If the Mac has a Retina display then I actually found XFCE runs worst of the various DEs at native resolution. Not in terms of resources but very choppy scrolling, video playback etc. Gnome and KDE Plasma actually ran better than XFCE for me on my 15” 2012 retina.
Presume it’s some kind of graphics acceleration thing, not 100% sure.
Excellent work, my favourite Mario Kart due to countless, countless hours spent playing at uni.
Need to set that bad boy to 4:3 not 16:9 for the aspect ratio to be correct though!
Definitely perfectly comfortable on Mint for day to day use… but would still struggle for anything that hasn’t got a GUI. Obviously can copy and paste commands but would like to be better than that.
This is installed on my old computer and I upgraded to a M1 Mac as my main one, so this is more a hobby project and learning experience than a daily driver.
Have had a lot of issues with previous installs from other distros failing, I think due to this Mac’s 2012 Intel/Nvidia hybrid graphics.
Can’t take any credit, but found this after doing some searching
Yeah, it’s nice!
I can’t take any credit for it, I found it here and figured out how to modify it slightly, mainly to remove the bits I couldn’t get to work.
Yeah, I foolishly shopped around a whole host of distros and DEs after seeing things on reddit and getting ideas above my station.
Most couldn’t even boot either the live USB or following install, and I didn’t really know how to find out why.
Others worked for a week or more before failing after an update and I hadn’t figured out Timeshift yet.
Probably my 2012 hybrid Intel/Nvidia graphics played a part if I was guessing.
A lot of it seems at least partly deprecated, had to just delete a few presets I couldn’t get to show any data
Thanks!
I’ve nuked and started again with Linux so many times at this point.
Did the usual ill-advised distro hopping instead of just using Mint, to see if the grass was greener… and it wasn’t.
So many distros couldn’t even load the live USB and locked up with a black screen.
Others would install… but then wouldn’t boot.
Others ran for various amounts of time before failing after an update.
At least now I’ve done what I should have done at the start and figured out Timeshift. If anything goes wrong again I’ll make sure I take the time to see if I can understand why, to learn from it.
Yeah it’s plain old Conky.
Trying to be incredibly non-invasive and able to backtrack on anything I do. So nothing extra installed and no Conky Manager, all just using someone else’s conky.conf settings I found online, which I then tweaked (and removed some bits I couldn’t get working!)
Interesting. This was one of the many distros I couldn’t get to install on my 2012!
Others here with old Macs seem to have had a much smoother run than me!
You can absolutely run Linux like a champ on that machine, but for reasons I'm not advanced enough to know/understand I've struggled with even booting the live USB for multiple distros on my Mid-2012 15" Retina. Maybe it's the version of the hybrid Intel/Nvidia graphics on the model, I can't really say.
I'm currently writing this from Linux Mint on said Mac, and all is well; but I've experienced the following:
I totally recommend Linux Mint overall. I've decided I like Cinnamon best, "it just works" far more than anything else I've tried. I consider it the closest to macOS in terms of being thought about from every angle and set up and ready to go as a beginner or as a more advanced user.
The tiny thumbnail for this looked like a belly button on my phone, had no idea what I was tapping on at first