Fedora Asahi Remix is now working on Apple M3

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:okydh7e54e2nok65kjxdklvd/post/3mdd55paffk2o

218•todsacerdoti•2h ago

Comments

dralley•1h ago

Nice! Good to hear that progress is still being made, I know it was on pause for a bit as developers rotated out and there was an effort to get things upstreamed.

electronsoup•1h ago

oh awesome! I had assumed they were just targeting M1/M2 for the time being

zozbot234•1h ago

Does this include the newer M3 ultra? Huge news if true!

2OEH8eoCRo0•1h ago

Displayport alt mode? Thunderbolt?

greenimpala•1h ago

and ProMotion, then its a serious contender

volemo•1h ago

Dunno, I don’t care about ProMotion (I’ve got it and I don’t see it), but sleep and battery life are very important to me.

porkloin•46m ago

Are you sure you've actually used the higher refresh rate? It might not be enabled by default. I'd be surprised if you can't tell the difference comparing 60hz to 120hz back to back.

fainpul•1h ago

At least for M1 they got it working. Seems to be in testing phase now. Promised to come soon.

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...

michaelRostom•1h ago

From that video "Our goal is to make this [dp-altmode] generally available to all people sometime early in the next year [2026]"

gignico•1h ago

Is that display port over USB-C? That’s the main showstopper for me to use Asahi on my M1 Pro MBP.

ZiiS•35m ago

Yes, the test branch works fine for me, should be officially supported soon.

hamandcheese•1h ago

I wish it were possible to directly fund DP-alt mode support. It is the only thing remaining preventing me from adopting Asahi.

ZiiS•32m ago

For me https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/tree/fairydust installed and worked without any tweeks. Don't think you can direct funding, but https://opencollective.com/asahilinux contributes to getting this fully officially supported.

hamandcheese•9m ago

No idea what the fairydust kernel is.

For more context, I gooled around and found this Phoronix article: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Asahi-Linux-EOY-2025-CCC

> On the display side, Asahi Linux developers have been working on the DisplayPort connectivity. For that there are now experimental DisplayPort patches for Asahi Linux via their "fairydust" tree.

That's great news!

jsheard•1h ago

Does anyone know if M3 support is likely to lead to M4 or M5 support in relatively short order? AIUI M3 took a long time because it was a substantial departure from M1/M2, especially in the GPU architecture, but I don't know if M4 or M5 made similar leaps.

OGEnthusiast•1h ago

M4 is apparently even harder because of some new hardware-level page table protections.

Source from Asahi contributor: https://social.treehouse.systems/@sven/114278224116678776

eddyg•44m ago

Memory Integrity Enforcement, perhaps?

https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...

worldsavior•20m ago

It's "Secure Page Table Monitor". https://support.apple.com/en-il/guide/security/sec8b776536b/.... The kernel requires it so they need to emulate SPTM.

zozbot234•1h ago

The M5 reportedly has a newer generation GPU compared to the M3/M4. For one thing, the GPU-side Neural Accelerators are obviously new to the M5 series. Other stuff is harder to know for sure until it gets looked into from a technical POV.

mananaysiempre•43m ago

It’s not like neural accelerators on non-Apple consumer hardware get much use on Linux, either, so that does not sound like much of a dealbreaker.

adgjlsfhk1•1h ago

The main reason M3 took a long time isn't related to m3 itself, but rather that the asahi project took on a ton of tech debt to get M1/M2 working. M3 wasn't too difficult, but before taking on the additional tech debt, the Asahi team focused on getting all of their changes upstreamed to the linux kernel.

tgtweak•1h ago

Prognosis is then that work for m4/m5 should be relatively straight line now that refactoring is done?

monocasa•40m ago

The main developer was also the target of a harassment campaign from a place that has pushed other targets to straight up suicide. That took almost all of their energy for the last year and they ended up quitting.

xattt•35m ago

   > The main developer was also the target of a harassment campaign from a place that has pushed other targets to straight up suicide.

