Yesterday I succeeded in making a Mint-Asahi image which can be flashed onto M1/M2 Macs with an installer script from Asahi Linux. The image contains a working Linux Mint system based on Debian (LMDE 7) using the Asahi kernel, m1n1 bootloader, u-boot, asahi-firmware extractor, asahi audio stack and Asahi scripts.
Included in the image is a way to set up a user account: the flashed system will boot the first time into an oem user account (autologin in LightDM), which will then autostart a small program I wrote to set up user name, password, hostname, timezone and locales. After the wizard is closed the system reboots and Linux Mint boots into a regular session where a normal user can login.
I have not been able to test this yet as I don’t have hardware to test it on. To be continued…