TIL something new… My hate for MacOS took over common logic. 2.8GB, 3 seconds file transfer on USB was to beautiful to be true. After some further investigation and hints from @[email protected] @[email protected] I learned that Linux writes to cache before writing it to the device, to see whats happening in the background: sync & watch -n 1 grep -e Dirty: /proc/meminfo.
Still, the transfer speed on Linux was slightly faster than on MacOS. My rant was unjustified, It just my fault for being clueless on some more advanced Linux stuff. But I learned something new today, so this post was actually helpful !
Howerver, I still hate MacOS and will probably give Asahi remix a try.
Thanks to everyone !
Hey guys ! I’m getting tired/bored of MacOS’ shenanigans… Yesterday was the last drop that make me think of trying an alternative.
While trying to upload a 2.8 GB file over to an USB-C stick it took like 8 minutes? Okay that’s “good” enough if you only do it from time to time… But 25 files takes literally 1h30min… Are we in 2001?
I mean the exact same 2.8GB file, with the exact same USB-C stick took FU***** 3 seconds on Linux !!
Ohh and don’t think I didn’t tried to “fix” the issue, after a long search on the web I came across a lot of people having similar issues that aren’t fixed since 2 major updates? With a total radio silence from the shiny poisonous Apple…
Among other things I tried:
- Disable Spotlight indexing
sudo mdutil -a -i off - Reformat the USB stick from Mac
- All available filesystem FAT32, exFAT…(yes even MacOS native
APFS) - Another USB stick
- …
Enough is enough. I was willing to learn their way of thinking for my personal experience and somehow always got my way around to reproduce what I learned on Linux to Mac. But now that there is an alternative OS, I think I’m ready to get back home.
So does anyone here already gave Asahi Remix a try? If so what was your experience with it?
I read their FAQ and most of their documentation and it seems good enough for daily drive (except for some quirks here and there) but I wanted to hear from people who already made the jump and how was their personal feeling.
PS: I got that MacOS for my birthday from a family member with good intentions. That wasn’t a personal choice. While I’m more than happy and thankful for the gift, I totally hate it more and more… Especially because MOST of my self-hosted services, applications, scripts, are open source.
I use it everyday. Got it with Gnome, which is very mac-y but think ultra-zen, minimalist, early macos style. Also with the spinning cube and the wobbly windows, I just can live without these very important productivity addons.
YMMV but for my use case it just works, period - and my use case isn’t light-browsing-casual-text-editing but multitrack mixing with Ardour over Pipewire and some video editing on kdenlive. Oh and we’ve got steam games now lol, I just started Portal (unavailable on Mac haha) for 0.99!
Good thing about Asahi is that it is dualboot by nature, you won’t loose your macos partition for that pesky proprietary app (fuck u Qlab)
Try it out, you’ll love it if nothing specific arm64-related gets in your way. Software availability is great, there’s Ftapak of course for more stuff… It works and is painless to try out.
The Air macs are the best: light, thin, with awesome batteries. The only words of warning are about the reboot mid-process during install: Mac laptops tend to boot on any keystroke, lid movement anything so be sure to not touch anything & just long-press the power button 'til the appropriate screen shows up. That’s all there is to it, the only risky moment. Just (long-)press that button.
multitrack mixing with Ardour over Pipewire and some video editing on kdenlive.
That’s good to hear ! Nowadays a play a lot with ffmpeg and mkvtools to encode my media library mostly to SVT-AV1/opus. I read somewhere in the documentation that they only playback H.264-encoded content. Does that mean that AV1 isn’t supported OTB yet?
Also video decoder/Encoder is WIP. Are they only talking about hardware or also software decoding/encoding?
Thanks for your response !
I ran into issues while exporting (rendering) with kdenlive, where you will notice available formats being different between the Mac version of kdenlive and the Linux one.
But to me it was a matter of compatibility, I don’t really care as long as I get useable files of sufficient quality, so I didn’t pay much attention, works-for-me style I’m afraid.
