Asahi Linux Now Officially Supports Apple M3 Macs

Asahi Linux now officially supports Apple's M3 chip family. After years of running only on M1 and M2 machines, the reverse-engineering project behind Apple Silicon Linux support has merged M3 code into its official installer — meaning the latest MacBooks and iMacs now boot Linux without hand-applied patches.

The announcement came from James Calligeros, one of the project's core maintainers, posted on the official Asahi Linux blog on September 6, 2026. It's the team's first standalone blog post outside its regular progress reports in a while — a sign they consider this milestone worth calling out on its own.

What works, what doesn't

According to the announcement, almost everything that worked on M1/M2 now works on M3 too:

• Built-in webcam and microphones
• USB, capped at the USB 3 hardware limit of 10 Gb/s
• Hardware-accelerated video decoding, including AV1
• WiFi and Bluetooth

Two big gaps remain: full DCP support and the GPU. No GPU driver means no high-performance 3D acceleration yet — the machine boots and runs, but don't expect gaming or heavy graphics workloads.

The missing DCP support has two concrete consequences: sleep doesn't work, due to limitations with the firmware-provided framebuffer, and the HDMI port on MacBooks equipped with one is currently disabled. For laptop users, that's not a minor detail — sleep is something people rely on dozens of times a day.

Why it's gated behind Expert mode

Because much of this code is fresh, M3 support currently ships only through the installer's Expert mode, not by default. Installing it means running:

curl -L https://alx.sh/ | EXPERT=1 sh

The team is aiming to drop the Expert mode requirement in time for the Fedora Linux 45 beta release, expected in a couple of weeks. That's assuming no major regressions show up first. After installing, a dnf upgrade --refresh is needed to pull the latest updates.

Current support covers MacBooks and iMacs running M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. The Mac Studio's M3 Ultra isn't supported yet — its dual-die design typically requires substantially more reverse-engineering work than the standard variants.

So what for developers

For anyone following Asahi Linux, this is proof the project keeps moving forward without any official cooperation from Apple. But there are a few things worth weighing before installing it on a daily driver:

• Not a full-time macOS replacement on M3 yet — missing sleep and GPU acceleration are two significant limitations for daily workflows, especially anything graphics-heavy or battery-sensitive.
• Good for experimentation — developers who want a real ARM64 Linux target for building and testing, or who are curious about Apple Silicon's architecture, can dual-boot it alongside macOS.
• Watch the GPU driver progress — the team says news on that front is coming "in the coming months." That's the milestone that will determine whether Asahi becomes seriously usable on M3, not just bootable.

The more interesting part isn't the feature checklist — it's that a volunteer-driven reverse-engineering project is keeping pace with Apple hardware that shipped nearly two years ago, without much lag compared to mainstream x86 Linux hardware support. For an effort with zero official documentation from Apple, that's a genuinely impressive clip.

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Content assisted by AI (Amy 🌸). Reviewed by the author.