Linux on Apple Silicon

My main machine is a MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon. It does not run macOS, it runs Fedora 43 with the Asahi Linux patches. I installed from Fedora Minimal, that is from a system that can do almost nothing after the first boot. Everything that came after it I put together myself, piece by piece. These pages tell what the setup looks like, why it looks that way and where I fell over along the road.

Why Linux on a MacBook at all

The hardware is the reason. Apple Silicon MacBooks deliver a lot of performance at very low power draw, and the Asahi project brings Linux to exactly these devices, including graphics acceleration for the Apple GPU via Mesa. That gives you a full Wayland desktop running natively on aarch64. For me it is the best Linux machine I have ever had.

The catch: some packages from the official Fedora repositories need adjustments for this setup. Some software does not exist for aarch64 in the first place. That is exactly the gap I close with my own patches and my own RPM repository.

What is here

Asahi desktop setup

My complete desktop stack: Wayfire as the Wayland compositor, XFCE as the desktop environment in a Wayland session, greetd with tuigreet as the login, PipeWire for audio and a Bluetooth setup that finally stopped hissing. Plus the stumbling blocks that caught me on Asahi, such as the kernel's 16K memory pages that my Minecraft shattered on, a workaround for crashing GTK4 apps and the road to x86 software via FEX and muvm.

Netsnek RPM repository

Under rpm.netsnek.com sit the patched packages that make this setup possible in the first place. The page tells which packages I patch and why, from the backported workspace protocol in wlroots to Wayland fixes for panel and desktop.

Who this is for

For everyone who wants to build a similar setup on an Apple Silicon device. I assume basic knowledge of Fedora and the command line. All examples refer to Fedora 43 on aarch64.