While the Ashahi engineers are working super hard reverse engineering the Apple Silicon, there has been a huge surge in Omarchy circles to get it all working with AI writing all the drivers and get all kinds of hardware in M4/M5 and later M6 working as well. It sped up a lot.
Why wouldn’t bringing up an OS on new hardware be necessary? Apple has no obligation or incentive whatsoever to write Linux device drivers…
Do you think Apple should be funding this work out of revenue? What possible justification could they provide for such a waste of money? This will not sell any more laptops.
Even if Asahi didn’t do it, the work would still be necessary by someone inside Apple. Drivers don’t spontaneously appear from the ether.
Nobody is complaining about code not being provided. It’s more the schematics that are sitting in a drawer in Cupertino that would make the painstaking reverse engineering unnecessary. Someone at Apple would have a much easier time.
They could also hire somebody to sabotage this work in some ways if it helps with the bottom line. That's totally reasonable thing to do that I will defend in that case, because I would love to see the trillion dollar corporation become 10 trillion dollar corporation, because reasons.
Apple had no obligation to write Windows drivers for Boot Camp either but did for over a decade. They could do the same for Linux even if they never open sourced them.
It's not just the Apple Silicon Macs, either; I have a 2017-model Intel Mac which runs any number of distros just fine except that sleep just doesn't work right. No amount of keystrokes or mouse-clicks will wake it up if it sleeps.
Wow thank you for saying this. Always thought it’s my problem(because its the same with my 4 OSes), some misconfiguration etc.
Mine doesn’t reboot, I am always turning off and on after SSD change; and I thought it’s about that.
Have you tried very recently? I have a 2018 Macbook Pro with touchbar and the progress on getting T2 macs working lately has been amazing - 3 months ago I was having issues but I reinstalled last week with a 7 kernel and it has been flawless: suspend, restore, touchbar, fan control all great.
Is there anything stopping this from being thrown some investment plus LLM tokens? I wonder what a KVM connected to the machine plus a few thousand in Astra/Fable tokens could do here. It seems funny to think of software feature defects in OSS software now if people are building full recombinations of closed source software daily now!
My only blocker for installing Asahi on my Mac Studio (M1 ultra) is that llama.cpp performance is very bad when compared to using the Metal backend on the same hardware.
I have similar issues with my ultra. Have put it on a laptop, but my desk Setup with my multiple desktop computers is usb-c video based ( kind of a poor man’s kvm) , and asahi doesn’t do usb-c video yet
Thanks for the effort, guys. This makes me think, shouldn't the driver layer be generic now. All the driver does is writing correct data at correct address when needed, there is no need for OS support except triggering driver when to do that.
I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You have to work through provided code samples and then eventually get the vendor’s engineers to look into problems that couldn’t be resolved through the documentation, where they would go look into the other teams and their sources to discover the answer.
The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. The honest answer is that it’s not worth the huge effort investment needed to document an entire platform for public consumption.
I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
You describe an exhaustive documention, but some documentation would already be better than none. Perfect is enemy of good, as your comment illustrates.
If you’ve ever tried to lock down a mac and dealt with the 100s of system services, you’d know why. I like the hardware and base os, but I have no idea what those services are doing.
Many are undocumented. A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. And, they’re chatty and persistent in trying to communicate out. You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.
I only use my mac for development. I’m a simple man and don’t need all the bloat and hidden behavior. Plus, I always feel like I’m one automatic update away from it becoming unusable.
> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.
I suspect there would be an element of induced demand here. IMO the MacBook range are the only laptops on the market worth buying - but not having support for gaming (or at least, hilariously bad support for a limited range of games) is compelling enough reason to install Linux for a large portion of users (filling the void left behind by the widely adopted Bootcamp).
> but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF.
Yeah, GPU ISA, controllers, power management, NPU, and who knows what else. I still believe that companies should be compelled by regulators to offer documentation and support necessary to write drivers as I believe it is part of the "right to repair" (M1 will lose support in 2 years, it's still a great platform).
> They chose to leave it open.
I _really_ wonder on this point. It's so uncharacteristic of Apple. Were they concerned about potential anti-competitive lawsuits and maliciously did the bare minimum to avoid them? "It's technically open hardware, but good luck figuring out how it works"
This is nonsense. Chinese vendors like Rockchip and Allwinner provide fairly halfassed docs at times, but they try. It's housnads of pages, total, sure. But even this along with public code samples allows to create almost perfectly FOSS supported implementations for their HW. And it's a complex HW similar to what Apple has. I've worked with all kinds of just annoyingly incomplete and badly written datasheets, and if you put some work into it having at least something helps tremendously, even if the manufacturer ignores you completely and you have no field engineer access, and just throws incomplete crap over the public fence.
No docs is clear statement Apple hates FOSS. "how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop" argument is very weak considering that only consumer platforms that engage in a complete lockdown are maybe some gaming consoles, and those are basically appliances and not a general computing machines.
> I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
Oh please - Apple provided a full suite of Bootcamp drivers for their hardware just a couple of years ago, not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.
