this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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41
OS Recommendations for 2014 MacBook Pro (lemmy.ca)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

i use debian stable on intel macs and it works fine. whatever youre comfortable with will work fine except that some distros like rhel don't handle broadcom-wl right still.

i use 10.14 mojave (32 bit support), 10.15 catalina and whatever 11,12,13 versions are best supported by opencore legacy patcher on the particular device.

your 11.1 mbp is not officially supported in 12 monterey but because it has the intel gpu the opencore legacy patcher should work very well.

when you partition, use apfs for your mac side of the disk. it lets all your macos versions use their own volumes inside the apfs partition and the result is that they all can use the free space but can't see each others files.

whats got you wanting to use mavericks or high sierra? those are pretty old and i don't remember either one having specific features that got removed later or something.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I've already gone and installed macOS 11 alongside OpenBSD (although I'm going to distrohop until I can find something that "sticks"). I might have a look at patching Monterey, though.

As for those specific versions, High Sierra was the oldest version with decent software support, and Mavericks has those lovely skeuomorphic icons. I know it's old, but I was using OSX Snow Leopard (alongside crunchbang++ i386) until I got this MacBook Pro.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Those are cool icons.

How is openbsd on that hardware? It’s been a little while since I used it with a desktop…

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's okay. I'll probably end up switching to Arch, though.

It works, but there are a couple of issues:

  • HiDPI is not supported by cwm, so I've had to do "duct tape" fixes on everything (changing .Xresources, changing GTK conf files, increasing the font size in polybar). Qt apps aren't playing ball.
  • The WiFi card isn't supported by any BSD, so I'm using a dongle.
  • The fan doesn't come on as often as it does on macOS, so the MacBook can get rather hot.
  • The headphone jack supports optical jacks as well as standard 3.5mm ones. Under OpenBSD, however, the LED inside is constantly on. This isn't a problem, but it's not normal.
  • Polybar can't seem to access any system information (e.g. disk usage), but I suspect that has nothing to do with the hardware.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

That’s not bad at all.

My 2015 worked close to out of the box with debian and a bunch of older mbps do too. if you aren’t looking for an adventure I can highly recommend it.

Since you already have your feet underneath you, a lot of secondhand computers with ssds can benefit from a “level 2” scan from the program spinrite. That process reads and rewrites every block on the ssd. I bet you could do the same thing with dd somehow but i just use spinrite instead.its my understanding that all the Intel Macs are able to boot it although i haven’t personally done it on an 11.1.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

We tested our TROMjaro on several macbooks from 2013-2014 so we've installed some drivers for the wifi card and such. www.tromjaro.com

TROMjaro is very easy to use and we even have a Layout Switcher to make it look like MAcOS if you so like it. See the homepage where we explain it in detail.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

I liked Debian, but really you can't go wrong with most Linux distros, just find one that suits your needs. Mint was another one that worked well on my MacBook

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I found Manjaro to work perfectly on my MacBook pro 2013 and recognized immediately the graphics card. Flawless experience so far.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Manjaro is actually the worst distro

https://manjarno.pages.dev/

endeavor is the same idea with much better execution

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You're speaking from experience or just copying the Majarno trend? My experience has been great.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Interesting. Come to think if hardware play a big role to that...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Will try openSUSE to that machine next then..

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

@Communist @WeAreAllOne
cannot speak for the second part, but I totally agree with the first

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

OpenSuse Tumbleweed if you want rolling

Debian if you want stable

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

I run Linux Mint Debian Edition on my 2014 Mac Mini and it's works really well. Should be the same on the MacBook. Or regular Mint.

I've run Mint on my 2015 MacBook Pro and it worked very well.

Either way I recommend a slow release distro because if you use a rolling distro the WiFi will stop working with every kernel update .... It takes a few days before they update the Broadcom reverse driver to work with the newer kernel.

That's why I'm on Linux Mint Debian Edition - I don't need the latest kernel nor my WiFi breaking every other week. Linux Mint Debian Edition is stable and just works.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Spicy pillow?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

1000073946

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

A bad battery

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Baddery

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I would like to dual-boot either Linux or BSD

Since you menrioned BSD, might be worth checking out helloSystem. Would feel right at home on a MBP I reckon.

Similarly, a Linux alternative could be elementary OS - despite its relatively low popularity, it's actually a pretty solid and polished distro.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

helloSystem sounds miserable. Copying all the weird things that macOS does and hiding how things work in favour of "simplicity"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I put LMDE on my 2010, and it runs smooth as butter. Fedora Silverblue, as some one else stated, will give you the ability to run Linux as your main and have Macos in a drawer without the need to dual boot. If I needed Macos on mine, I would have gone this route, too.

Edit: personally, I prefer official images, so I would have installed the official Silverblue and not the community edition from uBlue, but whatever floats your boat.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What’s your reasoning for the MacOS choices? I generally prefer Catalina for that era machine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Catalina could be the one, in that case. Essentially:

  • Mavericks is the only supported version with skeuomorphic icons
  • High Sierra is the earliest version still supported by enough developers for my needs
  • Big Sur is the latest version supported on the MacBook
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Gotcha. I have a 2015 Air that I tried Big Sur on and I didn’t care for it at all, went back to Catalina and it runs great. Monterey could run on this machine, and I prefer it to Big Sur, but it just doesn’t add anything I want and comes with a performance hit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I loaded NixOS on a 2014 macbook air, copying over my config from my framework laptop (just switching the hardware config), and it just works. I think pretty much any modern linux distro will work fine.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

MacOS is a BSD, so go with Linux if you want variety.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Elementary OS! It would be perfect on a Mac!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Fedora Silverblue from ublue.it to get a macOS like workflow but better. Why dualboot if you can create a macos install medium and store that in a drawer?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago

Your preferred distro probably runs great on the 2014 MBP.

“Newest compatible operating system: macOS Big Sur” according to: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201300