Is this legal?Īs long as no code is taken from macOS to build the Linux support, the result is completely legal to distribute and for end-users to use, as it would not be a derivative work of macOS. That means that, unlike iOS devices, Apple does not intend to lock down what OS you can use on Macs (though they probably won’t help with the development). Does Apple allow this? Don’t you need a jailbreak?Īpple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon Macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices. Advanced users will always be free to use the distribution of their choice and add the necessary patches/software themselves before this happens. We expect that support will eventually trickle up and back down to other distributions.

The distribution will be a convenient package for easy installation by end-users and give them access to bleeding-edge versions of the software we develop. The majority of the work resides in hardware support, drivers, and tools, and it will be upstreamed to the relevant projects. We will eventually release a remix of Arch Linux ARM, packaged for installation by end-users, as a distribution of the same name. Is this a Linux distribution?Īsahi Linux is an overall project to develop support for these Macs. The first target will be the M1 Mac Mini. FAQ What devices will be supported?Īll Apple M1 Macs are in scope, as well as future generations as development time permits. The Asahi Linux logo and website were designed by soundflora*.

旭りんご ( asahi ringo) is what we know as the McIntosh Apple, the apple variety that gave the Mac its name. The nameĪsahi means “rising sun” in Japanese, and it is also the name of an apple cultivar. In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open-source driver for it.Īsahi Linux is developed by a thriving community of free and open source software developers.

Doing this requires a tremendous amount of work, as Apple Silicon is an entirely undocumented platform. Our goal is not just to make Linux run on these machines but to polish it to the point where it can be used as a daily OS. Asahi Linux is a project and community with the goal of porting Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, starting with the 2020 M1 Mac Mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro.

Origin osx supported versions