The ARM Macs are seriously impressive hardware, even for just the build and tactile quality. But macOS is regressing quickly for professionals, there's too many design compromises to make the OS attractive and safe for 'casual users' but those same features are starting to become a hassle for professional users. Linux is the complete opposite of course, it's a hassle for casual users, but in exchange gives complete freedom to do what you want. Personally I'm still ok with macOS, but with each new macOS release the grass is looking greener on the Linux side ;)

Speaking as a Mac M1 users, but not a Linux user (I have played with Asahi, think it's great, but don't need it right now), I think almost no one (or a very small minority of people) buys Mac hardware to run Linux. I think it's the inverse, people buy Apple hardware and then realize Linux is available and want to run it.

Yes, I think the general opinion is that Apple's M1 and M2 platforms are superior to Intel, even at the Mac's (supposedly) higher price point.

Though MacOS is a complete Unix system, it is still proprietary, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to do your work (or play) on a free OS running on an excellent hardware platform. Asahi is giving people the opportunity to do that.

Finally, though I can't speak for the Asahi team, I think also there's an element of "because it's there". Here is a great new hardware platform offering a incredibly difficult challenge to a group of people who live for this kind of thing. Why would they not want to do it?

I buy “windows” hardware to run Linux.

I would buy an iDevice if I could take it home, boot it up to make sure it works then install Fedora with everything working.

Even my current laptop failed that since I wanted to play with GPU programming and I had to hunt down drivers for the the AMD APU — which I never got working 100% correctly but that was probably my buggy code, GPU programming is hard.

It's the hardware that's the key attraction. I have a linux laptop. It's slow. Ugly. Awkward to use (keyboard, trackpad, etc). Etc. And I have an M1 macbook pro for work, which is the opposite. It's just a really nice laptop to use. Basically, unrivaled by anything PC based currently. A few vendors come close. But not all the way. And if you like using Linux, having a really nice laptop to run it on is a good thing.

I tend to run the same kinds of tools on both laptops (open source ones).

The Apple software experience matters less to me these days. I spend most of my time switching between the same applications that I would use on Linux and I mostly ignore all the iApps that come with macos. Beyond finder and preview, there aren't any Apple applications that I regularly use or need. Mostly I don't care about M1 vs. Intel. I'm not a native developer and all the stuff I care about is available for both cpu architectures. I just need the OS to get out of the way and allow me to do my thing. I used the linux laptop extensively for a while when I was without a Mac last year. Works great as a daily driver.

> Is it the M1, it that fast and better than similar priced laptops running an x86-64

That's definitely part of it. You probably need to include battery life for it to really make sense. There's nothing else that will give you that performance and close to 20 hours of battery life in a slim laptop form factor.

There's also people who are mostly happy using macOS but may want to boot into Linux for specific tasks.

Currently M series laptop has the best TDP in the market and great hardware. Now i just want a good linux laptop

Maybe you want to dual-boot? You deploy on Linux and want a more production similar environment for investigation but prefer OSX for day-to-day work. Or maybe you work on OSS and want to validate cross-platform issues. Or maybe you were work-issued a mactop and prefer Linux. Or maybe you just like the challenge of porting Linux. The reasons are plentiful.

  Also is there relevant limitation on stuff you can't do on MacOS through homebrew or something and can on a Linux distro (not a mac user so I don't know).

- $Dayjob bestows a Mac, MacOS is fine but seems to have stagnated due to focus on iOS

- i3/Sway type window managers are more comfy

- Homebrew is hit or miss

- Apple seems to make the best bang-for-buck ARM laptops at the moment

- Asahi is a fine beer :)

Best hardware + most flexible OS.

There's two aspects of the apple advantage for me.

The first is apple hardware is reliably nice. It's just done right, with minimal corners cut. Full aluminum body (not plastic), great screen (bright, high resolution, great color (accuracy and range), great keyboard, great touchpad, amazing CPU (fast and low power), very nice GPU (better than any other integrated GPU and much lower power than any faster discrete GPU), with a great memory system (100, 200, or 400GB/sec).

Sure the best laptops some close on some metrics, but generally have lousy iGPUs or lousy battery life. Laptop memory systems typically max out at 75GB/sec, which drives the need for discrete GPUs, which drives the need for larger batteries. Sadly FCC limits max batter size, so you end up with terrible battery life and performance if you aren't plugged in. Or they have are great, except for a poor screen. Or have a nice screen and a lousy keyboard or track pad.

I also find it interesting that if you try to buy a 3 or 5 year old laptop, but far the most expensive are apple laptops. Almost as if they are built better.

My second issue is I find OSX to be MUCH less intuitive. The lack of a real package manage for the OS is painful. Having to add my own, like brew is ugly. Then the UI inconsistencies drive me nuts. Even things like cut/paste (control-c/v) are annoying. Doubly so when using iterm2 where you don't need the control-c. Or if running xquartz I'd need a state diagram to map all the copy/paste rules.

Linux seems much more sane, granted I'm more familiar with it. I'm on a website and want to drag an image in, I just drag the image from any image viewer or file browser and it works. I can drop files into signal by dragging. Or documents into thunderbird as attachments. OSX seems much more finicky about dragging objects between applications, and I end up in the finder, which I find particularly counter intuitive. Oh, sure I could try to remember that bang, splat, apple A goes straight to apps. Seems that browsing from ~ should be WAY easier, or even better just have better drag/drop supports.

Linux just makes more sense to me. 99% of my installs are apt install <appname>, not playing the do I search for the web for a DMG, or try to find it in brew, crap that was a different user, or maybe I need a 3rd app store? Oh that works in a brew cask, but not a brew app, etc. etc. etc.

I also find apple's handling of multiple monitors quite annoying. I don't have anything fancy, just N desktop of 2 monitors each, with a quick keyboard combo to switch (control-alt right or control alt-left). I ask apple folks about their setup and they seem to always mention some weird paid app that worked with the N-1 version of the Apple OS, but the devel got bored and stopped updating.

If you just need Signal, Teams, chrome, Firefox, terminal, and like a nice coherent package manager, drag and drop (not select, control-c, select, control v) of strings, images, documents I'd recommend Linux. I find OSX frustrating to use.