Hi everybody, The Asahi Team just officially released Asahi Fedora 39 for Apple Silicon and I wanted to share my experience as it may help some others out, I haven't really seen much posted here about it. I found it all to be super easy, and now that most everything is supported (Accept Citrix! Grrr! I'll keep trying, I guess), it's basically like setting up Windows in BootCamp but it's Linux and done via the Terminal. They're still using a similar (same?) method, but it "looks scary"...
As long as you follow their instructions to the t, you'll be cool.
Here's their announcement:
asahilinux.org
FIRST! Make sure you've got plenty of space allocated for Fedora. Do some basic cleanup stuff- delete any local Time Machine snapshots (I boot into a USB Installer's Recovery to do this) and turn off Time Machine for now so that another Snapshot isn't created (just remember to turn it back on when you're all done), empty the trash, clear out any files in the Downloads folder that aren't needed, etc...
In my case, I'm running a late 2020 M1 MBP w/ 2TB & 16GB, and I've already made a macOS USB installer with a separate Partition for "Storage" to move things back and forth afterwards.
To get started, enter this in a Terminal Window:
They did a great job showing step by step instructions all along the way explaining what to do. One of the main questions people have is how much space to allocate for this, and the installer makes it pretty simple. In my case, I only wanted roughly 60GB-80GB of space for Linux and to keep the rest for macOS. It asks you first how much space you'd like to allocate or keep for macOS (the existing system), and I chose the "percentage" option of 97% for macOS, which ended up being 70 something GB for Asahi Fedora, leaving me with about 250GB of free space left for my macOS partition. I have lots of digital stuff lol... Anyway, You'll be prompted for your Password, it checks everything to make sure it can run and that your macOS is up to date, and then will eventually reboot into Recovery with another Terminal window, again explaining exactly what to do. READ EVERYTHING. I found it all to be very straight forward and simple, but if you skipped anything or mess up, you'll need that macOS USB Installer you created. You did do that first, right?
After all is said and done, it'll set the Startup Disk to Fedora and boom, Bob's your Uncle. At that point, have your way with the Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop, which I personally like and find to be very customizable. I set my login screen to the "Wargames" looking Terminal Screen from the Movie. There's a Starship Enterprise looking login, too. Lots of cool community stuff you can get from within the System Settings app itself. You can even install the Gnome Desktop via Terminal if you'd prefer more of an Ubuntu / Debian / RHEL looking Desktop setup...
the 'tl;dr' is that you need to remove a specific Partition before the others, and Disk Utility doesn't let you do it because it's greyed out. He explains how to do it in Terminal, and in my case the code was the same as what he entered--
From that point I was able to use Disk Utility to get rid of everything else like he explains in the video. PLEASE WATCH THE VIDEO! We're talking about deleting partitions via Terminal. You want to make sure you've got it right, AND that you've got backups of everything. I have a few Time Machine drives I can revert back to, along with a USB installer of macOS 14.2.1 just in case. He also mentions needing to run a couple other lines of code in Terminal after the code above I posted, but I didn't have to do that. For me-
1- Run code above
2- Remove other Partitions in Disk Utility as he explains in the Video
3- Reboot
You're technically done at that point, as far as removing Linux from your Machine goes. I also ran the macOS Installer over itself again just to make sure everything was ok and then booted back into macOS again and used it all day like normal, making sure Time Machine backups were running and current, and then I installed Asahi Fedora again as noted above. For me, I didn't want to set aside THAT much space for Linux, and had already prior set it up with about 200GB of space for Fedora. This was actually the third time I've setup Linux on my M1 machine like this, and now that everything is "officially" supported, everything seems to be running great. Prior, speakers didn't work (among other things)! But since they can't "upstream" support for that, a fresh install was needed. Now it's running great, and it's easy enough to boot back into macOS, just like Bootcamp into Windows on an Intel machine. Hopefully this can help pave the way for Windows on ARM 'Bare metal' installs.
