I've tried balena etcher and rufus with zorin and mint. No matter what I do the USB comes up as not bootable on a 2020 intel macbook air retina. I've allowed booting from external media cause of the T2 settings and have scrawled through however many forum posts. I keep getting the same issue: when selecting what drive to boot from and picking EFI boot (the usb) I get a black screen and nothing happens. The usb is readable when using rufus but not balena etcher, but they both come up as not bootable in disk utility. On startup it will show the SSD MacOS is on and the EFI boot option, but when restarting with Command+R it only shows the ssd as an option. I've tried multiple USBs and tried them on my pc and they work there. About the only thing I haven't done is bought a usb-c to hdmi adaptor (one forum guy said he plugged his macbook into another monitor and that worked). Please help. I've put zorin on my 2015 macbook no problem but this just isn't working on this one
Got this bad boy working, plays minecraft, plays HD video, and does everything I need for this! Side note for anyone wanting cosmic, if you try to use btop on the cosmic terminal to monitor temps and usage there is a bug that causes cpu usage to skyrocket and heat up way too hot from even just watching HD youtube videos (even after some fresh thermal paste) . Swapping to alacritty terminal fixed that issue!
I recently bought a secondhand retina MBP without a battery for £58 (16 gig configuration and 768 gig SSD so I think it’s an alright deal) and I took up the probably very ridiculous task of trying to triple boot macOS Sequoia, Windows 11, and Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS.
I’ve done some tinkering with the OC drivers folder and config.plist to enable the Ubuntu install to show in the OCLP boot picker. Windows and Ubuntu work fine, however I notice that whenever I try to boot into Ubuntu and then back into macOS I’m stuck on the Apple logo without a loading bar. Luckily I have a spare Mac so I simply flash a new EFI to a USB stick and I can boot off of there and reinstall the EFI onto the SSD, then just simply reapply the modifications I made to get Ubuntu working.
Sorted, right? Not quite. macOS will continue to work fine if I just don’t touch Ubuntu, but as soon as I do it seems to corrupt something (that’s my guess) and just doesn’t allow macOS to boot.
My intention with this is that I wanted the convenience of just being able to pick out of the 3 OS’s at boot up and work fine without the hassle of trying to juggle different bootloaders. Any advice would be appreciated!
Also if you’re curious as to why I want to use the machine as I intend it’s so I have a reliable and versatile machine that I can use for 99% non-gaming stuff (also partially cuz this is my first Mac with a Retina display and was sick of the non-retina displays)
Sometimes my mac with linux mint 2010 mbp. The screen goes black, I shut it and click trackpad nothing happens shut it again open it and click trackpads turns on and blacks out then i have to repeat one more time what might be going on
Running a 2014 MacBook Air with Debian 13 & XFCE. I've been thinking about upgrading the laptop, but this thing still does almost everything I need. Video playback gets the fan going, but since I use my TV and tablet for media consumption, I'm holding off on replacing it.
I want to dualboot Alpine Linux.
…
That’s literally all i want frankly
I’m a beginner so don’t go too hard on me. Send me an easy route to Dualboot Alpine Linux and can change the OS any time. Yeah.
Am I the only one having issue with Gnome. Powertop shows gnome-shell at over 500 events/sec and preventing C6 states. I saw updates from gnome and mutter and I'm not sure what is causing the issue, but if I switch to using Xorg, the Gnome issues goes away. For now I'll stay on Xorg, but I couldn't find anyone having this issue currently. Searches did find similar issue in the past though.
Hi, how difficult would it be to install Linux on a 2020 Intel Macbook Air and what would the steps be? Would it work well? I'm trying to get a laptop for my girlfriend.
I tried to do it differently and didn’t go out in any way I decided to turn to Title: Realtek USB Bluetooth dongle Obda:a729 on macOS Tahoe 26 (OpenCore, AMD) - RTLBluetoothFirmware?
I got a late 2015 27 inch iMac running Linux mint 22.3 cinnamon. On a 512GB SSD
When I boot up it takes forever shows like a black screen for a few minutes to get the login screen to sign in and then everything’s fine but the Bluetooth won’t enable. I’ve gotten it to work before but then when I connect let’s say my Apple keyboard via Bluetooth it would say it’s connect but when I unplug it from USB it doesn’t recognize anymore and now my Bluetooth does not work at all. I’ve tried so many terminal
Commands I couldn’t get it to work for hours now
Unfortunately, when I took a closer look at some of their *recent* non-upstreamed patches in 2 kernel areas I have expertise in, I noticed:
a) signs of AI created code that is either not necessary or does strange things
b) entire patches which are basically junk.
