I recently got one of these beasts, and am wondering if anyone has tried to get Linux running on one. My preferred distro is Fedora, but I’ll settle for anything that works.
Any gotchas or game breakers? Is performance acceptable?
Has anyone tried to get the Touch Bar working in Linux? That’d be a neat trick, given how proprietary Apple is…
I have a feeling that a VM is probably my best option, but I generally prefer to run on bare metal.
Looks like you might be able to get it working. IDK how it really works though…
Thanks. I did some digging around and found this:
Looks like a pre-built Fedora ISO with the necessary T2, trackpad, etc. drivers bundled. It seems most devices are working, though WiFi is still a bit buggy. I do wonder if it’s using the AMD or Intel GPU drivers…
Love the finishing line in the article 
no need to panic if you’re a Linux user with a Cupertino hardware fetish
Yeah, that gave me some jollies.
I am sure both are useable but more than likely, the Intel iGPU will be the primary since it is initialized first electrically. You may just need to blacklist one to use the other.
Well, I actually got Fedora installed on the Macbook Pro. It boots with a graphical desktop, and most things seem to work. The notable exception being wifi. Not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it does makes it harder to justify keeping the thing.
According to lsmod it is using the amdgpu driver. Under Windows/Boot Camp, only the AMD GPU is usable, so it makes some sense that the same is true in Linux. However, I had gdm crash a couple of times, so it’s not entirely stable. As an experiment, I was able to use native Steam to install and run classic (32-bit) Skyrim, but only for a short test. I didn’t check to see whether DXVK or wine’s native DirectX support was being used.
The touchpad was working and had limited gesture support. Likewise, the touchbar had basic functionality (Fn keys + media control buttons), screen dimming worked, but the keyboard backlight would randomly come on and go off.
A lot of the obstacles with the T2 chip have been fixed. Internal storage works, as does the touchpad, keyboard and touchbar. I don’t know if Apple’s encryption has been broken, or a subtler approach was used. It was necessary to disable Secure Boot from the recovery partition to enable booting.
Given that Apple is likely moving to ARM next year and the fact that Linux support is a kind of dodgy, I may return this laptop. I have a few days to decide. That’s why I did something as crazy as installing Linux. I wanted to see what my options were like once Apple abandoned x86 altogether. The results weren’t too bad, and the deficiencies will likely be corrected with time. But I suspect Linux support will always be a bit, well, kludgy with the T2 chip mucking things up.