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?
with that gpu, x11 might work better than wayland. i’ll probably get downvoted for this but keeping macos isn’t a bad choice, there’s a firefox fork that tracks latest while retaining older macos support.
Brave to say that on a Linux community indeed ha ha. I might give this a try actually! I still use MacOS offline for a few softs.
Your GPU isn’t getting engaged because you either have to install the proprietary Nvidia driver, or if it is already installed, you need to use the utilities to switch over to the GT from the embedded.
I run boring, stable Debian on mine, but I have plentry of experience adding the non-free (not foss) drivers not included in the core distro. For gaming with lots of native hardware support right out of the gate, Bazzite is really popular.
No matter which distro you settle on, see if you can install the ‘linux-headers-generic’ package to avoid broadcom wifi issues after every kernel update.
Also check which Wi-Fi driver is used. ArchWiki delais this nicely. Sometimes you may end up with wrong one enabled (I did with some distros in the past).
Your computer is MacBook Pro 10,1 and pro 15” retina mid 2012 a1398.
The relevant technologies are ivy bridge, intel hd 4000 and nvidia Kepler.
According to opencore legacy patcher, you can use Ventura (osx/macos 13)with broken live text if you go the opencore route.
That will most likely offer a better experience than linux on your hardware.
