Asahi Linux adds official support for M3-series Apple Silicon Macs

Asahi Linux now officially supports Macs built around Apple's M3 chip family. The project merged M3-series support into its installer, according to a blog post by James Calligeros on the Asahi Linux site dated 6 September 2026, an announcement that surfaced on the Hacker News front page. The team writes that Linux on M3 machines has reached the point where almost everything that already works on M1 and M2 systems also works on the newer hardware.

What works on M3

The list of functioning hardware covers most of what a daily driver needs: the webcam, the internal microphones, USB up to the hardware ceiling of 10 Gb/s USB 3, hardware-accelerated video decoding including AV1, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and other components.

Two major pieces are still missing: full support for the display controller, which Apple calls DCP, and the GPU. The team is blunt that users should not expect fast or power-efficient 3D acceleration at this stage, and says more news on that front will arrive in the coming months.

How to install it

Because much of the underlying work is fresh, M3 support is currently gated behind the installer's Expert mode. Anyone who wants to try it runs the project's one-line install script from a macOS terminal with the EXPERT flag set, then performs a system upgrade (dnf upgrade --refresh) once installation finishes.

That gate is meant to be temporary. The team aims to drop the Expert requirement in time for the Fedora Linux 45 beta, which it says is a couple of weeks away, assuming no major regressions or showstoppers appear in the meantime.

Known limitations

• Sleep does not work yet, a limitation the team attributes to the firmware-provided framebuffer. It should be resolved once full DCP support is wired up for M3.
• The HDMI port on MacBooks that have one is disabled, again because DCP support is incomplete.
• The supported lineup covers MacBooks and iMacs with the M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max chips. The Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra is not yet supported.

Why it matters

For anyone running Linux on Apple hardware, the M3 generation is now viable for everyday use, with the notable exceptions of 3D workloads, external displays over HDMI and sleep. That turns a large chunk of Apple's recent Mac catalog into practical Linux machines rather than projects.

The milestone also shows how the project sustains itself. The team credits donations through OpenCollective and GitHub Sponsors with giving multiple contributors access to M3 hardware in the first place, and describes M3 support as the result of years of effort from several people.

The trajectory matters as much as the current state. With the Expert-mode gate set to fall around the Fedora 45 beta and GPU news promised within months, Asahi Linux is shifting from maintaining Apple's older chips toward tracking current hardware, its long-standing challenge.