I just installed EndeavorOS on an HP Spectre360 that’s roughly 2 years old. I am honestly surprised at how easy it went. If you google it, you’ll get a lot of “lol good luck installing linux on that” type posts - so I was ready for a battle.
Turned off secure boot and tpm. Booted off a usb stick. Live environment, check. Start installer and wipe drive. Few minutes later I’m in. Ok let’s find out what’s not working…
WiFi check. Bluetooth check. Sound check (although a little quiet). Keyboard check. Screen resolution check. Hibernates correctly? Check. WTF I can’t believe this all works out the box. The touchscreen? Check. The stylus pen check. Flipping the screen over to a tablet check. Jesus H.
Ok, everything just works. Huh. Who’d have thunk?
Install programs, log into accounts, jeez this laptop is snappier than on windows. Make things pretty for my wife and install some fun games and stuff.
Finished. Ez. Why did I wait so long? Google was wrong - it was cake.
Or a Mac ime. I tried to run mint OS on a 2016 intel MBPro and it was a disaster. I got it up and running but the Touch Bar didn’t work, the Wi-Fi didn’t work, all kinds of issues.
That’s because Apple doesn’t release drivers for all those components.
Running anything but a Mac OS on a Mac is a nice pet project, but you can’t expect Linux to work.
I know that now but I had a bunch of people encourage me to do it as if it was a reasonable thing for a novice to crack lol
It depends. I installed mint on a 2011 MBP a couple of years ago and it was a breeze. I installed arch on it recently and the only snag was having to install the proprietary Broadcom driver to get wireless. It runs great though — which is just as well because it would actually be more difficult to install OSX on the bloody thing, seeing as they no longer support it.
A 2016 MBP is still a bit recent, but, as a general rule of thumb, by the time a Mac stops getting software updates, Linux will be ready for it.
You should check out what the Asahi Linux project has been able to do with the ARM Macs already, it’s pretty impressive.
NixOS on an M2 Air here. Works fine, other than the fingerprint reader.
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The 2016-2017 MBP are unusually bad. Devices on either side of that? You’re fine. But the 2016-2017 devices? No wifi (except in some extremely unusual cases) is the big problem. Even then, it amazes me how much does work, with zero configuration, with a simple graphical install. The problem with this vintage MBP isn’t that it’s hard to get running–it’s that it’s (almost) impossible, but the parts that aren’t impossible are as smooth as they can be.
Yes, that’s cold comfort. But I’m speaking from the POV of an owner of a 2017 MBP who desperately wanted to keep it going.
The coda to the story is that my wife used it for a while with her business but it fell victim to an absolutely bizarre heat issue where the heat sink vents hot air directly across the controller cable for the display, leading to inevitable failure. Again: not an issue on either side of this model year. It’s sad because it could’ve served for another 4-5 years, making the initial purchase price substantially more tolerable.
Apple doesn’t support Linux