I’m looking for an Apple MacBook Air M2 alternative that could run Linux.
I need something fanless, super lightweight with very long battery life. The only apps I use are Shotcut video editor, Chrome and Firefox.
Any advice?
Is it a good idea to get a MacBook Air m2 and use something like Asahi Linux or should I wait for arm linux laptops to become available.
I don’t like apple as a company and their attitude towards repair makes it so i feel obligated to never recommend one of their products, but if you need it to be fanless, a macbook air is prolly your only really good option, honestly though an m1 should be just fine (I’m assuming your video editing workloads are pretty light), also i recommend checking out Just Josh on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtHm9ai5zSb-yfRnnUBopAg, he has some great laptop reviews
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/channel/UCtHm9ai5zSb-yfRnnUBopAg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The thinkpad-x13s-snapdragon is fanless and uses a qualcomm snapdragon processor, so an ARM like the macs use but lower performance. Batttery life is reputedly in the 20+ hour range.
Caveats:
- kinda pricey, 1K
- this arm chip is slow compared to macs.
- out of the mainstream so better do your homework on whether linux is well supported.
Laptops based on the snapdragon elite processors will come out this year, and performance should be comparable to the Mx macs. So maybe better to wait. Although, those may be considerably more expensive, and who knows what linux support will be like, especially at first.
1k? My last MacBook was 5k
My budget for laptops has always been <$350. Why are you willing to spend so much on a laptop?
Cheap, or second hand laptops, aren’t as good as new laptops. Whether the difference is worth it is a matter of opinion, but the difference between a $350 machine and a $3500 machine is extremely obvious.
If it’s a ThinkPad second hand can be just as good if not better than new/modern I’ve found
If it’s a revenue generating machine, the impact of 10 or 20% improvement in day to day could recoup the additional cost in a few months or a year.
Similarly, for someone who travels a lot, having a useful battery life of 8-10 hours of internet+video playback allows a work routine that is worry free wrt charging and this allows tighter travel schedules.
Ofc, this isn’t the case every time, but this creates anchor effect on several segments of the market. This also doesn’t include the extra cost of “luxury” aka thin and light or small bezels.
350 USD is perfectly fine if you don’t need a ton of battery life or color accurate screen or multimedia or multicore workloads. If you need any of this, most of the options get pricier than 700 USD. It’s not uncommon to have to shell out 1500 USD or more for the desired specs.
Brand name
With the advent of the m3, m2’s and m1’s still in inventory can be a steal, particularly 'Air macs which can be sub-1k easy. My mbp m2pro 16g was 1500. I’m not impressed by real-life macos performance tho, a lot of it is impressive in parts (blender rendering for instance) but everyday life is just the same… Yes, the same hanging Color Wheel Of Doom.
I hope your 5k investment isn’t having sound playback hiccups because dropbox is trying to log in and refresh in the background. I am actually furious with the 10% of the time I have to use macos on this machine.
It’s tricky enough getting hardware video encode to work on Linux with “this is just an Intel IGP, the exact same thing as every other Intel IGP”. Decode can even be tricky at times. I am very pessimistic about getting video editing software working on a system as far off the beaten path as a Snapdragon.
If you stick with more mainline hardware, you have fallback positions like “use linux Davinci” or “dual boot Windows and use one of the gazillion tools there”, or “MacOS has its own cavalcade of media tools”.
Thanks for the points you brought up. Very helpful.
The gpu is fully supported to my knowledge.
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it’s a “quantum leap” only in the original scientific meaning of “the smallest distance something can possibly move”
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The entire concept of “quantum” is that it’s the smallest possible unit.
A “quantum leap” is the smallest measurable change in electrical charge.
