Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2
asahilinux.org
asahilinux.org
When I got my M3 Pro MBP, I got it with the intention of eventually installing Linux on it. In hindsight I seriously underestimated the amount of effort needed for even partial Linux compatibility, which makes me all the more grateful for the work Asahi contributors have put in! I'll still be keeping macOS installed for iOS dev work(which I plan on doing soonish), but other than that all I really need is a web browser and Ghostty with good battery life.
Then why bother installing a different OS?
All the wasted resources on most people's machines are going to a) pixel buffers b) browser tabs c) both.
Also computers should run and not run what you choose. Apple should not be able to for e you to run "services" (for themselves) and apps you cant delete
The hardware is not even that good. Sure, the CPUs are nice but nice enough to actively support the most closed up system? Not by a longshot.
You can dual boot Asahi when the time comes.
it's fast as greased lightning and fantastic. I've used it two or so years on M1, M2, M2 Max, and M5 and it's what I think you too will love.
Parts aren't available but if you get your hands on there's cryptographic parts pairing so it more or less can't be replaced: https://rossmanngroup.com/services/ssd-data-recovery/macbook...
Overall, i wouldn't count on "many good years left".
Meanwhile Apple's standard OS support period is 7 years, that's a much more imminent limit.
Not saying that I support non-user-replaceable SSDs, but if your goal is reducing e-waste, there are more impactful changes to make.
I'm not saying that I support closed-source firmware, locked bootloaders, or even that replacing SSDs is the one true path to sustainability.
I believe it's a whole field and we shouldn't tolerate compromises on any level. It should be 100% illegal in any civilized country to sell the kind of lame hardware we have today. It should be 100% repairable, 100% open bootloader & free firmware, 100% public tech docs/datasheets. Original manufacturer OS support is not insignificant, but i believe it's only significant because we have so little control/understanding of the hardware/software stack.
It would be reasonable if all components on a motherboard had to be sold as spare parts by law (not just the entire board that costs the same as the entire device, that's malicious compliance) and all spec sheets were made available. That might just make the economy of a repair shop work again.
Selling spare parts was worth when things broke often and labor was cheap. We don’t live in that world anymore. That means a broken device will no linger get fixed. But on the plus side there are far fewer broken devices. I’m pretty sure that has the same problem shape as “there is no glory in prevention”
The DMA crap that the EU passed even seems to go in the wrong direction, allowing Apple to audit the financials of anyone who makes an iOS app.
I was mostly just reacting to your "barely matters" wording :)
That's why you have backups and drives are easy to replace, though reinstall/restore can be tedious.
Unless it's a soldered in one.
Display quality, trackpad quality, overall form factor, and very high RAM space in a laptop would be the primary reasons I'd go with Asahi Linux.
I’ve been a big Lenovo fan, settled on the X1 carbon. I’ve had three of them, G5, G6 and G9. The USB-C port broke on both G6 and G9 models. Apparently it’s a common problem. Unfortunately the ports are soldered directly on the motherboard making it difficult to fix(should be a small separate board for easy replacement). I was going to desolder and replace the ports, but haven’t gotten around to it.
I’m now using a MacBook Pro M2.
As long as you pay for Apple Care, not a problem. But maybe not the point…
With my old iPhone 12, 2019 16-inch MBP or my 2022 MBA? Not a single issue. The housing is simply constructed so tight and, being made of solid metal, rigid that the housing bears the torsion load and not the tiny PCB solder pads.
The only problem I have with my new USB-C iPhone 15 is that it is hard to clean pocket lint out of the socket, compared to the old Lightning connector.
What are you doing to these machines?! I work in the safety and security biz, including in the field, and my trusty HP EliteBook 2730p is still rocking along on its first USB ports. That machine is over 15 bloody years old!
I never needed one, but a good USB-C adapter (or maybe even small dock) with power passthrough should solve this. Burning through whole machines because a single USB-C port cakes out after just three years is an awful lot of waste.
Mostly, keeping them in my pocket with a USB cable attached to a power bank. Places an awful lot of torsion force on the connector. I tend to go through 2-3 charges a day.
