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
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    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.