The idea that a group of people would spend so much of their time trying to get linux to work on Apple hardware through reverse engineering always seemed absolutely crazy to me. I would never consider buying Apple hardware precisely because it doesn't support linux and the work they put in achieves nothing because the risk will always remain that they will lock the hardware further. Nevermind the fact that they will likely never fully reverse engineer all the components.

It just seems like a completely pointless endeavor... perhaps some people buy into it? why would anyone buy overpriced hardware with partial support that may one day be gone? the enhanced battery life doesn't really hold much appeal to me, and the arm architecture if anything is just another signal to stay away.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that they wanted the achievement on their resume, and in that given recent developments they succeeded?

You overlooked the UTM app on the App Store (and open source available too), which wraps Apple Silicon virtualization excellently, or you can use Qemu (which I don't).

I used to use Asahi, but the sleep modes power drain was tedious.

With UTM, I install a latest Fedora ISO (declaring it a "Linux", which exposes the option to skip QEMU and use native Apple Silicon virtualization.

It's fantastic. I mention this only because it's been super useful, way better than Asahi, with minimal effort.

It's like Hackintosh all over again but with Apple hardware rather than their cursed software.