Re: Mac with Asahi as daily driver?
Hi Nilesh,
At this point in time, the first page you should have a look at for
Debian on Apple Silicon is [1]. I think [2], which you linked to, needs
a major update.
I've been daily-driving Debian on an M1 Mac Mini since February, and
helping the Bananas Team with maintaining the Asahi stack since May. To
date, we provide full support for the entire user space stack except for
mesa, steam and widevine-installer -- the last two of which you may or
may not be interested in. Trixie will be the first Debian release to
provide such support.
I myself package and distribute the Asahi kernel [3], mesa drivers (with
full OpenGL, OpenCL and Vulkan support thanks to the outstanding work of
the Asahi devs) [4] and u-boot bootloader [5], which are the components
that have not been fully upstreamed yet, so they are not part of Debian
yet. The Asahi kernel is just the ordinary 16K-page Debian kernel + (a
lot of) Asahi patches, while for u-boot and mesa I have to be a bit more
creative with the packaging since for those the Asahi and Debian
releases are rarely in sync. They too are mostly identical to the Debian
packages though. My guiding principle is to treat them as they could be
upstreamed any day, including submitting patches to make sure that the
entire stack, kernel, mesa and u-boot included, remains buildable in
unstable/testing.
As far as stability goes, I had no issues [6] running Debian on Apple
Silicon as a daily driver. You can use it just like anyone would with an
ordinary Debian installation. As for hardware support, have a look at
[7] for the support matrix.
Drop by #debian-bananas on IRC (also bridged to Matrix) to say hi, if
you're interested we'll give you more up-to-date information on how to
install Debian on Apple Silicon.
Best,
NC
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Bananas
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/NoisyCoil/linux-asahi
[4] https://salsa.debian.org/NoisyCoil/mesa-asahi
[5] https://salsa.debian.org/NoisyCoil/u-boot-asahi
[6] Except for very occasional breakages which are promptly resolved by
the Asahi devs and thus never caused serious problems
[7] https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
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