July 1, 2026
Boot menu vanished, fans lost it
Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report
Apple hid Asahi from the boot menu, and the internet instantly made the devs folk heroes
TLDR: Asahi Linux fixed a nasty issue where Apple’s newest Mac software update made Linux disappear from the startup menu, even though users’ files were still safe. The comments turned the devs into legends while roasting Apple for not helping with support people clearly want.
The big plot twist in the latest Asahi Linux progress report is pure tech soap opera: after Apple’s new macOS 27 beta arrived, some users suddenly found their Linux option had vanished from the startup menu. Cue panic. Luckily, the team discovered the data was still there — Apple had basically stopped showing it because of one missing “yes, this can boot” marker. Asahi already has a fix for new installs and a repair option for old ones, which turned a potential disaster into yet another chapter of the project’s ongoing how are they even doing this? saga.
And honestly, that’s where the comments really took over. The loudest mood was straight-up admiration. “God bless the asahi team,” wrote one commenter, while another said they were in “absolute awe” that a small crew keeps solving problems this weird and specific. That admiration quickly turned into drama aimed at Apple itself. One of the hottest takes blasted the company for not assigning even a couple of employees to help, arguing the goodwill alone would be worth it — and then came the line about Apple chasing services revenue “the way a crackhead pursues crack,” which is the kind of comment that practically arrives pre-highlighted.
There was also a more grounded kind of nerdy curiosity: how do you even test this stuff, and how much is automated versus manually tried on real machines? Meanwhile, one cheerful aside about the AVD driver showed that even in the middle of boot-menu chaos, the community is still collecting side quests like excited fans tracking bonus scenes.
Key Points
- •Asahi Linux said its Apple boot integration uses a 2.5 GB APFS container that makes Apple’s boot tools recognize the installation as bootable.
- •The project reported that after installing the macOS 27 Golden Gate developer beta, some users could no longer see Linux in Startup Disk or the boot picker.
- •Investigation showed Asahi-related partitions remained intact after upgrade, indicating the issue did not involve data loss.
- •Asahi determined that macOS 27 now requires an APFS metadata flag marking the volume as bootable; manually setting that flag restored visibility in the boot picker.
- •The Asahi Installer will now set the flag automatically for new installs, includes a repair option for existing installs, and the project is testing a Linux-based fix tool called asahi-fix27.