My "Linux" Book Pro

That's it. A Macbook Pro 8.1 from 2011.
It's old but I love it. I was my first and only laptop.
And I have no money.

How does it run?

Fine. It runs fine. Games don't but for web browsing and listening to music it's a great machine. After 8 years the battery is 50-60% of what it once was. In Mac OS X Lion I got 5 hours of really good use, 10 if I was properly stretched wink wink. The screen is 1280x800px and 13' so quality is decent but not great, even back in 2011 but image quality is still better than many mid range laptops.

How does it run with Linux?

With the exception of graphical performance, it runs better in every single way.
Trackpad support is clearly inferior to Mac OS but better than Windows 7 and 8 on this Machine. I do miss some gestures which are "missing" on X.org but enabled and working well on Wayland.

What was it about graphical performance?

Simply put it, the Intel HD 3000 from 2011 came with ~400-512MB of shared VRAM as specified by Mac OS but hardcoded to a minimum of 256MB. Mac OS, due to its hardware integration, controls how much memory is allowed, I've actually got a kext that increased to 2GB and performance is gained but only up to 1-1.5GB which I also experimented with.
On Linux distros there is no hardware access to VRAM sharing so it defaults to 256MB which is ******* bull****. I have 16GB of RAM.



Battery is a bit better than recent Crap OS versions, getting around 2 hours with Linux Kernel 4.18-5.0 and TLP. Manjaro and Fedora are the best at that even with GNOME shell.

Network capabilities depend on the distribution.
Ubuntu and based distributions from 16.04 to 18.04 run the wireless drivers with a simple toggle in "Additional Drivers" if connected via Ethernet, reboot and it's good.
Manjaro worked out of the box.
Fedora was tricky, 29 and 30 run the proprietary amazingly well but installing the drivers requires a few commands and an Ethernet connection.
Ubuntu Budgie 19.04 was weird, recognized the hardware and enabled the drivers by default but it didn't actually do anything, I had to run two commands, reboot and it was done.

Final thoughts

I've beaten it to hell and back but it's like an old VolkSWAGen. They don't make them like they used to.
It's approaching the 10 year mark and I'll be sure to keep it for many more. Maybe get an SSD and some spare parts like monitor assemblies.