Asahi Linux Now Officially Supports M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max Macs

Asahi Linux now officially supports Macs powered by the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max, extending the project's native Linux port beyond the M1 and M2 generations. Compatibility with the chips and Macs that use them has been merged into the installer, according to a September 6 post on the project's blog.



Almost everything available on M1 and M2 machines now "just works" on M3, the developers say. That includes the webcam, internal microphones, USB up to the hardware limit of USB 3 10Gb/s, hardware-accelerated video decoding including AV1, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.


The two major exceptions are full DCP support and the GPU. The project warns users not to expect performant or power-efficient 3D acceleration for now, with more news on both areas promised in the coming months. The incomplete DCP implementation also affects sleep and HDMI. Sleep currently does not work because of limitations with the firmware-provided framebuffer and will be addressed once full DCP support is wired up for M3, while the HDMI port on equipped MacBooks is currently disabled.

The M3 Ultra Mac Studio remains unsupported. For other compatible M3 Macs, the new functionality is gated behind the installer's Expert mode while the work remains fresh. Users who want to try it can run "curl -L https://alx.sh/ | EXPERT=1 sh" in a macOS terminal and follow the prompts. After installation, the project advises running "dnf upgrade --refresh" to update the system.

Asahi aims to remove the Expert mode requirement in time for the Fedora Linux 45 beta release in a couple of weeks, barring major regressions or other showstopping issues. The project credits years of work from multiple contributors, many of whom were able to access M3 hardware through supporter funding on OpenCollective and GitHub Sponsors.