I don't get why you were downvoted to oblivion. A perspective from someone who actually used Asahi is very valuable, so thanks for sharing.
You're definitely right that having a usable system is not just about supporting first-party hardware. Linux on its own is a huge mess of different components that all somehow need to work together, and it's a miracle of engineering that it works as well as it does, even on well-supported hardware. I can't imagine how difficult it must be getting all of this to work on hardware that requires reverse engineering. It seems practically impossible to me.
On HN downvotes are usually because of disagreement. OP's experience doesn't match mine: I have used Asahi for quite a bit longer than OP and I have experienced no serious bugs.
But then again I only use those software that's available in the distribution or those that can be compiled by me. So naturally I don't deal with incompatible third party software.
That's great. Is your experience somehow more valid then?
Downvoting because of disagreement is asinine to begin with. Burying opinions that contribute to the discussion does nothing but perpetuate the hive mind.
Most of the software that ships works, but actually I've run into a number of bugs on stock. A bunch of seg faults and other crashes I couldn't trace.
For some reason a lot of apps have bugs in Wayland, like mousing over menus, only the first menu item shows up; move to a different item, then back to the first, and suddenly all the menu items show up. Persistently happens in several apps.
Some of the Flatpak apps also have serious performance issues and bugs that native ones don't. A big app I need to use is FreeCAD, which there was no ARM build for until the recent 1.0pre releases. Their FreeCAD build has some issues that their AppImage doesn't. But even the AppImage release has some weird bugs, and I wasn't able to figure out if they're FreeCAD bugs, Wayland bugs, Fedora bugs, or what.
And then there's DisplayLink drivers+userland, which amazingly kind-of works (after a bunch of tries), but then hard crashes or prevents the machine from resumung from suspend.
I also get weird giant green flashes on straight HDMI. And because the laptop resolution is fixed, when I attach a monitor, the laptop screen "invades" the monitor screen. Fullscreen doesn't work, the panels conflict, it's kind of a mess. I'm almost certain the latter is some kind of KDE/Wayland bug, but the green flashes must be the video driver.
There's a bunch of other issues I don't remember at the moment. But all of this adds up, sadly, to something I just can't make work. Really wanted it to.
FYI it seems that your account is perma-dead, or however HN calls this. Your comments are automatically flagged and not seen by anyone who doesn't choose to enable seeing them in their settings.
You're definitely right that having a usable system is not just about supporting first-party hardware. Linux on its own is a huge mess of different components that all somehow need to work together, and it's a miracle of engineering that it works as well as it does, even on well-supported hardware. I can't imagine how difficult it must be getting all of this to work on hardware that requires reverse engineering. It seems practically impossible to me.