The makers of Asahi Linux have released a beta version of the distribution running on Apple’s M2 chip. It’s an experimental build that’s starting, but it’s still far from working properly.

The creators of Asahi Linux Write in a blog post That the makers were able to create an operating system port to Apple’s M2 chip relatively quickly. At the moment, this works rudimentary: the distro runs with USB support, NVMe, battery health and Wi-Fi, but there is also a lot that does not work correctly. The keyboard doesn’t work like that in U-Boot and Grub yet. So users need an external keyboard for this. The keyboard and trackpad now work in the distro, where the operating system can actually be used.

Manufacturers say they only tested the operating system on the MacBook Pro 13″. There will also be support for MacBook Air, but its makers haven’t tested it yet. Developers say the Linux version is based on macOS 12.4. The team behind Asahi doesn’t want to provide long-term support for it and warns users Than manually upgrade boot components to macOS 13.0 at a later time.

According to the makers, the installation only works if users enable expert mode in Asahai Installer. They also caution that many of the ingredients are not likely to work yet.

Asahi Linux has been working on a Linux version for Apple’s socs for some time. In March, the company released for the first time Released an alpha architecture for computers with an M1 . chip. A lot of work has gone into that, but the product makers say that future distributions will be a lot easier to port to new Apple chips like the M2.