I still love this machine. On MacOS, it still runs very well but is not supported anymore unfortunately. I have installed Mint on it and it was very sluggish. I then went for Ubuntu 22.04 and gnome 42.9 and it has been much better, keyboard, battery, trackpad and shortcuts have been supported mostly out of the box.

But it’s still fairly slow, and it seems I haven’t managed to use the discrete GPU (NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M). Gaming on this, even with a low spec game, is impossible. Granted, 8Gb of ram feels a bit tight nowadays but it certainly has the raw power!

Any other distro you’d recommend? Or perhaps a specific setup I could give a try to enjoy my MacBook at full power?

  • Lonk@lemmy.ml
    1·
    17 hours ago

    I have a 2015 with R9 M370X, tried Ubuntu and Arch. The latter worked better out of the box (wi-fi, bluetooth, trackpad, etc. minus webcam) for me so that’s what I’d recommend (with archinstall).

    You should be able to use gpu-switch to enable or disable discrete graphics: https://github.com/0xbb/gpu-switch

    In the end I gave up on trying to run Linux on my specific MacBook. With amdgpu, it would seemingly run fine. Watching videos on Youtube, even with H264ify, the temps would slowly creep up over 90c. I had to bump up the fans quite high with mbpfan. However, the biggest problem was that it would randomly lock up after 20-30 mins of continuous general use.

    With Intel Iris graphics, even general browsing with firefox was too annoying for me. Even continuously scrolling basic webpages would raise my CPU temps to around 90c with the fans blasting. It ran fine otherwise, no kernel panics or anything. Just too noisy and hot for my liking.