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?

  • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    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?

      • artyom@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        4 months ago

        Mint has a dedicat3d program for installing firmware for specific devices. You just run it and it grabs the necessary stuff and installs it.

  • Tenebris Nox@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    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.

  • yuman@programming.dev
    0·
    4 months ago

    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.

    edit: https://lemmy.ml/post/42330116

  • DetachablePianist@lemmy.ml
    0·
    4 months ago

    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.

    • Leax@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      0·
      4 months ago

      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?

      • DetachablePianist@lemmy.ml
        1·
        4 months ago

        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.

      • anon5621@lemmy.ml
        1·
        4 months ago

        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

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    0·
    4 months ago

    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.