Same applies to hardware vs software encoding/decoding - the M chipset is quite powerful enough you shouldn’t have to worry about it in a pro context where encoding is something you gotta do and it’s doing it reasonably fast.
Just try it out, it doesn’t kill your mac install, and you can compare.
@reallyzen @N0x0n kdenlive uses ffmpeg so formats it has available depend upon what is compiled into your ffmpeg which for many linux distros is minimal. However, if you grab FFmeg from github, then configure it for every possible option and install all of the necessary libs (some of which you will also need to compile because most Linux distros do not include all of them), THEN kdenlive will have all possible output formats presently supported by opensource, but there are literally several hundred libraries and options needed, this and the configure file is a real piece of shit that rather than telling you every library that is missing so you can go chase them down all in one shot, instead tells you the first one missing and aborts, so you chase that down, run it again, and this literally takes about 300 iterations. But if you go through the trouble of doing all this and then put YOUR FFmpeg in the $PATH ahead of the system one, kdenlive will now show all the available formats for both input and output.
Eww. I ran into similar trying to build a meson app on Asahi. Fuck that. Since the point of the Fedora-Asahi partnership is to have a max of stuff upstream, I guess it leaves you with whatever fedora is shipping - which may not be good enough for you.
Again, depends in your use case; since the horrible business of having a full ffmpeg on one machine is done, you can use any sync software between them & not care further. I use syncthing to keep my mastering device (mbp 14, Asahi) in sync with a playback machine and a backup machine.
But it is my use case: I use different, dedicated devices for dedicated tasks as to spread out wear, risks and improve redundancy in case of failure.
@reallyzen Since I built the computer, I’m not too worried about hardware failures, I am competent in repairing them.
So you own a perfect mastering device at home, now you get the ultrathin laptop to wander about. One isn’t so portable, and the other may not be able to hardware-encode AV1 files. It only matters if it can play them decently.
Also, the M chips are good, but not that good. My M2 pro is about like a 12th gen i7, not like thrice quicker in any everyday way.
Huh. I’ve tried the Ardour and stuff way for a while. I’m curious what kind of stuff you’re producing. I tried for a while, but IME the good effects, and ESPECIALLY virtual instruments, were very few and far between. This and VR gaming are the two things I still have a Windows machine for.
Ultra-specific: soundtracks for theatre plays. I’m happy with the available vst’s, but I am not a musician, I don’t play instruments - I record people or I rip stuff & work from there. That said it means multi-band comps, tube-like preamps, parametric eqs, de-essers, echo/delays etc… It’s OK really.
Maybe all this is a bit like photoshop vs gimp: I mostly only ever used Ardour since forever and I cannot compare / suffer / get my workflow irremediably blocked because it doesn’t work for me like I expect it to.
Ardour is really a powerhouse now, and with the Pipewire audio stack, switching inputs or monitoring in every which way is just a breeze.
There’s tons of Linux musicians advice out there, including on, ahem, reddit. Yeah I know.
Now that we have Steam on Asahi my macos partition gonna get shrinked to minimal functional lol.
Ardour is indeed pretty good. I’m a Reaper guy, which is incidentally available on Linux as well nowadays, so on the DAW and audio interface front, I’m all covered. If anything, my older 2i4 runs slightly more stable over Linux/Pipewire than it does on Windows with the official driver. I’m more on the composition/production side of things (amateur, although I do have a very small amount of professional experience), it’s mostly the amp sim and virtual instruments landscapes that left me on my appetite a bit last time I tried. There just weren’t many option and they all frankly sounded like crap. Maybe that got better since then, I don’t know hehe.
@folkrav @reallyzen For that application you might want to try a real time or at least low latency kernel. Even the low latency kernel will generally manage a latency of <1ms which for most audio is sufficient. It is working well enough for me at least.
I mean the exact same 2.8GB file, with the exact same USB-C stick took FU***** 3 seconds on Linux !!
