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?
I have a 2015 with R9 M370X, tried Ubuntu and Arch. The latter worked better out of the box (wi-fi, bluetooth, trackpad, etc. minus webcam) for me so that’s what I’d recommend (with archinstall).
You should be able to use gpu-switch to enable or disable discrete graphics: https://github.com/0xbb/gpu-switch
In the end I gave up on trying to run Linux on my specific MacBook. With amdgpu, it would seemingly run fine. Watching videos on Youtube, even with H264ify, the temps would slowly creep up over 90c. I had to bump up the fans quite high with mbpfan. However, the biggest problem was that it would randomly lock up after 20-30 mins of continuous general use.
With Intel Iris graphics, even general browsing with firefox was too annoying for me. Even continuously scrolling basic webpages would raise my CPU temps to around 90c with the fans blasting. It ran fine otherwise, no kernel panics or anything. Just too noisy and hot for my liking.
had a bunch of those. the best thing you can do is disable the nvidia graphics and run it off the intel graphics, plenty powerful for everyday tasks, lower power consumption, less heat, longer battery life. only downside, you lose display out.
after that, any linux distro will suit you just fine. go with fedora for newest and best or debian for safe and boring.
If you’re experienced enough go for Arch
I’ve run Ubuntu on a Macbook Air 2012 and also on a Macbook Pro 2015 for about 5 years. Both have worked really well. I found early on that using Xorg made things seem faster (but that may be subjective). I’ve read that Debian (netinst) is meant to be really good on older macs and it’s something I’ll try at some point.
Back in the day I used to game hard as fuck on the 650m on my 2012 MBP lol
I have Fedora on mine now and it works great once you figure out how to make the wifi and graphics drivers play
Definitely ungrade to 16 gb RAM if you haven’t already. DDR3 is stupid cheap
Yes me too ha ha! Good to know about Fedora. As far as I remember though, the RAM is soldered isn’t it? So no way to upgrade…
I run boring, stable Debian on mine, but I have plentry of experience adding the non-free (not foss) drivers not included in the core distro. For gaming with lots of native hardware support right out of the gate, Bazzite is really popular.
No matter which distro you settle on, see if you can install the ‘linux-headers-generic’ package to avoid broadcom wifi issues after every kernel update.
Also check which Wi-Fi driver is used. ArchWiki delais this nicely. Sometimes you may end up with wrong one enabled (I did with some distros in the past).
Thanks that’s good to know!
Thanks! I have thought of giving a try to Bazzite but wasn’t sure I wouldn’t face the same problems with my GPU. You have the same MacBook as mine, with a discrete GPU, and you get the same snappiness as on MacOS?
Bazzite will not help, ur bottleneck is old nvidia which not supported anymore by nvidia, so u stuck to Linux kernel 6.8 and nvidia-driver-470, u also need MBPfan daemon without it cooler not working properly u will overheat all time https://github.com/linux-on-mac/mbpfan
Not quite the same actually; mine’s the mid-2012 MBP with a more generic Intel GPU. Yours is slightly better, but that Nvidia hardware is sometimes harder to drive properly on Linux. Bazzite should make that a breeze for you tho.
with that gpu, x11 might work better than wayland. i’ll probably get downvoted for this but keeping macos isn’t a bad choice, there’s a firefox fork that tracks latest while retaining older macos support.
Brave to say that on a Linux community indeed ha ha. I might give this a try actually! I still use MacOS offline for a few softs.
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.
Thanks! Ive never looked into Opencore legacy patcher. Have you used it before?
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.
Sequoia sucks actually, better install Monterey it works nice on such machines.
I had that same laptop but in a 13". I ran Zorin on it for a while before giving it to a friend. Didn’t have any problems. Did you run the firmware installer?
you would have the same problem with any distro you try. you just need to search forums and tweak a little
for example: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=466301
i had the same problem but it’s been years and i don’t remember how i fixed it, sorry
Try solus
Your GPU isn’t getting engaged because you either have to install the proprietary Nvidia driver, or if it is already installed, you need to use the utilities to switch over to the GT from the embedded.
Thanks! I did try to install the proprietary NVIDIA driver but couldn’t get it to work somehow. I had assumed I could at least get a good experience without it but it’s still been sluggish unfortunately.
When you say you couldn’t install it, how do you mean?
Did you install by package, or by running the Nvidia installer? Did you get errors, or it just didn’t work afterward?
Edit: I didn’t even think, but I bet you may have just tried to install the latest Nvidia drivers, which don’t support a card as old as yours. Good solutions here: https://www.stevestreeting.com/2026/01/26/linux-mint-22.3-on-an-old-macbook-pro-nvidia-gpu/
