Shortly after Apple announced their transition away from Intel x86 processors in late 2020, Linux creator Linus Torvalds expressed interest in Linux support for the Apple M1 Mac, but thought that the work to make this happen was too time-consuming for him to personally take on the necessary software development tasks.

[2] Martin announced the project in December 2020 and formally started work a month later in 2021,[3] after securing crowd-sourced funding.

However, it subsequently led to a thorough and comprehensive explanation of the previously undocumented boot process, which Martin and others published on GitHub.

[6][8] The project released an experimental alpha version of the Asahi Linux installer in March 2022.

The installer offered the choice of a desktop based on Arch Linux ARM, a minimal environment, or a basic UEFI environment for installing OpenBSD or alternate Linux distributions with support for Apple silicon via a bootable USB drive.

[18] Similarly, a review in Ars Technica was impressed by the amount of hardware that was already supported early in the project lifecycle.