I have a bias towards action, so when an idea forms with a clear path forward and little if any downside I tend to go for it. Now, the plan to detach from Apple will take years to fully implement, but stage 1 is well under way: to find and use workable Linux parallels to every app I’ve come to learn and love over the years. Some of those I have already replaced (goodbye, OmniFocus, hello, Emacs org-mode) and some are still a work in progress (you won’t believe what will end up replacing MarsEdit), but before all that here are a few things about replacing the OS.
I was worried that I would be lost between having to choose between various distributions of Linux, each with its own set of trade-offs, but having an M1 Macbook Air significantly limited my choices which in this case was a good thing. Asahi is a project to bring Linux to Apple Silicon chips and so far M1 and M2 series are almost fully supported. And Asahi chose Fedora as its flagship distrbution, so Fedora Asahi Remix was the obvious choice, though several other distribution since then have become available on Apple Silicon thanks to Asahi.
Still, there were two more choices to make: what desktop environment (KDE Plasma or GNOME), and how to actually run the thing (via Parallels or actual dual-booting). It seems like the Asahi people would want me to chose KDE — it was the default choice during setup and they highlight it on the Fedora Asahi page. Alas, it just looked to much like Windows and the configurability they touted as a feature also gave me pause: how much fiddling would I do as a procrastination mechanism? GNOME looked sort-of like MacOS but was clearly its own thing and dare I say was even more polished than Liquid Glass. So I picked GNOME.
As for the booting mechanism, Parallels or some other method of virtualization would 1) have been a cop-out, 2) still have me exposed to the disaster that is MacOS 26 Tahoe, and 3) not be representative of the actual experience once the M1 Air kicks the dust and I have to find a new laptop. So I dual booted. Fedora Asahi makes this incredibly easy, with a single incantation at the Terminal shrine:
curl https://alx.sh | sh
This downloads the entire thing, partitions the drive, installs the new OS via a MacOS Recovery drive (don’t ask me how this works, but it work it did) and changes the boot sequence to default to Linux. It would have been magic if not for the partitioning part, during which I found out that no I do not actually have 300+ Gb of free space on my 1 Tb SSD as MacOS doesn’t count the space used by temporary and cash files as occupied and would rather users don’t know about them at all.
Fortunately there is DaisyDisk which was one of my first Mac App Store purchases back in 2012, only the App Store version also doesn’t have access to these hidden files because why would people know what is on the hardware they paid for, so I had to re-purchase the app from the developer’s website. On one hand no harm no foul — I’ve had and use the software for more than a decade — but on the other this kind of shenanigans is exactly why I’m skipping Appletown.
So if I had to order how much time things took: partitioning was the longest and most tedious part owing completely to Apple’s opaqueness, writing this section comes after that, and the actual Fedora Asahi install was by far the quickest. The last time I dealt with Linux before this was when I installed Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon back in 2008 to dual-boot with Windows XP or what not (I was never a Linux maximalist), and oh my how things have changed.
A few things you should know before you type the incantation in your own terminal: Thunderbolt is not supported so no chance of a second display unless you find a Linux-compatible dock; touch ID doesn’t work and I doubt that it ever will; sleep mode is not fully baked so if your workflow involved leaving the laptop on for days relying on power management magic you should be prepared to switch back to turning the thing off at the end of a work day, which hey may actually not be a bad thing if it makes you less tempted to just take a quick peek at the work email during a movie watching night bio break, right?
The first one was almost a deal-breaker for me since I have grown attached to the LG 5K Ultrafine display, but everything else brought enough relief — even joy — for me to stick to the program. Now, for the Linux apps that brought joy back into my laptop use you will need to come back later this week, as this post has already gotten longer than planned. So it goes when you’re having fun.