Asahi Linux is led by Héctor Martin who is well known for his experience in ports.
The developers of the Asahi Linux project, disclosed recently through a blog post, his plans to create a base distribution with Fedora. And it is that until now, the test versions of Asahi Linux that have been offered have been built on the basis of Arch Linux.
For those who do not know about the project or have not followed its most important changes, I can tell you that the Asahi project, led by Héctor Martin, is intended to provide full Linux support to Apple Silicon machines, across all distributions.
In the first instance, as mentioned at the beginning, the first remix that was offered was based on Arch Linux, with which everything looked "good", but problems began to arise and it was the same Hector Martin who shared the problems with Arch Linux ARM:
Okay, I'm going to be honest with everyone… I'm getting really tired of Arch Linux ARM.
Missing packages from Arch upstream building correctly out of the box, random package builds broken, broken dependencies for years, missing rebuilds after ABI dependency boosts, and now "Firefox won't compile with WebRTC, so let's just... disable it." WebRTC». And maintainers are generally not responsive.
During the time that the problems that arose with the project, Fedora staff approached Asahi and with the talks they had with the Asahi team, this began to lead to the integration of Fedora into Asahi.
The Fedora Asahi effort is bottom-up, as is all of our kernel and Mesa work. Our custom tools, such as the m1n1 low-level bootloader and our asahi scripting tools, are already in the Fedora repositories and directly available to all Fedora users.
In the meantime, our hardware enablement package forks remain in COPR maintained by the Fedora Asahi SIG, built and serviced from Fedora infra.
And so it was, since as mentioned, the transition is due to the fact that Fedora has official support for ARM64 in the upstream branch. Additionally, the move will help the Asahi Linux team focus on reverse engineering the hardware, while Fedora Asahi will maintain the distribution. Also, migrate to Fedora will allow Asahi Linux developers to interact directly with maintainers from the Fedora repositories to troubleshoot software builds.
It is mentioned that Being able to collaborate with distribution integration experts and use distribution infrastructure like this, allows the Asahi team to focus directly on their work and provide an even better experience for Linux users on Apple Silicon.
This is particularly important for platforms like desktop ARM64, where we still run into random app and package bugs quite often. ARM64 Desktop Linux has been a niche platform (until now!), and with much less testing comes greater proneness to bugs, so it's very important that we can address these issues quickly. Fedora already has a very strong ARM64 port and is fully supported by a large user base in the server/headless segment, so it's an excellent foundation to build on and help improve the state of desktop Linux on ARM64 for everyone.
We're very excited to have this level of collaboration with Fedora, and the Fedora folks have been an absolutely amazing team throughout this effort. We want to thank Davide Cavalca, Eric Curtin, Leif Liddy, Neal Gompa, and Michel Alexandre Salim for starting the Asahi GIS and making all of this possible.
By the end of August 2023, the project plans to migrate from Arch Linux ARM to Fedora, given birth to "Fedora Asahi Remix", which will be being developed by Fedora Asahi SIG. Currently, the Fedora Asahi Remix builds and installer are already available for testing.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.