Apple's hypervisor.framework lets other OS instances run very very fast with the UTM app (open source on github, but i use the prebuilt version from the App Store). In my case i've used arm native linuxes (arch with various compositors, kde, gnome, fedora) all on M2, M2 Max, M5 and the experience is indistinguishable from native. MacOS is running too. I think hardcore graphics folks might want direct accelerator access, or there'd be curiously little reason for Asahi (other than that it's awesome work).
I use UTM in emulation mode, NOT Qemu simulation mode, which is wasteful.
What is the purpose here? You are still stuck with a full blown MacOS running the system no? That is what Asahi tries to replace, not the other way around.
I spent this past weekend giving UTM w/ Apple Virtualization a shot and can confirm that it really does work fantastically well! The only downside seems to be that it's not possible to pass USB devices through to the VM guest yet?
There's a lot of documentation required to write drivers for hardware; for the GPU, they'd need to share the instruction set of the GPU along with the specifications of the controller. Lots of weird things like power management too.
If shared, that's probably enough to create copycat hardware or at least an emulator.
Personally, I just want to run Linux on my latest MacBook Pro on day 1 with full hardware acceleration. If it was supported, MacOS would be on the device for as long as it took to install Linux.
I think the only way that would happen is if the EU extended "the right to repair" to include software, compelling companies to release documentation sufficient to produce drivers with. I'm sure Apple would maliciously comply, like provide the ISA but not power management specs - but that would still cut the work required by the Asahi team by 80%.
Aside from the "they have no incentive" answer, I imagine it's not so easy even if they wanted to. I suspect most of it won't be solely Apple's IP to share in the first place.
So that you have to keep buying Macs every few years of course. If they gave you a way to install linux easily then you could use it far past their intended lifespan and wouldnt keep you locked into the apple ecosystem. They have proved time and time again that Apple hardware running anything but MacOS or iOS is something they will work very hard to stop you doing.
It wouldn’t even be a problem for Apple to support Linux. Linux’s desktop market share has never been a threat to Apple at all. I hope Ternus, being the engineer he is, opens this up.
They want control on the walled garden. When was the last time apple did anything for public unless forced by FCC. Now there is no hope since they can simply donate to trump.
The FCC? I guess you mean their wifi chips or cellular modems or something? I can’t see the FCC having jurisdiction over anything else that Apple does. Maybe you meant the FTC?
Absent that, it'd take some kind of sustained right-to-repair, EU morality, many sternly worded letters pressure campaign.
Plus, once they did (officially), they're kinda committed to keep doing it. That's explains why they remain okay with emoloyees helping on their own time; all the upside, none of the down.
I expect they don't actually care whether or not people run Linux on macs. I mean they used to let you run Windows!
Probably the real reason is just that it's extra work - both in terms of producing the docs, and in dealing with complaints when they change things. From their point of view it's extra work with no benefit to them.
Yep, I suspect the goal is to reduce support footprint/burden to the absolute minimum possible, which is also why they don't maintain their legacy virtualization/translation layers indefinitely (Classic mode, Rosetta 1 (PPC → x86), Rosetta 2 (x86 → ARM)). The benefit is being able to make major changes, refactors, etc with relatively little delay and encumbrance.
This applies on both the software and hardware layers. In the past, CPU suppliers dragging their feet and/or being unable to deliver on promises were the chief motivation for switching architectures, and now that they're their own supplier they can banish that issue entirely so long as they're not beholden to any kind of external behavioral contracts or expectations.
If the OS teams need some new capability or discover substantial benefit from redesigning some part of the SoC, the SoC/hardware team can just implement it and not have to care about breaking anything. That's a major competitive advantage that practically nobody else in the computer or mobile device industries has.
They let you run Windows when they were losing in the market and needed a path to migration for users of the winning platform. Once they started winning, they stopped.
Conversely, Microsoft refused to interoperate with Linux. Until Linux became the clear winner in the datacenter space. Now they have WSL and actually work pretty well as a cross-platform development environment.
Community... is what you have with family, neighbors and such. Being a user of a mass produced thing is not a community.
But to answer your question: Why would they? Apple hasn't asked anybody to put Linux on their machines. They deliver them with a fully functional OS already and there are thousands of other computer models you can purchase instead of a Mac.
> Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community?
Because then they'll have to compete with Linux, which opens them up to someone else making a cheaper computer that does the same stuff.
I mean, I'm typing this on a junky Raptor Lake laptop I found on eBay for $220. Would I buy a Neo or MBP to replace it just to run the same software stack? Probably not.
If you believe OS X is the best environment and Apple Silicon will remain the best hardware in perpetuity, it seems silly for Apple not to allow some experimentation. Apple executives, to be blunt, know better. Lean times are always ahead.
The 1980s was filled with many companies that made the operating system and the hardware, Apple is basically the last vertical company left from that era. Why would they sacrifice that?
