They trade blows performance wise with the M1 MacBook Pro sitting on my desk. And theres nothing stopping asahi linux running on them except for driver support. They look like fantastic machines.
They’re not ideal for all use cases, of course. I’m happy to still have my big Linux workstation under my desk. But they seem to me like personal computers in all the ways that matter.
Asahi Linux is NOT an option and may never be one due to: The A18 Pro (and M4) introduced SPTM — Secure Page Table Monitor — which runs at a higher privilege level (GXF EL2) than the OS kernel. Unlike M1/M2/M3 where m1n1 can directly chainload Linux, on A18 Pro/M4 the page table infrastructure is owned by SPTM and must be initialized by XNU before anything else can run. You cannot bypass it. (source: https://github.com/rusch95/asahi_neo)