My distro-hopping adventure log on a macbook pro mid 2010

Hello,

lately I’ve been having fun experimenting with my macbook since mac os support has been dropped on this machine, i’ve been testing different distros mainly just to try them out and noticed extremely different behaviours on each of them.

I’ll go in alphabetical order:

  • Arch: probably one of the easiest to get up and running on this machine, even wireless was working during the installation.
    I had to edit manually the PCI-E registers to get the graphical environment working correctly (guide here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/264247/proprietary-nvidia-drivers-with-efi-on-mac-to-prevent-overheating/613573#613573).

  • CentOS: the installer just straight up refused to start, I decided it was not worth the effort and skipped this.

  • Kubuntu: even on kubuntu the installer had a few issues like crashing if not connected to the internet which required a cable connection since wireless was not working, however it managed to install and like with Arch I had to edit the PCI-E registers and install the proprietary nvidia driver (340).

  • Manjaro: like Kubuntu the installer freezees without internet connection, however this was the only distro that didn’t require editing the PCI-E registers to get the graphical environment working. Wireless was still an issue.

– Temperatures –

The temps were higher on Linux, however this is Apple’s fault since this happens on Windows as well. There are tools like TLP, thermald, etc. which help a bit however do NOT expect the same temps you get on Mac OS.

– Performance –

The performance was on par with Mac OS and faster than Windows when running KDE.
With XFCE it was a bit faster than Mac OS. I’m planning to try GNOME and LXDE as well in the future, I will probably report back once I try them out.

– My Pick –

While surprisingly it was not the easiest to get working I would suggest Kubuntu, you are required to tweak some stuff to get it working but the fixes are fast to apply and overall it’s probably the fastest one to get up and running if you know already the problems you are going to face (PCI-E registers and drivers)

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I never tried LXDE but i did try LXLE on this:


They used to sell them at wal-mart as the first 300 dollar pc, LXLE flew on it especially with the proprietary driver. This was a few years ago.
I don’t know antthing about LXDE but the both have the same creepy logo which reminds me of the shadow vessels from Babylon 5 :slight_smile:
image

If you are still up for trying things. You could try a RAM based distro, like MX Linux.

Don’t know if it would work in Mac

Try the MATE desktop. They have a Mac like global menu.

XFCE, KDE, and Solus also have that.

Yeah I’m still open to try new stuff,
It’s not my daily driver so I basically use it to try stuff out.

When I have some time I’ll give MX a try, never heard of that before.

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Not a big fan of MATE, at least in its vanilla form. It will be interesting to see how it behaves on the system though.

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