Many of those companies from the 1980s were very very good companies, but they gave up in the face of Wintel, Sun, SGI, Digital, Acorn (Arm processor), Amiga, Atari, etc… I would take any of those systems updated to today over Linux.
Only Apple with a mad man at the controls was able to survive (no Microsoft isn’t the reason). I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall when Intel said no to designing iPhone chips and then Steve Jobs still mad told his manager group that we have to design a new processor in house that would’ve been interesting, of course everyone in the room probably, said it can’t be done and many are probably saying the same thing about in house memory today which needs to be done.
Apple silicon is winning in performance and power consumption. It's not quite the same as the old Intel based generation, where they were more like premium/well built machines with good screens and hardware.
Now some people would like to use that top of the line Apple silicon but without MacOS that comes with it. I doubt this is a huge threat to apple but it's also not a huge market for them. From what I understand they are not actively impeding it but not actively helping it either.
I actually won a M2 laptop a while ago. I resold it, new in box still shrink wrapped because I did not care for MacOS, just a personal preference. People like me are a minority though.
The Asahi installer does this automatically, it guides you through sizing. You run it in a macOS terminal. By default, Asahi will be the default boot option, and to get to macOS you hold the power button on boot until it says "Loading startup options..."
I have two M1 pro asahi macbooks, and I only use macOS for VirtualDJ or AirPlay.
Reverse-engineering Apple's custom silicon is basically the modern equivalent of repairing a spaceship while it's actively launching. Incredible work by the Asahi team!
Makes you wonder who's choice it was to launch a half-finished rocket. AMD and Intel's rockets sit on the launch pad with GPU/CPU drivers shipped for Linux before T-10.
Processors, not just Apple’s, change constantly between generations. The core instruction set doesn’t change, but they get new capabilities, not just with new instruction sets.
Remember the SoC isn’t just the CPU. It’s display engines, GPUs, storage controllers, video decoders and more.
Even outside of Apple, you’ll see hardware vendors provide Linux patches for their latest CPUs to keep working well. There’s some baseline functionality that works out of the box but it’s never a free ride.
Me too. I've got an M3 Mac Mini running as a linux server with parallels, but it has a weird NIC bug that crashes the mini every few weeks, keen to get of macOS and it's buggy NIC driver. (really don't want to send it into an Apple repair shop, there are non local here, it's a whole thing)
I don't understand this. Buy something else to run Linux, as in anything other than Apple M series laptops. And if you want to do AI stuff, suffer with OSX using too much RAM, or again, buy something appropriate.
I don't think it makes much sense to expect such a cohesive/specific philosophy from an open source project like this.
The goal is "Linux on Mac". In a commercial product, specific details of what gets built usually stem from a more detailed vision that can be articulated as one. In open source projects those details are determined by what individual contributors are motivated to work on.
That doesn't means a cohesive vision can't emerge, there might be one for Asahi actually. But I think the default position is that it's kinda just a mob of people doing what they each feel like doing.
I don't think it matters that Asashi is a generation or three behind, because the moment you really need it is when Apple stops updating the OS for your hardware.
When M1 drops out of support I bet Asashi for the M1 machines will be pretty polished.
Oh, so an M2 will support GPU usage? Can you run CoreML and unsloth models in the same way you would use them on regular MacOS? Are there benefits to using Linux/Asahi for running models on Apple hardware?
It‘s going to be a godsend for people with M1 macs when Apple or App vendors decide to drop support for them.
The hardware is super capable and will make a great fileserver, TV box or HomeAssistant instance once I‘m done using it as daily driver.
Similarly, because of distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, I can keep using a 15y old Samsung notebook with a modern firefox, whereas Windows 8 already broke Samsung‘s display brightness driver and thermal management, and 10&11 are entirely unusable.
They are envious towards Apple Silicon and think Apple owes them something once again take the ball by the horns and build an Arm processor with a fork of Linux running on it. If three former engineers from Apple can start a company called Nuvia it can be done.
I have an M2 Macbook Air that i sometimes boot into Asahi to play Steam games that doesn't work natively on mac. It works unreasonably well given that there is something like five different translation layers to make it work!
Huh, I thought Asahi would still be too unpolished on M2 to play games reliably. Could you elaborate on your setup a little? What kind of games do you play? What is performance like? Is it really better than Crossover for example?
Are you talking about using a thunderbolt dock and GPU? I doubt that's a use case high in the developers minds. I'm curious though, I wonder if the open source NVIDIA driver can be built for it.
Target user is someone that wants to use Linux on good hardware. Apple hardware has some of the best perf-per-single-thread-perf-per-watt there is. Also, apple desktops are really compact and easy to keep out of the way while having really good performance too.
My current linux PC cuda machine is the latest Intel Ultra 9 mini PC from minisforum, and it still isnt quite as fast as a years old M1/M2. The only thing it has that the mac doesnt is cuda egpu support.
I bought a Mac mini M4 simply because it was very cheap and the M4 chip offers great performance. It is currently mounted on the back of my TV and serves as a media station.
