# Asahi Linux 260 Hacker News commenters recommended Asahi Linux and 94 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 0.67 years (21 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Recommended for running Linux on M1 and M2 Macs with great hardware, though newer chips lag behind and battery life, sleep and external displays remain weak. ## Why people recommend it - Excellent Linux laptop experience (7 comments): "The Macbook M2 Air running Asahi Linux is easily my favorite Linux laptop ever, far superior to any Thinkpad or Dell XPS I've owned" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46165234)) "the added value of „most powerful Linux/Arm64 laptop on the market” outweighs the few things that don’t work on Asahi" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47063200)) "Asahi Linux[1] is unbelievably great on Apple Silicon. It's honestly the best Linux install experience I've ever had." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45910161)) - Great Mac hardware under Linux (3 comments): "Display quality, trackpad quality, overall form factor, and very high RAM space in a laptop would be the primary reasons I'd go with Asahi Linux." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49459428)) "The Macbook M2 Air running Asahi Linux is easily my favorite Linux laptop ever, far superior to any Thinkpad or Dell XPS I've owned" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46165234)) "the added value of „most powerful Linux/Arm64 laptop on the market” outweighs the few things that don’t work on Asahi" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47063200)) - Fast performance (3 comments): "I've found that modern hardware has HUGE performance improvements (especially Intel, AMD, and Apple Silicon via the Asahi driver)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47449017)) "the added value of „most powerful Linux/Arm64 laptop on the market” outweighs the few things that don’t work on Asahi" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47063200)) "I can also tell you that Linux runs 2x faster (often much more) for everything compared to macOS" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47063084)) - Keeps old Macs from landfill (3 comments): "Asahi Linux is like a light at the end of the tunnel for those users who were entirely left behind by the ARM transition." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49459365)) "If this project diverts just a fraction of them from becoming e-waste for a little, it will be a win." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47061733)) "These people are singlehandedly saving _millions_ of laptops from going to the landfill one day." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48746343)) ## What people warn about - Lags behind new Apple chips (6 comments): "the Asahi effort is losing momentum. Core developers are going on to do other things, significant chunks (3922 commits) are still not merged upstream" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47914578)) "they had to implement their own bootloader chain and because of such overhead they need a lot of effort to port to each new apple SoC generation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730142)) "Support is imperfect and for a daily driver you can probably forget about using anything newer than an M2 at the moment." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45820641)) - Missing hardware support (6 comments): "Asahi still doesn't support a lot of basic things like: external displays, Thunderbolt, hardware accelerated video decoding, 120hz refresh rate" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755143)) "This is an Asahi Linux limitation, but I've seen various parts of the hardware not working when using other Linux distributions" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45990212)) "Sure the drivers are anywhere from bad to non existent but that's not the same thing as being unable to run your own kernel." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47449977)) - Poor battery life and sleep (4 comments): "Linux doesn't even have full hardware support, much less efficient battery life on these now several year old devices." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49470036)) "battery life is nowhere near what you'll get from MacOS due to inability to go into low power sleep state" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49442056)) "Thunderbolt and DP Alt mode aren’t supported, and there are issues with power management (sleep/wake)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45934289)) - Fiddly, requires tinkering (3 comments): "Every time I see Asahi doing new stuff, I install it on my m1 and m2, each time after a few weeks, I get tired of how fiddly it becomes." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46776723)) "palm rejection on the (ginormous) Apple trackpad didn't work at all, rendering the whole thing unusable if you ever typed anything." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46386379)) "As much as I like Linux this kind of tinkering is only for people with more time and less expectations about the experience" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589343)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Ubuntu](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ubuntu.md): 560 recommend - [Debian](https://hackerapproved.com/p/debian.md): 552 recommend - [Fedora Linux](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fedora.md): 437 recommend - [Arch Linux](https://hackerapproved.com/p/arch-linux.md): 362 recommend - [Linux Mint](https://hackerapproved.com/p/linux-mint.md): 277 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Asahi Linux", https://hackerapproved.com/p/asahi-linux/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).