I know there are a few Mac users in the group, so I thought it was time for a Mac thread (paging @skalyan and @Kangie)
Firstly, a brief shoutout to UTM which is an excellent emulation/virtualisation project based on QEMU. Iāve been using it exclusively as an alternative to Parallels (because their licensing model is drifting further towards a horrible tiered subscription one), and VMware Fusion (because Broadcom). It also emulates m68k machines too, so yay! If you havenāt tried UTM, give it a go for free via GitHub, or by flicking the project US$10 on the App Store.
Secondly, I was speaking with @Kangie at Chermsideās meeting on Thursday night about Asahi Linux and have been looking at making the leap over the next few weeks with a spare MBA M1, once I get the time to sit down and spend a day playing. Iām leaning towards the Asahi Fedora Remix (KDE Plasma flavour) to start, as it seems to be the best documented of the options for someone dipping their toe in for the first time. @Kangie and others, I canāt seem to find a great deal of information about full disk encryption via the Fedora Remix other than itās not an option included in the installer yet. Are there any traps to be aware of if one is trying to get LUKS working? Any others on the Discourse gone down the Asahi route, with their preferred Linux distribution (e.g., Arch, Gentoo, Debian) and who can offer any other general tips and tricks for Asahi installs and use?
Iād say probably not, given the 3D acceleration requirements. UTM doesnāt support 3D acceleration for emulation or virtualisation. It might work in Parallels - Iāve heard it does a reasonable job of 3D acceleration but havenāt tried it myself.
On the rare occasions I game now days, and where thereās no native macOS version of something, I tend to run things under Steam on Arch with great success (Edit: using x86_64 hardware, not any of my Macs). I can see a few references online about running SE that way, so if you really wanted to do it on Mac hardware, Asahi + Steam might be the way to do it.
I totally empathise with the Parallels comment. But Iāve found it to be the best solution for 3D gaming in a VM. Crossover is also pretty good. I found UTM and Fusion were very average for 3D performance.
That (and Wine) is the one I keep forgetting about for Mac use. I havenāt played with either in a very long time (15+ years). Iāll have to check it out again as the compatibility layer concept is a clever alternative to full VMs.
I havenāt gamed in months, but I was quite impressed with Steamās cross platform compatibility support on both Arch and macOS. It wasnāt 100% there, but it was very close. I think the issues I ran into were more to do with games using odd video codecs for FMV, or kernel level anti cheat (booo ) than the cores of the games themselves.
Iāve had a lot of luck between the two. In Crossover I can run American Truck Simulator quite smoothly. Same with Satisfactory. No Mans Sky also runs natively on MacOS which is nice too!
I did the upgrade to Tahoe on Tuesday on the M4, and did an install of Fedora Asahi Remix on the M1 immediately after Tahoeās āGorgeous New Designā shot me back to Windows Vista. Thanks to Apple for finally giving me the nudge to get Asahi going, I guess ?
Relatively impressed with both (despite Tahoeās Liquid Glass look). The move to Tahoe was far smoother for me than the move to Sonoma. @kangie have you got LUKS working on Asahi? I went with the Fedora KDE Plasma flavour for my first go around of Asahi given thatās where most of the documentation and support are, but was disappointed that LUKS wasnāt rolled into the installer. I can see some tutorials on how to get it working (bootable USB, cryptsetup, and so on) but thought Iād throw the question in here first.
@Kangie and others, I canāt seem to find a great deal of information about full disk encryption via the Fedora Remix other than itās not an option included in the installer yet. Are there any traps to be aware of if one is trying to get LUKS working? Any others on the Discourse gone down the Asahi route, with their preferred Linux distribution (e.g., Arch, Gentoo, Debian) and who can offer any other general tips and tricks for Asahi installs and use?
I have FDE going on my M2 and itās just fine.
I redid the Gentoo Asahi docs recently - they might give a bit of an insight into whatās actually happening under the hood. The Fedora Asahi install is a bit of a deprecated development path - this is how distros are supposed to work (according to the asahi docs anyway!) If you want to try out Gentoo we have a pretty decent set of aarch64 binary packages.
I was about to say that Iām not a mac guy but then I realised that I have macs from every generation sitting around the place: an old 68k, a PPC (no ppc64 tho :(, an Intel, and an Arm. Huh.
I will confess that Gentoo is filed away in my brain in the Here Be Dragons category after seeing a friend of mine do a Stage 1 install 15+ years ago. Iāll get it going on something spare amd64 when I get some time, and challenge that assumption before getting it going on the M1 . Thanks for the nudge to try it out again.
Also am ānot a Mac guyā with a surprising number of Macs from the Mac Plus all the way up to current day ā¦
I finally came back to the M1 MacBook Air over the weekend.
The Gentoo way definitely looks much cleaner than using a second install to retroactively encrypt a root partition, but I ended up getting LUKS going with Debian on the M1 with the latter method. Iāll confess to some expectation bias, as I was anticipating the workflow for a Debian install to be fairly similar to what Iām used to when installing Debian (i.e., get into the text installer and follow the bouncing ball). Instead, it was essentially identical to the Fedora Asahi Remix setup I tried last year. I decided to roll with Debian and get LUKS going via this method (with thanks to the author, āLerkā). I figured at least Iāve got a fighting chance trying to sort out any problems I have on Debian vs. trying to use Gentoo for the very first time on the MBA.
The only issue I ran into was getting Debian to connect to my WPA3 SSID. I initially thought it may have been an IPv6 Single Stack quirk, as it would happily connect to another SSID (IPv4+IPv6 Dual Stack). NetworkManager connected, showed WPA3-SAE, but then stalled at the point where it would pick up an IP. It took me a while to cotton on that the different SSIDs are also different encryption types (with WPA2 on the Dual Stack SSID, as there are some older devices on that network). After some troubleshooting, I changed to iwd which fixed the issue. No idea if itās a MBA wireless driver quirk or wpa_supplicant being too old for WPA3 and I didnāt dive that deep now that itās working. All my other Debian devices are wired Ethernet so Iāve not had a chance to run into the issue before. Any thoughts @Kangie?
Will pop a few odds and ends on it and see how it goes for getting actual work done. I also intend to try and get a Windows 11 VM going at some stage, more as a curiosity than anything else.
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) than the cores of the games themselves.
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. Thanks for the nudge to try it out again.
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(with WPA2 on the Dual Stack SSID, as there are some older devices on that network). After some troubleshooting, I