It runs macOS, but I have no particular interest in the operating system, nor do I own any other Apple hardware. (So no synergies.) It is alright (and better than Win11) but the preinstalled software does not even properly update without an Apple account. As soon as I can switch over to Linux, I will. ... I would just wait for all the ports to work.
Me too, M4 and keen to run Linux, partly because every damn system update bloats the system by 20GB but no memorably useful novel feature actually emerges and partly because it's long term stable. That said, at this stage in my career I appreciate a working system that doesn't require umpteen kernel recompiles!
Sounds like you haven't used Asahi. I found the kde remix to be pretty nice to use. Literally the only thing that I found frustrating was:
1) for the longest time, but no longer, Google did not ship an official chrome linux arm64 package. Chromium Browser also has not included google sync for years now. But now, google chrome does ship for arm64 linux so its all good.
2) usb-c video still doesn't work, so not ideal for a laptop without hdmi that you'd want to dock
My bet: Apple is going to close it down. It is too much of a legal risk. What if some Linux enthusiast finds patent infringements in Apple's undocumented APIs?
Why would they even care? 99% of people aren't going to be installing Linux on their Macbook. If Apple did care, they'd have stopped allowing dual booting a long time ago.
I recently read somewhere that someone wrote a letter/email to Apple's legal team, explaining the risks. Sorry if I cannot be more specific, I already went through my browser history and cannot find it back right now. PS: Browsers really need to improve here, it is crazy that I cannot search through my history in a meaningful way.
It is odd that Apple doesn't chip in here... they've originated so much decent stuff in the OSS space. Seems like a huge missed opportunity.
Apple are hostile to everything CopyLeft.
Why would they "chip in" here?
Well, they will get more people buying MacBooks, though they won't really use their services.
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Surely this is missing "/s"
While the Ashahi engineers are working super hard reverse engineering the Apple Silicon, there has been a huge surge in Omarchy circles to get it all working with AI writing all the drivers and get all kinds of hardware in M4/M5 and later M6 working as well. It sped up a lot.
The reason this amazing project exists is the same reason my current Mac will be my last Mac.
I wish the team every success.
Do you mean 'will be my last MacOS?'
This is really incredible work but so frustrating that its necessary
Why wouldn’t bringing up an OS on new hardware be necessary? Apple has no obligation or incentive whatsoever to write Linux device drivers…
Do you think Apple should be funding this work out of revenue? What possible justification could they provide for such a waste of money? This will not sell any more laptops.
Even if Asahi didn’t do it, the work would still be necessary by someone inside Apple. Drivers don’t spontaneously appear from the ether.
Nobody is complaining about code not being provided. It’s more the schematics that are sitting in a drawer in Cupertino that would make the painstaking reverse engineering unnecessary. Someone at Apple would have a much easier time.
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It would be nice if Apple provided documentation, not even code.
They could also hire somebody to sabotage this work in some ways if it helps with the bottom line. That's totally reasonable thing to do that I will defend in that case, because I would love to see the trillion dollar corporation become 10 trillion dollar corporation, because reasons.
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They could open source their software so others could utilise the code instead of needing reverse engineering
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Nobody likes hearing the realpolitik of the Linux/Mac situation but you're not wrong.
> Apple has no obligation or incentive whatsoever to write Linux device drivers…
In ideal world the society would make it an obligation for general computers to remain free (as in freedom) and accessible.
Apple had no obligation to write Windows drivers for Boot Camp either but did for over a decade. They could do the same for Linux even if they never open sourced them.
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Lack of sleep and HDMI support is real roadblock for adoption. Hope they gets past soon.
It's not just the Apple Silicon Macs, either; I have a 2017-model Intel Mac which runs any number of distros just fine except that sleep just doesn't work right. No amount of keystrokes or mouse-clicks will wake it up if it sleeps.
Wow thank you for saying this. Always thought it’s my problem(because its the same with my 4 OSes), some misconfiguration etc. Mine doesn’t reboot, I am always turning off and on after SSD change; and I thought it’s about that.
Have you tried very recently? I have a 2018 Macbook Pro with touchbar and the progress on getting T2 macs working lately has been amazing - 3 months ago I was having issues but I reinstalled last week with a 7 kernel and it has been flawless: suspend, restore, touchbar, fan control all great.
Is there anything stopping this from being thrown some investment plus LLM tokens? I wonder what a KVM connected to the machine plus a few thousand in Astra/Fable tokens could do here. It seems funny to think of software feature defects in OSS software now if people are building full recombinations of closed source software daily now!
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No, lack of GPU acceleration. Give me a laptop with sleep and HDMI output that has no 3d acceleration and I will give you back an unusable laptop.
If you don't want to play 3d games or run local LLMs, why is GPU acceleration important when you have a more than capable CPU for any desktop UI?
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Amazing project.
My only blocker for installing Asahi on my Mac Studio (M1 ultra) is that llama.cpp performance is very bad when compared to using the Metal backend on the same hardware.
Right!? Linux can be configured to idle at less than 500mb of ram - by contrast, with some aggressive shenanigans, MacOS can idle at 2-3gb.
