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?

  • gayhitler420@lemm.ee
    1·
    8 months ago

    i use debian stable on intel macs and it works fine. whatever youre comfortable with will work fine except that some distros like rhel don’t handle broadcom-wl right still.

    i use 10.14 mojave (32 bit support), 10.15 catalina and whatever 11,12,13 versions are best supported by opencore legacy patcher on the particular device.

    your 11.1 mbp is not officially supported in 12 monterey but because it has the intel gpu the opencore legacy patcher should work very well.

    when you partition, use apfs for your mac side of the disk. it lets all your macos versions use their own volumes inside the apfs partition and the result is that they all can use the free space but can’t see each others files.

    whats got you wanting to use mavericks or high sierra? those are pretty old and i don’t remember either one having specific features that got removed later or something.

    • Hellfire103@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      I’ve already gone and installed macOS 11 alongside OpenBSD (although I’m going to distrohop until I can find something that “sticks”). I might have a look at patching Monterey, though.

      As for those specific versions, High Sierra was the oldest version with decent software support, and Mavericks has those lovely skeuomorphic icons. I know it’s old, but I was using OSX Snow Leopard (alongside crunchbang++ i386) until I got this MacBook Pro.

      • gayhitler420@lemm.ee
        2·
        8 months ago

        Those are cool icons.

        How is openbsd on that hardware? It’s been a little while since I used it with a desktop…

        • Hellfire103@lemmy.caOPEnglish
          1·
          8 months ago

          It’s okay. I’ll probably end up switching to Arch, though.

          It works, but there are a couple of issues:

          • HiDPI is not supported by cwm, so I’ve had to do “duct tape” fixes on everything (changing .Xresources, changing GTK conf files, increasing the font size in polybar). Qt apps aren’t playing ball.
          • The WiFi card isn’t supported by any BSD, so I’m using a dongle.
          • The fan doesn’t come on as often as it does on macOS, so the MacBook can get rather hot.
          • The headphone jack supports optical jacks as well as standard 3.5mm ones. Under OpenBSD, however, the LED inside is constantly on. This isn’t a problem, but it’s not normal.
          • Polybar can’t seem to access any system information (e.g. disk usage), but I suspect that has nothing to do with the hardware.
          • gayhitler420@lemm.ee
            1·
            8 months ago

            That’s not bad at all.

            My 2015 worked close to out of the box with debian and a bunch of older mbps do too. if you aren’t looking for an adventure I can highly recommend it.

            Since you already have your feet underneath you, a lot of secondhand computers with ssds can benefit from a “level 2” scan from the program spinrite. That process reads and rewrites every block on the ssd. I bet you could do the same thing with dd somehow but i just use spinrite instead.its my understanding that all the Intel Macs are able to boot it although i haven’t personally done it on an 11.1.