Asahi Linux: Should you use it?
I found out about Asahi Linux funnily enough through Google News, And I was immediately on board after finding out more about the project. Asahi Linux aims to bring you a polished Linux® experience on Apple Silicon Macs. The name is derived from Japanese where Asahi means “rising sun”.
For technical folk as well as programmers, this could be perfect. A lot of people have found that Linux works better for compiling a lot of code (for example Hugo) sometimes compiling TWICE as fast as MacOS.
This most likely is because Windows and MacOS, being way more generalized and widespread, need to cater to the majority of the population as opposed to just a niche group of programmers.
Most people prefer to boot Linux off a drive, although I had downloaded it to dual boot on my macOS. Both ways work fine and it just comes down to personal preference.
Although more “raw” and faster than macOS, there still are some drawbacks to the OS. In my case, while trying to delete Asahi Linux (in order to get the full experience), I managed to accidentally delete an extra “partition” in my storage. Basically, I had to partition my SSD and give some amount of space directly for Linux to use. While deleting it, I misunderstood the tutorial and accidentally deleted what I thought was an irrelevant partition that was only around 500kb but as soon as I rebooted, It turned out I had completely bricked my laptop and it took another MacBook and about an hour and a half just to download macOS again even after losing all my data.
This was definitely a user error, but that’s the thing with Linux, there are so many mistakes you can make if you’re reckless even for a moment.
For most people, including most CS students, macOS will be just fine, but if you’re curious about Linux I would definitely recommend trying out a distro (Asahi Linux for Mac M1 users). It’s definitely a fun experience and if you wanna be a Linux power user or contribute to open-source projects, Trying out different distros will go a long way on the journey.
This is the official website for Asahi Linux: https://asahilinux.org/
This is the tutorial I followed to download it in dual boot mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcmmwugTF3U