Another issue is that I have cats that like to play with everything being too close to a table corner.
For 90% of the parts it’s honestly pretty easy to work with. You just need a few screwdrivers. And I sourced all my parts from eBay.
The documentation is excellent:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/100586
The only thing that’s egregious is the batteries. They tape the batteries to the case, and to remove them you have to do this complex twirling motion with tweezers to pull the tape out from under the battery. If the tape snaps during this then the documentation basically says get a new case.
This
Find me another laptop that has everything, even if it's more expensive ! You can't, some have keyboard as good, some it's the display. In best case you got 2 or 3 things but then it goes downhill on the other, like the trackpad.
Heh, that's precisely one grouping of reasons I avoid Apple, especially with regards to trackpads and form factor (and, to a lesser degree, displays).
1. Trackpads. I hate 'em. Keyboard-integrated trackpoints and/or trackballs is what I need. Detachables with a trackpad are acceptable as one can bring a Bluetooth substitute (that's how I do it on my HP x2 G4); on a non-detachable only a trackpoint, in addition to the trackpad, is acceptable (on my HP 2730p or my workplace ThinkPads I only use the trackpoint, the trackpad is turned off).
2. Form factor. Not counting their "castrated" tablets, Apple doesn't build 2-in-1 or 3-in-1 detachables (the best general-purpose mobile computing form factor) or convertibles (T-hinge models represent the second best form factor). The last orthodox-chassis laptop purchase I made took place in 1999. Outside of a vintage or retro machine I might entertain (which itself loses out to wedge-style keyboard computer cases), that form factor is dead to me.
3. Apple is not the only outfit that ships with good displays. Et cetera.
I've had high-end laptops from all the big vendors, and even at the highest price tier, other vendors don't deliver such build quality. I hate how all non-Apple laptops feel. The case, the hinge, the materials, everything. If I coud reliably use linux on Apple hardware, I'd never buy another laptop brand again.
Have they? What AMD or Intel laptop with Linux on it can hold a candle to and M4 air or an M4max pro? Genuinely curious, cause I found none...
that is 1/3 the battery life of a macbook in the same use case. seems completely incomparable
However nowadays it could mean running some agents all day long (remote models) and plug in to power only at the end of the day.
This also means that battery cycles accumulate more slowly and the battery’s lifetime is stretched further.
Also, generally more efficient chips don’t get hot as easily which makes the laptop more comfortable to use and prevents fans from becoming audible unless you’re really pushing the system.
(Did we really forget how inflated Apple battery claims really are?)
Granted Im not compiling large projects on a train all day but who is.
I don't see how? it is a 50Wh battery. Even at 6W that is about 8h of usage? On what OS + workload on x86 are you seeing just 6W usage? Or is it that each day your usage is only 2 hours?
It's nice that I can go a full office day without charging - the previous x86 notebook couldn't, but a decent one from the M3 generation probably could as well. But also if I put proper load an that thing the Macbook battery is done in less than 2 hours.
That said these numbers are with windows.
Fingers crossed for them then. I love the idea of a Framework laptop but I’m only interested in Linux performance.
I just went by what Framework said on release a few weeks or month back. Maybe you can find a more up to date Linux test somewhere.
And I bet you can soon get a ThinkPad with the same intel chip, that should have similar battery life.
Yes you can, speaking from experience. I have the T14 gen 7 with the 75 wh battery, and the 356H CPU, it only uses 4-6w/hour when coding with a lot of browser tabs open, a headless VM running, docker containers and so on, online meetings is about 6-8w/hour, this is under Linux, with default power setting from Opensuse.
It can easily last more than 10 working hours, I limit mine to 80% charge as it's more than enough for when I'm on the go.
Works for me, just wish I had a better display. It's possible to upgrade it, just so much conflicting information out there.
> Its two working days. Around 15-18 hrs i get out, depending on usage and power profile. If you do heavy compilation or so its much shorter :D
> Generally used balanced profile most time with intel lpmd (lpe core task util till threshold).
https://www.reddit.com/r/cachyos/comments/1sstqon/comment/oh...
