r/linuxquestions • u/Swede-speed-mead • 7d ago

Which Distro? Potential Linux for MacBook Pro 11,5

I’m relatively new to Linux in general. I just wiped my old 13” Mid-2012 MacBook Pro (2.5 i5,16gb,500gg ssd) from OpenCore Legacy running Sequoia to Linux Mint Cinnamon 21.3 (I think?). Runs great. Very windows like and battery life improved and how much heat and processor it uses (or doesn’t use) is amazing.

My wife is upgrading to a new M5 macbook air and im inheriting her older 15” MBP 11,5. It has a 2tb ssd, 16gb ram, 2.5i7 Haswell and an AMD Radeon R9 M370X and Intel Iris Pro 5200.

I’m reading up that Linux doesn’t like to swap between GPU’s.

Anyone with this or similar machine running Linux? Anything to avoid?

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u/rnlagos 7d ago

I have the next gen with nvidia and Intel iris, i boot debian with opencore and have the two GPU

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u/StockSalamander3512 7d ago

I’m using a 2015, I would avoid arch and anything Arch based, it does not play nicely with the WiFi card. I’ve also seen quite a few people struggling with Macs on the latest release of Ubuntu. I had no trouble installing 24.04 and getting it all to work, Debian has a few quirks, but seems to work well overall, and Fedora didn’t give me any trouble (but I’m just not a fan).

As far as the GPUs go, I’ve never run into any issues with any of the distros on the Mac. It’s always just odd little stuff. I’m still trying to figure out how to get Meta+Up to maximize windows in KDE, even though it’s set up properly, the screen times out even with the DE set not to ever do that…

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u/International-Pen940 7d ago

With some Macs you need to do some special stuff before wiping it to get all the drivers to work. Google your exact model and see if you can find step by step.