I have this laptop getting tired sitting in a drawer and asks me to work 🤪
What Linux distro can run on it? Preferably one with KDE plasma a a DE.
Fedora on a MacBook Pro from 2012 works like a charm.
Fedora’s my personal preference. They have a KDE spin
whatever distro you choose, disable the nvidia graphics first. you’ll lose the display out but you’ll gain a cooler laptop with better autonomy. integrated graphics is more than enough to drive Plasma.
Fedora
~~I have a 2013 MacBook running Ubuntu. I would recommend Kubuntu because idk which wifi chip your MacBook has but it probably won’t play nice with Linux (which is apple drivers fault). And there is a great guide on how to fix it for Ubuntu
~~
Actually Broadcoms fault not Apple. Pretty much every Ubuntu flavor I have used has the driver on the ISO and installs without issue.
True, it’s Broadcom’s fault. From which ISO? I only have one Mac so I’ve only been able to install there. It worked out of the box but it always randomly froze after two hours of use until I found it was the Broadcom Wifi
Mint, Ubuntu have all pretty much worked out of the box for me
Debian.
I got Arch on one, works like a charm. You need to install one driver for the wifi though.
I’ve run both Opensuse Leap and Nixos with good luck. As someone else mentioned, it really just boils down to the wifi adapter being shit… But that aside, everyrhing else seemed to work well for me with leap and nix.
Was thinking open suse slowroll also. Dont know whether Nvidia will work…
Nvidia breaks on me at least twice a year using Tumbleweed. But… That’s my own fault, as I just update almost daily… And too many times I’ve done an update that breaks nvidia. I can’t speak to this issue with leap, as I’ve not run Leap on my machine with an nvidia card.
Basically anything should work, I had one for a while running Arch + KDE. Wifi doesn’t work out of the box (thanks Broadcom), but once you install the right driver it’s perfectly fine.
+1 for Fedora. I have Nobara on my 2012 mb and it rocks. Nobara is Fedora but with all the codecs and Audio/video stuff preinstalled.
Zorin OS has a really good MacOS themed variant last I heard