Asahi Linux

What hackers pick instead

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• DebianA community-run, free Linux distribution recommended for rock-solid stability, curated trustworthy package repositories and painless in-place upgrades; critics say stable packages are old and bug fixes rarely get backported.552recommend
• Fedora LinuxA mainstream, beginner-friendly Linux distro that mostly works out of the box and balances stability with current packages, though frequent release upgrades occasionally break things.437recommend
• Arch LinuxA rolling Linux distro praised for up-to-date, near-upstream packages, excellent wiki docs and installs that last for years, though updates can break things and much is manual.362recommend
• Linux MintA beginner-friendly Linux distro that feels familiar to Windows users, works out of the box with no ads or nagware, though major version upgrades and display quirks can be troublesome.277recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 457 comments. Each links to the original.

1. the Asahi effort is losing momentum. Core developers are going on to do other things, significant chunks (3922 commits) are still not merged upstream

   Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0”

2. Display quality, trackpad quality, overall form factor, and very high RAM space in a laptop would be the primary reasons I'd go with Asahi Linux.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2”

3. they had to implement their own bootloader chain and because of such overhead they need a lot of effort to port to each new apple SoC generation

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “The end of the AArch64 desktop experiment”

4. The Macbook M2 Air running Asahi Linux is easily my favorite Linux laptop ever, far superior to any Thinkpad or Dell XPS I've owned

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Framework Laptop 13 gets ARM processor with 12 cores via upgrade kit”

5. palm rejection on the (ginormous) Apple trackpad didn't work at all, rendering the whole thing unusable if you ever typed anything.

   Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Asahi Linux with Sway on the MacBook Air M2”

6. I've found that modern hardware has HUGE performance improvements (especially Intel, AMD, and Apple Silicon via the Asahi driver)

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years”

7. This is an Asahi Linux limitation, but I've seen various parts of the hardware not working when using other Linux distributions

   Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Gaming on Linux has never been more approachable”

8. Sure the drivers are anywhere from bad to non existent but that's not the same thing as being unable to run your own kernel.

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “macOS 26 breaks custom DNS settings including .internal”

9. Asahi Linux is like a light at the end of the tunnel for those users who were entirely left behind by the ARM transition.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2”

10. Support is imperfect and for a daily driver you can probably forget about using anything newer than an M2 at the moment.

    Mixed · Nov 2025

11. Linux doesn't even have full hardware support, much less efficient battery life on these now several year old devices.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 7.2”

12. the added value of „most powerful Linux/Arm64 laptop on the market” outweighs the few things that don’t work on Asahi

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19”

13. Asahi Linux[1] is unbelievably great on Apple Silicon. It's honestly the best Linux install experience I've ever had.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Homebrew no longer allows bypassing Gatekeeper for unsigned/unnotarized software”

14. Asahi is great on earlier models but it will certainly not support the M5 before its already multiple models behind.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Apple introduces the new MacBook Air with M5”

15. Up to the M2 series are supported pretty much fully. There are a few exceptions, but it does work quite well.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra”

16. I installed NixOS on Asahi on a whim a few months ago and I only rebooted to MacOS to resize the partition

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Apple introduces the new MacBook Air with M5”

17. Runs on M series macs, you keep your regular MacOS install the same. Installed from terminal, runs great.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Why Gentoo?”

18. battery life is nowhere near what you'll get from MacOS due to inability to go into low power sleep state

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra”

19. it works so incredibly well that I was thinking this might finally be the year linux takes the desktop

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Linux is good now; to feel like you actually own your PC, put Linux on it”

20. If this project diverts just a fraction of them from becoming e-waste for a little, it will be a win.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19”

21. These people are singlehandedly saving _millions_ of laptops from going to the landfill one day.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report”

22. I can also tell you that Linux runs 2x faster (often much more) for everything compared to macOS

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19”

23. Asahi still doesn't support a lot of basic things like: external displays, Thunderbolt, hardware accelerated video decoding, 120hz refresh rate

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Qualcomm Linux 2.0”

24. Every time I see Asahi doing new stuff, I install it on my m1 and m2, each time after a few weeks, I get tired of how fiddly it becomes.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Fedora Asahi Remix is now working on Apple M3”

25. As much as I like Linux this kind of tinkering is only for people with more time and less expectations about the experience

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Asahi Linux on M3”

26. They basically take 2 years per new chip, when Apple releases one yearly. At this point, they'll never catch up.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble”

27. Thunderbolt and DP Alt mode aren’t supported, and there are issues with power management (sleep/wake).

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Minisforum Stuffs Entire Arm Homelab in the MS-R1”

28. the rest will take significant time (and might never materialize, it's difficult to reverse engineer)

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “Apple Introduces MacBook Pro with All‑New M5 Pro and M5 Max”

29. Speakers and mic, external displays, fingerprint reader, suspend are the sore points I've read about

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729”

30. With the way Asahi Linux, WINE and ReactOS operate - no AI, reverse-engineering has to be very carefully documented - it is much, much less likely someone can complain about violating laws and licenses.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Asahi Linux on M3”

31. Linux on Mac is absolutely a reality, and Apple specifically supported it by deliberately leaving a documented/supported mechanism for another OS kernel to be loaded.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Tim Cook to become Apple Executive Chairman”

32. Apple created a boot loader that allows the device owner to install and run an unsigned OS like Asahi Linux without degrading the system's security

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18”

33. The Asahi folks have already talked about how some of the things in the boot loader only make sense to allow non-Apple OSes.

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “New 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6”

34. Asahi had to fight to exist, especially early on when they essentially had to reimplement much of the graphics pipeline.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “The Forgetful CPU (Linux on M4)”

35. progress will be faster once the projects finishes getting their code merged into the existing Linux kernel and distros

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19”

36. Asahi is a very cool project, and worthwhile if someone goes into it well aware of the major tradeoffs they're making

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Show HN: Open-source engine running Gemma 4 26B in 2 GB RAM on any M-series Mac”

37. Asahi is specifically doing all the challenging RE work that typically gets passed over in favor of flashy headlines.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0”

38. a significant portion of the project has been upstreamed to the kernel at this point, so the bar is set very high

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra”

39. Consider Asahi Linux limited feature support for the M1, after all these years, this is not going to ever happen.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “I turned a $80 RK3562 Android tablet into a Debian Linux workstation”

40. It works unreasonably well given that there is something like five different translation layers to make it work!

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Asahi Linux on M3”