Contents
Intro/status
Most of the information on this page is based on the status of Debian as of the release of Bookworm/12, and thus (very) outdated. If you're installing in 2025 or after that, you probably want to start with something based on Debian Trixie/13. See the Bananas Team page for the most up to date information. We plan to refresh this page after the release of Trixie.
Apple Silicon
Macbook Air, Pro and Mini devices since the end of 2020 have been based on the ARM architecture (arm64). They all use variants of the M1 chip.
Note: a lot of the information on this page likely applies to M2 as well.
Note: M3, M4, etc are not yet supported.
Asahi Linux
Asahi Linux is the project to reverse engineer this device so linux can be used, and the first alpha release was in March 2022 and it allows Debian to run on the machines with most of the hardware usable (for device support see ?here).
For now (mid 2022), the best advice for getting Debian installed is to be found here: https://git.zerfleddert.de/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi/m1-debian/ Note: The above is based on Bookworm and is no longer maintained! See Bananas Team page for other third party offerings.
There isn't much point copying that info to these DebianOn pages yet as things are likely to continue changing for a while. Once things are uptreamed enough to install with debian packages these pages should be updated.
Team effort
A team to get Debian officially support Apple M1/M2 has been formed, here are the details: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Bananas.
EFI / u-boot recovery
In case u-boot (which provides the EFI environment) breaks, you should be able to boot into macOS and then restore an older working m1n1/boot.bin. See: https://asahilinux.org/docs/sw/partitioning-cheatsheet/#addendum-mounting-efi-partition.
Manual hacks
Updating old installations firmware
Note: this is not needed if you install using a recent installer.
Read this Fedora forum post about how to update the Firmware if you have an older installation (e.g. you need 13.5 firmware for working hdmi on m1pro):