Linux on Apple Silicon Macs Is Now a Mac App

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Last month, I put Ubuntu on my 2017 iMac. About newer Macs, I wrote one line: "Apple silicon Macs, M1 and newer, are a different story."

Now, Omarchy Linux 4.5 came out. That's the Linux distro from DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails. And it installs on Apple silicon Macs now. From an app in macOS. Or with one Homebrew line:

brew install omacom/mac/omarchy

No USB stick. No holding the Option key at startup.

Install

On my iMac, Claude Code wrote the Ubuntu installer to a USB stick. I held the Option key to boot from it. Then I went looking for a Wi-Fi driver. Of course.

On an Apple silicon Mac, the Omarchy installer runs inside macOS. It needs macOS 15 or newer, shrinks the macOS partition, adds its own, and downloads several gigabytes. The installer recommends leaving macOS about 38 GB free. The manual says at least 50 GB, and 100 GB is comfortable.

The last step happens in macOS Recovery. You shut down, hold the power button, pick Omarchy, and sign in with your macOS password. That step lowers the security setting for the Omarchy volume, the same way Asahi Linux does it. macOS keeps its own setting.

After that, holding the power button at startup lets you pick macOS or Omarchy. The Option key of Apple silicon, sort of.

One more thing from the installer: "Your first-boot password encrypts Omarchy. Keep it safe: there's no recovery key."

So, write that one down.

Macs

The release post says "M1/M2/M3/Neo MacBooks". The installer's list is longer. It covers the M1 and M2 desktops too, from the Mac mini to the Mac Studio, and even the M2 Mac Pro. Plus the M3 iMac, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro.

Not on it: the M3 Ultra Mac Studio. And anything with M4, M5, or M6. Those "are all being worked on right now," the team writes. No date.

But the MacBook Neo. Apple's $599 laptop runs on the A18 Pro, an iPhone chip. The Asahi installer doesn't support it at all yet.

In my "Do NOT Buy the MacBook Neo" piece, I wrote: "Want a dedicated Linux machine? Also valid. Buy a Framework or a TUXEDO instead."

Now the Neo is on Omarchy's list. Pretty cool!

Asahi

Most of this stands on Asahi Linux. The community project has been reverse-engineering Apple silicon for years, and it put out its first alpha in 2022.

Omarchy's own manual says it plainly: "Omarchy does not reimplement Apple's boot process: APFS resizing, partition creation, m1n1, the boot policy and recoveryOS remain the Asahi project's work."

The kernel is different, though. Omarchy runs the Aurora kernel, and Aurora's bootloader, kernel, U-Boot, and installer trees "began as forks of that work."

Asahi itself added M3 support in September. With gaps: sleep doesn't work, the HDMI port is disabled, the GPU isn't done, and the M3 Ultra isn't supported.

The Omarchy team's goal for the Mac port, in their words: "finish what Asahi started."

Hardware

The team tests every release on two reference Macs, a 14-inch M1 Pro and a 16-inch M2 Max MacBook Pro. On those, the manual lists as working: GPU acceleration, speakers, microphone, camera, battery, and external displays over HDMI, USB4, and DisplayPort.

Sleep works too. Mostly. A key press doesn't wake the Mac. You open the lid or press the power button.

Not there yet:

• Video acceleration in the browser
• Hardware video encoding
• Wi-Fi on 6 GHz

Every other admitted Mac "is expected to work" the same way. Expected.

Agents

The Mac port started in September, as "Omarchy M". The announcement calls the team "Fifteen people who didn't wait for permission, and who've been using agents to move at a pace that would have seemed absurd a year ago."

You can see that in the code. About 130 commits in the Mac installer carry a "Co-Authored-By: Claude" line. Probably more, since not every AI-assisted commit says so.

Asahi went the other way. In September, it tightened its own AI policy: "A contributor using an LLM to interpret a trace made using the m1n1 hypervisor may be issued with a first and final warning."

I build a lot with Claude Code myself. And in my vibe-coding piece, I wrote that I'm "a lot more careful now" when an app "changes my system in a big way."

An installer that resizes your disk and changes your boot policy is that kind of app.

Downsides

The lists don't agree. The release post says M3 and Neo. The installer marks the M3 Macs and the Neo as untested. And the hardware page of the manual, last edited on October 31, still says "M1 and M2 Macs only." So M1 and M2 are what the team has tested. The rest is a test run on your Mac.

No M4, M5, or M6 Macs yet. No date either.

No recovery key. Lose the first-boot password, and you're locked out of the Omarchy side.

And Omarchy has its critics. The Register: "The project, like the man behind it, is controversial." One blog it quotes goes further: "Do NOT use Omarchy if you care about security of your machine even a little bit."

It's also an opinionated setup on Arch Linux with a tiling window manager. Version 4.5 adds a traditional desktop mode, but Omarchy is mostly built for people who like to work from the keyboard.

The Bottom Line

A week ago, Linux on a newer Mac was "another topic" for me. Now it's an app and one Homebrew line. On M1 and M2, at least.

Would you put it on your Mac?

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