What are /r/linux_on_mac's favorite Products & Services?

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Here running MX Linux - https://mxlinux.org/ - on a MB Air late 2010 with 2GB RAM. A must more usable system than the original OS Snow Leopard (lacks support for new software) and smoother than Mavericks (eats more memory). Also a very easy install. Wifi works out-of-the-box. MX is based on Debian stable and antiX. Live medium available.

100% of the time with a great performance will be difficult.

Try using a distro geared towards older machines. Puppy OS is one such distro(http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Installation_on_Apple_Macintosh), as is Lubuntu.

Hello :-)

First up, I would say not to use a refurbished hard drive as they will be damaged. (Think scratched CDs that skip seconds or minutes when playing songs, that's what. Hard drive is). Stick an SSD in it. Otherwise it's going to be sloooooowwwww.

Second, elementary OS is a very good replacement for lion on those macbooks. I had WiFi issues with it, but I think that was my router more than the os. https://elementary.io

Edit: sorry, forgot to actually answer some of your questions.

Yes, you can run a distro off a pen drive with or without the HDD in it.

Yes, you can just install Linux without Mac OS.

See if you can create another Admin account...

Hold the "Command" + "s" key on boot, then in the terminal type:

"mount -uw /"

then

"rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone"

then

"reboot"

On this boot OSX will ask you to create a new account just like the MacBook is new, this account you create will have administrator access so you can do what you need.

The thing is you would have to devise a plan so that the parents still get data like it's still working fine, but you would also have another session/account that you would use for things you didn't want them to know about.

Doing this might also trigger Netnanny to alert them, so to prepare for this download a copy of the app "Little Snitch" to a USB before hand and install it after you create the new admin account. So make sure you do all this disconnected from the net/wifi. When you go to reconnect to the internet you can set Little Snitch to block all communications with Netnanny (You will have to research which daemons it's uses and block them from sending/receiving data). I would recommend downloading Netnanny yourself just to see exactly what kind of info and control they have to prevent any mistakes...

Once your new Admin account is created you should go ahead and make it hidden so no one gets curious of this new account, you can follow this: http://osxdaily.com/2015/02/01/hide-specific-user-account-mac-os-x/

If you can live with arm linux pick the latest air and install it into a vm using vmware or parallels. In the settings give to the vm all the hardware that you can and use it in fullscreen.

You will get perfect support for your drivers, good battery life, true tone, touch id, etc

Eventually after this project https://asahilinux.org/ meets their goal of bringing linux to the m1 you will be able to use linux natively

I think what happens is that most of the linux on mac community is outside of this subreddit

Each mac has different hardware so its a mix between things that you will solve separately like in a normal PC and then some specific things that will depend on the mac model you have

For example check this "macbook pro 2016" github page with info about the support of the hardware https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux

On my own experience there is always small things like power management, audio speaker equalization, drivers, etc that don't work 100% well, just good enough. So in the end it's better to just install linux into a VM, you can put it at fullscreen and you still get support for things like true tone, multitouch trackpad gestures, instant awake from sleep, touch id, etc

Though for the m1 macs it seems like there is a project that is trying to get a really good support matching the macos level, see this page for more info https://asahilinux.org/

Yep.

> When comparing MATE vs Budgie, the Slant community recommends MATE for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux desktop environments?” MATE is ranked 5th while Budgie is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose MATE is:

> Because it's older codebase is based on Gnome 2 which was the champion for desktop environments for a long time, it's very stable and has plenty of features which work perfectly for old machines.

I've actually done it on the same model, basically you need a bootable usb with a 32bit distro of your choice (I recommend Peppermint OS as it's the fastest fully featured distro I've ever used and works great on Core Duo and 2GB RAM), Peppermint OS can also partition the disk for you if you want to keep Mac OS X as well so no need to bother with disk utility. Now you can use the regular boot manager or you can install rEFIt which will allow you to select USB at boot. Once you have that you can just go ahead and install it, Peppermint OS doesn't even require to install any drivers (except the proprietary webcam drivers but that's a whole other bag of snakes).

From the docs:

> rEFInd 0.11.0 introduced a dynamic tag hiding feature. To use it, highlight a tag and hit the Delete (on PCs) or minus (-) key. […] rEFInd will ask for confirmation. If you give it, the OS or external tool tag will disappear, and should remain hidden indefinitely.

that's exactly correct.

MacBook-Pro-2:refind-bin-0.10.3 myname$ ./refind-install Not running as root; attempting to elevate privileges via sudo.... Password: ShimSource is none Installing rEFInd on OS X.... Installing rEFInd to the partition mounted at /Volumes/ESP Found rEFInd installation in /Volumes/ESP/EFI/refind; upgrading it.

**** ALERT: SIP ENABLED! ****

You are attempting to upgrade an existing installation, but it appears that System Integrity Protection (SIP) is enabled. If rEFInd is working now, then this is fine; you can upgrade your existing rEFInd. If rEFInd is not working, though, re-installing from this boot will not help. To re-enable rEFInd, you must re-install it from a Recovery system or from another OS. To enter the Recovery system and re-install rEFInd:

1. Reboot 2. Hold down Command+R as the chime sounds 3. When the OS has booted, select Utilities->Terminal 4. Change to this directory with the 'cd' command; it will probably be under /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/Daniel/Library/refind-bin-0.10.3 5. Re-run this script.

For more on this subject, see http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/sip.html