I just installed EndeavorOS on an HP Spectre360 that’s roughly 2 years old. I am honestly surprised at how easy it went. If you google it, you’ll get a lot of “lol good luck installing linux on that” type posts - so I was ready for a battle.

Turned off secure boot and tpm. Booted off a usb stick. Live environment, check. Start installer and wipe drive. Few minutes later I’m in. Ok let’s find out what’s not working…

WiFi check. Bluetooth check. Sound check (although a little quiet). Keyboard check. Screen resolution check. Hibernates correctly? Check. WTF I can’t believe this all works out the box. The touchscreen? Check. The stylus pen check. Flipping the screen over to a tablet check. Jesus H.

Ok, everything just works. Huh. Who’d have thunk?

Install programs, log into accounts, jeez this laptop is snappier than on windows. Make things pretty for my wife and install some fun games and stuff.

Finished. Ez. Why did I wait so long? Google was wrong - it was cake.

      • Andrzej@lemmy.myserv.one
        4·
        7 months ago

        It depends. I installed mint on a 2011 MBP a couple of years ago and it was a breeze. I installed arch on it recently and the only snag was having to install the proprietary Broadcom driver to get wireless. It runs great though — which is just as well because it would actually be more difficult to install OSX on the bloody thing, seeing as they no longer support it.

        A 2016 MBP is still a bit recent, but, as a general rule of thumb, by the time a Mac stops getting software updates, Linux will be ready for it.

          • Andrzej@lemmy.myserv.one
            2·
            7 months ago

            I do check in on it every now and again, and it is impressive! I reckon they’ll be able to offer a seamless transition once Apple stops servicing M1 Macs, which is really good going. But, depending on your use case, making the leap now would mean sacrificing some functionality

        • Hexarei@programming.dev
          11·
          7 months ago

          I hate to break it to you friendo, but 8 year old hardware isn’t recent. It may still be usable, but that doesn’t make it recent. It’s ok though grandpa, let’s get you back to bed

            • Hexarei@programming.dev
              1·
              7 months ago

              I can read, and a 2016 MacBook pro is not even a bit recent; It’s from 8 years ago :-)

              Just a bit of light-hearted leg pulling, nothing to get worked up over

              • Andrzej@lemmy.myserv.one
                1·
                7 months ago

                8 years is recent if it’s apple hardware and you’re expecting Linux to work flawlessly out of the box. Maybe things were different back in your day though

                • Hexarei@programming.dev
                  1·
                  7 months ago

                  It was a lighthearted jab at calling 8 years ago recent; Not a political statement about Apple or operating systems.

                  8 years is a ton of time in tech, CPUs from 2016 are ancient. Single-core CPU performance has doubled in Intel’s laptop chips since then, and modern laptop CPUs from Intel are often 12-core, versus the top end 2016 MacBook Pro having 4 cores.

                  Not trying to start any fights, was just poking fun at the choice to call 2016 recent

                  • Andrzej@lemmy.myserv.one
                    1·
                    7 months ago

                    Dude, there are so many contexts in which 2016 could be considered ‘recent’, including the one I was speaking in, and yet you march into my mentions with the patronizing bullshit. I don’t know, maybe you think you’re being friendly, but it doesn’t feel friendly to me.

      • pukeko@lemm.eeEnglish
        4·
        7 months ago

        NixOS on an M2 Air here. Works fine, other than the fingerprint reader.

    • pukeko@lemm.eeEnglish
      4·
      7 months ago

      The 2016-2017 MBP are unusually bad. Devices on either side of that? You’re fine. But the 2016-2017 devices? No wifi (except in some extremely unusual cases) is the big problem. Even then, it amazes me how much does work, with zero configuration, with a simple graphical install. The problem with this vintage MBP isn’t that it’s hard to get running–it’s that it’s (almost) impossible, but the parts that aren’t impossible are as smooth as they can be.

      Yes, that’s cold comfort. But I’m speaking from the POV of an owner of a 2017 MBP who desperately wanted to keep it going.

      The coda to the story is that my wife used it for a while with her business but it fell victim to an absolutely bizarre heat issue where the heat sink vents hot air directly across the controller cable for the display, leading to inevitable failure. Again: not an issue on either side of this model year. It’s sad because it could’ve served for another 4-5 years, making the initial purchase price substantially more tolerable.

      • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        7 months ago

        Surprisingly it was really easy to install fedora on my wife’s MacBook Pro from 2012.

        The only thing I had to do for everything to work perfectly was to install the RPM fusion repository and accept that the @ is gonna be mapped to the wrong key.

        It’s the easiest device I’ve had for installing Linux in quite a while…