Asahi on Macbook Air M2

05 May 2026 by cthos
1507 words

_{Shutterstock #2041259501 and Asahi Logo}

Over on Mastodon I mentioned, offhand, that I'd been daily driving (meaning, using daily but not as my primary machine) Asahi on a Macbook Air M2 (15") and some folks were curious what kind of experience I was getting with it. So, instead of making a giant thread, I figured I should blog about it instead given just how behind I am on blogging. Plus, most of my blog posts are lamenting the state of slop so this should be a nice change of pace.

I'll just walk you through what I'm using it for and the process from installing Asahi to using it on a daily basis.

Right, so this is worth noting that this is not my primary desktop. That is either a Mac Mini M4 or a System76 Thelio depending on if I'm at home or in my office. I use both of those for primary work, including destkop publishing stuff (which we'll touch on shortly because it's relevant to Asahi).

The laptop is used as a "writing machine", which means it has to do the following:

• Browse the internet
• Run Obsidian
• Run Nextcloud Desktop (to sync my writing files)

And that's it. However, it's worth noting that I also have git and some light dev tools installed on this so I can do stuff like update this very blog from this machine. For my editor I'm using Lazyvim with a bunch of plugins these days, and that runs basically anywhere.

Notably I'm not trying to hook this up to an external monitor (nor have I tried), and last I checked this was still a bit hit-or-miss if you're expecting displayport alt mode to work. Even if it does, it only supports a single external monitor due to hardware limitations.

So, if you're expecting that to work well, this is likely not going to be viable for you.

Installing Asahi was a breeze. The Asahi team has a shell script that goes and downloads a secondary package from their CDN and then runs an install shell script from there. The source for the installer is on GitHub if you want to go poke around in there and/or download it directly. The shell script from alx.sh is just a thin wrapper around downloading and executing said installer.

Once you're running the installer it interactively walks you through what you need to do:

• Resize the disk to make space for Asahi
• Install Asahi
• Reboot into recovery to finish the installation.

There's a Youtube Video showing the full process, if you're interested in what it all looks like.

WARNING: You really need to pay attention to what it is telling you. You have to take a manual step after the install is completed in order to get this working. It's recoverable if you don't, but it's a hassle and can render your mac unable to boot without reinstalling MacOS, but pay attention.

After that's all done (especially the manual recovery step to get uboot functional) you'll be taken into the Asahi Fedora Remix setup flow where you set up the user account and all the regular Fedora stuff.

Okay! Once that was done, the next thing you want to do is install some apps. Discover is shipped by default, and if you can find the app you're wanting in there, you're golden. Flatpaks included.

dnf is also available if you want to install packages that way.

So, I wanted to get a few things running immediately:

• Vivaldi
• Nextcloud Desktop
• Obsidian

The only problem with that is that neither Vivaldi nor Obsidian are in Discover because it doesn't have Flathub enabled by default. To do that, you can just go into discover's settings menu and click "Add Flathub", and viola.

But because I'm a masochist, apparently, I figured "You know what, let's just go get the AppImages for these two things I'm missing, like a fool, and run those!" The thought apparently never occurred to me that I could also just download the Flatpakref directly. I'm not sure what I was thinking. Probably something like "ooh I wonder if the AppImage will run okay." They do.

Dear reader, that does work, but once you've done that you want to move them somewhere safe and then set up menu entries for this. Normally I use Gear Lever for this, but since I chose not to add Flathub, that wasn't an option. Good news though, KDE offers a handy menu editor so you can just add whatever you want "easily" and so, like a fool, I did that.

Nota Bene: I've since tested the Obsidian flatpak on Asahi. Works fine.

The other bit of software that I use, Freetube, was giving me some trouble out of the box, and that required me to go in and add a command line flag to the menu entry: --js-flags=--nodecommit_pooled_pages which I pulled out of this GitHub issue which happens on other Electron apps as well, which is apparently to do with Asahi's page size.

Fortunately, I've not encountered anything else that's super broken when installing stuff, it largely "just works".

Okay, one thing that I would love to get working but cannot figure out is getting the v2 Affinity suite running on one of these things. It's about the only reason I have to boot back into MacOS to do.

Getting Affinity running on Linux is a bit of a chore, but thanks to AffinityOnLinux it's very straightforward and I've done it on several Linux installs (remember that System76 desktop from earlier, yep, it's working there).

Unfortunately, that's not so true on Asahi, where not only do you have to contend with Wine, you also have to translate from x86 to aarch64. Now, this is theoretically doable, but any combination of things I've tried has not worked.

Alas. Perhaps I'll give it another go later.

I can't really complain about the battery, it seems to last almost as long in active use as MacOS does.

What it does not do is sleep properly. If you just close the laptop lid, expect the battery to drain just as fast as if you were actively using it (maybe a bit slower since the screen is not on). You cannot just close the lid and expect it to still have 95% charge after a week of it sitting unused.

So, remember to turn the thing all the way off.

Asahi does this fun thing with the cmd key where it'll work in a mac-like fashion for some things, but not for everything so it really mucks with the muscle memory. This isn't a huge deal for me, because I frequently switch between Mac and various flavors of Linux, but I can see it messing with someone who's just hopping over for the first time.

Haven't had any issues with Bluetooth connecting to my earbuds, nor have I seen any weirdness with the built in speakers or adjusting the display brightness or keyboard backlight.

Resuming from the screen turning off does occasionally require me to tap the power button, but otherwise there's noting of note there.

Touch ID does not work, of course, there's no support for the fingerprint sensor here. Knew that going in, though, so it's not a downside.

I run Tailscale on it for Wireguard stuff and that works great. Wifi's been solid.

I'm sure if I had some more demands of Asahi I'd run into some things that are annoying, but for what I'm using it for, it's been really nice and generally aligns with my overall expectations of running Linux on a modern Macbook.

As an aside, I also have a 2015 Macbook Air 11" that runs Arch... it's a neat little machine.

So overall I think it's worth giving a try if you don't have really high demands of the thing, and even more so if it's not your main machine. I could probably get by with just Asahi for the kind of computing I do for my freelance work, but I've never tried it for that partly because of dealing with various VPN things.

... and yeah, that's it. Lemme know if there's anything you'd like me to answer on this post and I can update with an FAQ later.

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