r/debian • u/Tempus_Nemini • 3d ago

Debian Stable Question Debian 13 on iMac 2013

Hi there!

i've realized that all my other machines are on Debian now and thinking about moving from Arch to Debian on my iMac late 2013 (GeForce 750M graphics). Has anyone had any experience using it or similar with Debian, i worry about NVIDIA drivers (i'm on 470xx) and broadcom wifi?

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1

u/Buntygurl 1d ago

If it has an Intel CPU, no problem.

The rest is also manageable.

2

u/Tempus_Nemini 1d ago

Yes, i5-4670k if I remember coreectly

1

u/Buntygurl 1d ago

You may need to tweak the wifi, if necessary, but the system will work enough for that to be do-able. If you can stick an ethernet cable in there, you're already home and hosed.

2

u/ConstructionSafe2814 3d ago

I've got an iMac 2011 on Debian 13. Not sure how much they differ but works just fine. It's only something with the fans that you need to fix but it's too long time ago. IIRC you need to install something.

And my documentation says this, to fix backlight control 

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor"GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_backlight=vendor"

But again, that's for a 2011 model.

2

u/Own_Natural_6803 2d ago

With drivers that old it's fine. Very well supported at this point.

2

u/lisploli 20h ago

Just installed Debian on an Apple laptop from the same era, and graphics worked perfectly fine out of the box. A nice and snappy experience with KDE/wayland.

IIRC, this one had a 650M but the nouveau driver should cover them all. I had to use a second usb stick to load the b43 firmware into the installation, as described in the wiki.

1

u/retr00two 3d ago

Broadcom can be troublesome, you'll need STA driver and dkms ; rather buy cheap mediatek usb wifi adapter.

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u/Buntygurl 1d ago edited 1d ago

It's an IMac, apparently, so its got to have an ethernet port, but, even still, getting the Broadcom driver to work isn't a real big deal. It takes a bit of tweaking, depending on the machine, because the driver is proprietary, but it's not anything like the pain in the ass hassle of getting some Nvidia cards to play nice.