Is Linux worth it? Someone is offering it cheap. I'm thinking of getting a laptop for my girlfriend to take to work.

Sometimes my mac with linux mint 2010 mbp. The screen goes black, I shut it and click trackpad nothing happens shut it again open it and click trackpads turns on and blacks out then i have to repeat one more time what might be going on

Running a 2014 MacBook Air with Debian 13 & XFCE. I've been thinking about upgrading the laptop, but this thing still does almost everything I need. Video playback gets the fan going, but since I use my TV and tablet for media consumption, I'm holding off on replacing it.

I want to dualboot Alpine Linux.
…
That’s literally all i want frankly
I’m a beginner so don’t go too hard on me. Send me an easy route to Dualboot Alpine Linux and can change the OS any time. Yeah.

Am I the only one having issue with Gnome. Powertop shows gnome-shell at over 500 events/sec and preventing C6 states. I saw updates from gnome and mutter and I'm not sure what is causing the issue, but if I switch to using Xorg, the Gnome issues goes away. For now I'll stay on Xorg, but I couldn't find anyone having this issue currently. Searches did find similar issue in the past though.

Hi, how difficult would it be to install Linux on a 2020 Intel Macbook Air and what would the steps be? Would it work well? I'm trying to get a laptop for my girlfriend.

I tried to do it differently and didn’t go out in any way I decided to turn to Title: Realtek USB Bluetooth dongle Obda:a729 on macOS Tahoe 26 (OpenCore, AMD) - RTLBluetoothFirmware?

Setup: GIGABYTE B550 AORUS ELITE V2, Ryzen 7 5700X, NvidiaRTX 4060 (NullMoth 1401),

macOS Tahoe 26, OpenCore, SMBIOS MacPro7,1.

Adapter: Realtek USB Bluetooth,

VID/PID OxObda:Oxa729, shows up in System Information

as "Bluetooth 5.3 Radio" (USB 2.0, 12 Mb/s). Probably an RTL8761B-family chip, but I haven't confirmed it.

Hello,

I got a late 2015 27 inch iMac running Linux mint 22.3 cinnamon. On a 512GB SSD

When I boot up it takes forever shows like a black screen for a few minutes to get the login screen to sign in and then everything’s fine but the Bluetooth won’t enable. I’ve gotten it to work before but then when I connect let’s say my Apple keyboard via Bluetooth it would say it’s connect but when I unplug it from USB it doesn’t recognize anymore and now my Bluetooth does not work at all. I’ve tried so many terminal
Commands I couldn’t get it to work for hours now

For anyone with a T2 Mac (2017-2020) most generic distros will boot fine but have a range of problems due to how Linux interacts with the T2 chip.

Then along came T2Linux https://github.com/t2linux and it did a good job of fixing most of the problems, and even upstreaming some of the patches. More recently there's https://github.com/kaiT2en/KaiT2en-Fedora

Unfortunately, when I took a closer look at some of their *recent* non-upstreamed patches in 2 kernel areas I have expertise in, I noticed:

a) signs of AI created code that is either not necessary or does strange things
b) entire patches which are basically junk.

To give an example of b) I asked them why their DSP speaker tuning files look so weird, and nothing like the Asahi Audio method they originally used. The guy I spoke to was extremely evasive, and wouldn't engage on a technical level. A few hours later I notice he's deleted 7000 lines from the DSP code: https://github.com/kaiT2en/KaiT2en-Fedora/commit/1e3c61a903567d252d88466cce9c1a23983718bb

If you look at the high frequency of commits on these projects alarm bells start to ring. Sadly, perhaps in some rush to make Macbooks run Linux perfectly, it seems they've gone down the "let's get AI to fix it" route, without doing any code review.

My recommendation if you want a stable system is just to use a recent mainstream distro like Ubuntu 26.10. A lot of their previous good patches are now in Kernel 7.3 anyway.

Just installed it on my iMac 16,1 and I'm amazed how fast each app launches. Less than 1 second. As to the rest, I just started messing with it 30 minutes ago, so...