I'm not convinced it's only "several years".
Asahi was launched in January 2021. So 5 and a half years ago. Asahi, as far as I can tell, supports most of M1 and M2 features, so generations launched in November 2020 (6 years ago) and June 2022 (4 years ago).
I would be very surprised if a decade from now the story won't still be the same thing: 90% of features for systems half a decade old with software package gaps in important areas and everything slightly less optimized than MacOS.
Asahi is doing incredible work but it's still 5 people in a garage vs the huge corporation.
This can be a good tradeoff. An M1 Ultra still runs circles around 90% of consumer hardware sold today, and with Linux it has easily another 10+ years. Now support for M3 is coming.
> Asahi is doing incredible work but it's still 5 people in a garage vs the huge corporation.
Not sure why the "vs" scenario, this is a project that makes no promises. And I think they do have some support from Fedora / Red Hat fwiw.
That's a good tradeoff for durable hardware with available spare parts. That's not a good tradeoff for hardware that was designed so it cannot be repaired, such as newer Macs.
They are building something in an environment that's not supportive of what they're doing. Contrast with Intel or AMD.
There was a time when Wi-Fi, or Wayland, or XComposite, or Linux gaming, or just accelerated graphics at all or, or, or... People get excited, they work on it, other people get excited and mess about, and eventually it just works.
I would love to one day pick up a decommissioned M1 Ultra and use my OS of choice on it, and I'm grateful for the people who are doing the hard thing now.
And macbooks are reaching 18-20 hours usage on battery nowadays, I have stopped carrying the power adapter most of the time.
Of course it’s significantly more expensive, but you do get what you pay for.
12 is still good, but intel as of lunar lake (2 generations ago!) matched that. Now, the performance is still behind, particularly single core. But the efficiency is there, and these are standard x86 chips.
The efficiency doesn’t come from ARM, it comes from the process node and chip design. Apple uses the latest process nodes with an SOC design. When intel does the same, as they have done, they match the efficiency easily on x86.
The real gain is the SOC. When you shove the ram and chipset into the CPU you save massive battery.
> On the battery life front, both Intel and AMD have caught up.
Intel and AMD's cpus don't have batteries ;)
Their chips are approximately as efficient as Apple's chips from ~2 years ago, but that's not their fault, it's Apple getting the entire allocation of new chips for about 1.5 years.
> to get 18 hours, you need the lowest spec model and you need to basically not use it. Chromium or Firefox open? Bluetooth active? Yeah, you’re looking at 12 hours, not 20.
I work on compilers, often maxing out all the CPU cores, and have stopped carrying the power adapter altogether. I plug it in maybe once in three days.
> The efficiency doesn’t come from ARM, it comes from the process node and chip design. Apple uses the latest process nodes with an SOC design. When intel does the same, as they have done, they match the efficiency easily on x86. The real gain is the SOC. When you shove the ram and chipset into the CPU you save massive battery.
Yes, I agree. IDGAF about whether the battery lasts longer because of ARM or magic pixie dust.
I have both an M1 Pro MacBook Pro and an Asus lunar lake laptop. The M1 battery life is… good. But again not what Apple claims, if you actually use the computer. The lunar lake laptop has better battery life.
The base M1 is probably much better, but I still think these lofty 20 hour battery life claims from Apple are, well, lofty. It might be true if you playback local media with hardware acceleration and run in airplane mode. But as soon as you’re using all the antennas, the battery life goes down a lot. Bluetooth especially drains battery life.
Source: I bought the same (with core i7, so it's performant, etc.).
I'm still hoping one of these mega AI LLMs will figure out how to install Linux on the many old iPads that become nearly useless after Apple stops updating them and you can't install new apps.
What do I need any higher specs for, other than battery life?
While we're at the point where traditional software is pretty much fast enough for all but extreme use-cases, with LLM's it feels like we're back to the days where you press compile and go have a coffee or chat to your colleague.