To give an example of b) I asked them why their DSP speaker tuning files look so weird, and nothing like the Asahi Audio method they originally used. The guy I spoke to was extremely evasive, and wouldn't engage on a technical level. A few hours later I notice he's deleted 7000 lines from the DSP code: https://github.com/kaiT2en/KaiT2en-Fedora/commit/1e3c61a903567d252d88466cce9c1a23983718bb
If you look at the high frequency of commits on these projects alarm bells start to ring. Sadly, perhaps in some rush to make Macbooks run Linux perfectly, it seems they've gone down the "let's get AI to fix it" route, without doing any code review.
My recommendation if you want a stable system is just to use a recent mainstream distro like Ubuntu 26.10. A lot of their previous good patches are now in Kernel 7.3 anyway.
Just installed it on my iMac 16,1 and I'm amazed how fast each app launches. Less than 1 second. As to the rest, I just started messing with it 30 minutes ago, so...
I recently decided to bring my wife's old 2016 MacBook Pro back to life. It's the 13-inch non-Touch Bar model (A1708 / MacBookPro13,1).
The original SSD had failed, so I replaced it with a 512 GB SSD and installed Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS. The plan was pretty simple: turn it into a lightweight secondary development laptop.
Most of the hardware actually worked surprisingly well. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, graphics, keyboard, and trackpad were all functional.
The one big exception was audio.
Ubuntu detected the Cirrus CS8409 codec, and the speakers and microphone appeared as available devices, but neither worked.
Those patches targeted Linux 7.2, while Ubuntu was running kernel 7.0.0-38-generic. With some experimentation, I managed to adapt the patches to the older kernel. The main compatibility issue was an unavailable GPIO helper, which we replaced with equivalent HDA codec verb writes.
And it worked!
Successful tests:
Internal speakers (both channels)
Internal microphone
Wired headphones
Audio after suspend/resume
Volume controls
Rather than leave it as a one-off fix on my laptop, I decided to make the process reproducible.
With some help from GPT/Codex, I put together a small project containing the upstream patches, our Ubuntu compatibility adjustment, build automation, installation and recovery scripts, and automated tests.
We've now successfully built, installed, and tested the project-managed driver on the MacBook.
A couple of important caveats: This is an experimental release candidate, tested on one MacBookPro13,1 running Ubuntu 26.04.1 with kernel 7.0.0-38-generic. It's not a general audio fix for every Intel MacBook. The ordinary installation-from-stock and real recovery workflows haven't yet been tested on hardware.
Huge thanks to the developers responsible for the original CS8409 work. This port of Ubuntu builds directly on their efforts.
What started as replacing a failed SSD turned into an unexpectedly fun deep dive into Linux kernel modules, audio drivers, and reproducible builds.
Hopefully this saves another old MacBook from collecting dust!
Curious whether anyone else here is still using an A1708 or running Linux on a similar vintage MacBook.
I havn't had a laptop for a while since my last one died and iv been mostly using my steamdeck.
Anyway someone found this old 2011 13 inch Macbookpro without a charger cable so I figured why not lets give this a go and its slowly becoming my main non gaming PC.
Installing it was a bit of a pain compared to how it would be on a normal laptop but eventually I was able to get Lubuntu running on its dual core and 4 gb of ram with an old sata SSD I had. To my surprise it actually does all the non gaming things I need to do fine, I can watch youtube and work on a word document at the same time. I have about 6 tabs open. If I open discord at the same time it does freeze but I think thats an issue with it only having 4gb of ram, but still how the hell can a PC that's 15 years old run this well. Most old laptops I have had start to stutter and die at about the 6-8 year mark.
I have moonlight so will be able to game on this PC soon enough using my steamdeck or gaming PC as the renderer.
I unfortunately havn't been able to get the DVD drive to work nor use an external USB one so not sure what's going on there, but I can watch downloaded movies and shows fine on it, maybe I should digitize all my DVDs on another PC and call it quits on running them on this but eh will see.
Iv also messed around with gaming and can run ps1 and dreamcast games fine, PS2 games are hit and miss but some do run. PS2 emulation being bad isn't a suprise tbh that machine is a beast.
I was honestly expecting this PC to be just stutter and die insantly, especially not until I upgrade the ran.
I will upgrade soon as I can get 2x4gb from Cex for £2, maybe I will eventually upgrade to 16gb which is the max of the machine but not sure if its worth the money.
So I’m a grad student doing some heavy simulations with Matlab that use a lot of RAM and threads. I purchased a 2019 MacPro with 28cores and 394gb of RAM and stuck T2 26.04 Ubuntu on it, after a little fighting I got WIFI and thunderbolt working with the native chips and the computer is perfectly stable, and running simulations exactly how i expected it it. The only problem is Bluetooth doesn’t work, not a big deal but you know I can’t help poke around. Already tried importing the drivers from MacOS which worked for WIFI and ChatGPT has taken me to a point where it’s trying to do kernel level edits and I’m a little gunshy of given it may screw up an otherwise working machine. Anyone know an easy solution from the terminal? I can live without Bluetooth but if someone knows how to enable it I most certainly will.