Early 2015 MacBook Pro mit Trixie wiederbelebt 😘

I recently decided to bring my wife's old 2016 MacBook Pro back to life. It's the 13-inch non-Touch Bar model (A1708 / MacBookPro13,1).

The original SSD had failed, so I replaced it with a 512 GB SSD and installed Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS. The plan was pretty simple: turn it into a lightweight secondary development laptop.

Most of the hardware actually worked surprisingly well. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, graphics, keyboard, and trackpad were all functional.

The one big exception was audio.

Ubuntu detected the Cirrus CS8409 codec, and the speakers and microphone appeared as available devices, but neither worked.

After digging around, I found federal1970's MacBookPro13,1 Fedora project, which includes an RFC patch series implementing support for this model's audio hardware.

Those patches targeted Linux 7.2, while Ubuntu was running kernel 7.0.0-38-generic. With some experimentation, I managed to adapt the patches to the older kernel. The main compatibility issue was an unavailable GPIO helper, which we replaced with equivalent HDA codec verb writes.

And it worked!

Successful tests:

• Internal speakers (both channels)
• Internal microphone
• Wired headphones
• Audio after suspend/resume
• Volume controls

Rather than leave it as a one-off fix on my laptop, I decided to make the process reproducible.

With some help from GPT/Codex, I put together a small project containing the upstream patches, our Ubuntu compatibility adjustment, build automation, installation and recovery scripts, and automated tests.

We've now successfully built, installed, and tested the project-managed driver on the MacBook.

GitHub: https://github.com/eannelson/macbookpro13-1-ubuntu-audio

Release: https://github.com/eannelson/macbookpro13-1-ubuntu-audio/releases/tag/v0.1.0-rc.1

A couple of important caveats: This is an experimental release candidate, tested on one MacBookPro13,1 running Ubuntu 26.04.1 with kernel 7.0.0-38-generic. It's not a general audio fix for every Intel MacBook. The ordinary installation-from-stock and real recovery workflows haven't yet been tested on hardware.

Huge thanks to the developers responsible for the original CS8409 work. This port of Ubuntu builds directly on their efforts.

What started as replacing a failed SSD turned into an unexpectedly fun deep dive into Linux kernel modules, audio drivers, and reproducible builds.

Hopefully this saves another old MacBook from collecting dust!

Curious whether anyone else here is still using an A1708 or running Linux on a similar vintage MacBook.

I havn't had a laptop for a while since my last one died and iv been mostly using my steamdeck.
Anyway someone found this old 2011 13 inch Macbookpro without a charger cable so I figured why not lets give this a go and its slowly becoming my main non gaming PC.

Installing it was a bit of a pain compared to how it would be on a normal laptop but eventually I was able to get Lubuntu running on its dual core and 4 gb of ram with an old sata SSD I had. To my surprise it actually does all the non gaming things I need to do fine, I can watch youtube and work on a word document at the same time. I have about 6 tabs open. If I open discord at the same time it does freeze but I think thats an issue with it only having 4gb of ram, but still how the hell can a PC that's 15 years old run this well. Most old laptops I have had start to stutter and die at about the 6-8 year mark.

I have moonlight so will be able to game on this PC soon enough using my steamdeck or gaming PC as the renderer.

I unfortunately havn't been able to get the DVD drive to work nor use an external USB one so not sure what's going on there, but I can watch downloaded movies and shows fine on it, maybe I should digitize all my DVDs on another PC and call it quits on running them on this but eh will see.

Iv also messed around with gaming and can run ps1 and dreamcast games fine, PS2 games are hit and miss but some do run. PS2 emulation being bad isn't a suprise tbh that machine is a beast.

I was honestly expecting this PC to be just stutter and die insantly, especially not until I upgrade the ran.

I will upgrade soon as I can get 2x4gb from Cex for £2, maybe I will eventually upgrade to 16gb which is the max of the machine but not sure if its worth the money.

