'I Tried Running Linux On an Apple Silicon Mac and Regretted It'
4 156Installing Linux on a MacBook Air "turned out to be a very underwhelming experience," according to the tech news site MakeUseOf: The thing about Apple silicon Macs is that it's not as simple as downloading an AArch64 ISO of your favorite distro and installing it. Yes, the M-series chips are ARM-based, but that doesn't automatically make the whole system compatible in the same way most traditional x86 PCs are. Pretty much everything in modern MacBooks is custom. The boot process isn't standard UEFI like on most PCs. Apple has its own boot chain called iBoot. The same goes for other things, like the GPU, power management, USB controllers, and pretty much every other hardware component. It is as proprietary as it gets.
This is exactly what the team behind Asahi Linux has been working toward. Their entire goal has been to make Linux properly usable on M-series Macs by building the missing pieces from the ground up. I first tried it back in 2023, when the project was still tied to Arch Linux and decided to give it a try again in 2026. These days, though, the main release is called Fedora Asahi Remix, which, as the name suggests, is built on Fedora rather than Arch...
For Linux on Apple Silicon, the article lists three major disappointments:
- "External monitors don't work unless your MacBook has a built-in HDMI port."
- "Linux just doesn't feel fully ready for ARM yet. A lot of applications still aren't compiled for ARM, so software support ends up being very hit or miss." (And even most of the apps tested with FEX "either didn't run properly or weren't stable enough to rely on.")
- Asahi "refused to connect to my phone's hotspot," they write (adding "No, it wasn't an iPhone").
4 comments
Re: Over (Score: 5, Insightful)
by af1n ( 1031572 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @05:43AM (#65991554)
All good, but it's a single use device. Once anything fails, you have to thorw it away because it is not repairable. If you are wealthy it's not a problem, you just buy stuff and throw it away when you are no longer interested in it. There are numerous issues with apple laptops: - soldiered memory, if it dies you need expensive equipment to fix it - soldiered SSD drive - if it dies Apple recommends a 500$ - 1000$ motherboard replacement. Not to mention that the only supported operating system is MacOS. So after 8 years and EOL you are screwed. My kids are using 10 year old thinkpads that still perform great and have latest security updates on Linux.
Re:An interesting project (Score: 5, Interesting)
by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @04:33AM (#65991516)
I admin a bunch of Linux servers and workstations, and my daily driver for that has been a Mac. Admittedly mine is a simpler use case than what you're doing - I mean, mostly I just need a terminal, python to run ansible, ssh, and I like bbedit for editing - but macOS works as well as Linux for my particular use case.
My biggest complaint is - I feel like Apple's software quality has been gradually trending downhill over the past decade or more. The hardware engineering is still first-rate, but the OS and Apple-developed tools are just 'meh' at best. Some of the Tahoe bugs, even at 26.3, are absurd... which is why I'm sticking w/ Sonoma as long as it gets support.
But as to the actual topic: The Asahi folks are quite clear regarding what works and what doesn't work, and with which Apple processors. None of that should've been a surprise for the author, IMHO.
Linux fully ready for ARM??? (Score: 5, Insightful)
by HuskyDog ( 143220 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @04:32AM (#65991514)
Whilst Linux might struggle with propitiatory Mac hardware, I don't think that this is a fundamental issue with Linux and ARM. For several years my desktop, which I use every day, has been a ARM64 based Raspberry Pi running Gentoo Linux. I have to say that I don't experience any significant problems and the great majority of the software seems to work just fine.
Sheer, unadulderated bollocks (Score: 5, Informative)
by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Monday February 16, 2026 @04:57AM (#65991530)
The difficulties described are consequences of Apple’s proprietary platform design, not evidence that Linux or ARM are immature ecosystems. Conflating ISA compatibility with platform openness is a fundamental misunderstanding of how hardware enablement works.
“Linux doesn’t feel ready for ARM yet. Many apps aren’t compiled for ARM.”
This is the weakest argument in the article.
ARM Linux is widely deployed on:
Billions of Android devices (Linux kernel)
Most cloud hyperscalers (Graviton, Ampere)
Raspberry Pi ecosystem
Embedded and industrial systems
Major distros eg:
Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian have mature AArch64 support.
And today most open-source software compiles cleanly for ARM64.
Browsers, compilers, containers, dev tools are fully native.
Even Steam supports ARM via translation layers.
The real issue is x86-only proprietary binaries.
That’s not Linux-on-ARM immaturity.
That’s legacy x86 ecosystem inertia.
Even Apple solves this via Rosetta — a translation layer.
Linux uses FEX or box64 for similar purposes.
Translation instability platform immaturity.
I guess the source is MSN though ...