It takes a lot of expensive hardware, and most people don’t have extreme enough requirements to recoup that investment.
That might change, but it would require either that hardware gets much cheaper or everyone’s demands for LLMs increase significantly.
And given how fast the hardware and software is evolving, I can easily imagine a future where we all have very capable models running on our own devices for an embedded intelligence layer that's doing most of the day-to-day tasks, and only have to outsource to a super-smart cloud model for specific things.
To run poorly made software. Despite Apple having the best hardware around, they still manage to slow down M1 devices on Sequoia. Somehow.
I think it’s a double-edged sword. Powerful hardware means powerful hardware. But it also means developers get lazy, and start writing poor quality software because it still runs OK on the latest and greatest.
Luckily Linux doesn’t have that problem, which is why you can easily add 10 years to a laptops lifespan just by using Linux.
If you run noscript then yeah, why not keep rocking your pentium.
However they still have to nail single core performance on chips that can operate without a fan before they can be said to have caught up.
Also Tahoes absolutely horrendous performance for the last year..
I really want to go back to linux, but mbp is just too good!
After 2 years of usage, I still have issues with basic actions like copy paste.
edit: omg, writing this post, i checked if there is some way to use linux shortcuts and there is (Kanesh/KMonad or Karabiner-Elements). Maybe my suffering will finally stop.
I’m either doing it wrong on Windows or the entire world is putting up with unnecessary finger pain because whoever chose Ctrl-C was a masochist.
In fact the last time I bought a keyboard I made sure the keyboard mapping can be customized so I can actually put the Insert key on it.
[1] Tested on KDE Wayland and Xfce X11.
(to replies, yes, i understand that macos keyboard shortcuts might objectively be better, but if you are using multiple computers and macos is the only one of OSs, those shortcuts become pain in the neck)
Command+c command+v has worked every single timein every program since macOS 7.0 when I started.
Apple's indifference to OSS does not give me much hope.
Rather it seems that as time goes on Linux just outgrows old devices entirely, again excluding very niche distros. Not that it makes them increasingly efficient.
Have you seen Linux getting more efficient over time? What's your use case?
Maybe things will unlock soon and stay that way long enough for it to be viable for me. I'm just not holding my breath.
Of course it's great to have a supported OS for retired hardware--regardless of battery performance. That's a different use case. And I salute all those who work to keep old devices out of landfills.
Once the upstreaming was largely done, they first mentioned beginning the work of adding M3 support in the February progress report.
Now we have this:
> With all of this progress coming on top of milestones already reached on M3, we are pleased to announce that we are almost ready to cut an official release! We will have more to say about this in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!
I'm not seeing any reason for gloom or doom.
I sometimes do wonder at what point do ARM find and test these stuff and ask Apple to follow. Obviously this is not the first time we see such thing happened.
See also when Microsoft introduced DocX, Apple products corrupted documents because Apple followed the standard that Microsoft had specified but turns out they didn't follow it themselves.
Sabotage others on things you don't have to do.
By running Linux in a VM on MacOS on Apple silicon, you sacrifice some raw speed but in return you still get to run MacOS apps occasionally and have access to the same data from either MacOS or Linux without having to duplicate everything. And battery life is reasonable, which is not true yet with Asahi.
>and because there's no performant way to share disk space for data with MacOS
Have you tried a ZFS partition? If it's a desktop system use iSCSI to network storage (I'm not running Linux directly on my Studio or M4 mini but I still put my Home folder on the network)?
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0: By which I mean, for equivalent features. It's possible to go really far out of the normal with ZFS in terms of silly compression and multiple copies of data even within a single OS and checksumming and so on in ways that add computational overhead, but I don't hold that against it vs APFS.
I think the issue is funding is so low the developers don’t even have access to newer Apple Siicon, let alone funding for token costs, etc.
https://marcan.st/2025/02/resigning-as-asahi-linux-project-l...
These large tech companies can't have their cake and eat it too.
