Shortly after
Apple announced their transition away from
Intel x86 processors in late 2020, Linux creator
Linus Torvalds expressed interest in Linux support for the
Apple M1 Mac, but thought that the work to make this happen was too time-consuming for him to personally take on the necessary software development tasks. Martin announced the project in December 2020 and formally started work a month later in 2021, after securing crowd-sourced funding.
Alyssa Rosenzweig, who developed the
open-source graphics driver stack
Panfrost, joined the project to help support the Apple Silicon
graphics processing unit (GPU). The project has been made challenging by the lack of publicly available documentation of Apple's proprietary
firmware. The project released an experimental alpha version of the Asahi Linux installer in March 2022. The installer offered the choice of a desktop based on
Arch Linux ARM, a minimal environment, or a basic
UEFI environment for installing
OpenBSD or alternate Linux distributions with support for Apple Silicon via a bootable
USB flash drive. Despite being able to launch a UEFI shell, booting
Microsoft Windows is not supported, and there are no plans to do so, as it would involve modifying the proprietary Windows kernel. Other projects that are attempting to study a possible port of Windows to these systems specified challenging roadblocks related to Windows handling the proprietary Apple Interrupt Controller (AIC), and the 16K pages only found on the
IOMMU. In July 2022, the Asahi Linux team released an update with support for the
M1 Ultra,
Mac Studio, and early initial support for the
M2 MacBook Pro. In August 2023, it was announced that Asahi was partnering with the
Fedora Project to release the Fedora Asahi Remix, which would supersede the original Arch-based distribution as Asahi's flagship OS. The effort began in late 2021, and is an upstream-first project. The end goal of the project is to merge
upstream all changes so that the project's distribution becomes unnecessary. In October 2023, Fedora Asahi Remix was released as a Beta, then 3 months later, as a stable. In February 2025,
Hector Martin, founder and lead developer of Asahi Linux, announced his resignation from leading the project, citing
burnout and difficulties with the Linux kernel community. Subsequently, the Asahi Linux team moved to a shared governance model and began accepting funding via
Open Collective. In December 2025, Sven Peter gave a talk at the 39th
Chaos Communication Congress about the project outlining the current status and showing early M3 and external display output support. ==Hardware and driver support==