I salvaged this 2018 mbp from work. Love the retina display but hate the keyboard. Ended up modding it with thermal pads and made a custom laptop stand for it with some old case fans, an easel, and a 12v power brick from a broken monitor. I was dual booting macOS sequoia 15 windows 10 via bootcamp but finally took the plunge with KaiT2en fedora.

It's been about two weeks and I'm still blown away at how great it runs. Unbelievable snappy and much better gaming performance than on windows 10 which I didn't expect at all. Granted I definitely don't recommend KaiT2en or Linux in general to any first timers if you don't have at least a handful of hours to figure everything out.

I've tried Linux twice on the past, Ubuntu once about 10 years ago and mint about 3 years ago but they've always given me issues. I think what changed now is just how much more options there are and the software support. Say what you will about all the vibe coders but pretty much everything I used to use on windows has a Linux compatible equivalent so the switch was pretty painless. (Granted I RDP into my workstation at home if I need to get any real work done).

One big tip for anyone who's thinking of trying it out. Definitely try codex (the free cli) or antigravity by Google or a local LLM on your/a separate machine. Just ask it if you have any issues or want anything set up for you and it usually does a good job with giving you the right commands. (Definitely set up some restore points though... Just in case).

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Zap fellow linuxers on apple hw

Moved from fedora to slackware, did write a small how to. Was straight forward.

Install, fix wifi, add audio, add touchar, reboot.

All good, no systemd so life is simple now :D

https://inku.bot.nu/posts/slackware-current-macbookpro-2017/

I have a 2019 16" MacBook Pro with 64 gigs of RAM, Core i9-9980HK (8 cores/16threads) a 512 SSD, and a Radeon 5600 with 8 gigs of VRAM. When I bought it in early 2020, it was a screaming demon. And now macOS just sucks on it. Has anyone gotten Omarchy to run on this? Has an Apple T2 chip.

I keep getting drawn into the allure of Omarchy and it has left me wanton. My user experience was so bad on my MBP I pulled out my old Thinkpad T450s with Fedora KDE and have been using that as my on the go computer.

I just glommed onto the last of the PowerPC Mac marketted, on eBay. I'm sure it'll need a lot of work just to make it functional, such as rebuilding the liquid cooler without a coolant that's corrosive.

It's actually the first Mac to come with PCIe, which uniquely positions it in computing history.

But I want to integrate it into my existing computing infrastructure, which requires a SAS HBA and a SFP network adapter.

These Macs came with four PCIe gen1 slots. All x16 physical. The bottom is x16 electrical, and is occupied with an Nvidia GeForce 6600 GPU with two DVI ports. The remaining slots, from bottom to top, are x8 (2 GB/s) and two(2) x4 (1 GB/s). The hard drive subsystem is also SATA 1 (150 MB/s). It comes with (I think) the original 250 GB hard drive.

There's a FibreChannel card available from Apple, but I don't use FC. I use SAS. I prefer 12 Gbps SAS-3, which the gen1 x8 slot could technicly do, but where would I find a SAS3/PCIe1 card that the PowerPC OpenFirmware system could talk to?

Likewise, I prefer 10 Gbps fiber ethernet in my network, but the remaining slots top out at 8 Gbps. But, if there's a SFP ethernet PCIe card out there that can auto-downshift to gen1 speed, I'll take it, but again, there's the question of PowerPC OpenFirmware compatibility.

Anyone have any advice on this wild goose chase I've started?

If I have to settle for SAS2 (6 Gbps) and/or 5Gbps Ethernet, I'll not be complaining, but I don't know this platform's quirks with regard to PCIe card compatibility.

Are there any Reports/Experiences if the Touchbar works under Linux on the MacBook 13" (2020)?

Hey everyone!

I have a 2017 MacBook with the following specifications:

Processor: 1.8 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5

RAM: 8 GB DDR3 (1600 MHz)

Storage: 121 GB total, with around 100 GB available

I wanna become a SOC analyst and hence I want to start learning skills on linux. I'm confused which linux should i use that'll be best for my MacBook. I asked chat gpt and it said I won't be able to run heavy labs on it so I want your help knowing whether it's right and if it's right then what should I do??

I9 64GB ram, it runs my local LLM ;)

hi guys i just wanted to show that i have arch on my mac, im very happy that it works, also wifi works while booting from the iso :)

MBP 2018 user here. My SSD is 256G which an okay number.

I plan to try out KaiT2en and guide (as well as for t2linux) recommends to keep macOS around.

At the same time I have a usb-ssd laying around without particular use and I already successfully installed macOS on it and it boots up just fine. It was a small experiment, nothing fancy.

Hence a question: do I still need an original macOS installation on internal SSD?

Key Features & Support Matrix:

Wi-Fi & NVMe Power Management: Stabilizes Broadcom BCM43602 Wi-Fi reconnections and configures MemorySleepMode=deep alongside NVMe d3cold service rules for reliable S3 sleep/resume.

Cirrus CS8409 Internal Audio: Integrates pinned community audio driver configurations and headers for working sound across system states.

Apple T1 Touch Bar & Input Fixes: Features T1-aware resume hooks and usb_control_msg() return-value normalization to restore Touch Bar brightness, volume, and function keys.

Optional ACPI Fast-Wake Workaround: Provides safe, opt-in management scripts for display illumination after deep S3 sleep with strict risk acknowledgements.

Safe, Rerunnable CLI Tooling: Includes modular scripts (MBP14_2-FIX-v5.sh, audio helper, and USB patch tools) equipped with --report, dry-run safeguards, and rollback options.

https://github.com/abdalgaderalsaid/Hardware-specific-recovery-fix-toolkit-for-Ubuntu-on-MacBook-Pro-14-2-2017-Touch-Bar-Apple-T1-

I mean, no issues at all. Downloaded the .iso on a stick, booted from the USB, and 90 minutes later I have breathed new life into this slowcoach old Mac.

After a lot of work, I have Ubuntu running on my 2015 mpb. This reddit was a great source of knowledge, so thank you!

Took time and testing to get the disk, wifi, bluetooth, sound, graphics and suspend to work correctly, including a recompiled kernel and a module.

I created a repo that can be copied to an USB, with scripts to fix the common issues on MBP 11.5.
I just wiped the partition and ran it all a second time. Worked fine.

https://github.com/CarlRibbegaardh/macbookpro11-5-ubuntu-26.10

It's only virtual but works perfectly 👍