We’ve seen Linux running on Apple Silicon Macs before, but this week marks the first time you can run Fedora Linux on M1 and M2 Macs.
This is a collaboration between Asahi Linux and the Fedora Project, and marks a key milestone in a project which kicked off back in 2021 …
ZDNet reports.
Fedora Asahi Remix 39 has been released. This makes Fedora Asahi Remix the first full M1/M2 Linux distribution to see the light of day.
Fedora-Asahi Linux runs on Apple’s ARM-based computers. Specifically, you can now run the distro on all Apple M1 and M2 series MacBook, Mac Mini, Mac Studio, and iMac devices.
If you’re thinking there’s one Apple Silicon Mac missing from that line-up, you’d be right: It doesn’t yet run on the current Mac Pro. For that, you’ll need to wait for the Fedora Linux 40 release, which is also expected to enable full Apple M1/M2 graphics support.
In a blog post earlier this year, the team said that as well as providing a polished Linux experience in its own right, the project was also intended to provide reference work for other distributions.
Our goal is for all distros to eventually integrate all this work, so that users can use their choice of distro and be confident that it will work well on their machine. But, in order to kick off this process, we had to prototype what this integration looks like, which meant we had to create our own distro.
And so, the Asahi Linux Arch Linux ARM remix was born. We took Arch Linux ARM, added our own overlay package repository, and packaged all of our integration work there. Notably, this is a fully downstream project: we have no significant involvement with upstream Arch Linux ARM or Arch Linux, and we directly use the Arch Linux ARM package repositories for the core distro. Our overlay just adds integration scripts, bootloader components, extra userspace support packages (for things like audio), and our forked kernel and Mesa packages.
Fedora Asahi offers a choice of two desktops.
Fedora Asahi uses the KDE Plasma 5.27 Long Term Support (LTS) desktop environment as its default environment. The developers said it gives you “a buttery smooth desktop, with absolutely no tearing or glitching, just like on macOS.” Not a KDE fan? You can use GNOME 45 as your desktop instead.
Both desktop options employ the Wayland window system by default. For compatibility with legacy X11 applications, it incorporates XWayland. It also comes with OpenGL 3.3 support, featuring GPU-accelerated geometry shaders and transform feedback. Thus, Fedora Asahi Remix 39 boasts the world’s first certified conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 implementation for Apple Silicon, a milestone in graphics support for these devices.
OpenGL 4.x support is promised for the next release.
The remix is installed from macOS, and requires 13.5 or 14.2. Installation is straightforward:
To install the latest release build, open up the terminal and run the following as a regular user:
$ curl https://fedora-asahi-remix.org/install | shFollow the prompts from the script and you’ll have Fedora Asahi Remix installed in no time.
If you want to install a nightly build and have more options available (e.g. beta and previous releases), use this command instead:
$ curl https://fedora-asahi-remix.org/builds | shImages: Fedora Project/Milad Fakurian/Unsplash
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