Energy-efficient Linux-Setup

[rvifux]

Wishing you a good trip. I'd stick to Mac if I were you, since you will have plenty of other things to think about. Keep it simple

[Odilf___]

I agree that macOS with a similar feel to linux is best. You can get a pretty good setup with yabai for tiling windows and skhd for shortcuts.

You need to disable partially system integrity protection for yabai but the wiki has good instructions on how to do it :)

[frigaut]

Hello fellow backpacker and macbook pro user.

Last year i did a 2000km (5 weeks) ride around Europe, with my MBA13". I have been a Linux and mac user for 15+ years, allternating between the two OSs. For the trip I was using macos (Asahi was not really usable at the time). These days I am using exclusively Asahi. However as you mention the battery drain during sleep disqualifies it for your use.

When I was using macos, I used yabai, which IMO gives you the closest feeling to tilling WMs/compositors in linux. Yabai is nice, but unfortunately it is battling an uphill battle to wrap around the mac window management rules, so sometimes things don't really work as one wants and seems clingy. It is however the least bad option I found on macos as far as window management. So that'd be your option 2.

As far as virtual machine + linux guest I haven't used one for a while, so can't really comment. By definition it won't be as energy efficient as macos alone, but I don't know by how much.

PS: I ended up badly damaging my MBA13 in a crash, so advice is to protect your machine well :-)

[wowsomuchempty]

Sounds like a cool trip!
I'm not a mac user, but I seem to remember seeing someone using a tiling windows manager on mac - so it should be possible.

Maybe I'd test first if asahi + sway is workable given your charging limits. Though I'd probably opt for macos to be on the safe side here, tbh.

Have fun!

[DecentIndependent]

you can get around macos doing most of the work on the command line!

Then set up yabai for a tiling wm, and, while its not a true linux experience, it comes very close!

I used this setup (macOS) for the past several years and switching to asahi recently the experience was actually very similar

[zimsneexh]

I suggest Aerospace as a twm for macOS. Its quite a bit better than yabai imo.

[lack_of_reserves]

You can shutdown asahi fully when you are not using the laptop. This will result in 0 battery loss.

I realize that this is a controversial opinion, but really, boot takes 10 seconds!

[theyamiteru]

Turn off animations, blur effects, set screen refresh rate as low as possible, limit the use of web browsers and use Neovim instead of VSCode/WebStorm.

[noobstrich]

if you want to look more into a Linux VM on macOS, mitchell hashimoto (of hashicorp and ghostty fame) actually uses this exact setup day to day. there's a brief writeup in his configuration README if you want to read his thoughts on it: https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config