For that test you should run sync afterwards to make sure the file was really written and is not waiting in a cache.
Just because the USB C is rated at a transfer rate of 4.8Gb/s doesn’t mean the flash memory or the controller is capable of anywhere near that speed. I have a 2TB USB flash drive but it is slower than a mechanical hard drive as far as transfer speed goes.
Yeah I get that, that’s not my point. The same USB stick on Linux takes seconds, while on a MacBook air 1 rated at 10Gb/s takes 8 minutes??
Same USB stick, same file, other system.
Yeah, those three seconds were probably just to the kernel cache - on the contrary - most linux desktops has the unfortunate design decision that they showed the source to kernel cache progress instead of source to dest. I hope you tried to safely eject the drive before removing it and waiting the rest of the hour for that.
@JonnyRobbie @N0x0n I would suggest from a terminal window as super user type sync, that will flush anything buffered in memory out to disk, and then do a df to see if it is mounted, if so umount it first.
Thank your for the hint, I will give it a try. I feel a bit stupid right now 😅
Ohhh? Interesting… First time I heard that and somehow rings a bell… I think I need to investigate your lead. Makes me feel a bit stupid right now.
:/
It might have been fixed in most modern DE’s right now - I’m not sure about the current state. But it used to be the problem…don’t ask how I know…
Hey :) Thanks for the pointer. This was to beautiful to be true ! I searched around the web and found out what is actually happening in the background (learned something new and important so thank you!). And effectively It was writing to the cache and I wasn’t aware that was a thing on Linux.
The command I used to track it down:
sync & watch -n 1 grep -e Dirty: /proc/meminfo. Took me some time to come across the right command and realize what’s happening.Will update my post right way (BTW is still hate MacOS !)
@N0x0n Ok, well these days I run a self-assembled computer but back in the day I had a Mac Pro, it had quad Xeon processors and 32GB of RAM (I upgraded from the stock 4GB) and STILL it was slow, so I loaded Linux onto it and never looked back. I miss garage band that was fun to tinker with but otherwise there isn’t much I miss.
(SmartassMode)
M1 Macs are capped at around 1.7 GB/s
(SmartassMode \ )
@BudgetBandit The M1s are a genre I’m not familiar with as the MacPro is the last Mac I owned, since then I’ve been assembling my own machines from components.
And I guess there isn’t any way to “uncap” the throughput without being an even more Smartass? 😄
No no, it’s physically not possible more out of it (despite being advertised for 2 GB/s)
2GB/s or 2Gb/s? Because from the documentation USB 3.1 Gen2 is advertised UP to 10Gb/s.
Its GB/s! My external SSD is capable of 2GB/s and I get around 1.9~ish with my desktop and 1.7~ish with the Mac.
Wait I did the maths and it doesn’t look right
The current implementation only supports USB 2.0 I believe. Apple doesn’t have any docs on the hardware so it is all done with clean room reverse engineering.
If you want stable reliable Linux don’t use Apple hardware
Well, I’ve been using it as my daily driver for the past year and it has been fun. I’ve watched support gradually increase for the hardware, with it now having support for speakers webcam and Vulcan!
It runs great (am on KDE) although of late I’ve been having some graphical glitches on flatlpacks.
Also of note, the battery life is worse (a “mere” 10 hours on a 13” M1 MacBook Pro) but still perfectly acceptable (depending on your use case)
What sort of battery life are you people seeing from Asahi Linux nowadays when compared to Mac OS? The GPU drivers have matured greatly over the last year so I expect battery life to have improved
They were great in the aughts. Once the iphone became the flagship it went downhill. Believe it or not at one point macphiles bragged about how many more ports they had than typical windows machines and how much more powerful they were spec wise.
I use Asahi as a server OS on a Mac Mini where it works great. Have not tried it as a desktop.
My setup is not very portable, I’ll give you that.
I never owned a mac in my life.
