What would be the best way to dual boot MacOS and Asahi on a Macbook M2 ?
simply using the installer from https://asahilinux.org
the devs strongly discourage single-booting
Asahi Linux on M3
161–170 of 359 posts
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
> every few years of course That sounds like a you thing; I've kept my macs for at least 5 years. My M1 is still going strong and I haven't felt any pressure to upgrade.
2 more years and your mac will not install the latest MacOS version, which then means you will no longer be able to update any software on your own computer or install any new software either. If you could install linux or any other OS on it you would be able to use it for decades to come, but instead you will be forced to buy another new shiny Apple box. You will probably argue thats ok because you would have wanted…
Which will make it 7 years old. That is hardly a machine that must be replaced “every few years”
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#163[dead]
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Their Silicon was written to be OS agnostic, Apple's was not. i don't think that's accurate. the M series chips and memory architecture enable capabilities for the OS software to take advantage of, and the software and hardware teams get to collaborate to be ready for a simultaneously launch, but nothing about that is macos specific, just that they're on the same side of a walled garden.
Apple silicon has features specifically designed for macOS or software running on macOS. e.g.: Rosetta 2. From Wikipedia: One of the key reasons why Rosetta 2 provides such a high level of translation efficiency is the support of x86-64 memory ordering in the M1 SoC.[12] The SoC also has dedicated instructions for computing x86 flags. So, Apple always adds one more thing to their hardware to enable their magic. [0]:…
ya but that one is usable on linux, here is a real world project taking advantage of it: https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/pull/2665
you can find more apple-specific stuff by digging around in these docs: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/subsystems/
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. Right now, yes. But Linux support is like freedom of speech in a dictatorship. Everyone makes fun of it and says it's useless but fundamentally the powers that be are deathly afraid of it ever turning the tide.
Sure but that's not really their point. They're not saying that Linux is a joke nor that it's useless; they're saying that the amount of people installing Linux on their Macs is so small that it wouldn't make financial sense for Apple to support them. Knowing how much an engineer gets paid, even staffing a small team to supporting Linux would cost Apple a couple million each year. That's not even taking support into…
They had a revenue of $416 billion in 2025.
That would be like you buying something at the dollar store.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#166Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#167I'm not sure I understand the target user for Asahi. Is this someone that only wants to run Linux and wants to use their GPU on Linux? Seems like this is not the case, yet. Or, is this for someone that wants to dual boot and use Linux sometimes, and then reboot into MacOS when they want to use the GPU?
It‘s going to be a godsend for people with M1 macs when Apple or App vendors decide to drop support for them.
The hardware is super capable and will make a great fileserver, TV box or HomeAssistant instance once I‘m done using it as daily driver.
Similarly, because of distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, I can keep using a 15y old Samsung notebook with a modern firefox, whereas Windows 8 already broke Samsung‘s display brightness driver and thermal management, and 10&11 are entirely unusable.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#168This is great news. Hoping for M4 to the latest chip. We need Ashai to support more chips.
Me too. I've got an M3 Mac Mini running as a linux server with parallels, but it has a weird NIC bug that crashes the mini every few weeks, keen to get of macOS and it's buggy NIC driver. (really don't want to send it into an Apple repair shop, there are non local here, it's a whole thing)
Can't wait to get Linux running on it native.
Re: Asahi Linux on M3
#169I'm not sure I understand the target user for Asahi. Is this someone that only wants to run Linux and wants to use their GPU on Linux? Seems like this is not the case, yet. Or, is this for someone that wants to dual boot and use Linux sometimes, and then reboot into MacOS when they want to use the GPU?
I bought a Mac mini M4 simply because it was very cheap and the M4 chip offers great performance. It is currently mounted on the back of my TV and serves as a media station. It runs macOS, but I have no particular interest in the operating system, nor do I own any other Apple hardware. (So no synergies.) It is alright (and better than Win11) but the preinstalled software does not even properly update without an Apple…
Same same. I love Mac, and macOS, but as a server, macOS is terrible, and bloated, and a pain to run docker/podman.