Have a Great Day!
As long as you follow their instructions to the t, you'll be cool.
Here's their announcement:
Fedora Asahi Remix - Asahi Linux
FIRST! Make sure you've got plenty of space allocated for Fedora. Do some basic cleanup stuff- delete any local Time Machine snapshots (I boot into a USB Installer's Recovery to do this) and turn off Time Machine for now so that another Snapshot isn't created (just remember to turn it back on when you're all done), empty the trash, clear out any files in the Downloads folder that aren't needed, etc...
In my case, I'm running a late 2020 M1 MBP w/ 2TB & 16GB, and I've already made a macOS USB installer with a separate Partition for "Storage" to move things back and forth afterwards.
To get started, enter this in a Terminal Window:
Code:
curl https://alx.sh | shThey did a great job showing step by step instructions all along the way explaining what to do. One of the main questions people have is how much space to allocate for this, and the installer makes it pretty simple. In my case, I only wanted roughly 60GB-80GB of space for Linux and to keep the rest for macOS. It asks you first how much space you'd like to allocate or keep for macOS (the existing system), and I chose the "percentage" option of 97% for macOS, which ended up being 70 something GB for Asahi Fedora, leaving me with about 250GB of free space left for my macOS partition. I have lots of digital stuff lol... Anyway, You'll be prompted for your Password, it checks everything to make sure it can run and that your macOS is up to date, and then will eventually reboot into Recovery with another Terminal window, again explaining exactly what to do. READ EVERYTHING. I found it all to be very straight forward and simple, but if you skipped anything or mess up, you'll need that macOS USB Installer you created. You did do that first, right?
After all is said and done, it'll set the Startup Disk to Fedora and boom, Bob's your Uncle. At that point, have your way with the Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop, which I personally like and find to be very customizable. I set my login screen to the "Wargames" looking Terminal Screen from the Movie. There's a Starship Enterprise looking login, too. Lots of cool community stuff you can get from within the System Settings app itself. You can even install the Gnome Desktop via Terminal if you'd prefer more of an Ubuntu / Debian / RHEL looking Desktop setup...
Already Installed?
If you're like me and have been testing Asahi Arch or Asahi Fedora for a few months and want to start over again, Mr. Macintosh tells you what to do---the 'tl;dr' is that you need to remove a specific Partition before the others, and Disk Utility doesn't let you do it because it's greyed out. He explains how to do it in Terminal, and in my case the code was the same as what he entered--
Code:
diskutil eraseVolume JHFS+ drive /dev/disk0s4From that point I was able to use Disk Utility to get rid of everything else like he explains in the video. PLEASE WATCH THE VIDEO! We're talking about deleting partitions via Terminal. You want to make sure you've got it right, AND that you've got backups of everything. I have a few Time Machine drives I can revert back to, along with a USB installer of macOS 14.2.1 just in case. He also mentions needing to run a couple other lines of code in Terminal after the code above I posted, but I didn't have to do that. For me-
1- Run code above
2- Remove other Partitions in Disk Utility as he explains in the Video
3- Reboot
You're technically done at that point, as far as removing Linux from your Machine goes. I also ran the macOS Installer over itself again just to make sure everything was ok and then booted back into macOS again and used it all day like normal, making sure Time Machine backups were running and current, and then I installed Asahi Fedora again as noted above. For me, I didn't want to set aside THAT much space for Linux, and had already prior set it up with about 200GB of space for Fedora. This was actually the third time I've setup Linux on my M1 machine like this, and now that everything is "officially" supported, everything seems to be running great. Prior, speakers didn't work (among other things)! But since they can't "upstream" support for that, a fresh install was needed. Now it's running great, and it's easy enough to boot back into macOS, just like Bootcamp into Windows on an Intel machine. Hopefully this can help pave the way for Windows on ARM 'Bare metal' installs.
Have a Great Day!
