After months and months of testing, Linux is now officially supported on M1 Macs. The latest update with the Linux kernel 5.13 update has been released, which brings support for several ARM64 chips, including Apple’s M1.
Linux Now Officially Supported on M1 Macs
It was reported earlier that the Linux support for M1-based Mac and MacBooks would arrive in June 2021. And just as per plan, a release candidate (RC) build of Linux with 5.13 kernel was been released last week. Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced the latest release of Linux with over 16,000 changes.
The new kernel brings support for several ARM-based chips, and Linus has confirmed that the update supports Apple’s latest M1 Macs and MacBooks. It was possible to run Linux on M1 Macs even now. However, the port by Corelliun isn’t native — which basically means that it doesn’t take full advantage of Apple M1.
The new 5.13 Linux kernel update unlocks the full potential of Apple M1. Despite the compatibility, some of the features like support for accelerated graphics aren’t there yet. More improvements and bug fixes are expected in the future version of Linux.
It’s worth noting that the build that has been released is the Release Candidate build. RC is generally the term used for pre-stable version rollout of operating systems. A Stable release of Linux with M1 support is expected to be released sometime in July.
