I now have a working Linux installation on my laptop. Honestly, I doubted I’d ever be here again.
I quit my sysadmin job a little over 10 years ago to pursue a non-technical career (law school, now lawyer), and I just didn’t have the mental bandwidth to keep up with all the changes being made in the Linux world: systemd, wayland, the rise of docker and containerization, etc. Eventually, by 2015, I basically gave up on Linux as my daily driver. Still, when I bought a new laptop in 2019, I made sure to pick the Macbook with the best Linux hardware support at the time (the 2017 13" Macbook Pro without the touchbar or any kind of security chip, aka the 14,1). Just in case I ever wanted to give Linux a try again.
When the reddit API/mod controversy was brewing this summer, I switched over to lemmy as my primary “forum,” and subscribed to a bunch of communities. And because lemmy/kbin seemed to attract a lot of more tech-minded, and a little bit more anti-authoritarian/anti-corporate folks, the discussions in the threads started to normalize the regular use of Linux and other free/open source software as a daily driver.
So this week, I put together everything I needed to dual boot Linux and MacOS: boot/installation media for both MacOS and Linux, documentation specific to my Apple hardware, as well as the things that have changed since my last Linux laptop (EFI versus BIOS, systemd-boot versus grub2, iwd versus wpa-supplicant, Wayland versus X, etc.). I made a few mistakes along the way, but I managed to learn from them, fix a few misconfigured things, and now have a working Linux system!
I still have a bunch of things to fix on my to-do list: sound doesn’t work (but there’s a script that purports to fix that), suspend doesn’t work (well, more accurately, I can’t come back from suspend), text/icon size and scaling aren’t 100% consistent on this high DPI screen, network discovery stuff doesn’t work (I think I need to install zeroconf but I don’t know what it is and intend to understand it before I actually install and configure it), I’d like a pretty bootloader splash screen, still have to configure bash (or another shell? do people still use bash?) the way I like it.
But my system works. I have a desktop environment with a working trackpad (including haptic feedback), hardware keys for volume (never mind sound doesn’t actually work yet), screen brightness, and keyboard backlight brightness. I have networking. The battery life seems to be OK. Once I get comfortable with this as a daily driver, I might remove MacOS and dive right into a single OS on this device.
So thank you! Y’all are the best.
That’s great that hardware support for Windows-oriented laptops has made the progress it has!
The reason why I basically quit Linux in 2015 was because my hardware lost support from nvidia’s proprietary driver, and I never could get nouveau or the others to play friendly. That’s on top of the fact I never got bluetooth or the webcam to work (not that I ever intended to use those), and the proprietary Broadcom wifi driver didn’t seem to work as well as Windows. And the CPU/thermal management was atrocious, with progressively worse battery life over time. So I gave it up.
So my experience with a 2017 model of Macbook, using 2023 versions of all the firmware/software, is actually better than where I was in 2015 with a Dell laptop that literally shipped with preinstalled Linux in 2010. I think all I need to do is get past the initial setup of the non-standard or quirky hardware, and I’ll be in a better place with this laptop today than I was with my laptop in 2015.
If the typical off the shelf laptop available today is a one click installation with the typical beginner-friendly liveUSB installer, that’s great. It certainly wasn’t true in 2006 when I first switched, and wasn’t true in 2015 when I gave it up.