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.
I use lubuntu on mine. It works fine. If the distro is not sexy enough it can be fixed with a good pair of programming socks. It’s all in the attitude.
I am running Mint on a 2011 MacBook Air and it is running just fine. I tried Manjaro recently on an iMac 2014 but it does not come with drivers for Wi-fi and Bluetooth so I went to Mint with this one too. And I installed Mint on a friend’s MacBook Pro, can’t quite remember what year that was, guess 2009. And she hasn’t called me once for support since so I guess no problems.
This is great info thank you! Dumb question: do you have any issues with the cd drive?
none of these did have a cd drive
Woops you did say Air! Thanks again!
Don’t remember if my friend‘s Pro had a CD-Rom That were often removed to make room for a second HD or SSD
Fedora is the only distro that I tried, that had WiFi working out of the box on my MacBook Pro 2017. It’s a little bit newer than your MacBook, but it should work. Also I prefer the KDE spin of fedora.
Thanks for this! I keep going back and forth on this. The very first article/tutorial I found was about Fedora on exactly the model of MacBook I have. I’m still considering it simply because I know it works based on this persons experience, but if I recall correctly the Wi-Fi didn’t work out of the box and some configuration was needed.
On fedora 36 Wi-Fi didn’t work out of the box. But on fedora 38 it works out of the box
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I’ll give it a look. Thank you!
I use EndevourOS ( easier to install Arch ) on several MacBooks. One of them is either 2011 or 2012.
It has worked great for me, including WiFi. I use XCFE on the older hardware as it runs a little lighter.
Mx Linux works great on an even older Mac.
Awesome. Thank you!
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.
Awesome! I was just reading about this. Pretty sure the port is there, ill just need to dig out a cable :) Thank you.