When running inference, I would love to use all of my hardware please Apple.
I have similar issues with my ultra. Have put it on a laptop, but my desk Setup with my multiple desktop computers is usb-c video based ( kind of a poor man’s kvm) , and asahi doesn’t do usb-c video yet
Thanks for the effort, guys. This makes me think, shouldn't the driver layer be generic now. All the driver does is writing correct data at correct address when needed, there is no need for OS support except triggering driver when to do that.
A true HAL, any OS can run on that HAL.
That data and that address changes, and the logic changes.
Why should the address and logic change, when both are defined by hardware ?
Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community? So much wasted effort when they can just share a pdf.
> when they can just share a pdf.
I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You have to work through provided code samples and then eventually get the vendor’s engineers to look into problems that couldn’t be resolved through the documentation, where they would go look into the other teams and their sources to discover the answer.
The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. The honest answer is that it’s not worth the huge effort investment needed to document an entire platform for public consumption.
I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
You describe an exhaustive documention, but some documentation would already be better than none. Perfect is enemy of good, as your comment illustrates.
If you’ve ever tried to lock down a mac and dealt with the 100s of system services, you’d know why. I like the hardware and base os, but I have no idea what those services are doing.
Many are undocumented. A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. And, they’re chatty and persistent in trying to communicate out. You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.
I only use my mac for development. I’m a simple man and don’t need all the bloat and hidden behavior. Plus, I always feel like I’m one automatic update away from it becoming unusable.
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> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.
I suspect there would be an element of induced demand here. IMO the MacBook range are the only laptops on the market worth buying - but not having support for gaming (or at least, hilariously bad support for a limited range of games) is compelling enough reason to install Linux for a large portion of users (filling the void left behind by the widely adopted Bootcamp).
> but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF.
Yeah, GPU ISA, controllers, power management, NPU, and who knows what else. I still believe that companies should be compelled by regulators to offer documentation and support necessary to write drivers as I believe it is part of the "right to repair" (M1 will lose support in 2 years, it's still a great platform).
> They chose to leave it open.
I _really_ wonder on this point. It's so uncharacteristic of Apple. Were they concerned about potential anti-competitive lawsuits and maliciously did the bare minimum to avoid them? "It's technically open hardware, but good luck figuring out how it works"
> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.
It's only going to grow every year as apple stops releasing OS updates for perfectly functioning hardware.
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This is nonsense. Chinese vendors like Rockchip and Allwinner provide fairly halfassed docs at times, but they try. It's housnads of pages, total, sure. But even this along with public code samples allows to create almost perfectly FOSS supported implementations for their HW. And it's a complex HW similar to what Apple has. I've worked with all kinds of just annoyingly incomplete and badly written datasheets, and if you put some work into it having at least something helps tremendously, even if the manufacturer ignores you completely and you have no field engineer access, and just throws incomplete crap over the public fence.
No docs is clear statement Apple hates FOSS. "how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop" argument is very weak considering that only consumer platforms that engage in a complete lockdown are maybe some gaming consoles, and those are basically appliances and not a general computing machines.
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> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.
Right now, yes. But Linux support is like freedom of speech in a dictatorship.
Everyone makes fun of it and says it's useless but fundamentally the powers that be are deathly afraid of it ever turning the tide.
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> I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
Oh please - Apple provided a full suite of Bootcamp drivers for their hardware just a couple of years ago, not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.
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Apple's hypervisor.framework lets other OS instances run very very fast with the UTM app (open source on github, but i use the prebuilt version from the App Store). In my case i've used arm native linuxes (arch with various compositors, kde, gnome, fedora) all on M2, M2 Max, M5 and the experience is indistinguishable from native. MacOS is running too. I think hardcore graphics folks might want direct accelerator access, or there'd be curiously little reason for Asahi (other than that it's awesome work).
I use UTM in emulation mode, NOT Qemu simulation mode, which is wasteful.
just my $0.02.
What is the purpose here? You are still stuck with a full blown MacOS running the system no? That is what Asahi tries to replace, not the other way around.
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I spent this past weekend giving UTM w/ Apple Virtualization a shot and can confirm that it really does work fantastically well! The only downside seems to be that it's not possible to pass USB devices through to the VM guest yet?
This misses the point entirely. What happens when apple inevitably discontinues support for this hardware.
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I don't think you understand what Asahi Linux is.
This isn't about running VMs.
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I'd imagine it's for IP protection.
There's a lot of documentation required to write drivers for hardware; for the GPU, they'd need to share the instruction set of the GPU along with the specifications of the controller. Lots of weird things like power management too.
If shared, that's probably enough to create copycat hardware or at least an emulator.
Personally, I just want to run Linux on my latest MacBook Pro on day 1 with full hardware acceleration. If it was supported, MacOS would be on the device for as long as it took to install Linux.
I think the only way that would happen is if the EU extended "the right to repair" to include software, compelling companies to release documentation sufficient to produce drivers with. I'm sure Apple would maliciously comply, like provide the ISA but not power management specs - but that would still cut the work required by the Asahi team by 80%.
