I haven’t looked into Asahi Linux in a while now, but I figured the experience would be pretty good by now. You don’t need to “hack” anything to get it to run. Last I read, there were just a few driver issues, but I haven’t looked into it in probably 2-3 years now.

Apples implementation of SMB has always been abysmal. I’ve been using Mac’s for close to 20 years now, and connecting to SMB shares has always been a pain. IMO, it’s gotten better recently (since they dumped AFP and were forced to work better with SMB). For whatever reason, it has always been slow to connect through Finder. Not sure there has been much progress on that front…

Really makes you wonder what Apple uses internally, because it must not be SMB!