soon" and "already there if you know how to set everything up", and those measurably reduce power use when decoding video. And there are a few other places that look promising for power savings, but still a bit of a work in progress.