![]() This vulture has installed Linux on a few old Intel Macs, and the Asahi experience is very different. As recent moves both by Mozilla and Red Hat seem to indicate, the rise of Wayland is now all but unstoppable, and some more usable desktop environments will adopt the new protocol. Saying that, this will change relatively soon. Meanwhile, GNOME goes too far the other way and removes core functions we use every few minutes – such as middle-clicking on the title bar to send a window behind the others. KDE is horribly overcomplicated, with a dozen superfluous options everywhere you look and little support for Windows keystrokes. Frankly, if macOS does what you need, it works better – including the ability to run x86 apps seamlessly.Īsahi only offers first-class support for Wayland, and for now Wayland only has two complete desktop environments, which are in many ways polar opposites. Happy Mac users, content to pay for the polish of the Mac experience, who often disdain Linux for its poor fit and finish, will see nothing to tempt them here. On the other hand, for this jaded old cynic who's been using Macs since System 6 in 1988 and owns a couple of Intel Macs (secondhand, I'm not silly) … well, it's still Linux. It made our MacBook Air feel much less Mac-like and more like an amazingly thin, light, silent and cool-running PC – and that is not an entirely bad thing. If what you want is a blazingly fast Linux box running only FOSS tools, with the familiar controls from x86 PCs, this will probably please you very much, and we were impressed with how well it works. You must use PC/Windows-type keystrokes, with Alt for menus and Ctrl for hotkeys (the Apple keys become Super keys under Linux – they don't do much, and what they do isn't what you expect). On the other hand, it is Linux, with old-school text boot screens complete with a few error messages flashing by. It boots in seconds, it's snappy and very responsive, and the OS's integration with the hardware is good. On the one hand, even this low-end model is a fast machine, and it still feels just as quick. Running Linux on an M1 Mac feels strange. ![]() Fedora and Asahi Linux pals revamp installation process.Long-term support for Linux kernels is about to get a lot shorter.Asahi Linux goes from Apple Silicon port project to macOS bug hunters.Wayland takes the wheel as Red Hat bids farewell to X.org.FOSS desk fave Panwriter does offer ARM64 builds – but only for macOS, not Windows or Linux. We couldn't find Vivaldi, Opera, or Microsoft Edge either. Flathub has an entry for Google Chrome, but it's a generic entry that we couldn't install. Just as with Linux on other Arm devices – such as the aforementioned ThinkPad X13S – some familiar programs are missing because they don't offer Arm versions yet. Once it's running, it feels much the same as any other Linux machine, only quicker. After a reboot, a full update pulled down over 350MB of updates: Fedora 39 has been out for over a month now and the ARM64 editions are getting updated along with all the others. Asahi Fedora doesn't use it to install the OS, just to handle the post-install configuration. The basic Fedora installation will fit into about 20GB.Īs we mentioned earlier this year, you will see the Calamares cross-platform setup program – but only very briefly. This vulture actually likes macOS (which is more than he can say for the two desktops Asahi Fedora offers – KDE Plasma 5.27.9 or GNOME 45) so we took just 64GB off the end of our 256GB SSD, leaving 53GB for Fedora – not much, but enough. Which took a while, so even with these machines' superb battery life: we suggest doing it while connected to mains power. We upgraded our victim target machine to the newly released macOS 14.2.1, freed up as much space as possible, ran First Aid over all our partitions, then gave the install process a whirl. We also suggest that before you begin, you make sure that you know how to get into Apple's Recovery Mode – this too is quite different to the way it works on x86 Macs. It's also quite different from the process of installing Linux on an Intel Mac, so we advise caution, patience, close reading of the on-screen prompts, and lots of backups. The script shrinks the Apple partitions to make some free space, then makes some new Linux partitions, builds a Linux installation in there, and adds it to the normally hidden boot selection screen. The script runs in a terminal window, it's interactive, and by shell-script standards it's friendly, but will likely deter the sort of Mac user that doesn’t want to install Linux - so that's probably not a problem.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |