Would installing elementary OS on Apple Silicon work?

[ichflippaus]

I have a an M2 Macbook Pro and for various reasons I'd love to switch the OS to Linux (dual booting with macOS for some software that I still need). elementary OS would be my #1 choice for the distribution. Now the blog post announcing v 8.1 states "For the first time we now also offer ARM64 builds for devices that boot with UEFI. This means you’ll be able to run OS 8.1 on M-series Apple Silicon".

My question is, (how) would this work in practice?

I have Asahi Linux installed on my laptop (with Fedora Remix for now) and if I interrupt the U-Boot boot sequence I can boot into the elementary OS ARM64 usb drive (using instructions from Gentoo's Project Asahi).

However, during the elementary OS boot (with the big elementary logo displaying), at some point the laptop just reboots with no error message and the usual boot sequence restarts.

Any ideas what could be going wrong? Is installing elementary OS on Apple Silicon actually possible at this stage?

Thanks a lot for any help (or pointers to any documentation that I may have overlooked)!

[ichflippaus]

I should maybe add that when I disable the splash screen I can see that the error message stdin: Invalid argument is repeated a couple of dozen times before the reboot. The last two lines before that: [0.907412] BTRFS info (device nvme0n1p6) : last unmount of filesystem 4344a275-2eac-4b47-b7b5-5056ce6ed810 done.

[ryonakano]

Is installing elementary OS on Apple Silicon actually possible at this stage?

No, we don't support installing elementary OS on Apple Silicon as a bare metal; we only support installation on VMs (using e.g. UTM).

[arodriguez22]

Curious if this is an upcoming goal. It would be fitting for the most MacOS like desktop to come to Macs!

[ichflippaus]

That's what I suspected, but also too bad! Hopefully it can become an option in the future. Thanks for the quick response.