It's important to wait for the Mac to shut down completely. I was a little surprised how long the partitioning took (pictured above)-almost an hour on my M1 mini! At the end, this warning appeared: Some of the options, if chosen without understanding, could lead to a bit of a degraded experience if you choose poorly, so don't just dive in on your main or only Mac if you rely on it day to day! If you want to get more comfortable with the process, I highly recommend reading Asahi's Introduction to Apple Silicon. The prompts are fairly straightforward, though you should probably not attempt installing Asahi (it's alpha after all!) unless you're familiar with at least the basics of the command line and Linux. The alx.sh URL just loads in an installer from and some data files to kick off the installation process. Since I'm okay with completely nuking this Mac back to factory defaults if things go wrong, I'll take them up on the offer.Īt some point the Asahi community might also offer an App download or USB-stick-based installer too, but right now the easiest way to get all the partitions in order is to run a script from their site. The instructions in the blog post give a curl | sudo bash style instruction to run curl | sh. So instead of selling my M1 Mac mini, I wanted to see if I could repurpose it: I run a lot of services on Raspberry Pis-which have ARM64-architecture CPUs just like the M1 Mac mini-and it would be interesting to see if I could run services on the M1 mini-way faster than on the Pis.įull support of all M1 features (most notably, the GPU) isn't complete, and it's nowhere near a final release, but I thought it would be fun to try it out, and see how well Linux (at least one distro) runs on Apple's ARM64 architecture. If you haven't heard of Asahi, it's a Linux distribution based on Arch Linux that aims to bring a polished Linux experience on Apple Silicon Macs (all the current M1 Macs, and any new Apple Silicon Macs that come in the future). But just last week, Asahi Linux announced their first alpha release. Usually, I sell off my old workstation to offset the cost of the new one. After upgrading my main workstation to a Mac Studio, I decided to break tradition.

Mac linux distro compatibility