Asahi Linux adds official support for Apple M3 Macs, with a few limits
Support has landed for most Apple M3 Macs, but GPU acceleration, sleep and HDMI output are still not fully available.
Linux. By Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
- Asahi Linux now supports most Macs with M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips.
- The M3 Ultra Mac Studio is still unsupported.
- Sleep, HDMI ports, and full graphics performance do not work yet on supported M3 Macs.
- M3 installation currently requires Expert mode, but the project hopes to remove that soon.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
The Asahi Linux distribution now officially supports Apple M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max-powered Macs, with some minor caveats.
The project announced that support for the M3-powered machines has been merged into the Asahi installer over the weekend, meaning users can now install the Linux distribution on most Macs powered by Apple's 3rd-generation Apple Silicon chips. The M3 Ultra Mac Studio, however, remains unsupported.
For those unfamiliar with Asahi, it is a community-led project working to bring Linux to Apple's custom silicon Macs. Apple does not provide Linux developers with engineering documentation for its hardware, so the project has to spend time and effort reverse-engineering Apple's chips and peripherals and writing the drivers needed to make them work under Linux.
The project began shortly after Apple introduced its first M1 Macs in 2020, and it released its first public alpha in 2022. Since then, developers have gradually brought support for increasingly large parts of Apple’s M-series hardware stack to Linux. In 2023, the project adopted Fedora Asahi Remix as its main distribution.
What Asahi Linux now supports on M3 Macs
According to Sunday’s announcement, almost everything that works on M1 and M2 Macs now works on supported M3 machines, including webcams, internal microphones, USB 3, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and hardware-accelerated video decoding with AV1 support.
That said, there are still some significant gaps. For one, the Apple GPU isn’t fully supported, so users should not expect performant or power-efficient 3D acceleration. Full support for Apple's Display Co-Processor (DCP) also remains unfinished.
This incomplete support has some practical consequences. You can’t use the Sleep function on the supported M3 devices, nor can you use the HDMI ports.
Since this work is fresh out of the oven, the project has placed M3 support behind the installer's Expert mode for now, although it hopes to remove that requirement before Fedora Linux 45 beta arrives in a few weeks.
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Macs have always been popular with Linux developers and power users for their performance, but the open-source operating system remains officially unsupported on the devices.
In May, an engineer managed to use a Linux virtual machine on an M4 MacBook Air to drive Nvidia's RTX 5090, an external GPU that macOS does not support on Apple silicon.
The setup required extensive modifications to QEMU, custom workarounds for Apple's DMA limitations, and plenty of troubleshooting, but it demonstrated how Linux can provide a hardware workaround.
The Asahi project takes that idea much further, enabling everyone to use Linux as their daily driver on top of an M-series Mac.
Phoronix reports that M3 support is actively being upstreamed to the mainline Linux kernel. While initial boot support is already live, full feature parity with Asahi Linux requires several additional patches to be upstreamed in Linux 7.4 and beyond.
