While the Asahi Linux project has made good progress on bringing Linux to Apple Silicon hardware, much of the success and in turn upstreaming to the Linux kernel has been around the aging M1 and M2 Macs. Apple M3 and newer has been a struggle but progress is being made. One of the Asahi Linux developers shared the ability now to boot to the KDE Plasma desktop with the experimental Asahi Linux code on an M3 MacBook but without any GPU acceleration yet.

The initial Apple M3 hardware debuted back in 2023 while the Asahi Linux bring-up has been slow given engineering changes that have also carried on to the newer M4 and M5 hardware too. Paired with the reduced volunteer manpower, it's been a slow process being able to enjoy Linux on newer Apple Macs. Asahi Linux developer Michael Reeves shared some progress though this week on the porting to the M3 hardware.

Michael Reeves shared on X that they have reverse-engineered enough of the M3 SoC to get storage, display, and input in "solid" shape with their downstream code.

Notably lacking right now though is GPU acceleration with the Apple M3. So booting to the KDE Plasma desktop means using LLVMpipe CPU-based software acceleration. Besides being slow performance with LLVMpipe, it ends up keeping the CPU cores busy and thus atrocious battery life for now until the GPU can be properly enabled.

Nice seeing progress made on the Apple M3 for (Asahi) Linux and hopefully the bring-up for M4/M5 will go smoother and ultimately seeing the necessary changes upstreamed to the mainline Linux kernel in due course.