Fedora Asahi Remix is the best Linux distro for Apple Silicon-based Mac computers, developed in collaboration between the Fedora and Asahi Linux team. The latest update makes it even better, though it’s still not a perfect experience.

Asahi Linux is the main project to bring desktop Linux to Mac computers with ARM-based Apple Silicon chips, which has involved a lot of reverse-engineering and building drivers. In 2023, Fedora Asahi Remix became the flagship distribution, and subsequent updates have continued improving the experience. Fedora Linux 41 was released for most PCs and servers at the end of October, and now the Asahi Linux version is available.

Fedora Asahi Remix 41 includes all the changes from the other versions of Fedora 41, including the shiny new GNOME 47 and KDE Plasma 6.2 desktop environments, and updates to the DNF 5 package management tool. This version also adds x86/x86-64 emulation, allowing more PC apps and games to work on Asahi Linux, in the same way Rosetta 2 works on macOS.

The Asahi team showed off progress on emulation earlier this year—in combination with its Vulkan 1.4 drivers and the Wine compatibility layer, games like Control, Fallout 4, The Witcher 3, Portal 2, and Hollow Knight to run with decent performance. Asahi Linux is actually ahead of macOS here, since Apple doesn’t natively support Vulkan.

The blog post explains, “Fedora Asahi Remix offers KDE Plasma 6.2 as our flagship desktop experience. It also features a custom Calamares-based initial setup wizard. A GNOME variant is also available, featuring GNOME 47, with both desktop variants matching what Fedora Linux offers. Fedora Asahi Remix also provides a Fedora Server variant for server workloads and other types of headless deployments. Finally, we offer a Minimal image for users that wish to build their own experience from the ground up.”

Even though Asahi Linux is undoubtedly impressive, it’s still not as polished of an experience as macOS on the same hardware. M1 Macs are best supported, but some functionality is missing on M2 Macs (like the microphone on the 2023 MacBook Pro), and support for M3 Macs is still in the early stages. There’s no official compatibility at all with Apple’s latest M4 models yet. If you just need to run some Linux software on your Mac, a virtual machine might be a better option, or the software you need might be recompiled for Mac and available through Homebrew.

You can download Fedora Asahi Remix with the instructions on the Asahi website.

Source: Fedora Magazine