The Planck length, based (it’s a long story, links below) on that smallest possible charge, is around 1.61×10−35 m. (That’s 0.00…00161, with about 31 more zeroes). Which is about as much societal/technical progress as I think Apple has made.
https://www.snexplores.org/article/explainer-quantum-world-super-small https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/06/26/what-is-the-smallest-possible-distance-in-the-universe/?sh=518af32248a1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units
The only company that can achieve that kind of efficiency is Apple. I say this as a proud Apple hater.
It is not about efficiency, we already know for some time that x86 is not really efficient compared to newer architectures like arm and risc.
But no other ecosystem exists that can force such an architecture move without much much more problems.
So i would rephrase it as “The only company that can force that kind of fundamental change on its user and developers is Apple”
I am not saying it is a bad thing (just alone the rosetta translate layer is actually really impressive). Would love to have some actually good and mainstream arm options such as Linux Laptop.
Microsoft is trying the same - but royally screwing up how they deal with hardware partners. Performance wise the snapdragons they use are roughly a decade behind what Apple is doing - I have both systems for work projects.
The x86 emulation in Windows is imo better solved than rosetta - but the rest of the stack is a mess. For example, the deployment tools only got arm support a few months ago.
And Linux support on those things sucks - while using it on the M1 is great.
Apple silicon is in no way a ‘quantum leap’ over anything. Even arm’s general efficiency in low power situations diminish as it enters ultrabook territory
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Because they’re ARM…
Where did you pull that from? Both amd and Intel has 20W class cpus that compete with base m-series cpus while being based on older nodes
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OK it seems all ‘15W’ cpus from those brands boost much higher so the wattages aren’t as good as I thought but here are some that still compete:
M3 - 3nm, 20W
Amd 7840U - 4nm, 30W, 15% slower on single thread and 20% faster on multi thread.
Intel 1365U - 10nm, 25-55W, 15% slower on multi threadAMD can compete in performance and power/Watt mid to high load, but is shit with low load efficiency. intel has nothing at all. Apple scales nicely over the complete range.
If you want a relatively small notebook with lots of RAM you also don’t have options (not really AMDs fault, but hardware manufacturers seem to produce mostly shit now). Framework is pretty much the only somewhat decent option with 64GB max, if you want more there’s pretty much only apple - which is way overcharging for that.
What’s the application of a laptop with more than 64GB of ram?
Because it doesn’t use x86. It also costs twice as much compared to other arm based laptops, because Apple.
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I guess I need to be more clear.
The reason it’s more efficient is because it doesn’t use x86. This is not exclusive to Apple. You can buy arm laptops elsewhere.
The reason it costs twice as much is because it is Apple. This is exclusive to Apple.
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If there are other ARM laptops that compete on power and efficiency, I’d very much like to learn more about them. Can you share?
ThinkPad X13s
There are some purpose-built ARM Linux laptops available but as an owner of an unused Pinebook Pro… can’t recommend
Walking the path of a PC hater is not easy
Do it the Linux way and remove the fan yourself.
Just kidding. Or am I?
Rip out the fan and connect the processor heatsink to a heatpipe
Then carry around a cup of water to dip the heatpipe into
This is not a bit, I am a real hardware designer
the m1 is fine with asahi. i don’t personally own one but i’ve worked on em in the past and its getting better by the day still.
idk about the m2 but it seems fine. people complain about the battery life being worse on asahi.
it’s gonna be years before arm laptops in general hit the scene in a big way and they’ll have the same problems that smartphones and sbcs have (weird non mainline kernel support, etc).
that’s not to say it isn’t happening, just that it’s happening slowly. you want to be in the big common platform as the transition to arm happens and like it or not, that’s apple.
if i were you i’d get the m2 and dual boot asahi. when its broke you still got the apple os that works fine.
I run an older dell xps 13. Its a bit under powered but most of my real work is done on a remote server.
I think best for you is one of these: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Notebooks/Alle.tuxedo#1349,1385;1885,1975
My sister has a tuxedo for work and it is ducking awesome! She told me, that there are ARM tuxedos, but I was not able to find them in my short research. Don’t hesitate to ask tuxedo directly, they have great support 😇
Nvidia graphics?! what are they thinking??
