Let me be upfront: this is not a "should you do this" post. This is a "I did this and here's what it's actually like" post.
Arch Linux Asahi Remix is the Asahi Linux team's Arch-based distro specifically built for Apple Silicon — M1, M2, M3, M4 chips. The Asahi project is doing something genuinely impressive: reverse-engineering Apple's proprietary hardware to get Linux running on it properly. Not in a VM. Bare metal.
Why
Because I have a Mac and I love Linux and I don't want to choose. Because running Arch on something it technically shouldn't run on is deeply satisfying. Because the Asahi team is doing real kernel work that's getting upstreamed into mainline Linux, which means you're on the frontier of something.
Also I just like doing this kind of thing.
The Install
The installer is surprisingly smooth for what it's doing. You boot, run a one-line curl command (yes, yes, I know), and it walks you through the process. It partitions your disk, installs a custom U-Boot bootloader, and sets up the Arch base system. The first time it worked, I sat there for a second just staring at a neofetch output showing aarch64 and an Apple logo.
That felt good.
What Works
A lot. More than I expected. WiFi works. Bluetooth works (mostly). The display is beautiful at native resolution. GPU acceleration is there via the gpu-hw flag and the AGX Gallium3D driver. Battery life is reasonable — worse than macOS, better than any x86 Linux laptop I've used.
The keyboard and trackpad are fine. Audio works. USB-C works.
What's Still Broken or Janky
Suspend/resume is the big one. It works sometimes. Other times you open the lid and the display doesn't come back. Touch ID doesn't work at all — no kernel support yet. Some GPU-accelerated things crash. Thunderbolt is limited.
Some apps don't have ARM Linux builds yet, which means you're either compiling from source or going without. That's not an Asahi problem, that's just the Linux ARM ecosystem still catching up.
Is It Daily-Driver Worthy
For me, mostly yes. I do web dev, write code, use the terminal 70% of the time anyway. For that workflow it's completely fine.
If you need specific apps that only exist on macOS, or you rely heavily on GPU-accelerated creative tools, or you just want everything to work without thinking about it — stay on macOS.
But if you're the kind of person who reads this far into a post about running Arch on Apple Silicon, you already know which camp you're in.
The Asahi team is doing incredible work. Follow them. Star the repo. Donate if you can.