I have an M1-chip 2020 MacBook Air on which I have dual-booted with Debian 12 initially, then "upgraded" to sid (in hopes of getting better hardware support). It has several hardware ... glitches, and my google-fu is failing me in finding solutions. I'm hoping someone here can help.
First, the good news: Basic functionality works fine. Both Gnome and Plasma work on both X11 and Wayland; graphics are crisp (albeit tiny, until I use the GUI's size-mag feature to bump it to about 175%), and both wired and wireless networking work, even with our certificate-based authentication wireless network, that I could never get to work with a version of Debian around 9 or 10 or so (but the connection is a little daunting for the average Joe). I can't really speak for Sleep/Hibernation, as I haven't had it running that long (UPDATE: It just announced it was automatically suspending as I was typing this; I suspect it'll wake when I try it in a few (UPDATE: Yes, it woke up instantly, perhaps too instantly?)), but screen time-out/wake-up works fine. Audio via my Bluetooth ear buds works great. Now the bad news: - keyboard backlight. Ag, how I need this in my usually-dark computing environs! - display brightness. It's either full-on or full-off. This is a much more minor concern. - audio. As mentioned above, audio works fine via Blluetooth (watched an interesting Adam Savage video about a $13 USB-c cable vs Apple's $130 version; I can't believe I'm saying it, but I think the Apple version might actually be worth that), but I can't get a peep out of the built-in speakers. Everything *seems* to be in order; alsamixer sees both the Pipewire device and the native Mac sound device; volume controls move up and down (or left/right); there's just never any sound. Not even from "speaker-test" after I've killed X/Wayland/gdm3, although "speaker-test" (as a non-root user) looks like it's working. It acts like the speakers are muted, but I can find no way to unmute them. When I run "speaker-test" as root, it complains that the service (server? device?) is not running/available? (Sorry; don't recall the exact message at the moment.) - Though not really a hardware matter, thought I'd mention this for anyone who wants to try Debian on their MacBook Air M1; when I updated to Sid, apparently the Mac got "confused", and when I tried to boot back into macOS, the system insisted on having my decryption password (which I guess is normal, now that I think about it, 'cause FileVault 2 does that also, just ... differently, so that I didn't recognize it), but then it also insisted on a Recovery Key being typed in (like when Bitlocker locks you out of Windows when it thinks the hardware has been tampered with). Thankfully I had that key available, or it would have been a wipe/reimage (or perhaps worse, the way Apple has locked things down of late). So if anyone has any help for these issues, especially audio and the keyboard backlight, I'm all ears. Thanks! Linux debian kernel 6.1.0-rc8-asahi #1 SMP Tue Dec 6 21:41:25 CET 2022 aarch64 GNU/Linux trixie/sid -- Kent West <")))>< IT Support / Client Support Abilene Christian University Westing Peacefully - http://kentwest.blogspot.com