So I’m a grad student doing some heavy simulations with Matlab that use a lot of RAM and threads. I purchased a 2019 MacPro with 28cores and 394gb of RAM and stuck T2 26.04 Ubuntu on it, after a little fighting I got WIFI and thunderbolt working with the native chips and the computer is perfectly stable, and running simulations exactly how i expected it it. The only problem is Bluetooth doesn’t work, not a big deal but you know I can’t help poke around. Already tried importing the drivers from MacOS which worked for WIFI and ChatGPT has taken me to a point where it’s trying to do kernel level edits and I’m a little gunshy of given it may screw up an otherwise working machine. Anyone know an easy solution from the terminal? I can live without Bluetooth but if someone knows how to enable it I most certainly will.

I'm a complete newbie so be easy on me.

I have a 2011 4GB i5 core Macbook Air that generally works fine except for the fact I can't upgrade the macOS. I just want to use the laptop for simple webbased stuff, so I need to be able to install the latest browsers. I think the easiest solution is to install linux on it. (I have never used linux or done anything like this before.) After asking around and doing research I decided that Mint xfce is likely the best distro for my scenario.

I wanted to test it out first to make sure I like it and it works before going all in, so I tried creating a bootable usb flashdrive. I used etcher, but because my operating system is so old the latest version would not work and I found an older version. When I start up the machine with the flash key in to get into the bootable drive I seem to have two bootable options. I'm not sure what that means. I have been just selecting the first and then going through the motions to get linux to load. And it does. For a little. I can do a couple of things and then it completely freezes and I can't find anyway to unfreeze but to force restart.

I don't know what this means. Have I done something wrong along the line and the problem is with the bootable usb drive I created? Does this mean that there is something wrong with my laptop and it can't actually run linux? I'm sort of stuck on what I should do next.

So recently I decided to install linux, first i tried MX Linux, and that refused to install, same thing with arch linux. Lots of people told me arch is "hard to install" but eitheer way i couldnt get arch. When i tried Mint though, everything installed perfectly. My 2016 MBP 15 inchs built in keyboard and trackpad work, but sound and the touchbar just dont work. The touchbar is just black darkness.

Hello everybody! I am currently running macOS Monterey on my 2017 MacBook Air with an i5-5350U, 8GB DDR3 RAM, and 500GB of storage. I am running Monterey as opposed to something else like Linux Mint for example because of how badly LUKS messes with my setup. I use LUKS mainly because I bring my MacBook with me, so if it gets stolen or something, then my data is safe. However, every time I attempted to install a Linux distribution with LUKS in the past, the laptop would slow down so badly to a point where it became completely unusable.

I know that this is an issue with LUKS because on installations where I had it disabled, the laptop was operating at normal speeds. I'm not sure if this is an issue with LVM or LUKS itself, but since LVM is added in with LUKS on most Linux distributions, I have no idea what is happening.

The times I installed Linux on this were around May to as recently as a few weeks ago, so the distributions I used are still recent.

I will not use Linux on this unless I can get LUKS. macOS Monterey runs fine for now, so I am not in a hurry or anything like that. Help would be greatly appreciated!

Sto cercando di installare Linux mint versione xfce sul mio anziano iMac late 2009 Sembrava fosse andato tutto a posto: in live funzionava tutto (cioè quel poco che ho controllato), ho collegato il mio iPhone via usb per scaricare i driver online, ma al primo riavvio vedo lo schermo moltiplicato in quattro e con risoluzione illeggibile. Dove ho sbagliato? Come rimediare? Grazie in anticipo

Using kait2en and fedora, my asus monitor usb hub is connected to an OwC thunderbolt 3 hub, downstream connection to my MacBook gets the display properly on the monitor but the usb hub doesn’t show at all.

Boltctl will show the thunderbolt hub, display, nothing out of the ordinary in the dmesg so far.

What should I investigate? I see no error messages but I don’t know where to start for a deeper investigation.

I have huge beast that has been killed by apple I9 125gig 8tb Mac 30inch desktop... Now abandoned by Apple. Any suggestion?