While the Asahi Linux project has made good progress on bringing Linux to Apple Silicon hardware, much of the success and in turn upstreaming to the Linux kernel has been around the aging M1 and M2 Macs. Apple M3 and newer has been a struggle but progress is being made. One of the Asahi Linux developers shared the ability now to boot to the KDE Plasma desktop with the experimental Asahi Linux code on an M3 MacBook but without any GPU acceleration yet.
The initial Apple M3 hardware debuted back in 2023 while the Asahi Linux bring-up has been slow given engineering changes that have also carried on to the newer M4 and M5 hardware too. Paired with the reduced volunteer manpower, it’s been a slow process being able to enjoy Linux on newer Apple Macs. Asahi Linux developer Michael Reeves shared some progress though this week on the porting to the M3 hardware.
What exactly is the point of Linux on a Mac if there are so many other alternatives out there? Is it fun to reverse engineer adversarial hardware?
The point is the same as for any other laptop:
More specifically for the Mx MacBooks, they are best in class laptops in terms of battery life, performance per Watt, if you get all the drivers right that is. People like these devices in general but which they could use something else than Mac OS. They are by far the most wildly spread ARM computer on the user market today, which makes these prim candidates for Linux support, worthwhile to spend the effort and large community interest in this project.
There are many other AMD64 laptops but afaik there isn’t a single Linux focused Arm laptop. Tuxedo was working on one but found there were no advantages (in battery life or performance) of the Snapdragon X Elite over AMD64 processors (not helped by almost no official Linux support).
Theoretically with the X2 elite Tuxedo might reconsider but its highly unlikely, the core issues have not yet been addressed and there’s no reason to believe they will be.
As for why Apple instead of pushing for Snapdragon support, because there’s several models from many gems so supporting them is significantly harder. Also people actually use Apple hardware rather than snapdragon hardware (outside mobile users).