Question is title.
In the past I’ve installed many distros on many older PCs, but never used linux properly (although slowly moving over to avoid win11). I’ve also had a heap of history with windows installs.
A family member has been testing Mint on an old laptop and is going well. This is a trial run before I update their iMac laptop (not sure what one but no longer supposed by OS updates).
I’ve never booted to an iMac BIOS or installed over top of apple.
- Is this going to be like installing over windows?
- What issues can I expect?
- Should I consider another distro?
Asking here as searching results in AI bullshit websites.
Linux runs fine on Intel Macs. There are a couple peculiarities you’ll want to be aware of, though.
- Ventoy doesn’t work as an installer. The boot menu will come up, but any ISO you choose will hang
- Not all distros will recognize the wireless card and install the firmware (Be prepared to install it using a USB to Ethernet adapter)
- Same goes for the iSight web cam
Other than those initial hiccups, everything works pretty flawlessly.
I installed EndeavourOS on a 2013 MacBook Air a month ago for a backpack trip. It was light enough to carry around and it was cheap enough I did not worry about it being broken or stolen.
It works fantastically. LibreOffice, Outlook online, Teams, OBS Studio, Distrobox, Docker, IntellijIDEA. I have even played a little Steam on it. The only thing that was not out of the box was the iSight camera and even that was a one line command after install.
The only software that let me down was DaVinci Resolve. The integrated GPU is not supported.
All I did was hold down Option at boot so I could boot off the USB and then I let the installer do the work. Anybody could do it.
Oh, and the person you’re helping may be better served by either the dosdude Catalina patcher or the open core legacy patcher.
Walk through your process on these with someone who’s used them first before you just go off, if you don’t have access to another device running macos then you can “soft lock” yourself.
If you’re gonna work on macs it’s good idea to have one, even what the kids used to call a hackintosh.
You need to know what you have. Other people have teased out that you have a MacBook Air, but there’s several different versions.
Apple hardware for like twenty years has used two types of naming conventions, the Trade Name (Approximate Date) and the Trade Name Number,Number designation. You might have a MacBook Air 7,1 for example which is an Early 2015. The TN N,N is the model Identifier and the TN (AD) is the model.
You can find out what you have by clicking on the apple menu in the upper left hand corner and choosing “about this mac”. The window that pops up will tell you the model and if you click “system report” you will get a ton of information that should have the model identifier somewhere near the top.
You can also look up the serial on the website everymac.com and it’ll tell you a best guess which is almost always right!
Once you’ve done that you can much more effectively search for the pitfalls of installing Linux on that computer.
It would help if you got the model right, and an exact one at that. As the others said, “iMac” isn’t a mac laptop, but an AIO desktop.
From the thread I gather you have some model of MacBook Air, that looks like this:
I run linux on one of these. Everything worked out of the box, except for wireless. See my 2-part adventure for how I solved it.
Mac “bios” isn’t exactly how you’d expect from PCs. Hold down alt key during startup to enter boot menu, and you’re good to go.
If your family member was a mac user before, they might be most comfortable on Gnome, as it has aped many ui features from mac os. It has a similar dock, fluid trackpad-friendly navigation that works the same way, and more.
