How can I create a bootable USB Stick with a Linux distro for my M1 Mac?

Solution 1:

Those instructions won't work on your system. They were written for "Intel" Macs – i.e. with CPUs supporting the Intel x86_64 (aka amd64) architecture, like most PCs use. The M1 is completely different from those.

  1. M1 and other "Apple Silicon" CPUs use the ARM64 architecture – they cannot run x86_64 software. You would need an ARM-compatible distro image. (If the downloads page just says "64-bit", it's almost always x86_64.)

  2. The boot process of Apple Silicon systems is different from not just from UEFI PCs, but even from Intel Macs. It doesn't look for the same files or partitions, and it doesn't use the same type of bootloader. (According to its docs, the bootloader has to be shaped like a "XNU kernel" – i.e. be a macOS kernel or pretend it's one.)

  3. Most importantly: Linux, in general, cannot run on M1 yet. The entire system architecture of the M1 is rather nonstandard, even compared to other ARM systems – PCI works differently, USB works differently, interrupts work differently, etc.

    There is an effort to write all necessary Linux drivers for the M1 series Macs, but while it mostly works on developers' machines it'll still take a while for it to reach distro releases. For example, as of this post, the Linux patches necessary to support M1's PCI Express controllers were submitted literally yesterday. Proper GPU support is expected to still take a while.