Thinking nothing more wonky than mint/pop!/bazzite/elementary. I know there is never “one” perfect one but feeling like trying something new on this machine that’s at least somewhat push button. Since it no longer receive regular updates from Apple I just want to keep this machine available for use when needed.
I’m pretty comfortable on the above ones I mentioned. I’m not a coder/engineer so I tend to lean heavily on flatpaks and such, though if I have to go into the terminal occasionally I can usually poke my way around
try arch with something comfortable like kde, you seem like you’re at the perfect skill level for it
ubuntu because everything works.
in case you can’t stand the snap business go fedora, add rpmfusion and poke around. if everything works, you’re set.
two possible issues with resume from sleep. if your wifi won’t come back, use the script from t2linux. if your laptop won’t wake up expeditiously (takes a while), come back here and ping me and I’ll dig up the the script.
stay away from mints and xfces and friends as you need wayland (so, Plasma or Gnome) for fractional scaling, gestures, seamless dock/undock, etc.
Mint is the only distro that “just worked” for me
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Everything worked for me on my dell xps 9700 out of the box except the fingerprint reader
This is for a MBP
I think driver wise Linux is almost all the same as they are all in the kernel
I would recommend giving bazzite a go. But if performance is an issue then mint with xfce might be the sensible choice
Why don’t you type out “MacBook Pro?” I think “MBpro” and “MBP” is probably confusing to people and they might not even know you’re talking about something that isn’t PC/Intel-adjacent.
If you’re comfortable administering your own system, try Arch.
If you’re not comfortable administering your own system but you want a rolling release, try tumbleweed.
If you don’t want a rolling release, try Fedora.
I’d advise against Ubuntu, Debian, mint, and their derivatives. The only one I know of that doesn’t ship out of date packages is Debian unstable.
If you hate yourself, try Gentoo lol
Endeavour OS has been the best I’ve found on my 2012 MBP
I used to run Linux Mint on mine. Worked fine, some quirks with the ctrl key not working. Did you have the same problem on EOS?
The only problem I’ve had was the Mac not going asleep properly, and immediately waking up. But that’s something I encountered on other distros including Mint also.
Found a fix for it.
Ctrl key hasn’t been a problem. Often on many distros the old hybrid Nvidia graphics and the old Broadcom card were both problems. But ok on Mint and EOS.
Fedora
I like zorin. Comes with libre office, disc burning, rdp client, play on linux to make running via wine easy, windows like interface. Its a nice out of the box distro for installing and going. Its an ubuntu spin and they only make the changes necessary for the look to be windows like and then the out of the box software so otherwise it pretty much behaves like ubuntu. Its a good lazy mans distro.
Very cool. Have you used it on an older MBPro?
Sorry no. Not in some time but one thing I did not mention is zorin uses ubuntu stable. Main complaint with people is old because it by no means tries to be bleeding edge. So it is relatively good on older hardware although its not a lightweight distro made to handle very old hardware. So I don’t know how well it will do on a mac book pro but im betting it will do as well as any other.
I have used Pop! aon my 2015 MBpro, but performance wasn’t the best. Switching to Mint Xfce might be a better choice.
