So my friend has a 2010 macbook they do not want anymore and I got to thinking it would be a nice side laptop Vs My Dell Precision truck of a laptop, don’t get me wrong the dell is better in every aspect except presentation and weight (its like carrying around a pile of bricks in my briefcase).
Anyways if anyone could shed some light on the installation of RHEL and or similar on 2010 or close macbooks it would be very helpful. mainly want to know, will it work? and will it be painful?
P.S I have been doing some research on it but additional input is much appreciated
I wouldn’t recommend RHEL unless you set it up before and/or have a RHEL license already.
If you want the pure RHEL experience, go CentOS or Rocky. If you want something more up-to-date but stay in the RHEL ecosystem, go Fedora.
Otherwise for Laptops popOS is fairly well done.
As for whether it would be painful I can’t say, but I wouldn’t think so. Linux runs on pretty much anything you throw at it. And a 2010 macbook should be probably a 1st or 2nd Gen i5? Should be fine.
@rando7719 the only way to know if it will work and if it will be painful is to try and install it. If someone gave me a laptop, I would create whatever distro of Linux I wanted to try USB install stick and try it. Don’t install it right away; try it first, then if you like it, install it.
Installing Linux on a laptop can be a pain. I once had an old laptop I couldn’t install any Linux distribution on it. The problem was graphics are handled differently on laptops than on desktops. At the time, there wasn’t a way to address those differences. I am sure there have been advances in how Linux works since I tried it, so that you might have better luck than me.
This is probably the most helpful advice. Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS offer live environments so you can try everything out in before you install it. Just note that the perfomance might be a bit lower when running from a USB vs actually installing it to the hard drive.
Linux has also come a long way in the area of graphics drivers and networking drivers, but I haven’t personally installed it on a mac, so YMMV. But with it being a 2010, odds are good that everything will just work
I already have a developer account with rhel, and would have very much preferred it but I have the macbook working with fedora 34. after getting over the gui changes in gnome 40 im really enjoying my time using it. Also unlike most laptops the touch pad doesnt tweak out if i have another finger somewhat close to it without touching so a bonus
Thank you all for the input! i got the macbook and I am running fedora 34 after finding out I would have to chop off my arm and preform a ritual with it in order to have rhel bootable on it. But that aside with fedora 34 I am nothing but pleased with it. the display is beautiful and even competes with modern laptops. Performance wise with a ram upgrade I had laying around It works like a dream just need another 4gb stick to replace the last 2gb stick. But again thank you all!!!
I don’t know what that is so I couldn’t tell you
But Cent and Rocky are binary compatible because it’s the same distro with the trademarks taken out, so I would assume yes.
I dont believe they will work in that case, Rhel images are built with -nomacboot. But I just found that they now offer a image builder so I will tinker with that and see if I can make a image that supports mactek-boot.
