Asahi Linux first impressions

After seeing that Asahi had implemented 120Hz refresh rate I knew I had to try it. I got a refurbished M1 Pro and I must say from someone who never owned a Mac, the installation process was fairly straightforward. First thing I tried was installing Cosmic Desktop (I am a tiling guy). Unfortunately, that didn’t work. It turns out I had to update Asahi first. Now it’s installed, but you know what? After all these years I am gonna try Gnome again since it’s supposed to be a better MacOS than MacOS so maybe that’s what I was missing all along to love Gnome, a Mac. Besides not using the touchpad - did I mention I was a tiling guy - which takes a good 40% of the real estate (almost the same size as the keyboard!) Before closing, I would like to mention some caveats. These might be quite important before spending quite a lot of money on some hipster’s cravings. The OS doesn’t seem to support sleep, or at least hibernat. That means you will lose 30% overnight if you don’t straight up turn off the PC. I don’t mind turning it off. It boots up quite fast anyway. The internal microphone doesn’t work, but that is well documented in the Asahi docs. The refresh rate is not variable, 120Hz look smoother but that will drain your battery quite fast, also well documented. After the computer wakes up from suspend, the wifi doesn’t work. That I can reproduce consistently. Last but not least, there should be a palm rejection feature. Just writing this short article I got tripped up at least five times. There seems to be a solution online but I would argue that this should be built-in.

Written on February 22, 2026