Final week ZDNet reported Linux had added upstream help for the Apple M1 Professional, M1 Max, and M1 Extremely chips after which concluded that “newer Mac homeowners can sit up for operating Linux on their M1-powered machines.”
Saturday Asahi Linux known as ZDNet’s story “deceptive and borderline false,” posting on Twitter that “You will be unable to run Ubuntu nor another commonplace distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please do not get your hopes up.”
We’re constantly upstreaming kernel options, and 6.2 notably provides gadget bushes and fundamental boot help for M1 Professional/Max/Extremely machines. Nevertheless, there may be nonetheless an extended highway earlier than upstream kernels are usable on laptops. There is no such thing as a trackpad/keyboard help upstream but.
When you can boot an upstream 6.2 kernel on desktops (M1 Mac Mini, M1 Max/Extremely Mac Studio) and do helpful issues with it, that’s solely the case for 16K web page measurement kernel builds. No generic ARM64 distro ships 16K kernels at present, to our information.
Our aim is to upstream every thing, however that does not imply distros immediately get Apple Silicon help. As with many different platforms, there may be some integration work required. Distros have to bundle our userspace tooling and, presently, supply 16K kernels. Sooner or later, as soon as 4K kernel builds are considerably usable, you possibly can count on zero-integration distros to considerably work on these machines (i.e. some {hardware} will work, however not all, or solely partially). This must be adequate so as to add a third-party repo with the mixing packages.
However for out-of-the-box {hardware} help, distros might want to work with us to get every thing proper. We’re already working with some, and we count on to announce official Apple Silicon help for a mainstream distro within the close to future. Simply not fairly but!
