The direction of travel with MacOS itself is troubling. Ads, bugs, dark patterns. There’s been no acknowledgment from Apple that any of these are a problem, so I can only assume that they are unable or unwilling to address them. At the same time, many of us are invested in Apple’s excellent hardware and other quality of life features and are unable or unwilling to consider alternative hardware (at this time). Running Asahi on bare metal might be an option for some uses on M1 / M2 machines, but for others the trade-offs are too great at this time.
I’ve personally looked into:
- Ubuntu - Silverblue (Atomic) - Kinoite (Atomic) - Fedora - Bluefin LTS (Atomic) (the only Bluefin version for which an ARM build - based on CentOS - is available)
on UTM (QEMU and Apple Virt Framework), but many of them don’t appear to support GPU acceleration, which is non-negotiable for a smooth desktop experience, or are sub-optimal in other ways.
I can’t really recall seeing any comments on HN from people daily driving this kind of setup. Is that because everything involves unpalatable compromise?
What does the community think? Are there some clear standouts?
The Linux desktop experience on Apple Silicon isn't up to par with what macOS can offer you, and lacks OEM drivers like AMD, Intel and Nvidia hardware has. If you're not willing to run Asahi and you don't want to use macOS anymore, you might want to start looking at alternative hardware.
Where is macOS showing you ads? And what "dark patterns" are you referring to?
I have tested Fusion, Parallels and UTM and Fusion seemed to be the most stable for me.