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Distro for 2012 MacBook Pro Retina (15 inch) (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I still love this machine. On MacOS, it still runs very well but is not supported anymore unfortunately. I have installed Mint on it and it was very sluggish. I then went for Ubuntu 22.04 and gnome 42.9 and it has been much better, keyboard, battery, trackpad and shortcuts have been supported mostly out of the box.

But it's still fairly slow, and it seems I haven't managed to use the discrete GPU (NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M). Gaming on this, even with a low spec game, is impossible. Granted, 8Gb of ram feels a bit tight nowadays but it certainly has the raw power!

Any other distro you'd recommend? Or perhaps a specific setup I could give a try to enjoy my MacBook at full power?

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[–] 3 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Your computer is MacBook Pro 10,1 and pro 15” retina mid 2012 a1398.

The relevant technologies are ivy bridge, intel hd 4000 and nvidia Kepler.

According to opencore legacy patcher, you can use Ventura (osx/macos 13)with broken live text if you go the opencore route.

That will most likely offer a better experience than linux on your hardware.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    Thanks! Ive never looked into Opencore legacy patcher. Have you used it before?

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    Yes it works good if you read first and plan and follow the instructions. If you just yeet it into your computer you will have problems.

    You may end up doing a reinstall as opposed to a patch or upgrade.

    You may find that dynamic wallpaper not working, needing to update with command line, photos app can’t edit and needing to use a third party browser is an okay set of tradeoffs to get to sequoia (macos 15) which still gets point updates and security patches (grimly: for now).

    If I was using a 10,1 I’d back up my system and jump straight to sequoia with oclp. If you can get by long enough to save up for a more recent computer (m1+) then that’s a win. Sequoia is the last version of macos with support for Intel processors. Now is a bad time to be running old versions.

    E: before oclp the linux wisdom for these models was to go in with a soldering iron or a chip clip and disable the dedicated gpu in order to avoid problems with it. Often it would break the hdmi or DisplayPort or whatever video out port was on the side of the laptop because while the integrated display could run off the intel processors gpu the video out was hardwired to the dgpu.

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