HARD pass.
Used to be the best way to get performant graphics on Linux.
Like, 8 years ago.
the Surface Go tablets and some of the older Surface pros are fanless but you will have nowhere near the performance of a M1/2 air
I have a Surface Go 1 and I’m perfectly happy except for some mouse/bluetooth issues.
It’s not powerful but it works perfectly for the browsing or writing that I’m doing.
I bought a used gen1 Thinkpad X1 Nano. It is super light (<1kg), works flawless out of the box with Linux, and while I think it does have a fan I’ve never noticed it.
How about Chromebooks?
You can put Linux on most of them and they’re perfectly capable of (even designed for) running Chrome and Firefox.
Not on all. Chromebooks are closer to a smartphone, meaning not all drivers are available for Linux.
I have an M1 MBA and it runs Asahi just fine, for the most part. And it should suit you well too, since you’re only going to use basic apps. Even if there are some limitations currently, you could always run Linux inside a VM such as UTM.
But may I ask why do you want to run Linux, when you’re going to use only those three apps? Objectively, Linux wouldn’t be offering you much in your use case, and in fact if battery life is your primary concern, you’d be better off sticking with macOS. Another option could be a Chromebook.
But may I ask why do you want to run Linux
If I had to guess, it’s because Linux doesn’t suck.
Noo you’re not supposed to find your home folder >:[
I use Asahi too, and at the moment the killing factor is battery depletion while sleeping (50% a day!). Performance wise, working with kdenlive is about on par with an i7 12th gen Intel chip (direct comparison between Thinkpad X1 i7 16g ram 2023 and mbp m2pro 16g ram) - nothing close to the power macos can leverage from the m chip but still perfectly usable. But frustrating in a way.
If you install Asahi, it will be dualboot by default - why not trying it out? The install process is a delight, very well explained.
As for hardware, the Air is pretty unique. There are other fanless stuff out there, but it’s gonna be cheap netbooks without the power to handle video work.
I’d say give Asahi a try ; I love booting mine in front of people and looking at their confused faces when I spin the cube to move a wobbly window around (Though the big Fedora logo at startup is a bit of a giveaway)!
Edit: also, you already own the hardware. Stop wasting money/resources, jut make it do what you want.
Thanks. I want to run linux because that’s what I’ve used for the past 15 years :) The company I work for has provided us with intel Macbooks, but rarely use it. Instead i do all my work using my own Thinkbook 14s Yoga running Fedora.
Chromebooks or macbooks are your best bet. I believe top of the line Chromebooks are actually very good. If you put Linux on them they’ll be very capable.
How is the driver support?
Don’t buy a Chromebook for linux. While driver support usually isn’t an issue, the alternative keyboard layout is terrible for most applications. To even get access to all of the normal keys that many applications expect you need to configure multi-key shortcuts which varies in complexity based on your DE. In most cases it will also void your warranty because of the custom firmware requirement.
That’s true. I did see a video of some developers making top of the line Chromebooks run Linux, you may need to do further research on it. Check out if your device is supported :
https://mrchromebox.tech/#devices
Cool video I saw on chromebook linux gaming
I use asahi on a MacBook air, and love it. The battery life on sleep mode has been improving but it’s nowhere near the voodoo Apple does to MacOs. I recently installed Linux on my Asus machine and found the process and community to be really helpful, so maybe that’s an option for you. Check out https://asus-linux.org/
My ryzen laptop uses around 10% per day in sleep mode with linux 6.8 kernel
That’s awesome. My Asus uses a bit more I think but I never measured it. The MacBook air used to die in one day in sleep mode and now it’ll last almost two days, so progress!
My 2021 XPS 13" is quad core i7, 32gb of ram, 1tb nvme, 5k touch screen, running arch. 3-4 hours battery life. Nothing close to Apple but power in linux is always a crapshoot.
