Gravity Linux is a newly announced distro targeting newer Apple Silicon Macs, and its first experimental alpha already boots an accelerated desktop on the M4 Mac mini. The project homepage says: "Gravity Linux is a Fedora remix that brings a fast, modern Linux desktop to Apple Silicon – built in the open, by people like you." If this sounds familiar, the About page explains: "Gravity Linux was initially forked from Asahi Linux over differences in policy, namely regarding LLM use. We have tremendous respect for the Asahi Linux project and emphasize our shared goal of running Linux on Apple Silicon." There's already an early alpha release for the M4 Mac mini, a model launched in October 2024 just days after the company announced the M4 iMac. It includes GPU acceleration with OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenGL 3.3 support, but is explicitly aimed at developers rather than daily use. HDMI output works, but USB-C displays, USB4, Thunderbolt, and suspend do not, while power management remains incomplete. In terms of hardware generations, this puts Gravity ahead of Asahi Linux. As The Register reported earlier this month, Asahi has only recently added preliminary M3 support, for now without graphics acceleration. The comparison is not exact, however: Gravity's M4 release is an early developer alpha, while Asahi is a longer-established project supporting a much broader range of hardware. Apple, meanwhile, has already moved on: The Reg reported on the first M6-based Macs last month, nearly three years after the company launched its "scary fast" M3 systems. The Reg reported on the new Asahi Linux project in March 2022, and tried it out later the same month. However, Asahi has since lost several prominent contributors. Project lead Hector Martin resigned in February 2025. A week later, the leader of the GPU effort, known only as "Asahi Lina," also quit. As we mentioned later that year, in August 2025, the leader of the GPU driver effort, Alyssa Rosenzweig, left the project. She had already, in her own words, passed the reins on to her other Arm GPU drivers that April. As her resume [PDF] shows, she's been working for Intel since then. Gravity attributes much of its rapid progress to a development method that Asahi explicitly prohibits. Project lead Cody Ho previously worked at both Apple and OpenAI, and has published a two-part account of using coding agents for Apple Silicon reverse engineering. On August 3, Ho published the first part of "I Came, I Prompted, I Left," describing the construction of a custom hypervisor for newer Apple Silicon. The second part, published on September 15, explains how he and co-developer Niklas Sheth built an M4 GPU driver in about a month. Ho says much of the work was performed through largely unattended LLM loops. This is one of the sharpest differences between Gravity Linux and Asahi Linux. Ho and Sheth are reverse-engineering Apple's hardware with the assistance of AI tools, while the Asahi project has a Generative AI (LLM) Policy that says "we broadly forbid the use of generative AI tooling for material contributions to Asahi Linux." Gravity's LLM Use and Clean-Room Policy permits such tools but attempts to contain the legal risks through separation. It states: "If in any session your LLM has looked at any disassembly, decompilation, or other protected implementation details of an Apple component, you must consider yourself tainted with respect to that component." This does not mean nobody involved looks at Apple binaries. Ho says that while developing the hypervisor, he used an LLM to disassemble Apple's proprietary SPTM component. That made him ineligible to write the corresponding clean-room implementation, so the knowledge had to be documented and handed to someone who had not seen the protected material. Ho and Sheth say the GPU work followed a stricter route, using hardware traces, live probing and self-written shaders without inspecting Apple binaries. They also acknowledge benefiting from Asahi's earlier M1 and M2 work and using its existing userspace API. The result is nevertheless striking: Gravity's first alpha brings an accelerated Linux desktop to an M4 Mac mini, and Ho credits LLMs with helping the pair achieve in weeks work that would ordinarily take far longer. But the code still requires extensive testing, human review, and refactoring before it can be upstreamed. Gravity's developers warn that its kernel driver may have to wait for Asahi's M1 and M2 driver to land upstream first. Gravity has therefore produced an intriguing demonstration of what AI-assisted reverse engineering can do, rather than a controlled experiment proving that Asahi's policy is what held it back. ®
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