After the 2nd hardware breakdown of a Lenovo Thinkpad in just 5 years I was ready to try something I never thought I would do … I bought an Apple device, a used MacBook Pro M2.

Installing Asahi Linux on it was a very smooth ride and I was able to be one of the first users of Fedora Asahi Remix 43 with KDE Plasma 6.6. And if you have an external monitor with HDMI (USB C won’t work yet) and accept a few missing native apps, then I could even recommend it, at least to a bit technical people to try it out. Check the supported hardware before.

The single core speed seems to be already identical to MacOS, at least for my use cases (GraphHopper import and maven compilation). So it is quite an impressive mobile powerhorse.

Here are a few unsorted tips (will be updated over the next weeks):

Big Disk

First of all make sure you buy a computer with enough disk space as you will have MacOS also sitting on the same disk. 500gb is a bit low. Probably 1TB is a good minimum for having two OS’s.

Flatpak Firefox?

Initially I tried to use KeePassXC with a flatpak version of Firefox as it was more recent, but I couldn’t get it working. I know that it works and it is a bit tricky as I was able to do this on the Thinkpad (Ubuntu), but somehow this time it did not work at all and so I fell back to the dnf installed version, which was also updated in the mean time.

Touch ID

Unfortunately the touch ID (to log in) does not work yet unlike on my Thinkpad. I knew that before and I can live without it.

WTF DRM. WTF Netflix?

DRM is a bigger issue. On Fedora (or maybe just on Asahi/ARM Linux?) the DRM option for Firefox was hidden and there is no simple “enable DRM” button as I was used to under x86 Firefox. But this is not a big problem if you know how you can make it working to listen to spotify or view netflix. You need to do a few things: first enable browser.eme.ui.enabled=true in about:config of Firefox and then install widevine-installer. Also ensure that you use a user agent for ChromiumOS on netflix.com:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS aarch64 15236.80.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.5414.125 Safari/537.36

New Bluetooth Bug

Bluetooth usually works on MacBook Pro M2, but I was unlucky and a few weeks ago there is a new bug in KDE it seems, which makes bluetooth an ugly experience. However there is a simple workaround: disable bluetooth for kdeconnect. Maybe even disabling kdeconnect completely, is a good idea to reduce energy consumption if you do not use it (although I have heard many good things about it).

Audio

This is really great! Will have to find out how to reduce basses a bit. Also there is some strange clicking noise when e.g. going forward/backward in youtube videos.

Touchpad

I thought I would miss the buttons above the touchpad, but I can live without them and the touchpad works great as it is. Tap-to-click is disabled, but you can enable it if you want. Also bottom-right pressing could be interpreted as right-click, but default is two fingers, which takes a bit time to learn, but is fine too.

Keyboard Layout

The Keyboard is a downgrade for me. Not only the typing experience that you have to get used to but also all these missing keys like POS1, END, PageUp+Down. The replacements that I found are:

• PageUp via Fn+Up (same for PageDown)
• POS1 via Fn+Left
• END via Fn+Right
• ~ Option+*
• {} via Option+8 or 9
• | via Option+> (or Option+7)
• [] via Option+5 or 6
• \ via Option+?

Also fortunately you can easily swap Fn and Ctrl keys:

echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/module/hid_apple/parameters/swap_fn_leftctrl

This will be lost on reboot so you make it permanent:

echo 'options hid_apple swap_fn_leftctrl=1' | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/hid_apple.conf

It is also possible to swap Command with Option:

echo 'options hid_apple swap_fn_leftctrl=1 swap_opt_cmd=1' | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/hid_apple.conf

Energy Usage

Energy usage is heavier than under MacOS, but I have not yet done extensive tests and it still lasts around 8 hours which is fine for me.

One reason seems to be a constant energy usage (>10W) although nothing important is done and brightness is already set to 5%. Read more about the “idle situation”. I’m hopeful that this idle energy usage can be brought further down to around 7W or less like it is the case for the Thinkpad and then the MacBook can be used 2-4 more hours. The inbuilt smallest brightness percentage above 0 is 5% and is often still a bit too bright. You can lower it or use an arbitrary value:

echo 15 | sudo tee /sys/class/backlight/apple-panel-bl/brightness

Also there is no hardware acceleration for decoding and so video stream etc isn’t as energy efficient as it is on MacOS.

Also I noticed is that for the file search some indexing is done and in my case this took several hours and I don’t think I need this feature and so I disabled it in the settings (file search -> disable or file names only).