Asahi Linux Now Officially Supports Apple M3 Macs – With Caveats

JLO64•about 1 hour ago

Here's the blog post from the Asahi devs announcing this: https://asahilinux.org/2026/09/m2-episode-1/

whatever1•about 1 hour ago

Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community? So much wasted effort when they can just share a pdf.

alt227•about 1 hour ago

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.

sansah•about 1 hour ago

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.

novafunc•about 1 hour ago

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.

IshKebab•about 1 hour ago

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.

cosmic_cheese•4 minutes ago

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.

ajross•about 1 hour ago

> 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.

Krish1577•about 2 hours ago

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!

TomJansen•about 1 hour ago

I am wondering how much the spec changes per M-chip iteration? I think that after some iterations, the spec stays the same, no?

dagmx•about 1 hour ago

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.

sansah•about 1 hour ago

Lack of sleep and HDMI support is real roadblock for adoption. Hope they gets past soon.

benoau•about 1 hour ago

Some big caveats but still amazing progress!

tunder•about 1 hour ago

Still no thunderbolt support.

alt227•about 1 hour ago

To be fair this is the thing that is likely to be the most difficult due to it being closed proprietary apple/intel tech.

MYEUHD•about 1 hour ago

You can contribute support for it

Asahi Linux Now Officially Supports Apple M3 Macs – With Caveats

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Discussion (29 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews