Silly question.. is there a way to run Asahi Linux on a M1Pro MacBook in a live mode without installing it?
I’d love to try it for fun on a computer that is not mine…
I’d love to try it for fun on a computer that is not mine…
Apple Silicon machines cannot boot from external storage. While it may look like they do when you choose an external macOS volume, behind the scenes parts of its boot components are being copied to the internal drive to make this work. It’s unclear whether this mechanism will ever be usable by third party OSes, for technical reasons.
Instead, we recommend using the UEFI environment only installer option to install only a UEFI bootstrap to your internal drive. This only requires around 3GB of disk space, and it will then automatically boot from any connected USB drive with a UEFI bootloader. Note: installing the Asahi Linux desktop images to a USB drive automatically isn’t supported right now, though if you’re adventurous enough it’s not terribly hard to do manually :-)
It still requires adding a new partition with bootloader and some other files required by Apple for successfully verifying the signatures on everything, so it's not a "live mode".