This toot is brought to you by my ex-work MacBook Pro that I installed Asahi Linux on! (I figured I'd chuck a couple of stickers on it to distinguish it from my completely and utterly identical-looking M4 MacBook Pro work machine that arrived last week.)
Gotta say I'm extremely impressed with the job the Asahi team has done, the installer was a breeze, it all Just Worked and I even have working brightness and audio keys (and audio!) out of the box! I decided to go for the KDE environment, partially because I haven't used that since 2003 when I took this screenshot of KDE 3.1 back under Mac OS X when I was mucking around with running XWindows inside it, and partially because that's the Asahi team's main focus in terms of polish. I haven't pushed it yet but just doing light browsing and general poking around getting things set up, the battery life is exactly what I'd expect the machine to be under macOS; right now it's reading 85% charge and 10 hours of battery life remaining, and it's completely cool and silent.
I haven't looked into the keyboard shortcut swapping yet (having Ctrl-C be copy everywhere except in a terminal session where you have to remember to use Ctrl-Shift-C irritates the bejesus out of me every time, and in general I find the ergonomics of having the Command key position being the primary modifier to be far superior to Control) but that'll probably be my next mini-project. I got 1Password working, although they don't have a proper distribution of aarch64 binaries yet so I'm having to start it in a terminal session like some sort of barbarian. The browser extension works fine at least.
[EDIT] Well that was easy, someone wrote a thing called Toshy that takes all the hard work out of remapping everything!
Posted on 26 October 2025, 20:14