The Linux developer and YouTuber Asahi Lina (@LinaAsahi) has now announced the implementation of support for the Apple M2 chips and the successful launch of the KDE and GNOME user environments on the Apple MacBook Air with the M2 chip with full support for GPU acceleration with ten cores.
On a MacBook Air 13″ (2022) with M2 SoC and full graphics acceleration via the 10-core GPU, Asahi ran KDE Plasma and Gnome. Asahi Linux and the open-source graphics stack Mesa 3D serve as the basis, which is essential for gaming under Linux, as the developer demonstrates in a long video with a duration of more than eleven hours in which the launch of the free and platform-independent first-person shooter Xonotic game was demonstrated, simultaneously with the well-known OpenGL 2.0 benchmark Glmark2 and a tech demo, the eglgears tests.
All these ran in parallel and with full GPU acceleration on the 3.6 TFLOPS graphics unit of the Apple M2. It is also noted that the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) driver adapted for the M2 chips for the Linux kernel can now work with the Asahi OpenGL driver developed for Mesa out of the box without making changes in user space.
Full GPU acceleration support pushes Linux desktops on Apple silicon one step closer to the Linux mainstream. In addition to the M2, the developer’s driver covers the M1 lineup.
