We are proud to announce the early alpha release of Gravity Linux for the M4 Mac mini. This release includes working support for the DCP and GPU (OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 3.3 compliance).
Gravity Linux is a Fedora remix and by default uses KDE with Wayland by default.
This release is primarily intended FOR DEVELOPERS. It is not yet ready to be used as a daily driver.
Before installing, there are some limitations you should know about:
There may be no upgrade path from this alpha to the beta or final release. You should assume that the beta will require a complete reinstall.
The following features are known not to work: suspend, display out on the USB-C ports (HDMI works), and Thunderbolt/USB4. Additionally, power consumption may be higher than expected (not very relevant for a desktop); we have set conservative limits for max speaker volume for safety reasons; and shutdown/reboot are flaky (you can just use the power button anyways). Every feature not listed here works and has been tested.
The entire release has gone through very limited testing. There may be general stability/usability issues. Because this release is intended for developers, some settings are enabled that are not usually enabled for release builds.
If any of those are deal-breakers, we recommend waiting for a later release.
This release is meant to get Gravity Linux into the hands of developers early, so people can test real workloads, find bugs, contribute fixes, and help us harden the platform before beta. Our beta release will significantly alleviate and/or remove the above limitations.
Additionally, we (Cody Ho and Niklas Sheth) are not experts in maintaining Linux distributions. We take the quality of the user experience extremely seriously and will do our best to avoid user-facing errors, especially those impacting privacy and security. Nevertheless, it is likely that mistakes will be made at some point.
Installing
From macOS, just run the following shell command:
curl -fsSL https://install.gravitylinux.org | sh
The installer will handle the required setup and installation process from there.
What’s next
This alpha release on the M4 Mac mini is only the beginning. We’re working toward extending Gravity Linux support to the MacBook Neo and the remaining M4, M4 Pro, and M4 Max devices soon, and some promising new contributors have already made significant progress on this front. All M5 and M6 devices remain in scope as well.
Our long term-goal is to upstream all of our work as the only practical way of ensuring a sustainable project. To this end, we have gone out of our way to document our methods and findings, respect Apple’s copyright (we have not looked at any Apple binaries to write Linux drivers), and follow a textbook clean-room reverse engineering process.
For now, if you have an M4 Mac mini, enjoy experimenting— and please report everything you break.
Join Us
If you want to be a part of our journey, please talk to us on Discord, and have a read through our contributor guide.