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Asahi Linux, the project that aims to bring desktop Linux to Apple hardware with Apple silicon—the M series chips—is out with Fedora Asahi Remix 40. More hardware features are supported on Apple devices, the distribution based on Fedora Linux 40, ships with the new KDE Plasma 6 desktop and countless bugs have been squashed to be replaced with more.

Fedora Asahi Remix is ​​a “fully integrated distribution,” according to the Asahi team, and you can “expect a solid and high-quality experience with no unwanted surprises.” It supports all M1 and M2 devices in the MacBook, Mac Mini, Mac Studio and iMac lines. It’s OpenGL 4.6 and OpenGL ES 3.2 certified and comes with “the best Linux laptop audio you’ve ever heard.”

So, should you install it on your Mac? Keep scrolling down the Asahi release page and check the “Device Support” section. Most of Apple’s M-series devices still lack support for Thunderbolt and USB4, built-in microphones and Touch ID, as well as USB-C display support. Speakers are not supported on iMac. And HDMI audio is in rough shape, capable of “breaking the audio in the system completely.”

Still, for someone who uses an Apple laptop primarily as a portable device or simply connects to a monitor with less modern all-in-one cables, expect a desktop. Installing it is a single cURL command. Let’s try.

Pretty easy installation, given the purpose

The rest of this post was written in Fedora Asahi Remix 40, recently installed on an M2 MacBook Air. The Asahi install script was as useful and easy as a terminal script that resizes your hard drive can be. After choosing a size, choosing which version of Fedora Asahi to install (KDE by default, but GNOME or Server options are available), and reading an extended warning about how to properly reboot the machine in Fedora, I was almost there, but not quite there.

First you need to drop into the sterile Mac recovery environment by giving your new Linux partition permission to have an alternate security scheme. I was fine with this until the command prompt asked me to type which user approves this change, with no options to choose from. The macOS interface does a pretty thorough job of abstracting away your actual Unix username to the point where I had to guess several times to get it right. Make sure you save your own before logging in.

I finally got to the Fedora Asahi Remix desktop. I’m not very familiar with KDE in general, but it’s not hard to navigate. In a few hours of use, I encountered no crashes, no visual oddities, and only a bit of harsh speaker clipping when adjusting the volume. I set the keyboard to a reasonable facsimile for my familiar Mac hands (left command as control, changing alt+tab to control+tab). The touchpad settings lacked options for palm sensitivity, so after some random scrolling and selecting, I turned off touch to click.

The chicken-egg-chicken scenario

The biggest barrier to getting your ideal setup on Asahi Linux remains the architecture. Most software outside of Fedora’s own repositories is not available on 64-bit ARM (or “AArch64”), at least not without more extensive compilation and configuration work. That means no Slack or Steam for now. I know there are ways to get there, but since everything works so well in this Fedora-approved desktop, I’m not ready to scatter the parts over the grass just yet. As my colleague Andrew Cunningham noted in his Raspberry Pi 5 desktop experiment, using and engaging with Asahi Linux, Raspberry Pis, and other ARM variants of Linux can only help, although it will take time.

It’s easy to forget what a remarkable thing Asahi Linux is on a broad level. The fact that there is a common Linux distribution for this very new and purpose-built hardware is impressive in every way. With this, the second release of Fedora Remix, Asahi becomes an almost normal installation distribution, a reasonable place for computing. Where it goes from here should be exciting.