My grandma just gave me her old MacBook Pro (MacBookPro11,1 A1502) and, after removing a spicy pillow, air dusting everything, and copying off her old photos, I’m ready to do a clean install.
I would like to dual-boot either Linux or BSD (which will be my main partition) alongside macOS (which will be handy for testing and for use with certain peripherals; either Mavericks, High Sierra, or Big Sur).
I am already well-versed in unix-like operating systems, so I’ll only start having trouble if I try to use a source-based distro (e.g. Gentoo, Source Mage, LFS, etc.)
Can I have some recommendations for the Linux and the macOS version, please?
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Your preferred distro probably runs great on the 2014 MBP.
“Newest compatible operating system: macOS Big Sur” according to: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201300
I run Linux Mint Debian Edition on my 2014 Mac Mini and it’s works really well. Should be the same on the MacBook. Or regular Mint.
I’ve run Mint on my 2015 MacBook Pro and it worked very well.
Either way I recommend a slow release distro because if you use a rolling distro the WiFi will stop working with every kernel update … It takes a few days before they update the Broadcom reverse driver to work with the newer kernel.
That’s why I’m on Linux Mint Debian Edition - I don’t need the latest kernel nor my WiFi breaking every other week. Linux Mint Debian Edition is stable and just works.
Spicy pillow?
A bad battery
Baddery
I would like to dual-boot either Linux or BSD
Since you menrioned BSD, might be worth checking out helloSystem. Would feel right at home on a MBP I reckon.
Similarly, a Linux alternative could be elementary OS - despite its relatively low popularity, it’s actually a pretty solid and polished distro.
helloSystem sounds miserable. Copying all the weird things that macOS does and hiding how things work in favour of “simplicity”
I liked Debian, but really you can’t go wrong with most Linux distros, just find one that suits your needs. Mint was another one that worked well on my MacBook
OpenSuse Tumbleweed if you want rolling
Debian if you want stable
MacOS is a BSD, so go with Linux if you want variety.
Elementary OS! It would be perfect on a Mac!
I put LMDE on my 2010, and it runs smooth as butter. Fedora Silverblue, as some one else stated, will give you the ability to run Linux as your main and have Macos in a drawer without the need to dual boot. If I needed Macos on mine, I would have gone this route, too.
Edit: personally, I prefer official images, so I would have installed the official Silverblue and not the community edition from uBlue, but whatever floats your boat.
Fedora Silverblue from ublue.it to get a macOS like workflow but better. Why dualboot if you can create a macos install medium and store that in a drawer?
What’s your reasoning for the MacOS choices? I generally prefer Catalina for that era machine.
Catalina could be the one, in that case. Essentially:
- Mavericks is the only supported version with skeuomorphic icons
- High Sierra is the earliest version still supported by enough developers for my needs
- Big Sur is the latest version supported on the MacBook
Gotcha. I have a 2015 Air that I tried Big Sur on and I didn’t care for it at all, went back to Catalina and it runs great. Monterey could run on this machine, and I prefer it to Big Sur, but it just doesn’t add anything I want and comes with a performance hit.
I loaded NixOS on a 2014 macbook air, copying over my config from my framework laptop (just switching the hardware config), and it just works. I think pretty much any modern linux distro will work fine.
I found Manjaro to work perfectly on my MacBook pro 2013 and recognized immediately the graphics card. Flawless experience so far.
Manjaro is actually the worst distro
endeavor is the same idea with much better execution
You’re speaking from experience or just copying the Majarno trend? My experience has been great.
I’m speaking from experience, my experience has been absolutely abhorrent, i’ve given it to 3 people and thoroughly regretted it every time, troubleshooting insane problems that never happened on arch. I have nothing but awful experiences with the distro.
It was great until it broke, and it inevitably will break in unforeseen ridiculous ways. Over and over again. One of the peoples computers I maintain refuses to switch to kinoite and I dread working on his computer because manjaro is such a terrible experience.
There’s a reason there’s a trend. Manjaro makes arch significantly worse, adds nothing to the equation except maintenance burden, and breaks a bunch of shit for everyone else too. It’s just an absolutely awful distro, probably the worst of all time, and I say this as someone with literally years of experience with the distro.
Interesting. Come to think if hardware play a big role to that…
It’s 100% not hardware, none of the issues that I had were related to hardware, they all appeared on all 3 machines simultaneously, or were fundamental design issues
an example of a fundamental design issue is the way the linux kernel packages are handled, they’re numbered, which means when you run the updater, you don’t automatically get the newest one, they should’ve used an ignorepkg or something else to achieve the same effect, because now if you don’t manually go in and change the kernel after a year or so, which no normal user would think to do, it breaks an unbelievable amount of shit, especially with nvidia drivers. This is just one of many horrible things that happened with that distro, you should really give endeavor or anything else a shot, even default arch is great now since there’s an installer.
I truly believe there’s literally no reason to use manjaro.
Will try openSUSE to that machine next then…
If you use gnome/kde I highly recommend an immutable distribution like kinoite or silverblue, if you prefer SUSE, microos is the equivalent. It’s unbelievably good if you want something that just works all the time.