Is this the Torvalds/Hector dispute that comes on the Google AI summary, or was this a three-letter agency type of harassment faced by Aaron Swartz?

alright2565•23m ago

Anti-trans hate.

gpm•23m ago

Neither actually... It was an anti trans/kiwi farms brigade...

The Torvalds dispute probably came about in part because of defensive behavior triggered this brigade but was really unrelated.

internetter•1h ago

I would just like to point out that Michael Reeves (the poster, no relation to youtuber) is a high schooler who has also found numerous high impact vulnerabilities in Apple software. Immensely talented.

iknowstuff•1h ago

How many peaked with our curiosity and exploration software engineering as teenagers and subsequently got ground down by 9to5 corporate soul drain T_T

benoau•1h ago

Just take the top ticket, thanks.

preisschild•1h ago

Me. Got countless old servers as a teenager and self hosted as much as possible. Now I have enough money for new servers (well, besides memory...) but not enough time and energy.

fellowniusmonk•1h ago

I was born with heart defects and pre ACA had to be a wage slave to get health insurance.

The moment ACA happened I started several successful businesses.

Honestly we already should have contribution/impact based merit threshold UBI with a much lower barrier than research grants or even just time limited UBI systems for youth and adults that meet a contribution threshold.

VC allocation is too biased towards group think, profit motivation, predatory contracts and hold on to top many class and cultural artifacts.

Yes of course it would be difficult to implement but difficult isn't impossible and gradiated rollouts can help catch unintended side effects. We need to push more money into the hands of the intrinsically motivated. Society already is catering to the whims of consumers and feed zombies.

AndrewDucker•50m ago

Or you could have universal healthcare. Which everyone else seems to manage and would untie a lot of people from specific jobs.

fellowniusmonk•44m ago

I can't think of any credible reason not to have universal healthcare at this point.

Maybe 20 years ago but there is too much empirical data across multiple countries and environments now.

Assuming our cost for care drops commiserate to what's been seen in other countries we could use the saving to increase merit scholarships for the contributing young as a introductory form of UBI.

giancarlostoro•5m ago

It sounds like a great idea, then a government shut down happens.

mid-kid•20m ago

It stings how much I relate to this.

xeonmc•46m ago

If I get a nickel every time a high schooler with a decorated history of hardware tinkering goes on to work on Linux for Apple Silicon, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird they all happens to gravitate to Apple.

fragmede•35m ago

It's genuinely nice hardware, and everyone's gotta have a hobby. But it's not all of them. Geohot did some hardware stuff and hasn't (afaik) been working on Asahi. Linus was 21 when Linux was first released. Of course, Apple silicon ARM laptops didn't exist in the wild then, so we can let both of those pass.

mid-kid•24m ago

They used to go work on homebrew for nintendo consoles instead. Times change.

drBonkers•1h ago

Can anyone point me to a good report of the current working status and known drawbacks of Asahi on Apple Silicon? Would there ever be a reason to run it on a Mac Mini or Apple desktop device? Or at that point would you just get a Linux box?

ncrmro•1h ago

I’ve managed to get NixOS running on an 8gb MacBook air which tools a bit of tweaks but asahi installer sets everything up where you can boot and install from NixOS

kreetx•1h ago

Could you expand/explain, you install Asahi first and then NixOS?

volemo•1h ago

Asahi includes a shell script that you run from macOS before installation to properly partition the storage (it’s quite involved). I guess, GP ran the script and then just booted from Nix ISO and installed to the new partition.

0xADD1E•17m ago

More or less- Due to the amount of unusual requirements for installing on Apple hardware (such as being kicked off from macOS, to name the tip of the iceberg) the Asahi installer gets used for most (all?) distros running on Apple Silicon. https://asahilinux.org/docs/alt/policy/#installation-procedu...

edit: The minimal UEFI part of the Asahi installer specifically sets up a “normal” environment that other distros (like Nix) can use, it doesn’t actually install a full distro like Asahi Fedora

kreetx•1h ago

https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support

dylan604•1h ago

> Or at that point would you just get a Linux box?

