Linux on Apple Silicon: The good, the bad, and the ugly

I took Fedora Linux for a spin on my MacBook Air M2 and here's everything you need to know if you're interested in getting the best of both worlds.

This is possible thanks to the Asahi Linux project. You get a fast, smooth desktop experience on your Mac with Fedora 40, KDE Plasma 6 (or GNOME 46), and a 100% Wayland environment with XWayland as a bridge for legacy apps. The installation can be done by running a single command from macOS to set up a dual boot system so you can use Linux or macOS depending on what you need to work on.

Something you need to be aware of from the start is that some of your hardware won't work: USB-C displays, Thunderbolt/USB4, the microphone, and Touch ID. Since you can still boot into macOS when you need any of those, this may not be a deal-breaker for you.

Pros:

• Easy installation.
• Fast system running directly on your Mac.
• Firefox is preconfigured to disable ad measurement, which is a nice touch for privacy. Update: Asahi confirmed to me they don't customize this configuration. It's unclear why it is this way for me.
• NordVPN works although it took me a couple of tries.
• On KDE's Discover (the app store) you can add Flathub and "Snap" (presumably Snapcraft) plus the RPM Fusion repositories for finding additional apps.
• Asahi Linux now supports gaming on Steam. Although it claims to work on M2 systems, it did not work on mine. Maybe it's only tested on M1 processors.

Cons:

• Many Linux apps are available only for processors with amd64 architecture (Apple Silicon is arm64). That means you can't run Docker Desktop, Spotify, Homebrew, 1Password desktop (though you can run the browser add-on), and others.
• There's a bug on the KDE settings screen where the touchpad configuration options are not visible unless you access the setting specifically from the "Most used" shortcut.
• The search feature on Discover doesn't find all Flathub apps even after adding the repo.
• I was not able to add Snap to Discover even though snapd is installed. There's a bug where the checkbox to include the repo doesn't actually do anything. There's also a bug where Discover throws an error every time you reboot.
• There's a NordVPN bug where it connects to a random country every time you reboot and you have to manually connect to the one you want.

So, should you install Linux on your Mac? It depends on your needs. I have an Apple Studio Display 5K that I can't use because there's no support for Thunderbolt or USB-C displays. I also need Docker Desktop for my development workflow. I also use the 1Password desktop app and its integrated SSH agent to store my SSH keys and authorize my requests to GitHub with Touch ID.

Because of all these points, I have to say it was a fun experiment but for my laptop I'll be going back to macOS where everything works. I will, of course, continue to use Linux on servers, virtual machines, containers, and IoT devices.

To delete Asahi Linux delete the relevant partitions.

Comments

[Willi]

Why would you install docker desktop on Linux? While it's not as horrendous as on Mac, it's still unnecessary with much overhead.
Just install it the classic way.

[santisbon]

It gives you an easy way to speed up the develop-test inner loop by using dockershim to share the image cache between the Docker engine and Kubernetes. It fits many people's use case very well.
As an aside, not sure where the hostility is coming from. This forum is a place where civility is expected. Telling someone what to do without knowing anything about their use case is not what experienced professionals do. Jumping into a solution without understanding requirements is always a bad idea. As the saying goes, assumption is the mother of all screwups.