You can get a team together and do the work… Nothing worth doing is free.
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Aside from the "they have no incentive" answer, I imagine it's not so easy even if they wanted to. I suspect most of it won't be solely Apple's IP to share in the first place.
Darwin is open source has been for 25-26 years is it too much hard work? https://github.com/PureDarwin/PureDarwin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system) https://www.puredarwin.org/
So that you have to keep buying Macs every few years of course. If they gave you a way to install linux easily then you could use it far past their intended lifespan and wouldnt keep you locked into the apple ecosystem. They have proved time and time again that Apple hardware running anything but MacOS or iOS is something they will work very hard to stop you doing.
> every few years of course
That sounds like a you thing; I've kept my macs for at least 5 years. My M1 is still going strong and I haven't felt any pressure to upgrade.
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> past their intended lifespan
Thanks to the community, you can install macOS 15 (or older) on unsupported macs (as old as 18 years)
https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht...
https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher
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> past their intended lifespan
This bullshit needs to die. The products are designed to last.
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My family continues to use my old 2009 MacBook Pro.
YMMV
It wouldn’t even be a problem for Apple to support Linux. Linux’s desktop market share has never been a threat to Apple at all. I hope Ternus, being the engineer he is, opens this up.
The sad part is that it's known that Apple internally maintains Linux ports to their SoCs
> https://talents.vaia.com/companies/apple-inc/software-engine...
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I don't think Linus Torvalds has any sway on what Apple does. Or do you mean John Ternus, the new CEO?
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They want control on the walled garden. When was the last time apple did anything for public unless forced by FCC. Now there is no hope since they can simply donate to trump.
Apple made some changes specifically for Asahi Linux to make it more robust.
I believe it was Hector Martin who discussed it on Mastodon a while ago.
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The FCC? I guess you mean their wifi chips or cellular modems or something? I can’t see the FCC having jurisdiction over anything else that Apple does. Maybe you meant the FTC?
> They want control on the walled garden.
It would have been trivial for them to lock out other operating systems entirely.
Even the Asahi team has been much more appreciative of Apple leaving this open.
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Yes but: Apple has no incentive to open up.
Absent that, it'd take some kind of sustained right-to-repair, EU morality, many sternly worded letters pressure campaign.
Plus, once they did (officially), they're kinda committed to keep doing it. That's explains why they remain okay with emoloyees helping on their own time; all the upside, none of the down.
Because that's not their business model. How is that not obvious?
I expect they don't actually care whether or not people run Linux on macs. I mean they used to let you run Windows!
Probably the real reason is just that it's extra work - both in terms of producing the docs, and in dealing with complaints when they change things. From their point of view it's extra work with no benefit to them.
Yep, I suspect the goal is to reduce support footprint/burden to the absolute minimum possible, which is also why they don't maintain their legacy virtualization/translation layers indefinitely (Classic mode, Rosetta 1 (PPC → x86), Rosetta 2 (x86 → ARM)). The benefit is being able to make major changes, refactors, etc with relatively little delay and encumbrance.
This applies on both the software and hardware layers. In the past, CPU suppliers dragging their feet and/or being unable to deliver on promises were the chief motivation for switching architectures, and now that they're their own supplier they can banish that issue entirely so long as they're not beholden to any kind of external behavioral contracts or expectations.
If the OS teams need some new capability or discover substantial benefit from redesigning some part of the SoC, the SoC/hardware team can just implement it and not have to care about breaking anything. That's a major competitive advantage that practically nobody else in the computer or mobile device industries has.
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> they used to let you run Windows!
They let you run Windows when they were losing in the market and needed a path to migration for users of the winning platform. Once they started winning, they stopped.
Conversely, Microsoft refused to interoperate with Linux. Until Linux became the clear winner in the datacenter space. Now they have WSL and actually work pretty well as a cross-platform development environment.
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Legal reasons. Lawyers say "no".
Why would they?
When Intel-based Macs debuted they touted their support for dual-booting Windows (Bootcamp).
Apple makes money selling hardware.
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Competition could use it as well. Why make it easy.
Community... is what you have with family, neighbors and such. Being a user of a mass produced thing is not a community.
But to answer your question: Why would they? Apple hasn't asked anybody to put Linux on their machines. They deliver them with a fully functional OS already and there are thousands of other computer models you can purchase instead of a Mac.
> Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community?
Because then they'll have to compete with Linux, which opens them up to someone else making a cheaper computer that does the same stuff.
I mean, I'm typing this on a junky Raptor Lake laptop I found on eBay for $220. Would I buy a Neo or MBP to replace it just to run the same software stack? Probably not.
If you believe OS X is the best environment and Apple Silicon will remain the best hardware in perpetuity, it seems silly for Apple not to allow some experimentation. Apple executives, to be blunt, know better. Lean times are always ahead.
The 1980s was filled with many companies that made the operating system and the hardware, Apple is basically the last vertical company left from that era. Why would they sacrifice that?
