this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
141 points (95.5% liked)

Linux

48248 readers
776 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Recently I had to return the laptop from my workplace, and was briefly left without a working laptop. Luckily (that’s what I thought at the time), we had a spare old 2013 macbook laying at home with an upgraded battery and a 256 GB SSD. The only problem was – it had MacOS installed. Now, I don’t really have a problem with using MacOS, in fact I had to daily-drive it for the past 8+ years, as most of the time I was using a work-issued laptop, which unsurprisingly ran MacOS. But this time I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to try and install a working Linux distro on this old macbook? I mean, it’s not like I have anything better to do on a weekend, right? What followed was a journey of pain, suffering, surfing 8 years old forum posts, with occasional glimpses of hope and joy, which made the entire experience worth it. Some of the problems I encountered were really Mac-hardware specific, while the others had to do with the rather early stage of Wayland protocol and the HiDPI support in general in Linux (worsened by the disinterest of corporate software developers in spending at least some time on making sure their product works on not-so-widely-used OS-s).

all 24 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

exacurbated

Is that a mashup of exacerbated and masturbated?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

They did say they loved it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

At first it was the former, then the latter. )

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Did this with an 09 MacBook, installed Debian 12 with XFCE, and everything just worked with no additional setup!

[–] Dynamo 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is it the white unibody MacBook? I have installed LMDE on it and am absolutely satisfied with it so far. Thinking about selling my 2016 Intel MacBook Pro now!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I recently did the same with a mid 2013 macbook air. I installed NixOS because I already have a config for my framework laptop. It took maybe 10 minutes to put together the extra lines of config for the macbook air, then 30 minutes of waiting for everything to install, and now I have two laptops with the exact same software and layout. The macbook air doesn't exactly scream, but it's a lightweight option for bringing to a coffee shop to write that does its job well, and it was just collecting dust before.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I have a late 2011 that I might be interested in doing this to. Any practical advice on avoiding your suffering?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Like the other reply suggests: look up which drivers you got (mainly the wlan, bluetooth and the camera), and see if WL or facetimehd support those. It wasn’t that much of a pain with the drivers though. Also, find out whether you have the “over the internet recovery”. If not, I would probably avoid deleting the recovery partition, and opt for a dual boot (or manual partitioning).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks, I appreciate it! I'm happy for a dual boot and for no camera, so here's hoping for the rest.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Look up which distros come with drivers/documentation for your hardware (different for many MacBook versions) especially the WiFi/Bluetooth chipset.

Don't try anything fancy, unless you have a surplus of life energy and time to waste.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Excellent, thankyou! I was just going to throw ubuntu at it unless I really needed something else because of the potato specs, so hopefully drivers are already sorted.

especially the WiFi/Bluetooth chipset

Noted. I would be pissed to not have that working.

Don’t try anything fancy

No chance, I've been burnt by my unix arrogance enough times to not want to try it on proprietary hardware. Until now I assumed even getting Linux on there was too fancy, I still remember other people fighting for weeks with their hackintosh a decade ago.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I've been burnt by my unix arrogance enough times

Same here, haha. As long as you stay away from ideas like "compiling your kernel from scratch" you'll be fine.

[–] pathief 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I recently installed arch on my late 2011 MacBook pro, pretty much everything worked out of the box except wi-fi. The broadcom-wl-dkms driver ended up working the best and without disconnections.

I really recommend it, the performance really surprised me. It's at the very least 2x faster than MacOS. It really brought life to the laptop, it was unusable before that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

2012 MacBook Pro with an upgraded ssd.

Installed Fedora 38 easily on it with just one line of command for enabling rom fusion to get the WiFi drivers.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What’s the multi monitor support like on mac’s running Linux?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Well in that sense Macs aren’t too different from any other laptop. HDMI worked just fine. I was also trying to connect a USB-C monitor through an HDMI adapter, which didn’t quite work, but I think that might be the case with other laptops too (it’s probably a driver issue). From the desktop experience point of view, KDE handles multi monitor flawlessly, can’t think of any complaints.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They actually had hi-res screens 10 years ago? Like I'm 2013? Resolution is 1600. That's pretty high for a 10 year old laptop

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That sounds about right for the first retina MacBooks

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, I believe these were one the first retinas with 200+ ppi. Honestly, for a person who spends most of the time staring at a code or a text, hidpi is basically a necessity for me at this point. So the fact that slack or vscode had such a bad support for fractional scaling is a huge deal for me. (Wayland fixes this in some instances as I mentioned)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Oh, tell me about the hi dpi. I can't believing that 1080p is actually still a thing in 2023 on laptops. Especially on anything 15" or bigger. It looks like dogshit and I can see every single pixel. Everything in my house is 4K except my two work monitors, and they're 1080p. I can't stand them. I think 1080p is ok for gaming, but that's about it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

2010 MacBook Pro, still runs Arch with ease (back when I set it up I had more time than I do now, would go with a less DIY-ish distro nowadays, probably something Debian based)

The only chore was to get the RTC alarm wake up working, which was a bit hacky.