Most of the 23rd was spent on holiday celebration stuff, but I did find a little time in the morning to upcycle a 2015 MacBook pro to running latest NixOS, full GPU w. Vulkan & Wayland support too.
The minion greatly appreciates the upgraded Roblox experience.
Next upcycle projects are replacing worn microswitches on otherwise excellent mice, and investigating a reverse-engineering project to auto-boot an old iMac with a nice display into target display mode.
@theWarhelm As far as I am aware, there is no specific Linux OS/distribution which is specifically suited for Apple hardware in general?
NixOS is a very acquired taste, which I just happen to personally prefer and so apply it by default :)
If you have no existing preference, you are probably going to have the best time going at it with Ubuntu - given the prevalence of tutorials, blogs, stack overflow posts, etc. catering to Ubuntu.
@theWarhelm Do note that that for not necessarily directly applicable device-specific insight, the Arch Linux wiki is a great resource. Though I would not recommend Arch for the specific install, the wiki is extremely useful.
For some optimistic vibes, I also have a 1st gen MacBook Air, a 2013 Air, and a 2015 iMac running NixOS really well.
The caveat being that the models with AMD or Intel GPUs are significantly nicer to get going. Old NVIDIA drivers are... not fun.
@theWarhelm For the MacBook Pro I sorted the other day I had to pass kernel parameters to properly enable support for quite old AMD GPUs and explicitly instruct how the backlight should be handled.
The first detail I found on the NixOS wiki, but both it and the backlight one were also available on the Arch wiki.
For the iMac with NVIDIA GPU I had to struggle getting the right version in and then fiddle with boot order, but that was also on the Arch wiki.
@theWarhelm Note that all the machines could boot right into the install immediately.
The AMD and Nvidia ones just needed more work to get GPU acceleration going. And getting a Vulkan-supporting driver going generally took more steps than settling for OpenGL-only (running an older driver interfacing with an equally old GPU vs. getting a newer driver to play with an old GPU).
@AngryAnt Apologies for the late reply and thank you for all the details! I'll definitely give this a go :) Have you noticed any differences in battery life? Does sleep/resume work when you close the lid?
@theWarhelm Battery life is not likely to be exactly as good, given that macOS does a good amount of device-sepcific driving.
That said, modern day Linux is a whole lot better on laptops than was previously the case. You should not see a dramatic change. I would expect better than with Windows though.
When configured for it, I haven't had issues with sleep/resume on any of the macbooks. The one troublesome install I have on that front is a Surface Go 2 tablet.
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