My grandma just gave me her old MacBook Pro (MacBookPro11,1 A1502) and, after removing a spicy pillow, air dusting everything, and copying off her old photos, I’m ready to do a clean install.
I would like to dual-boot either Linux or BSD (which will be my main partition) alongside macOS (which will be handy for testing and for use with certain peripherals; either Mavericks, High Sierra, or Big Sur).
I am already well-versed in unix-like operating systems, so I’ll only start having trouble if I try to use a source-based distro (e.g. Gentoo, Source Mage, LFS, etc.)
Can I have some recommendations for the Linux and the macOS version, please?
I found Manjaro to work perfectly on my MacBook pro 2013 and recognized immediately the graphics card. Flawless experience so far.
Manjaro is actually the worst distro
https://manjarno.pages.dev/
endeavor is the same idea with much better execution
You’re speaking from experience or just copying the Majarno trend? My experience has been great.
I’m speaking from experience, my experience has been absolutely abhorrent, i’ve given it to 3 people and thoroughly regretted it every time, troubleshooting insane problems that never happened on arch. I have nothing but awful experiences with the distro.
It was great until it broke, and it inevitably will break in unforeseen ridiculous ways. Over and over again. One of the peoples computers I maintain refuses to switch to kinoite and I dread working on his computer because manjaro is such a terrible experience.
There’s a reason there’s a trend. Manjaro makes arch significantly worse, adds nothing to the equation except maintenance burden, and breaks a bunch of shit for everyone else too. It’s just an absolutely awful distro, probably the worst of all time, and I say this as someone with literally years of experience with the distro.
Interesting. Come to think if hardware play a big role to that…
It’s 100% not hardware, none of the issues that I had were related to hardware, they all appeared on all 3 machines simultaneously, or were fundamental design issues
an example of a fundamental design issue is the way the linux kernel packages are handled, they’re numbered, which means when you run the updater, you don’t automatically get the newest one, they should’ve used an ignorepkg or something else to achieve the same effect, because now if you don’t manually go in and change the kernel after a year or so, which no normal user would think to do, it breaks an unbelievable amount of shit, especially with nvidia drivers. This is just one of many horrible things that happened with that distro, you should really give endeavor or anything else a shot, even default arch is great now since there’s an installer.
I truly believe there’s literally no reason to use manjaro.
Will try openSUSE to that machine next then…
If you use gnome/kde I highly recommend an immutable distribution like kinoite or silverblue, if you prefer SUSE, microos is the equivalent. It’s unbelievably good if you want something that just works all the time.