What exactly is a Linux box? If you're running Linux on an M3, is it not now a Linux box?

emodendroket•47m ago

Considering how far behind they are of new releases of hardware I'd imagine the most appealing use case is going to be trying to squeeze some more life out of outdated hardware that struggles running the latest Apple software. But that's kind of the sweet spot for a Linux desktop anyway, isn't it?

n0n0n4t0r•1h ago

According to Asahi's own documentation, they're far from done from the M3. So I guess "now working" is probably a bit misleading...

https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/#tab...

michaelRostom•1h ago

I understand where you are coming from, I think the major hurdle was getting it boot and fixing M3 specific things. Now that it is working, they can port over their driver very easily (they might just work or need a small tweak)

n0n0n4t0r•1h ago

Thank you for the clarification!

zozbot234•1h ago

I'm not sure that this list is updated; this is breaking news, and documenting stuff takes longer than that.

umanwizard•1h ago

True. Nevertheless, the fact that it even boots, after many years of it not working at all, is huge news.

dtartarotti•55m ago

Promising progress, I'm excited to try it when they get more things working on M3 Pro

dangus•37m ago

Really cool, though if I was looking for a Linux laptop today, I’d be watching the Intel Panther Lake products rolling out.

The top SKU has a similar performance and efficiency profile to the base M5 processor along with faster graphics performance.

Review embargos for the top SKU just dropped today.

hard_times•10m ago

You can't really be that naive, can you

drcongo•36m ago

This is great news. If Apple ever get around to releasing actually pro M5 MBPs I'm buying one and turning this M1 MBP into a linux laptop.

SirMaster•17m ago

Is there a reason why it's so hard to support newer M chips after supporting an older one? Like so much harder than supporting a new generation Intel or AMD chip doesn't seem too hard in comparison.

zer0zzz•7m ago

1) Intel and AMD help to implement support in Linux before their chips even ship. Actually a sanitized version of the Intel graphics ISA bspec is actually available to the OSS community too.

Apple on the other hand provides no support. The one nice thing they did do is allow their bootloader to boot non-apple signed OSes. They do not do this on iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, Watches, or homepods btw.

2) The GPU ISA changes drastically and often. Its not entirely uncommon for the entire instruction set to change entirely within one generation. Every change to the ISA would require an entire round of new reverse engineering (I suspect, ive never reversed).

worldsavior•7m ago

They change the arch and add new features all the time. In M4 they added new kernel protections which now they need to somehow emulate.

sroussey•6m ago

M1/M2 were pretty similar.

M3 had gigantic GPU changes.

M4 had some security stuff added, and M5 much more so. Not sure how/if those can be disabled. Others can be explain why this matters better than I can.

thfuran•6m ago

Because Intel/AMD regularly contribute kernel changes to maintain support for their own hardware, whereas Apple keeps making undocumented changes that Asahi has to reverse engineer.

codepoet80•16m ago

Have they fixed the touchy trackpad issues? Super impressive work, and I want to want this, but...

weinzierl•5m ago

Relevant 39C3 talk from three weeks ago:

Porting Linux to Apple Silicon

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...

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Find 'Abbey Road when type 'Beatles abbey rd': Fuzzy/Semantic search in Postgres

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When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries

What "The Best" Looks Like

There is an AI code review bubble

Not all Chess960 positions are equally complex

OSS ChatGPT WebUI – 530 Models, MCP, Tools, Gemini RAG, Image/Audio Gen

Things I've learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager

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OpenFlexure Microscope

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Show HN: Only 1 LLM can fly a drone

The Holy Grail of Linux Binary Compatibility: Musl and Dlopen

Exactitude in Science – Borges (1946) [pdf]

Notice of Collective Action Lawsuit Against Workday, INC

Google Books has been effectively killed by the last algorithm update

The browser is the sandbox

Text Is King

After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

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Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'

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