Many of those companies from the 1980s were very very good companies, but they gave up in the face of Wintel, Sun, SGI, Digital, Acorn (Arm processor), Amiga, Atari, etc… I would take any of those systems updated to today over Linux.
Only Apple with a mad man at the controls was able to survive (no Microsoft isn’t the reason). I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall when Intel said no to designing iPhone chips and then Steve Jobs still mad told his manager group that we have to design a new processor in house that would’ve been interesting, of course everyone in the room probably, said it can’t be done and many are probably saying the same thing about in house memory today which needs to be done.
Apple silicon is winning in performance and power consumption. It's not quite the same as the old Intel based generation, where they were more like premium/well built machines with good screens and hardware.
Now some people would like to use that top of the line Apple silicon but without MacOS that comes with it. I doubt this is a huge threat to apple but it's also not a huge market for them. From what I understand they are not actively impeding it but not actively helping it either.
I actually won a M2 laptop a while ago. I resold it, new in box still shrink wrapped because I did not care for MacOS, just a personal preference. People like me are a minority though.
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How does providing the specs to run Linux on a MacBook open them them up to competition from junky used eBay laptops?
What would be the best way to dual boot MacOS and Asahi on a Macbook M2 ?
The Asahi installer does this automatically, it guides you through sizing. You run it in a macOS terminal. By default, Asahi will be the default boot option, and to get to macOS you hold the power button on boot until it says "Loading startup options..."
I have two M1 pro asahi macbooks, and I only use macOS for VirtualDJ or AirPlay.
simply using the installer from https://asahilinux.org
the devs strongly discourage single-booting
Reverse-engineering Apple's custom silicon is basically the modern equivalent of repairing a spaceship while it's actively launching. Incredible work by the Asahi team!
Makes you wonder who's choice it was to launch a half-finished rocket. AMD and Intel's rockets sit on the launch pad with GPU/CPU drivers shipped for Linux before T-10.
They publish documentation because they need OEMs to be willing to support their products.
Apple doesn’t. Apple consumes it, so Apple always has a customer.
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Their Silicon was written to be OS agnostic, Apple's was not.
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macOS ships with full working drivers for everything. They're unfortunately not under AGPLv3.
You're replying to an LLM-written comment.
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I am wondering how much the spec changes per M-chip iteration? I think that after some iterations, the spec stays the same, no?
Your intuition here is wrong.
Processors, not just Apple’s, change constantly between generations. The core instruction set doesn’t change, but they get new capabilities, not just with new instruction sets.
Remember the SoC isn’t just the CPU. It’s display engines, GPUs, storage controllers, video decoders and more.
Even outside of Apple, you’ll see hardware vendors provide Linux patches for their latest CPUs to keep working well. There’s some baseline functionality that works out of the box but it’s never a free ride.
Some big caveats but still amazing progress!
This is great news.
Hoping for M4 to the latest chip.
We need Ashai to support more chips.
Me too. I've got an M3 Mac Mini running as a linux server with parallels, but it has a weird NIC bug that crashes the mini every few weeks, keen to get of macOS and it's buggy NIC driver. (really don't want to send it into an Apple repair shop, there are non local here, it's a whole thing)
Can't wait to get Linux running on it native.
we need to be supporting asahi if we want these things. their funding has fallen off.
I wish they would get an Arm license and start the process like those three guys that worked at Apple and started Nuvia…
Does USB work already or is that a 2027 item?
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Here's the blog post from the Asahi devs announcing this: https://asahilinux.org/2026/09/m2-episode-1/
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I don't understand this. Buy something else to run Linux, as in anything other than Apple M series laptops. And if you want to do AI stuff, suffer with OSX using too much RAM, or again, buy something appropriate.
Still no thunderbolt support.
https://social.treehouse.systems/@sven/117186314116319619
Not quite there yet though. No PCI or DisplayPort (latter is working but unstable). But at least they seem to be on it.
You can contribute support for it
Indeed, not sure why you are being downvoted. Contribute to open source with the energy you have to call out missing features.
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To be fair this is the thing that is likely to be the most difficult due to it being closed proprietary apple/intel tech.
Intel and AMD both support Thunderbolt on Linux, it's not impossible per-se.
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Let me know when we get M4 support.
I thought development officially ended?
Some contributors left, but others were able to take over. The project is still ongoing.
I'm not sure I understand the target user for Asahi.
Is this someone that only wants to run Linux and wants to use their GPU on Linux? Seems like this is not the case, yet.
Or, is this for someone that wants to dual boot and use Linux sometimes, and then reboot into MacOS when they want to use the GPU?
I don't think it makes much sense to expect such a cohesive/specific philosophy from an open source project like this.
The goal is "Linux on Mac". In a commercial product, specific details of what gets built usually stem from a more detailed vision that can be articulated as one. In open source projects those details are determined by what individual contributors are motivated to work on.
That doesn't means a cohesive vision can't emerge, there might be one for Asahi actually. But I think the default position is that it's kinda just a mob of people doing what they each feel like doing.
