Have been using it for a few months now. Did a clean install after GA which ironed out the last few little kinks. What can I say, I love this machine. I have been using different kinds of Linux laptops over the last two decades or so, but nothing really comes close so far. The hardware is great (I got an M2 MBA), good battery life, no fan, really powerful, and Fedora with KDE is a joy to use.
My experience with Fedora KDE was pretty terrible. Bugs galore, minor and major. After a few days it just stopped logging me in. On Arch, the experience has been greatâŚI assumed there was just something wrong with Fedoraâs implementation of KDE for some reason. openSUSEâs KDE was also great for me. Only Fedora KDE has been bad!
But Fedora has recently enabled Discover to perform system upgrades the same way as GNOME Software, so they do care about it.
The official announcement piqued my interest because of the projectâs choice to use Fedora + KDE + Wayland as their flagship Linux experience. (I am also using that combo for all of my laptops.)
100% Wayland Experience
Have some X11 apps to run? No worries, XWayland is available and fully supported as a bridge for legacy applications.
It is also refreshing that the Asahi Linux project is as, if not more, forward-thinking as the Fedora Project.
Remarks related to Asahi Linux and Apple Silicon that are not privacy-related
As someone who purchases used/refurbished/open-box, not-current-generation devices to save money, one recurring pain point has been the shitty screens on the base configurations of Thinkpads and the like. Why is 250 nits, 45% NTSC (
) still a thing? I suspect companies like Lenovo are cynically banking on the large swath of enterprise customers who probably use their laptops when plugged into external displays most of the time.
I like that the laptops that Asahi Linux supports all come with a good screen even in their base configuration (the M1 MBA has the lowest brightness of all the Apple Silicon laptops at 400 nits).
This is all to say that so long as Apple doesnât pronounce the devices with Apple M1 processors as unsupported and end-of-life in the near future, the thought of purchasing a used/refurbed M1 Macbook and installing Linux on it is very enticing. Specifically, I am excited at the prospect of enjoying the benefits of Apple Silicon hardware that you mentioned while also enjoying the benefits of Fedora + KDE + Wayland.
Running this on my M1 currently. Zero issues so far, and oh my god it is fast.
Installation was straight forward as well.
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How so?
My remark referred to the two quoted lines above it.
When I made the remark you quoted, I assumed that Asahi did not support X11 desktop sessions, hence their explicit mention of XWayland.
I looked into that and found that they havenât dropped it yet, but one of their lead developers has expressed a strong desire to do so in the future:
We do expect Xorg to continue to function for the bare essentials (i.e. showing a working desktop), but thatâs it. We wonât be working on any features or non-desktop-breaking bugs beyond that.
Xorg will be relegated to SDDM, and once a native Wayland release of that finally happens, we wonât be shipping any usage of the X server any more.
Edit: hereâs a more recent comment from the same dev about X11 support
we donât test against native Xorg
If you want to use a X11-based desktop, the only supported option is to run a Wayland compositor and XWayland inside it in rootful/fullscreen mode. Setting this up is left as an exercise to the reader.
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This is not surprising, Xorg hasnât really been maintained for a while. Fedora 40 is considering dropping X11 for GNOME. RHEL 10 is also dropping Xorg.
There are a few hobbyists who still want to use it, but theyâll eventually switch when bitrot sets in and nobody fixes it.
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Thanks for explaining your thinking. Like you, Iâm all in on Wayland, and ready to see the transition completed. Fedora has telegraphed their intent to stop shipping X11 (as a backup, Wayland has been the default in Fedora for many years). Itâll still be in the repos for users who want/need it, just not preinstalled or encouraged. Iâm encouraged to see Asahi taking an equally positive approach towards Wayland.
It looks like Fedora 40 KDE (soon to be released) will drop X11. For Fedora workstation, it looks like they opted to take a slightly more conservative approach, and not remove it entirely in Fedora 40. As it stands right now the Fedora Gnome team will follow Gnomeâs lead (when Gnome drops x11âwhich is being considered and may happen soonâFedora Workstation will as well). However it is currently being actively discussed whether to drop X11 for Fedora Workstation in the next release (Fedora 41).
As noted by someone in one of the links you provided, pretty much all of the major players in Linux seem to be rowing in the same direction here. And the transition towards Wayland seems to have accelerated in recent years. Fedora and others just announcing an intent to drop X11 sometime in the future, seems to have a positive effect on encouraging projects to stop dragging their feet on Wayland support. People had been encouraging alternative (non Gnome/KDE) desktop environments to support Wayland for years, but it never seemed to be even a moderate priority outside of Gnome/KDE and some WMâs. Within 6 months of the proposal to drop support, 3 more DEs (XFCE, LXQT, and Cinnamon) have re-prioritized Wayland support, and are either actively working on, or have completed the first big steps towards Wayland support. Iâm really encouraged by this news.
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