Linux distribution for Apple Silicon Mac already installed and running on brand new M2

Unlike Intel Macs, Apple silicon Macs were designed to run only Apple software. But the developers at the Asahi Linux team are working to change that by painstakingly re-engineering support for Apple processors and other Mac hardware and releasing it as an unfinished distribution that can boot and run on bare metal, no. virtualization is required.

Today the Asahi Linux team released a new version with many additions and improvements. Specifically, the distribution now supports the M1 Ultra and Mac Studio, and added preliminary support for the M2 MacBook Pro (which has been tested by the team) and the M2 MacBook Air (which has not been tested but should work).

Preliminary Bluetooth support has also been added for all Apple Silicon Macs, although the team notes that it doesn’t work well when connected to a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network because “Wi-Fi/Bluetooth coexistence is not yet properly configured.”

There are many other things that don’t work properly, including USB-A ports in Studio, faster than USB-2.0 speeds from any Type-C/Thunderbolt ports, and GPU acceleration, but progress is being made. all these fronts. In particular, work is underway on the GPU, and a “prototype driver”that is “good enough to run real graphics applications and benchmarks”is already up and running, although it is not included in this release.

The Asahi team has said in the past that it expects support for new chips to be relatively easy to add to Asahi, as Apple’s chip designers often reuse things and don’t make significant hardware changes unless there is a good reason to do so. Adding basic M2 support to Asahi happened within a single 12-hour development session, and it only took “a few days”of extra effort to get the rest of the hardware to work as well as with the M1. This process may get more complicated as the Asahi team works with more hardware – supporting the new GPU will probably be a little more difficult than getting the keyboard and trackpad working – but it looks like the team will be able to fairly support the M2 chip family. fast,

The Asahi team’s stated goal has always been to contribute all their work upstream as it’s ready, and new versions of the Linux kernel already have some support for Apple Silicon Mac. After all, everything from Ubuntu to ChromeOS Flex can run on Apple silicon computers without much extra effort, which could be useful many years from now when Apple stops supporting older Apple silicon computers with new macOS releases. The OpenBSD version is also up and running on Apple Silicon thanks to the efforts of the Asahi team.