The makers of Asahi Linux have released an experimental version of the distribution that runs on Apple’s M2 chip. It is an experimental build that starts up, but is still far from working properly.
The creators of Asahi Linux write in a blog post that the makers were able to make a port of the OS to Apple’s M2 chip relatively quickly. At the moment that works rudimentary: the distro boots with support for USB, NVMe, battery health and Wi-Fi, but there’s also a lot that doesn’t work properly. The keyboard doesn’t work like that in U-Boot and Grub yet. Users therefore need an external keyboard for this. The keyboard and trackpad now work in the distro, with which the operating system can already be used.
The makers say that they have only tested the operating system on a MacBook Pro 13″. There would also be support for the MacBook Air, but the makers have not tested that yet. The developers say that the Linux version is based on macOS 12.4 The team behind Asahi doesn’t want to provide long-term support for that and warns users to manually upgrade boot components to macOS 13.0 at a later date.
According to the makers, the installation only works if users enable expert mode in the Asahi Installer. They also warn that many components are unlikely to work yet.
Asahi Linux has been working on a Linux version for Apple’s own socs for some time. In March, the company released an alpha build for computers with the M1 chip for the first time. A lot of work went into that, but the makers say future distros will be a lot easier to port to new Apple chips like the M2.