Linux is not exactly “ready to run” on Apple silicon, but give it time
It's an odd thing to see the leaders of an impressive open source project ask the press and their followers to please calm down and stop celebrating their accomplishments.
But that's the situation the Asahi Linux team finds itself in after many reports last week that the recently issued Linux 6.2 kernel made Linux "ready to run" on Apple's M-series hardware. It is true that upstream support for Apple's M1 chips is present in 6.2 and that the 6.2 kernel will gradually make its way into many popular distributions, including Ubuntu and Fedora. Work on Apple's integrated GPU by the four-person Asahi core team has come remarkably far. And founder Linus Torvalds himself is particularly eager to see Linux running on his favorite portable hardware, going so far as to issue a kernel in August 2022 from an M2 MacBook Air. But the builders of the one Linux system that runs pretty well on Apple silicon are asking everybody to please just give it a moment.
"You will not be able to run Ubuntu nor any other standard distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please don't get your hopes up," the Asahi Linux team tweeted on Sunday morning. In a threaded reply, they added, "We are continuously upstreaming kernel features, and 6.2 notably adds device trees and basic boot support for M1 Pro/Max/Ultra machines. However, there is still a long road before upstream kernels are usable on laptops. There is no trackpad/keyboard support upstream yet."
