Hi! Firstly, thank you so much for your work on getting Linux to Apple Silicon Macs.
I am excited to run Fedora on my Mac, and everything seems promising in terms of reliability, but I was wondering if something breaks with my Fedora partition, what is the likelihood that it’ll break my macOS partition or render my machine unusable?
Additionally, if something does break and I have to remove my Fedora partition, I’m assuming I just need to use the disk utility to reclaim my partition and everything? Or is there something else I should now?
It’s incredibly unlikely that your Fedora system will break the macOS system on the same storage.
But if you ever need to remove your Fedora system, there are 3 partitions that you have to remove - all of which can easily be removed using diskutil in macOS. The partitioning cheatsheet that John Smith posted has these details, but you can find a simpler/visual walkthrough in this blog post (which also has a link to the partitioning cheatsheet).
It’s essentially impossible to permanently brick the machine, as you can always recover using DFU mode (if you don’t have another Mac you can try idevicerestore or take it to an Apple store, they’ll do it for free). This process does, however, wipe all your data.
As for damaging macOS, the chances are about the same as dual-booting Linux on any other platform. That is to say, Linux doesn’t have any guardrails and you can definitely clobber macOS with partitioning/disk related commands, but it’s not going to happen randomly. Backups are a good idea in general, for any machine holding data you care about, for all sorts of reasons beyond dual-booting too, so that’s always encouraged.
Sweet! Glad to hear that’s the case. I have backups of everything and I know my way around diskutil and everything, so I think I’ll go ahead with the install.
Thanks again!