OS Recommendations for 2014 MacBook Pro - eviltoast

My grandma just gave me her old MacBook Pro (MacBookPro11,1 A1502) and, after removing a spicy pillow, air dusting everything, and copying off her old photos, I’m ready to do a clean install.

I would like to dual-boot either Linux or BSD (which will be my main partition) alongside macOS (which will be handy for testing and for use with certain peripherals; either Mavericks, High Sierra, or Big Sur).

I am already well-versed in unix-like operating systems, so I’ll only start having trouble if I try to use a source-based distro (e.g. Gentoo, Source Mage, LFS, etc.)

Can I have some recommendations for the Linux and the macOS version, please?

    • Communist@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      8 months ago

      It’s 100% not hardware, none of the issues that I had were related to hardware, they all appeared on all 3 machines simultaneously, or were fundamental design issues

      an example of a fundamental design issue is the way the linux kernel packages are handled, they’re numbered, which means when you run the updater, you don’t automatically get the newest one, they should’ve used an ignorepkg or something else to achieve the same effect, because now if you don’t manually go in and change the kernel after a year or so, which no normal user would think to do, it breaks an unbelievable amount of shit, especially with nvidia drivers. This is just one of many horrible things that happened with that distro, you should really give endeavor or anything else a shot, even default arch is great now since there’s an installer.

      I truly believe there’s literally no reason to use manjaro.

        • Communist@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          8 months ago

          If you use gnome/kde I highly recommend an immutable distribution like kinoite or silverblue, if you prefer SUSE, microos is the equivalent. It’s unbelievably good if you want something that just works all the time.