Posted by todsacerdoti 1/26/2026
Although, I was daily-driving Asahi on an M1 Pro before GPU support was here and it was very usable.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/faq/#can-i-dual-boot-asa...
Personally I don't consider it "working" as a laptop on an Apple M3 unless you actually have GPU support. Software rending just sucks, even with a SoC as powerful as the Apple M3.
The top SKU has a similar performance and efficiency profile to the base M5 processor along with faster graphics performance.
Review embargos for the top SKU just dropped today.
I can't recommend Macs to other Linux users in good faith unless they're already stuck with the hardware and loathe macOS. If you need an ARM laptop that supports Linux, you should probably wait for Nvidia to release theirs.
12:00 mark, you can see panther lake performs better in Cyberpunk 2077 than the M5 with less power draw.
6:25, Panther Lake is barely behind the M5 chip at Cinebench. Just a slightly lower score at the same wattage.
And don’t forget, the M5 is years away from supporting Linux fully. We are just talking about the M3 getting decent support.
If you’re the kind of person that wants a thin and light laptop for productivity and also wants to fire up some light games here and there, it’s hard to argue that an M5 MacBook Air is the right system for you. Even with recent strides in game compatibility, macOS is a terrible gaming platform that really can’t hold a candle to Windows or Linux x86, and Panther Lake graphics smokes the M5.
Obviously a Mac with macOS is a better choice for things like video editing.
x86 is the minority of the issue compared to securing cutting-edge nodes and optimizing for big.LITTLE. And once you factor in all of the dark ops on Apple Silicon (NPU, anyone?), they've basically butt up against the same wall of wasting transistors on specialized hardware that is obsolete within 3 years of release. Minus the ability to cleanly integrate it with compiler tech for efficiency gains, a-la SSE/AVX.
The only real drawback is no thunderbolt, and till recently no DP, and no x86 support. But I don't use any x86 only apps enough for it to matter. No thunderbolt sucks though.
I’ve got a framework 13 and literally nothing is broken, device firmware updates happen automatically through Linux, literally more integrated with the hardware than a windows laptop.
edit: The minimal UEFI part of the Asahi installer specifically sets up a “normal” environment that other distros (like Nix) can use, it doesn’t actually install a full distro like Asahi Fedora
Apple makes great hardware (even more so now with their own CPUs) but I've steered clear of it simply because I run Linux. Last I checked the GPU wasn't fully supported and there were also concerns of of efficiency, that power draw is generally higher than macOS, thus the same hardware on Linux doesn't have the same benefit as with macOS.
What exactly is a Linux box? If you're running Linux on an M3, is it not now a Linux box?
Local models are slowish, I guess, but that’s pretty niche and they’re still usable. Nothing else is even noticeably laggy at all compared to my partner’s M4.
It’s got 64GB so that helps.