Asahi Linux for Apple’s M-CPUs continues as upstream Fedora Asahi Remix

Asahi Linux will continue as an upstream of Fedora in the future. The Linux distribution also gets a new name. The largest distro for Apple’s M2 processor was always based on Arch, but is now changing course.

In the future, the operating system will be known as Fedora Asahi Remix, write the developers. They previously announced this on the Flock to Fedora Developer Conference. Fedora Asahi Remix will be upstream first, allowing new features to be integrated directly into Fedora. This happened before, with the m1n1 bootloader and the asahi script tools that Asahi already made available to Fedora. In the future, this will also happen with all other aspects of the distro.

Asahi was always based on Arch Linux, but as a downstream distro. According to the makers of Asahi, it was clear from the start that this was not a good way to further develop the distro, partly because there was poor support for third-party apps and maintaining a downstream distro yourself is more work than an upstream one.

The developers at Asahi have therefore been working with the Fedora project on an alternative upstream distribution since the beginning of last year. The developers have already released kernel support, custom packages, and the mesa forks for Fedora. On the other hand, Fedora gives tips to Asahi developers for working on Arm64 architecture, which Fedora works better with than Arch.

Asahi Linux is the largest and best-known distro specifically made for Apple’s M chips. The first working build for the M2 was released last year. The developers now say they plan to release Fedora Asahi Remix at the end of this month. A test build is already available, but the makers warn that it may not yet work properly.