r/AsahiLinux

I have an M1 Max would this operating system have any faults or dose it have any bugs I should prepare for if I run this bare metal

As someone using ARM64 Ubuntu daily on an X Elite laptop, and also considering Asahi for my Macbook M1, here's a few thoughts I had on the two platforms.

Hardware

The X Elite is roughly equivalent to a MBP M2 in performance. The new X Elite 2 is roughly equivalent to a MBP M4. X Elite laptops often have 500 nit 120hz OLED screens (better than Mac), but no haptic touchpads and no smart speaker amplification like Asahi Audio. X Elite have generous specs (16/32GB RAM, 1TB storage), and previous gen models are under $1000.

Linux on X Elite

Since Jan 2026 everything works including sound, webcam, charge limit threshold, and usb-c displays. Support is extremely device dependent - basically only 3 laptops (2 Lenovo, 1 Dell) are daily driver level. Suspend technically works, but loses 4.5% battery an hour. Normal usage is now down to about 4W-7W power draw (low-moderate screen brightness). Unlike Asahi the webcam ISP hasn't been reverse engineered, so currently quality is acceptable but not great. Qualcomm's gpu driver Freedreno is open source and under active development.

Progress

Slow but steady, often driven by Qualcomm engineers themselves. Qualcomm's priorities are Windows on ARM and IoT Linux, but some of their engineers are Linux enthusiasts (such as Hans de Goede) and are allowed to do things which benefit desktop Linux too. Things like 4K120Hz, 3W power draw, 2-3% suspend loss, look to be mainlined for kernel 7.1 or 7.2.

The new X Elite 2 models from Lenovo have similar SoC to the 1st generation, so should get supported much more rapidly than the 2 years it took to get X1 to work well.

Future

Qualcomm may never be interested in explicitly supporting Desktop Linux, but unless they make radical changes to their architecture there shouldn't be any roadblocks. Probably their webcam ISP and speaker DSP will never be available, but as softISP matures and with the correct pipewire digital audio filters or Room Eq Wizard tuning, these aren't huge issues.

A Macbook Pro M2 with working usb c display support running Asahi is still superior to anything Qualcomm based. But it seems to me that when Linux is up and running on X2, probably this summer (e.g. Lenovo Slim 7x 2026) that may no longer be the case.

Summary

Asahi Linux is a Herculean feat of reverse-engineering to get Linux working on premium hardware, but improving it further and for new generations seems very hard. Ubuntu X Elite is a process of small patches (from both Qualcomm and the community) and configuration tweaks, with little reverse-engineering, that is slowly but constantly improving.

Anyone have luck getting the Steam Controller (2026) working on Asahi? Steam isn’t recognizing it and it’s stuck in “lizard mode.”

I have a Mac M1 Air from 2020. been using it for 6 years, and I'm tired of it now. I wanted to ask if there's any other Linux distro Asahi supports, and is Asahi viable? Is it safe? And does it run well on M-series Macs?

I finally got waydroid working.. Followed this guide to build the images.. And after a day of fixing everything up.. I got both android and roblox running on asahi.

https://preview.redd.it/taa3fkmiphzg1.png?width=2560&format=png&auto=webp&s=faeb7e62958681d438326c929489e005fcf65723

https://preview.redd.it/mzc3v0ccphzg1.png?width=875&format=png&auto=webp&s=cf59f4410997ac1878104c02531b25450a902e12

I put the images I built up on github for everyone https://github.com/yuk1n0w/waydroid-on-asahi
I'm still new to stuff like this so the scripts to fix the mount and network issues might be broken but I did try using codex to help fix it so it should be good..

Since, I've updated to Fedora 44 and all the other latest updates that might have come my idle power draw on m1 MacBook air have been better. This is all anecdotal and I've not done any tests, but I've been falling asleep with a tv-show from my Jellyfin Server and the Mac usually died when I woke up again. But that have since stopped.

Has there been any improvments to the idle power draw lately? Or am I just imagining things haha.

Edit: I did update to the fairydust kernel for USB-C display support, maybe there was improvements there?

I was triying to change my DE, i configured all i need in hyprland but i notices that firefox uses too much CPU, thats because it isnt recognizing the drivers por hardware acceleration. Does anyone know how to fix this, ive seen people using hyprland but never seen them complaining about this.

Merge email text:

Hej,

This series adds initial device trees for M3 Apple silicon devices. The
device trees contain only a minimal set of hardware not going much
beyond the minimum required for booting kernel and initramfs and
verify via serial console that the hardware and drivers work.
The hardware with the exception of the interrupt controller is
compatible with the M1 and M2 SoCs and the existing drivers.
`make dtbs_check` fails due to already applied and dropped apple,i2c
dt-bindings change (commit c5f25f5800f5 ("dt-bindings: i2c: apple,i2c:
Add t8122 compatible") in
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wsa/linux.git
i2c/for-next).

Merge strategy:
Apply whole series ivia apple-soc / arm-soc to keep `make dtbs_check`
errors minimal. Otherwise no dependencies between the patches.
I might want to send another series which depends on this later in this
cycle.

Signed-off-by: Janne Grunau <j@jannau.net>
---
Changes in v2:
- specify merge strategy
- rebased onto v7.1-rc1 and thus dropping the aic3 comment
- collect Acked-by and Reviewed-by: tags
- drop already picked up changes:
  - [PATCH 1/9] dt-bindings: arm: cpus: Add Apple M3 CPU core compatibles (in v7.1-rc1)
  - [PATCH 5/9] dt-bindings: pinctrl: apple,pinctrl: Add t8122 compatible (in v7.1-rc1)
  - [PATCH 6/9] dt-bindings: i2c: apple,i2c: Add t8122 compatible (for v7.2-rc1)
- Link to v1: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20260320-apple-m3-initial-devicetrees-v1-0-5842e1e393a8@jannau.netHej,

This series adds initial device trees for M3 Apple silicon devices. The
device trees contain only a minimal set of hardware not going much
beyond the minimum required for booting kernel and initramfs and
verify via serial console that the hardware and drivers work.
The hardware with the exception of the interrupt controller is
compatible with the M1 and M2 SoCs and the existing drivers.
`make dtbs_check` fails due to already applied and dropped apple,i2c
dt-bindings change (commit c5f25f5800f5 ("dt-bindings: i2c: apple,i2c:
Add t8122 compatible") in
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wsa/linux.git
i2c/for-next).

Merge strategy:
Apply whole series ivia apple-soc / arm-soc to keep `make dtbs_check`
errors minimal. Otherwise no dependencies between the patches.
I might want to send another series which depends on this later in this
cycle.

Signed-off-by: Janne Grunau <j@jannau.net>
---
Changes in v2:
- specify merge strategy
- rebased onto v7.1-rc1 and thus dropping the aic3 comment
- collect Acked-by and Reviewed-by: tags
- drop already picked up changes:
  - [PATCH 1/9] dt-bindings: arm: cpus: Add Apple M3 CPU core compatibles (in v7.1-rc1)
  - [PATCH 5/9] dt-bindings: pinctrl: apple,pinctrl: Add t8122 compatible (in v7.1-rc1)
  - [PATCH 6/9] dt-bindings: i2c: apple,i2c: Add t8122 compatible (for v7.2-rc1)
- Link to v1: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20260320-apple-m3-initial-devicetrees-v1-0-5842e1e393a8@jannau.net

https://preview.redd.it/o22mo6e543zg1.png?width=1380&format=png&auto=webp&s=9dea6a04728ad2e4485b0d2be550d72630398136

Hey! I wanted to learn JS so I built this little GNOME extension.

Not sure if it’s worth releasing, let me know what you think!

Thanks

Hi, i have fun with Asahi for i while but now i need to remove it to sell my macbook. Is there any similar script to the install process to remove it?

Hi,

Thanks for this amazing work.

I'm just wondering why the installer uses macOS 13.5 as the stub in the installation process, instead of, say, the latest one or the version the user has, or any other version.

Is there any technical reason for this?

And, regarding the main macOS installation in the same disk, should I keep that up-to-date or is there a risk that an upgrade would not allow booting asahi in the future?

So I'm gonna get Fedora Asahi on my Mac M1 Air soon, but I wanted to ask. what should i download and what should i do once i boot into fedora asahi.

So rn I’m using fedora asahi Linux, but I’m thinking of switching to ALARM asahi Linux since I heard a lot abt it. Is it safe tho? Is it viable?

So I have a 256GB, 16GB ram M1 MacBook Air, and I wanted to know if it's possible to get Void Linux. I have a Pendrive, a USB-C dock. I wanted to know if it would be able to install void-linux? by making the partition via Asahi then using the Asahi Linux installation ISO to install the distro.

hey,

so I’ve been using Asahi with KDE for two days now, in general it’s working really nice, I feel like it will become my main distribution. However, there are two things that are scaring me a bit:

1. The battery seems to be heated all the time, no matter what I run on the OS. It may be even idle, but the battery is still somehow hot - it didn’t happen like that on macOS.

2. Even though the loudness of speakers is set to like 50%, the system notifications seem to be really, really loud - I saw that there’s a separate switch for notification loudness, but for some reason it didn’t change anything. The first time I booted Asahi I thought it was going to destroy the speakers - it was so loud and distorted (kinda).

Overall, thank you for making the distro so nice!