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Recommended distro for 2011 MacBook Pro (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Does anyone have a recommendation for distros that would work well on a 2011 MacBook Pro? It’s in decent shape and as far as I know there’s nothing wrong with it. I figured I could use this as both a learning opportunity for myself and a way to give the laptop a second life. I’ve done some research the past few months and there seems to be some conflicting opinions out there and also some of the posts/tutorials are a few years old so I’m not sure if anything has changed. I’ve generally seen that Ubuntu, Mint and Arch would be good and the processes seem straight forward. I’d really appreciate any suggestions before I pull the trigger.

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

I've been a fan of running Fedora on my MacBook Pro, I believe its a couple of years older than the 2011 model but I imagine it'd still work out.

The only thing you might need to be prepared for is to have a way of connecting to the internet. At least, with my model, it uses a Broadcom Wireless card which doesn't have open source drivers so its not included by default. On both Ubuntu and Fedora I was able to use USB tethering to connect my MBP to the internet through my phone, allowing me to download and install the proprietary driver for it. Of course, if you have a USB <-> Ethernet adapter (or your model has a built in Ethernet port) that also works, and I believe I've also done Bluetooth tethering to share the internet connection through that as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Awesome! I was just reading about this. Pretty sure the port is there, ill just need to dig out a cable :) Thank you.