Linux is not exactly “ready to run” on Apple silicon, but give it time
Enlarge / Everything Asahi Linux's four-person team has done to make Linux work on Apple's M-series chips is remarkable, but "ready to run" is a stretch. (credit: Apple/Asahi Linux)
It's an odd thing to see the leaders of an impressive open source project ask the press and their followers to please calm down and stop celebrating their accomplishments.
But that's the situation the Asahi Linux team finds itself in after many reports last week that the recently issued Linux 6.2 kernel made Linux "ready to run" on Apple's M-series hardware. It is true that upstream support for Apple's M1 chips is present in 6.2 and that the 6.2 kernel will gradually make its way into many popular distributions, including Ubuntu and Fedora. Work on Apple's integrated GPU by the four-person Asahi core team has come remarkably far. And founder Linus Torvalds himself is particularly eager to see Linux running on his favorite portable hardware, going so far as to issue a kernel in August 2022 from an M2 MacBook Air.
But the builders of the one Linux system that runs pretty well on Apple silicon are asking everybody to please just give it a moment.