[Darth-Apple]

I have a few older Macs lying around that I've been looking for good uses for. My college laptop was a 2012 and it was pretty decent for its time (doesn't receive software updates anymore, stuck on Catalina. Opencore works for more recent versions, but I prefer having older OS versions on older hardware anyway).

I also have a 2017 that was a work laptop at one point, and it's a dual core model much like the 2012 (although with a much higher clock speed and a newer architecture, so it performs noticeably better). I don't have any PCs laying around anymore and missed having an Ubuntu computer, so rather than going up to a pawn shop to buy a cheap laptop, I figured I'd throw Ubuntu on this thing instead.

Despite this thing being a Mac, Ubuntu has actually worked quite well on it. I had to install a few custom kernel modules to fix bluetooth and speaker drivers, and had to fix a couple of issues with it crashing on suspend and using too much power for the CPU (tlp fixed this, Mac has a bad battery so unexpected shutdowns can occur if the processor tries to draw too much).

Aside for a few things that required manual fixes, it's been working more smoothly than I expected. I like Ubuntu/Gnome 3 better than Mac OS (it's very Mac-like but much less cluttered), and it's been snappier than Mac OS has been on a dual core processor.

Anyone else ever installed Linux onto Mac hardware? How well did it run?

[tc4me]

Sorry I can't do anything with MAC :-(

[SpookyZalost]

Power PC? yes, but not on an intel mac. and it ran pretty good.

[Darth-Apple]

Yea, I've heard people have still been able to get fairly modern Linux installs on the G3/G4 Macs too. I'm sure the G5 ones actually wouldn't perform too terribly badly by today's standards (probably about comparable to a Core 2 Duo on the dual CPU models), but those processors were so power hungry that they never could quite get them to be practical in laptops.

That thing was like the Pentium 4 of PowerPC CPUs. It probably was what finally spurred Apple to switch architectures once Intel figured out how to make more power-efficient processors.

[tc4me]

Yea, I've heard people have still been able to get fairly modern Linux installs on the G3/G4 Macs too. I'm sure the G5 ones actually wouldn't perform too terribly badly by today's standards (probably about comparable to a Core 2 Duo on the dual CPU models), but those processors were so power hungry that they never could quite get them to be practical in laptops.

That thing was like the Pentium 4 of PowerPC CPUs.  It probably was what finally spurred Apple to switch architectures once Intel figured out how to make more power-efficient processors.

Look here