In Asahi Linux specifically, there was not long ago a PR for M3 or similar for removing a big roadblock that existed (and I think still exists). Turns out this whole PR was implemented by an LLM (using copyrighted materials, probably most of it is Apple's) and it was immediately closed. Yes, it's a problem and illegal.
Either everybody gets to use it or nobody does.
Especially that the code getting trained on is for the vast majority copyrighted open source software so if anybody has something to say, it's the opensource community rather than Apple
It doesn't matter if they can't prove it, their legal budget is just too big compared to anything Asahi team can do.
(I realize these little things may seem insignificant, but (1) it's customary for people to underestimate the provocations in their own posts and overestimate those in others, and (2) they add up like mercury in the bloodstream.)
If you really think about it, it's kinda amusing how far we came from https://wiibrew.org/wiki/MINI being used to bootstrap homebrew on the Nintendo Wii on PPC to being used to fire up our Macs daily running Asahi on ARM.
Considering how much better m-series CPUs are, i’d say actually keep thinking different.
For example: "AFAIK the TLA is NFG for well written prose FWIW, NGL."
It is awkward to parse them and is infuriating when the author can clearly write well otherwise, because they don't use three- or four-letter-acronyms to replace standard sentence structures for the rest of their prose.
And I give some thoughts into may be they are not "much better". And in that case may be sticking to spec and not Thinking Different on certain things matters more.
they are still better. better than previous gen, essentially better than competition.
only the latest intel cpu are beginning to get "comparable" with previous m-series cpu.
>only the latest intel cpu are beginning to get "comparable" with previous m-series cpu.
I am comparing ARM CPU against ARM CPU Core. Which is why it needs to there to the ARM Spec specific to ARM ISA. And those are standard ARM CPU design tested across industry benchmarks. Not sure what is baseless about it.
It’s still an improvement.
That being said, the Asahi team is doing incredible work. I am very thankful for what they are doing.
It’s simply a business decision for Apple. And quite a dumb one at that. Here’s hoping that Ternus reverses that shortsighted decision.
I wish the amount of time and brain power spent on this project was instead used to work on something more friendly to the Linux community.
For example to improve Strix Halo GPU and NPU support.
Most likely they just not interested in working on well maintained drivers that require 1000 times more effort to upstream code.
All the fun of reverse engineering and we know the processors already run Linux...
You have to appreciate the effort Apple puts into security - goes some way to understanding why they won't endorse/support installing an alternative operating system.
Intel and AMD set the standard for "tremendous effort" bringing up support for alternative OSes. Nvidia follows behind, and Apple's support is (somehow) behind Nvidia's foot-dragging.
Yes, Apple put effort into making it possible to install alternative operating systems on Macs, but that is an exception to the design because the chips are designed to be locked down. I expect Apple to remove the option at some point because nobody is using it on any of the recent hardware.
> Rumours circulating that Apple are actively hostile towards efforts such as Asahi, or that their security must be bypassed or jailbroken to run untrusted code are unfounded and false. In fact, Apple have expended effort and time on improving their security tooling in ways that only improve the execution of non-macOS binaries. An example of this is giving their Boot Policy configuration tool the ability to wrap raw AArch64 code in a proper Mach-O format starting with macOS 12.1. This is only ever required for enrolling a boot object that is not already a macOS kernelcache.
You get a jmp to some arm64 instructions of your choosing, with a bunch of CPU features locked out.
Tremendous efforts would be to publish reference manuals for all their hardware components.
Apple is doing the bare minimum, which is to not build 10km tall walls around its walled garden.
But in the modern day of walled gardens, that's viewed as generosity.
To be perfectly clear, Apple is like a lifeline to a lot of people. They are one of the last bastions of quality in the hardware and software world. This is why it's such a disappointment that they've been faltering lately: we had high expectations of them, which hasn't been quite so true for the rest of the industry for a while. So it is a big deal that hidden gems like this continue to crop up from them: it is a sign that some of their core values still remain. And I really hope the new CEO will bring back some of what they lost after Steve Jobs.
There are a lot of shortcuts they could have taken to leave us with less freedom and they did not take those shortcuts. For that, I am grateful.