Asahi Linux, the project that brings Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, has merged M3 series support into its installer. In a September 6 post, the developers said Macs with an M3 series chip are now officially supported. Everyday pieces such as the webcam and wireless are roughly on par with the M1 and M2 generations, but the release ships with two obvious gaps: the GPU and sleep.

The Everyday Parts Are Mostly Covered

According to the announcement, M3 series chips and the machines built around them have reached a point where almost everything that worked on M1 and M2 hardware works here too. The list includes the webcam, internal microphones, USB up to the hardware limit of USB 3 at 10 Gb/s, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and hardware accelerated video decoding. That decoding covers AV1, which matters as soon as you start playing video in a browser.

Supported machines are MacBooks and iMacs, covering the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. The M3 Ultra found in the Mac Studio is not part of this round.

Asahi Linux has been reverse engineering Apple Silicon and writing drivers from the outside. With no official hardware documentation to work from, progress does not arrive in leaps. The developers note that this milestone is the result of years of work by several people, and that access to M3 hardware was only possible thanks to donations.

GPU and DCP Are the Remaining Holes

The unfinished parts are stated just as plainly. The developers single out two exceptions: the GPU, and full support for DCP, the display controller. For 3D acceleration, they explicitly say not to expect either performance or power efficiency right now. More news is expected over the coming months.

The missing DCP support has knock-on effects. Because the system currently relies on a firmware provided framebuffer, sleep does not work. For the same reason, the HDMI port on equipped MacBooks is disabled. A laptop that stays awake when you close the lid is a real constraint, and this is likely where the decision to use it daily will be made.

Trying It Requires Expert Mode

Because much of this work is fresh, M3 installation sits behind the installer's Expert mode. Run the following in a macOS terminal and follow the prompts.

curl -L https://alx.sh/ | EXPERT=1 sh

Once the install finishes, the developers ask users not to skip the system upgrade.

dnf upgrade --refresh

The goal is to drop the Expert requirement in time for the Fedora Linux 45 beta, a couple of weeks out, barring major regressions or other showstoppers. Until then, it is fair to treat M3 support as experimental.

Upstreaming Is Still Underway

One more thing worth keeping in mind is that this official support applies to Asahi Linux itself. The mainline Linux kernel currently carries only basic boot support for M3. Reaching the same state as Asahi Linux requires the remaining patches to land upstream in later kernel releases.

A distribution running ahead of mainline is not unusual for Apple Silicon. Still, only once the work lands upstream will other distributions run the same hardware, so for anyone choosing Linux on an M3 Mac, the pace of upstreaming matters more over the long run.

Summary

Asahi Linux's M3 support brings the everyday essentials, including Wi-Fi, USB, and AV1 video decoding, to a usable state, while the GPU and sleep remain unfinished. The supported machines are MacBooks and iMacs with the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max; the Mac Studio with M3 Ultra is not included. Installation goes through Expert mode for now, with a plan to move to the normal path alongside the Fedora Linux 45 beta. Whether it can serve as a daily driver depends on GPU and DCP progress, and the reports over the next few months will decide that.