Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Fedora Asahi Remix provides similar experiences to upstream Fedora Linux, just tailored to the Apple Silicon Mac hardware platform.

The KDE Plasma variant receives the most testing and platform integration work and is the recommended option for users new to Fedora Linux and Linux on Apple Silicon platforms. The GNOME variant is also fully supported, for users who prefer that desktop environment. Advanced users who want an alternate desktop environment may choose the Minimal variant and manually configure their system to their liking, while those who want to set up an Apple Silicon-based Linux server may prefer the Server variant.

The native Xorg server is available as a manual install, but its use is not recommended as it has several known bugs and deficencies when used on Apple Silicon platforms. As upstream Xorg development has slowed down, we only support Wayland-based desktop environments. Please do not file bugs related to usage of the Xorg server.

XWayland is fully supported as a transition technology to use native X11 apps on a Wayland desktop.

We are using a Remix as opposed to delivering Apple Silicon support in Fedora Linux proper because this ecosystem is still very fast moving and we believe a Remix will offer the best user experience for the time being. Also, the Remix allows us to integrate hardware support as it becomes available. Nonetheless, as much of this work as possible is being conducted upstream, with several key components being developed, maintained and packaged in Fedora Linux upstream. The Remix image build infrastructure and the installer are currently hosted outside of Fedora Infrastructure due to technical limitations. The infrastructure is entirely open source (see our GitLab and Pagure repos), and we will eventually migrate to Fedora Infrastucture once it becomes possible.

Ultimately, we expect Apple Silicon support to be integrated in Fedora Linux in a future release, and are working towards this goal. This approach is in line with the overarching goal of the Asahi project itself to integrate support for these systems in the relevant upstream projects.

Fedora Asahi Remix can be installed from https://fedora-asahi-remix.org or from https://asahilinux.org (which points to alx.sh). These are functionally equivalent, with the only differences being:

Both endpoints serve the same installation images, so there is no difference in the resulting system if the same installation option is chosen.

The Asahi Linux project website maintains a landing page with device support information, which is kept up to date as features and new devices are added. Fedora Asahi Remix closely follows the upstream kernels and support packages, so you can expect support to be on par with that page.

For more detailed information on specific driver and kernel support, visit the Asahi Linux wiki and browse the Feature Support pages (linked at the top of the sidebar).

We strive to make sure that our platform support packages and the installation process are completely safe and cannot cause any damage to your computer. In general, it is safe to install and use Fedora Asahi Remix on any supported machine (the installer will refuse to work on unsupported machines). As with all Free Software, please be aware that Fedora Asahi Remix is offered with no warranty.

As a Linux distribution, Fedora Asahi Remix gives users much more control over their computers than the stock macOS system does. This also means that there are fewer safeguards against dangerous operations. In general, Apple Silicon systems are very resilient against permanent hardware damage, so it is very unlikely that anything you do will cause any physical, unrecoverable harm to your machine. However, these machines are less resilient against becoming unbootable than typical x86 machines, and this can happen if important boot partitions on disk are corrupted or destroyed. You should be careful if you are using partitioning or disk formatting tools on the internal NVMe storage device:

If you do end up with trouble booting your machine after making changes to the disk, please see the Troubleshooting section for recovery and restore steps. Note that in the worst case this may involve a full factory reset and loss of all data (on both macOS and Linux partitions), so users are advised to have up-to-date backups before doing any disk management operations.

In addition, you should avoid making any changes to the existing macOS container partition (usually /dev/nvme0n1p2, identified as type Apple APFS and typically label Container on stock systems). Changes to this partition may make macOS unbootable, which will make it difficult to perform system firmware upgrades or recover, upgrade, or reinstall any Linux installations. At this time, Fedora Asahi Remix users are expected to have and maintain a working macOS installation, as the installation and bootloader upgrade process relies on the macOS admin user credentials to provision the bootloader. This requirement may be relaxed in the future, once we support system user management and firmware upgrades directly from Linux.

We currently do not have a supported process to install to external storage. The Apple Silicon platform in general cannot boot from external storage at all, so some components must always be installed to internal storage. It is possible to manually move the root filesystem to external storage, but there are limitations (e.g. sleep mode is not currently supported as it causes external disks to re-enumerate) and therefore this is left as an exercise for the advanced user.

In the future, we expect to have a supported process for external-storage installs that does not require re-partitioning the internal disk (taking advantage of the same mechanism used for macOS installs to external storage), but this is not ready yet. Note that such external installs will still be tied to the machine they were installed on (since some components would still be installed to the internal disk, as the platform requires this to boot).

Fedora Asahi Remix now includes support for emulating x86 and x86-64 software, initially targeted at gaming. For more details, please see Running x86/x86-64 applications on Fedora Asahi Remix.

For Free/Open Source Software, it is always preferable to make a build for aarch64 (ARM64) instead of trying to emulate an x86-64 build. If your favorite software package is not yet available for this architecture, please request it from its developers! Users comfortable with building software may want to try building it themselves. If you do so, consider becoming a package maintainer to help bring the software to all Fedora users.

Sometimes there are options other than running x86-64 software, such as native third-party alternatives or web versions. See the How do I download software? section for some examples.

See Entering the GRUB boot menu.

Run sudo widevine-installer and follow the prompts. Note that Widevine is third-party software not officially affiliated nor endorsed by the Fedora Project or Asahi Linux.

In addition, Netflix requires manual browser configuration to work. You need to install a browser extension to override your User-Agent for specific sites, and set the user agent for Netflix to:

See Enabling the RPM Fusion repositories.

A large amount of free and open source software is available in the Fedora repositories. Just install it directly from your desktop environment’s software management tool or use dnf!

Some free software is not packaged directly in Fedora, but aarch64 builds may be available officially or from third parties. Look for instructions for Fedora users and aarch64 builds. AppImage or Flatpak versions may also work as long as they are built for aarch64.

For example:

Third-party Fedora builds of software are also available in Fedora Copr.

Most proprietary software is only available for x86-64 (Intel/AMD) machines and will not run natively on Fedora Asahi Remix, but often web versions or third-party clients are available that do work:

Note: Fedora does not endorse nor offer support for third-party software packages or COPR repositories. Make sure you trust the software and repository you install it from.

Run the following command to resolve the issue:

This is caused by an upstream Chromium bug. This step will be necessary after certain upgrades until the fix is released for the various Chromium-based frameworks and applications built on them.