[jsheard]

And that's with Apple deliberately leaving the bootloader open on Macs. If they had locked it down like they do on every other product then it would be even more of a struggle, and there's always the looming possibility that they'll just change their mind with future models.

[imiric]

This is my main concern. I applaud the effort that the Asahi team is doing, but there's no way that I would rely on a small team of inarguably passionate and talented hackers to maintain a system that uses reverse engineered software running on hardware manufactured by a company historically opposed to everything they're doing, even if they left this small door open for that.

It would be like going back to the days of early Linux and all the Windows-specific hardware we had to deal with, but extrapolated to the entire system. As impressive as all of their work is, it's not worth the IMO minor UX benefits of Apple's hardware.

Mainline Linux on ARM is solid these days; new x86 chips from Intel perform very well and are reasonably power efficient; and battery life of most professional laptops in Linux is quite good. For example, I get a good ~12 hours of work done on an X1 Carbon Gen 13 from a single charge. This may not be as impressive as Macbooks, and the packaging certainly isn't as sleek, but it's good enough for me. The tradeoff for a solid software experience, modulo the usual Linux shenanigans, is worth it to me.