23 Jun 2026
Asahi Linux on a Macbook Air M1
Setting up a headless server
I’ve been wanting to move my server from a VPS hosted at Hetzner to my own hardware for a while. After scouring the internet for suitable low-power devices, think Raspberry Pi but more powerful, I landed on a weird idea: What if I just repurpose my Macbook Air M1 as a server? It’s still a super performant machine and consumes barely any power idling. After some research it seems like this should be well possible thanks to the Asahi Linux project. So here we go.
I’ll use this chance to revamp my server setup again, but that’s not the focus of this note. Here I just want to run through the fundamental software tweaks necessary to make this device capable of acting as a server. All the other basic hardening that should be applied to any server I leave out as that is better found in a serious server setup guide.
Step 1: Install Asahi from macOS as described in their documentation.
Step 2: Ensure device doesn’t sleep when lid is closed.
# /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/lid-ignore.conf
[Login]
HandleLidSwitch=ignore
HandleLidSwitchDocked=ignore
HandleLidSwitchExternalPower=ignoreStep 3: Turn screen off when lid is closed. Don’t want to waste power.
sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="consoleblank=30"
Step 4: Set battery charge limit to 80%. Let’s keep the battery healthy and avoid it exploding in my closet.
echo 'SUBSYSTEM=="power_supply", KERNEL=="macsmc-battery", ATTR{charge_control_end_threshold}="80"' | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/10-battery.rules
Voilà
With those basic tweaks I can plug my Macbook into power and Ethernet and set it aside. It acts as a neat little arm64 server while sipping around 1.75 Watts at idle. Great success.
Known issues
One inconvenience I found is that my USB-C to Ethernet adapter doesn’t get listed when the server reboots. I have to physically plug it in again for it to be picked up. None of the common workarounds work for me. I have tried a different dongle, which seems to work. That one is however slower and seems to consume about 3 Watts just by itself. It also gets pretty warm just sitting there. So I’ll just live with having to be home when I want to reboot the machine after updates. That’ll do for my purposes. If it turns out to be annoying I may go hunting for another adapter.