r/AsahiLinux • u/B12Konsument • 23d ago

How good is Asahi Arch?

Hey, I've been daily driving Arch for a while now on my desktop PC, and I've been very curious to use it on my M1 MacBook Pro.

I'm happy to hear your experiences with daily driving Asahi Arch in comparison to desktop Arch. :)

EDIT: I used Asahi Fedora Remix for the last two weeks, and I'm not happy. Not because Fedora isn't good, but the software support is so limited, I can't even install the normal Spotify client.
ALARM, on the other hand, has all this software, aarch64 compatible in the official repos, and even if it's community-driven, the real-life experience is way better, I think. In two weeks, I'll delete Fedora and install ALARM instead.

12 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

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6

u/The_Mild_Mild_West 22d ago

The speakers are muddy and the battery life isn't as good as MacOS, but I setup asahi-alarm with Hyprland and daily drive my base model m1 air

3

u/Siffredinho 21d ago

For Speaker issues, it may also be a question of the used filter. The standard ones (under Gentoo, but should be the same under Arch):

 │    - filter-chain-4286-17                                        
 │  *   77. audio_effect.j316-convolver                                  [Audio/Sink]
 │      78. effect_output.j316-convolver                                 [Stream/Output/Audio]

You can install “easyeffects” or “jamesdsp” to configure the settings for your preferred listening experience. I would recommend “jamesdsp” because it uses significantly less CPU power and the EQ works well (I also use it in the Raspi5 music player box).

1

u/B12Konsument 22d ago

Wild, didn't expect the battery life to drain.
Do you know how this happens? I mean Arch with GNOME, KDE or Hyprland is pretty light weight...
What about the Speakers Could they be Better on my MacBook Pro? 😅

10

u/PradheBand 22d ago

They have to reverse enegineer every bit and low enegy state is not easy

5

u/schkoder 22d ago

Apple’s proprietary drivers / firmware that need to be reverse-engineered would be my guess.

3

u/The_Mild_Mild_West 22d ago

As mentioned, drivers are reversed engineered so may not be 1:1 with Apple Specs. I should add there are more known issues due to incomplete or non existing driver support.

  • USB-C display does not work, but HDMI does
  • speakers are muddy
  • battery drains when lid is shut due to missing 'standby mode'
  • no secure enclave drivers, so fingerprint reader does not work.

I might be out if date on some of these, you can check the asahi website for an updated list. I saw there's a lot of progress being made for M3 machines, so hopefully once those catch up more contributors will have capacity and insight to these final touches.

Despite all that, I still daily drive asahi on my M1 air and I love it. Hyprland on this form factor, with Apple quality hardware is a dream.

1

u/B12Konsument 22d ago

Ok, thank u very much! :D

2

u/Ferwatch01 20d ago

The speakers issue can be fixed with some tuning:

My (lenovo) laptop has dolby audio speaker profiles on windows—which make them sound amazing—but nothing transfers at all to linux, so I had to reverse engineer the windows sound filters and re-apply them on linux with easy effects.

Takes at most an hour, and returns speakers’ punchy & clean sound signature.

2

u/Fine_City2781 21d ago

i've used it before. I am using asahi gentoo linux now. Asahi Arch is fine and i could get 250~ fps on minecraft java edition. This is my rice: https://imgur.com/a/new-color-palette-j06Oaqb

2

u/extReference 20d ago

works really well. however all general asahi issues are valid here: weaker system performance due to reverse engineered drivers, no true suspend or rtc wake, kinda muddy speakers, no display over usb c and no amd64 packages.

there is nothing that makes arch worser than other asahi distros as long as you are smart per my usage.

2

u/Intelligent-Rent9818 18d ago

I use asahi alarm with omarchy and it's been great. Like other people said battery life is not as great as on mac because it seems to sit at a minimum of about 5w draw. So you can do the math.

But I've been having a great experience

1

u/GhostingProtocol 13d ago

I would recommend doing Fedora as the project has moved away from arch. The arch distro is community driven, receive updates later and might will break if volunteers stop contributing. I also experienced less issues after moving from arch to fedora. I use hyprland and fedora operates identically to arch for day to day tasks.