Asahi Linux now officially supports Apple's M3 series Macs. The support was merged into the installer, which means you can run a mainline-quality Linux distribution on current Apple Silicon without waiting for community patches — or buying non-Apple hardware.
The announcement came as a blog post titled "M2: Episode 1 (or, Asahi Linux on M3)" from Asahi Linux developer James Calligeros, published 2026-09-06. Linux support for the M3 series SoCs is now "in a state where almost everything supported on the M1 and M2 series machines just works."
What Works on M3
The feature list is solid for day-to-day use:
- Webcam
- Internal microphones
- USB, up to the hardware limit of USB 3 at 10 Gb/s
- Hardware-accelerated video decoding, including AV1
- WiFi
- Bluetooth
The phrase "almost everything" is doing a lot of work, though. The two major exceptions are the two things that matter most if you're doing anything graphical.
The Catch: GPU and Sleep
The Asahi team is blunt about the current state:
Do not expect performant or power-efficient 3D acceleration right now.
Full DCP (Display Coprocessor) support is not wired up for M3 yet, and that cascades into two concrete limitations:
| Limitation | Consequence |
|---|---|
| No full DCP support | GPU is not performant or power-efficient for 3D acceleration |
| No sleep support | Laptop sleep does not work due to firmware-provided framebuffer limits |
| HDMI disabled | The HDMI port on equipped MacBooks is dead without DCP |
So if you want a Linux box that runs a compositor smoothly, plays games, or drives an external display over HDMI, the M3 is not ready for you. If you need a terminal, a web browser, and a compiler, it's fine.
How to Install
Support is gated behind the installer's Expert mode. From a macOS terminal:
curl -L https://alx.sh/ | EXPERT=1 sh
After installing, run a full system upgrade:
dnf upgrade --refresh
The Asahi team plans to drop the Expert requirement in time for the Fedora Linux 45 beta, "barring any major regressions or other showstopping issues."
Device Coverage
MacBooks and iMacs are supported — M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. The Mac Studio (M3 Ultra) is not yet supported.
On the mainline kernel side, upstreaming is still ongoing. The initial M3 support for basic boot is in the mainline Linux kernel, but various patches remain for upstreaming in Linux 7.4+, per the Phoronix coverage.
Who Should Care
I'd reach for this if you're running an M3 MacBook as a primary development machine and want a Linux environment without a VM or dual-boot waiting game. For local AI work on Apple Silicon, note that Asahi's GPU driver situation means you're mostly CPU-bound — the same constraint I've covered with other unified-memory platforms.
The other angle is practical: this is a milestone for the broader Apple Silicon Linux story. Every generation of M-series hardware so far has eventually gotten usable, mainline-quality Linux support. M3 reaching "officially supported" status is a signal that the pattern holds — and that older M1/M2 hardware, which Asahi already supports more fully, is the safer bet if you need GPU acceleration today.
The catch is real. No sleep on a laptop is a dealbreaker for many workflows — closing the lid and losing your session is not something most people will put up with. If you're on a Mac mini or an iMac plugged in at a desk, sleep matters less. I'd treat this as a functional desktop Linux box, not a laptop you can actually carry around.
I'm also watching what happens with the GPU work. The Asahi team says they'll have more news "in the coming months." If the M3 GPU driver reaches the level of maturity the M1/M2 drivers have, this becomes a genuinely compelling platform.
For now: if you need 3D acceleration or an external HDMI display, wait. If you need a Linux terminal on current Apple hardware, go install it.
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