Within roughly two and a half hours of appearing on Hacker News, Asahi Linux's M3 announcement had drawn 382 points and 228 comments. That burst of attention landed on an unusually qualified version of official support: M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max Macs have entered the installer, but only through Expert mode, while sleep and fast, power-efficient 3D acceleration remain unavailable. For developers with a 2023 or 2024 Mac, this opens a real Linux installation path aimed at testers, as both the Hacker News discussion and Asahi's release post make clear.
The September 6 release covers M3 MacBooks and iMacs, including machines built around the base M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max. The M3 Ultra Mac Studio is excluded. Asahi says most hardware that works on its M1 and M2 ports now works on these machines too, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, webcams, internal microphones, and hardware video decoding with AV1 support. USB reaches the machines' 10 Gb/s USB 3 limit, according to the project announcement.
Official support starts behind a switch
The normal installer does not yet offer M3 machines. Asahi has put the new path behind an environment variable because much of the code is fresh. Its announcement tells M3 owners to start the installer from a macOS terminal with this command, then run a system upgrade after the first boot:
curl -L https://alx.sh/ | EXPERT=1 sh
dnf upgrade --refresh
Asahi aims to remove the Expert requirement around the Fedora Linux 45 beta, which the project expected within a couple of weeks of the announcement. That target depends on testing finding no serious regressions. The label therefore describes project support and installer availability, while Expert mode still tells users how the maintainers rate the maturity of this particular path. Both the command and the planned timing come directly from Asahi's M3 release note.
The gaps matter before anyone repartitions an everyday Mac. Sleep does not work because the current system relies on a firmware-provided framebuffer and lacks full Display Co-Processor support. That same DCP gap disables the HDMI port on MacBook models that have one. Asahi also warns users against expecting performant or power-efficient 3D acceleration at this stage, according to the release note.
Those omissions weigh differently on a desktop test machine and a laptop. A MacBook that cannot sleep loses one of the behaviors people depend on between meetings or while travelling. Weak 3D performance narrows the sensible workload further. The supported Wi-Fi, keyboard, touchpad, audio, webcam, CPU frequency control, and video decoding make the port useful for testing and development, but the project's warning and its June hardware report argue against treating this release as a drop-in macOS replacement.
Why M3 needed more than a device list
Asahi's August engineering report shows where the time went. Apple changed the USB port controller on M3 Pro and M3 Max from the CD3217 design used through the base M3 to ACE3, which communicates over an SPMI bus. Contributors reverse-engineered that interface and found a familiar register set inside the new wrapper. Their resulting SPMI and ACE3 support brought USB 3 and Thunderbolt operation to the M3 family, the Linux 7.2 progress report says.
The USB-C physical layer also needed new initialization values after Apple's move to TSMC's N3 process. More consequentially, the firmware interfaces for Apple's GPU and display controller are tied to macOS releases rather than kept stable across generations. Asahi chose the interface shipped with macOS 14.8.3 as its target for M3. By late August, the project reported that its M3 DCP work was approaching the feature set of the macOS 13.5 interface used for M1 and M2, but it was not ready to carry the September release across the sleep and HDMI line (Asahi Linux).
Other pieces transferred with less drama. A June report said Apple's audio controllers and amplifier choices had changed little, so M3 speaker and headphone support mainly required Devicetree entries and configuration for Asahi's audio services. Existing drivers also handled CPU frequency changes, while new device descriptions enabled appropriate scheduling across efficiency and performance cores. PCIe, NVMe storage, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, the keyboard, and the touchpad were already working by then, according to Asahi's Linux 7.1 report.
That mix explains the release's lopsided state. A working keyboard can reuse mature code once the new machine is described correctly. The display controller and GPU sit behind firmware protocols that changed enough to demand another round of investigation. "Official" is consequently a statement about the project's installer and support threshold. It does not mean every component has reached parity with macOS or even with Asahi on older Apple Silicon, a distinction also present in Phoronix's report on the release.
The release is ahead of the feature table
One source of confusion is Asahi's own documentation. At publication time, the M3 support page still labels the installer and main display as work in progress. It also lists sleep as available in the downstream kernel, even though the newer release post says sleep currently does not work in the configuration being shipped. The release post is dated September 6 and supplies the operative installation instructions; the matrix should be read as lagging documentation rather than a more recent reversal.
The project already has an open documentation issue about that lag. Filed in May, it says the M3 and M4 tables still show work in progress or unplanned labels for features that appear to have advanced. The issue remained open when checked for this article (AsahiLinux/docs issue 264). For an experimental installation, this mismatch is more than housekeeping: readers need the dated release post and current installer output beside the feature table when deciding which hardware works.
Upstream status adds another boundary. Phoronix reports that mainline Linux has the initial pieces needed to boot M3 systems, while more of Asahi's patches remain in its downstream tree and are expected to continue moving upstream in Linux 7.4 and later. Installing Fedora Asahi Remix therefore gives users Asahi's integrated hardware stack; it does not imply that an ordinary ARM Linux image now has the same M3 support (Phoronix).
Installation still depends on macOS
Asahi's installer configures dual boot, and the project recommends keeping macOS. Its FAQ says an internal macOS installation is required to install the system, resize it, and update or repair the m1n1 boot component. A fully external USB installation is not supported. There is also no automatic uninstaller, so removal means identifying and deleting the Asahi partitions manually (Asahi Linux FAQ).
That architecture matters for anyone tempted by the single command. The installer creates a small APFS container with the Apple boot components, a 500 MB EFI System Partition, and a Linux partition. Asahi's partitioning guide treats those pieces as one logical installation and warns that each must be accounted for during removal. Expert mode is a reasonable invitation for people comfortable reading partition prompts and recovering a dual boot setup, not a cosmetic label.
The next observable gate is the normal installer. Asahi plans to open M3 support beyond Expert mode around the Fedora 45 beta if testing goes well. After that, DCP work has to restore sleep and HDMI, while the GPU work must deliver 3D acceleration that is both fast and economical enough for everyday use. The project has promised more GPU news in the coming months, but has published no performance target or fixed date. Those concrete changes, documented in the M3 announcement, will say more about suitability for everyday use than the word "official" does today.