Posted by todsacerdoti 11 hours ago
* It has an all-aluminium chassis that feels a lot like a MBP.
* Hardware all works - fingerprint reader, webcam, suspend etc etc. Takes a bit of work, but all works in the end. Helps that HP ships them with Ubuntu as official option.
* Strix Halo chipset, which is basically AMD's attempt at an Apple Silicon type design. Single big chip, with unified LPDDR5X-8000 RAM (up to 128GB!) shared between CPU and GPU (which is surprisingly strong as well, 40 CU!). This thing is a beast for local LLMs!
Only downside really is the battery life. I haven't played around with it too much, I think there's a bit more room with custom tuned profiles, but rn I get like maybe 6 hours on a good day?
- The build quality of each are excellent. The touchpad on the G1a is probably the closest to a MacBook touchpad I've seen and it even manages to boast an OLED screen. On the other hand, the G1a is only available as a 14" option.
- Strix Halo will still leave you wishing it were Apple Silicon in pretty much every case except "I need to run a x86 native app/VM". It's certainly the best alternative, but you definitely trade away to go to it. You can load large LLMs (I have the 128 GB version for non-AI reasons) but they only run ~3x faster than a laptop without a GPU would because 256 GB/s still ends up being a big bandwidth limit. If you do actually do this regularly, then prepare to hear the fans and look for your power adapter as it does get quite hot doing so.
- Speaking of power adapter... you need either a 100 W or 140 W charger + USB C to be able to charge the G1a while you use it. If you want to use a lower wattage adapter you need to power off, or it seems to draw 0 W out of spite.
- It's massively refreshing to have a normal UEFI bootup process, and as long as you have a current kernel the hardware support is indeed pretty great on the G1a. Between the two, the G1a has better supported than the M1 w/ Asahi - as one would expect for a corporation officially supporting Linux vs a fan project.
If I were to do it all again, I'd say I might have either just gotten an M2 Pro for Asahi or an M4 w/ macOS and a Linux VM as needed. Part of going for an x86 laptop was to be able to dual boot into games with strict DRM, but after trying multiple versions of AMD graphics driver for the 8060s it was more a frustration in random stutters and I ended up not gaming on it as much as I have on other laptops anyways. Bazzite does work great though, just not with all of the different DRMs or games.
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.
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...
For more context, I gooled around and found this Phoronix article: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Asahi-Linux-EOY-2025-CCC
> On the display side, Asahi Linux developers have been working on the DisplayPort connectivity. For that there are now experimental DisplayPort patches for Asahi Linux via their "fairydust" tree.
That's great news!
edit: ok, I've tried toggling ProMotion on and off, and I can see it. However, I still think the improvement is marginal.