Bazzite on a tablet and Asahi Linux on a Macbook Oh My!

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Hi there! Don’t worry, I’m still alive. I’ve had to move away yet again. From living in California for four years while working, to moving to Colorado for another four before relocating to Michigan, I’ve seen a good bit of the USA!

Today I’d like to talk about running Bazzite on a refurbished Minisforum V3 tablet I’ve received recently, as well as my adventures with Asahi Linux on an M1 Pro Macbook Pro that I’ve been testing every few weeks.

This here is the awesome Minisforum tablet! I love how thin it is and I think it’ll become my new multimedia device.

Looks like it came with a keyboard and kickstand attachment but no pen. I believe this refurbished model is known as the “Minisforum V3 standard” as I believe there is also an “SE” version.

Later in the evening I ended up getting Bazzite instaled. Turns out this guy shipped with a dead battery, which took me a little while to figure out. Charge first, install things later!

Bazzite has a “tips and tricks” section on their site that links to a github repo here, but it seems that no backlight control for the screen nor keyboard was functioning, and some odd graphical glitches would happen whenever I opened the power management menu or brightness controls from KDE’s lil bar duder. Might try pure Fedora Gnome on it next to see how things go, with maybe CachyOS after. Onwards!

On the Macbook Pro front, BLUE! I like Blue, per the keyboard cover. The flash drive was for prepping the Bazzite installer. This Macbook Pro has been in my possession for probably about a year now. Got it from a friend as they were selling off-lease equipment from a partner.


Anyway, good little bit of kit but it seems the 16GB unified memory can be a bit too small when both the cpu and gpu are fighting for it. I’m regularly using 80% or higher of the RAM just doing web things! May have needed to ask to see the higher spec models.

Sleep seems to work with some battery drain, and most steam games will crash due to memory limitations, but it’s definitely interesting to try Asahi on here. With the news that M2 and M3 chip Macbooks may be supported in the future, I might trade up to a quieter Macbook Air since it will mainly be utililzed for light web use and no gaming or rendering.

On another note, I’ve been going through my past hoard of tech gizmos and will be selling a bunch of things soon. Likely recycling the chromebooks I worked on in the past as well as selling any working and running systems on local marketplace apps soon.

This guy here was a ThinkCentre Chromebox from Lenovo that I eventually got Corebooted using this Chrultrabook guide and running Linux Mint. It was mainly a little smartphone flasher and chip programmer thin client, but it fulfilled its purpose prior to the move to Michigan. Now, it must go as I downsize!

As I’ve written in some previous posts, I’ll add a list of things I found interesting here. I know it’s been a while. I also have links throughout this post, so look for the slightly-different-colored words as you read.

Short Update: M1 Linux excitement, PS4 Future Project

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Hello there again!

I’m waiting on some parts to come in for my Linux Gaming project on the PS4. Thankfully, many out there have already made some videos on how to run tethered exploits for the PS4, so it looks like getting Gentoo or Arch running won’t be that difficult. Looking forward to having a spare “gaming pc” sitting around for when people can visit again.

In other exciting news, Marcan, known for his Playstation reverse-engineering in the past, is going to wholly devote himself to working on getting Linux distros running on the new M1 Macs. The target of his project is initially the M1 Mac Mini, and then to support further laptops etc from there. From his Community Stream, he mentioned he intends on having this be a full-time effort he can devote himself to. My knowledge barely scratches the surface of the reverse-engineering and exploits he’s worked on in the past, but it appears the M1 Macs can run alternate kernels other than macOS, so it’ll be interesting to see what work he does there.

I’ve been working on some Raspberry Pi-powered retro consoles and little mini Nextcloud servers for friends, amongst fun handheld terminals, for xmas. We’ll see how everyone likes their little custom projects as presents. I love building little things :)

I’ll update this blog more, and likely have a timestamped dedicated project page, when I have more to report regarding a PS4 running Steam in Linux and am excited for what the future holds! I may be going more mobile in the future, with all the layoffs and economic disasters that have been happening in my country this year, so we’ll have to see.

Have a happy 2021!