Was looking at getting a macbook air with an m1 chip in it and running Asahi Linux on it. My question is how viable is it for daily life? E.g. browsing, torrenting, uni notes ect. Would it be equivalent to a regular x86 laptop running Linux? Or would I be missing useful features?

Edit: Another question is how it holds up against newer AMD laptops, as it is 3-4 years old at this point.

  • tyler@programming.dev
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    4 months ago

    Mac comes built in with those shortcuts just by holding command. Command left and right is home and end. Command up and down is page up page down.

    And yeah there are definitely some holes? But Karabiner-Elements closes them up better than anything on windows does.

    For navigation by keyboard you need to turn off a bunch of the animations and it’s very very snappy. I use Hammerspoon and can jump between apps faster than on Linux and windows.

    • WhiteBerry
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      4 months ago

      I am aware that command left and command right is home and end. However, I still prefer to use shift + end to highlight from my cursor to the end of the line as opposed to shift + command + right. There’s also switching between tabs, it’s a similar thing, 3 keys instead of 2.

      However, the most important part of this is I cannot even have ALT+Q behave as ALT+F4. I cannot have F11 act as fullscreen EVERYWHERE.

      “Global” mappings are the biggest issue for me, but I do strongly prefer having dedicated home, page up, page down, end keys.

      Currently typing this on a Microsoft Surface without dedicated home, page up, page down and end keys, and I am heavily noticing the difference, despite using fn + down to behave as page down.