I don't think it matters that Asashi is a generation or three behind, because the moment you really need it is when Apple stops updating the OS for your hardware.
When M1 drops out of support I bet Asashi for the M1 machines will be pretty polished.
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Asahi on previous M-series chips supports the GPU, they just don't support it on M3 yet (they have to reverse-engineer the GPU to write the driver)
More info: https://alyssarosenzweig.ca/blog/asahi-gpu-part-n.html
Oh, so an M2 will support GPU usage? Can you run CoreML and unsloth models in the same way you would use them on regular MacOS? Are there benefits to using Linux/Asahi for running models on Apple hardware?
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It‘s going to be a godsend for people with M1 macs when Apple or App vendors decide to drop support for them.
The hardware is super capable and will make a great fileserver, TV box or HomeAssistant instance once I‘m done using it as daily driver.
Similarly, because of distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, I can keep using a 15y old Samsung notebook with a modern firefox, whereas Windows 8 already broke Samsung‘s display brightness driver and thermal management, and 10&11 are entirely unusable.
They are envious towards Apple Silicon and think Apple owes them something once again take the ball by the horns and build an Arm processor with a fork of Linux running on it. If three former engineers from Apple can start a company called Nuvia it can be done.
I have an M2 Macbook Air that i sometimes boot into Asahi to play Steam games that doesn't work natively on mac. It works unreasonably well given that there is something like five different translation layers to make it work!
Huh, I thought Asahi would still be too unpolished on M2 to play games reliably. Could you elaborate on your setup a little? What kind of games do you play? What is performance like? Is it really better than Crossover for example?
Steam is incredible on Linux. I'm amazed my kids can play so many games using proton on Ubuntu.
So, if there are five translation layers, why not run a Linux VM using UTM and play there? Is there a technical reason that does not work?
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> I'm not sure I understand the target user for Asahi.
If you want to run bare metal Linux on Apple's hardware (instead of running it in a virtual machine) you are the target audience.
I think it is more the technical challenge of doing it that drives development than any target users.
Are you talking about using a thunderbolt dock and GPU? I doubt that's a use case high in the developers minds. I'm curious though, I wonder if the open source NVIDIA driver can be built for it.
Target user is someone that wants to use Linux on good hardware. Apple hardware has some of the best perf-per-single-thread-perf-per-watt there is. Also, apple desktops are really compact and easy to keep out of the way while having really good performance too.
My current linux PC cuda machine is the latest Intel Ultra 9 mini PC from minisforum, and it still isnt quite as fast as a years old M1/M2. The only thing it has that the mac doesnt is cuda egpu support.
Why does it have to be for anyone other than the people involved in it?
(Though I’m sure people outside the project get value from it as well, like OpenBSD using Asahi bootloader)
I bought a Mac mini M4 simply because it was very cheap and the M4 chip offers great performance. It is currently mounted on the back of my TV and serves as a media station.
It runs macOS, but I have no particular interest in the operating system, nor do I own any other Apple hardware. (So no synergies.) It is alright (and better than Win11) but the preinstalled software does not even properly update without an Apple account. As soon as I can switch over to Linux, I will. ... I would just wait for all the ports to work.
Same same. I love Mac, and macOS, but as a server, macOS is terrible, and bloated, and a pain to run docker/podman.
Me too, M4 and keen to run Linux, partly because every damn system update bloats the system by 20GB but no memorably useful novel feature actually emerges and partly because it's long term stable. That said, at this stage in my career I appreciate a working system that doesn't require umpteen kernel recompiles!
Honestly I wouldn't waste any of my time trying to run a worse OS than MacOS in a hardware that wasn't completely supported by the sw
As much as I like Linux this kind of tinkering is only for people with more time and less expectations about the experience
If I need Linux I can always go for UTM or something similar
Sounds like you haven't used Asahi. I found the kde remix to be pretty nice to use. Literally the only thing that I found frustrating was:
1) for the longest time, but no longer, Google did not ship an official chrome linux arm64 package. Chromium Browser also has not included google sync for years now. But now, google chrome does ship for arm64 linux so its all good.
2) usb-c video still doesn't work, so not ideal for a laptop without hdmi that you'd want to dock
Otherwise, it works really well.
My bet: Apple is going to close it down. It is too much of a legal risk. What if some Linux enthusiast finds patent infringements in Apple's undocumented APIs?
Why would they even care? 99% of people aren't going to be installing Linux on their Macbook. If Apple did care, they'd have stopped allowing dual booting a long time ago.
It works for now, but one day it won’t then what?
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Asahi linux has been going on for a few years now
I recently read somewhere that someone wrote a letter/email to Apple's legal team, explaining the risks. Sorry if I cannot be more specific, I already went through my browser history and cannot find it back right now. PS: Browsers really need to improve here, it is crazy that I cannot search through my history in a meaningful way.
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Man… they absolutely do not care. An Apple engineer made the boot loader for Mac open in the first place.
Darwin is still sitting there all these years. It’s called market inertia.
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