Fedora Asahi Remix is the only Linux distribution that actually works on Apple Silicon Macs

Apple’s MacBooks are often a go-to in the tech world for developers, and there’s a reason for that. Phenomenal battery life on Apple Silicon, great performance, and a Unix-like environment make them perfect for development out of the box. Sure, you can run WSL2 on Windows, but there are a lot of developers out there happy to just use a MacBook and be done with it. The only downside is the lack of support for other operating systems on Apple Silicon, but Asahi Linux aims to bring a full Linux distribution to those Macs.

Of course, Asahi Linux isn’t really a great replacement for most people instead of Apple’s macOS, but it works surprisingly well. It’s a project built from the ground up by reverse engineering Apple’s proprietary hardware, and it can get the job done in a pinch. While I’d recommend using a virtual machine instead of running Asahi Linux, it does work quite well considering how little information the developers had to work with from Apple before getting started.

Apple Silicon posed a challenge to other operating systems

Even if it came with benefits

Apple’s modern computers previously used Intel CPUs for the most part, based on the x86 architecture. While they ran a different operating system to other computers, the hardware was more or less the same when compared to the likes of a Windows-based laptop. You could use Apple’s Boot Camp to install Windows in an official capacity, and there were plenty of other projects out there designed to enable users to install Linux on a MacBook, too.

Then came the transition to Apple Silicon, with a whole host of benefits over its Intel counterpart. The downside, though, was that the change in architecture coupled with the proprietary nature of Apple’s hardware meant that there was no easy way to run another operating system anymore. Apple’s documentation was sparse at best, and any low-level development posed a massive task to any hobbyist looking to build an operating system that would run on the platform.

Nowadays, the best way to run another operating system is to virtualize it from inside of macOS, using tools like Parallels to do so. That’s where Asahi Linux comes in; the team behind it has been hard at work documenting Apple Silicon, reverse engineering the hardware and building on the Fedora Linux distribution so that it can run natively on Apple’s proprietary hardware.

Enter Asahi Linux

A feat of engineering

Asahi Linux is the product of a significant amount of reverse engineering, with drivers for system components created from scratch by a team of developers. That team included former lead developer Hector Martin, a previous member of fail0verflow (formerly known as Team Twiizers) and the owner of an extensive resume when it comes to reverse engineering. He has since left the project over a dispute relating to the Rust for Linux project.

Reverse engineering the hardware in Apple’s hardware in order to write drivers for every piece of hardware has been a daunting task, and it’s still not all done. Asahi Linux only recently got support for the Mac’s microphones for example (and that feature isn’t enabled in public builds, yet), and Thunderbolt still isn’t supported. The display is also limited to 60Hz. Those are the major downsides, and aside from those, Asahi Linux is a very functional operating system at the moment, which makes it a pretty incredible achievement when you consider the insurmountable odds that would have faced a project like this.

Setting up Asahi Linux was a surprisingly easy endeavor. There’s a command on the Asahi Linux website that you run in your Mac’s Terminal, and it will then guide you along for every step. It repartitions your storage, adds Fedora to your boot options (there’s technically an Arch Linux option, but development is geared around supporting Fedora and Arm support is better with Fedora), and installs everything for you. After that, you reboot your Mac, choose Fedora, and set it up like you would any other operating system on any other kind of machine.

Note that Asahi Linux is technically the series of drivers in the kernel and that users have managed to get other distributions like Ubuntu running on these MacBooks, too. If it helps, think of Asahi Linux as being the project that enables Linux as a platform to run on Macs, and Fedora Asahi Remix is the distribution of choice by the developers in implementing it.

What it’s like using Asahi Linux on a MacBook Pro

Surprisingly usable

I installed Fedora on my M1 Pro MacBook Pro to experience it, and I was surprised by it. Are there features missing? Sure, but I was impressed by how well it worked given all of the adversity that faced this project. It installs, it runs, and I can install other applications and I can use it like I would a normal laptop in most instances. There are even people who use it as a daily driver, though be aware in doing so that you’re taking a risk when it comes to stability.

I was able to install VS Code and Zen Browser, and both work just fine. Applications like Spotify don’t run natively (as they don’t have arm64 builds for Linux) but you can access it in a browser. There’s an included Widevine Installer that uses a ported version of Widevine from ChromeOS devices so that you can stream DRM-protected content in Firefox, hence why Spotify works.

It’s just a typical operating system on the surface, and if you don’t do anything too sophisticated, you probably wouldn’t notice many of the downsides. Even in the case of Spotify, you can use an alternative client if you’d prefer over the web client. Plus, you can install fex-emu to execute x86/x86-64 applications, though its performance is considered unstable and not really reliable at the moment. Installing Steam with dnf and launching it will launch a wrapper that handles setting up the emulation for you, and games can run under it.

To be clear, there is a fairly complicated configuration used in order to play games. FEX translates x86 instructions to Arm, Wine translates Windows to Linux, and then DXVK and dk3d-vulkan translate DirectX to Vulkan. There are a lot of layers and a lot of steps, but it does work, and that’s the main thing (so long as you have enough RAM, anyway). Users have reported being able to play games like Cyberpunk 2077 with this configuration, which is pretty impressive.

Would I use this as a daily driver, personally? No, but it’s honestly the best way to use Linux on your Mac. Virtualizing it works pretty well, but if you want a native solution that starts on boot, then there’s no alternative aside from Asahi. The work that’s been done here has been incredible, and with support for more hardware in these MacBooks expected to arrive later this year, it’s worth trying out if you own an older Mac.