this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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I have a late 2011 that I might be interested in doing this to. Any practical advice on avoiding your suffering?
Like the other reply suggests: look up which drivers you got (mainly the wlan, bluetooth and the camera), and see if WL or facetimehd support those. It wasn’t that much of a pain with the drivers though. Also, find out whether you have the “over the internet recovery”. If not, I would probably avoid deleting the recovery partition, and opt for a dual boot (or manual partitioning).
Thanks, I appreciate it! I'm happy for a dual boot and for no camera, so here's hoping for the rest.
Look up which distros come with drivers/documentation for your hardware (different for many MacBook versions) especially the WiFi/Bluetooth chipset.
Don't try anything fancy, unless you have a surplus of life energy and time to waste.
Excellent, thankyou! I was just going to throw ubuntu at it unless I really needed something else because of the potato specs, so hopefully drivers are already sorted.
Noted. I would be pissed to not have that working.
No chance, I've been burnt by my unix arrogance enough times to not want to try it on proprietary hardware. Until now I assumed even getting Linux on there was too fancy, I still remember other people fighting for weeks with their hackintosh a decade ago.
Same here, haha. As long as you stay away from ideas like "compiling your kernel from scratch" you'll be fine.
I recently installed arch on my late 2011 MacBook pro, pretty much everything worked out of the box except wi-fi. The broadcom-wl-dkms driver ended up working the best and without disconnections.
I really recommend it, the performance really surprised me. It's at the very least 2x faster than MacOS. It really brought life to the laptop, it was unusable before that.