Asahi Linux brings official support to Apple M3 Macs

Asahi Linux has officially added support for Macs built around Apple's M3 series chips. M3 support has been merged into the project's installer, bringing those machines close to the feature set the distribution has provided on earlier Apple Silicon hardware for years.

In a blog post published on 6 September and signed by James Calligeros, the project says almost everything that works on M1 and M2 series machines now also works on M3: the webcam, internal microphones, USB (up to the hardware limit of USB 3 at 10 Gb/s), hardware-accelerated video decoding including AV1, WiFi and Bluetooth.

What still doesn't work

Two major exceptions remain. Full DCP support and the GPU are still missing, and the developers warn users not to expect performant or power-efficient 3D acceleration at this stage, promising more news in the coming months.

There are also two known limitations: sleep does not currently work because of limitations with the firmware-provided framebuffer, and the HDMI port on equipped MacBooks is disabled. Both issues trace back to the missing DCP support and should be addressed once it is wired up for M3.

How to install it

Because the M3 work is fresh, support is gated behind the installer's Expert mode. Users who want to try it run a single command in a macOS terminal — curl -L https://alx.sh/ | EXPERT=1 sh — and follow the prompts, then perform a system upgrade once installation has finished. The project is aiming to drop the Expert requirement in time for the release of the Fedora Linux 45 beta in a couple of weeks, barring major regressions.

Years of work, funded by donors

Asahi Linux credits its supporters on OpenCollective and GitHub Sponsors, noting that M3 support is the culmination of years of work by multiple people, many of whom only had access to M3 hardware because of that funding. The project is asking users for feedback.