Hello,

I got a late 2015 27 inch iMac running Linux mint 22.3 cinnamon. On a 512GB SSD

When I boot up it takes forever shows like a black screen for a few minutes to get the login screen to sign in and then everything’s fine but the Bluetooth won’t enable. I’ve gotten it to work before but then when I connect let’s say my Apple keyboard via Bluetooth it would say it’s connect but when I unplug it from USB it doesn’t recognize anymore and now my Bluetooth does not work at all. I’ve tried so many terminal
Commands I couldn’t get it to work for hours now

I can't get passed a black screen on linux I have an amd ryzen 5 3500, 32gb ram, 1tb nvme ssd, and Intel arc b580

Hi! I would like to build my own data center. Therefore I consider buying an athlon 3000G. I know it s compatible AM4 like every other Apu CPU of the last 3 years and so compatible with series 300, 400, 500 motherboard.

Question is: Does the oldest motherboard need the bios update when I buy them or the constructor is doing it by default now ?

I don't have any other older AMD part to do the update :/

Of if you have an other better idea on what components should I put inside. I try to build it, as inexpensive as possible, to seed , ddl torrent, and share files with my family. And able to stream 4k out of it.

I install Debain [stretch] [mate] [yep], works like a charm.

Issues I had

-1 The temperature sensors didn't want to work properly -or at all I should say. But after a quick google search, all was good.

-2 When first installed wifi doesn't work but you can easily fix it without having to buy a usb to ethernet adapter. I think I just googled it on another machine then transfered the file over & installed like a boss.

-3 Realizing that I am more of a hipster than normal macbook users being that I am using a macbook but am too good to use macos.

& that's pretty it dudes. Have fun.

Early 2015 MacBook Pro mit Trixie wiederbelebt 😘

For anyone with a T2 Mac (2017-2020) most generic distros will boot fine but have a range of problems due to how Linux interacts with the T2 chip.

Then along came T2Linux https://github.com/t2linux and it did a good job of fixing most of the problems, and even upstreaming some of the patches. More recently there's https://github.com/kaiT2en/KaiT2en-Fedora

Unfortunately, when I took a closer look at some of their *recent* non-upstreamed patches in 2 kernel areas I have expertise in, I noticed:

a) signs of AI created code that is either not necessary or does strange things
b) entire patches which are basically junk.

To give an example of b) I asked them why their DSP speaker tuning files look so weird, and nothing like the Asahi Audio method they originally used. The guy I spoke to was extremely evasive, and wouldn't engage on a technical level. A few hours later I notice he's deleted 7000 lines from the DSP code: https://github.com/kaiT2en/KaiT2en-Fedora/commit/1e3c61a903567d252d88466cce9c1a23983718bb

If you look at the high frequency of commits on these projects alarm bells start to ring. Sadly, perhaps in some rush to make Macbooks run Linux perfectly, it seems they've gone down the "let's get AI to fix it" route, without doing any code review.

My recommendation if you want a stable system is just to use a recent mainstream distro like Ubuntu 26.10. A lot of their previous good patches are now in Kernel 7.3 anyway.

Just installed it on my iMac 15,1 and I'm amazed how fast each app launches. Less than 1 second. As to the rest, I just started messing with it 30 minutes ago, so...

I was inspired from the recent trend of reverse engineering apps like the Adobe suite, and decided to have a go at using AI to reverse engineer the Windows driver for a fingerprint reader I got from https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005012693895809.html and add Linux support.

It's supported on Windows out of the box, but became a brick after I switched to Linux Mint ;)

The entire process from start to finish took about 7-8 hours switching between Windows to capture the messages, and developing and testing on Linux. But all in all, being able to adding fingerprint authentication to a device that's not natively supporting with just an AI subscription and less than USD$7 seems crazy to me.

The project is here: https://github.com/iewil/libfprint-petaic-moc, and I hope to be able to add this support into the main libfprint library.

The tested unit is Package 2 from the linked product listing, with USB ID 28e9:5159. I tested enrollment and fingerprint verification through fprintd, plus fingerprint unlock on Linux Mint. Other product variants and firmware versions have not been verified.

!!! Security caveat: the model certificate on my unit has expired, so installation requires a local pin for that reader and its current firmware. Also for full transparency, the code and documentation were created entirely by AI (OpenAI Codex). I supplied the hardware, captured protocol traffic, performed the physical tests, and reviewed the code.

If you test it, please share the reader package variant, firmware if known, distribution/version, and what worked or failed. Please don’t post fingerprint records, raw USB captures, device keys, or serial numbers.

I recently decided to bring my wife's old 2016 MacBook Pro back to life. It's the 13-inch non-Touch Bar model (A1708 / MacBookPro13,1).

The original SSD had failed, so I replaced it with a 512 GB SSD and installed Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS. The plan was pretty simple: turn it into a lightweight secondary development laptop.

Most of the hardware actually worked surprisingly well. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, graphics, keyboard, and trackpad were all functional.

The one big exception was audio.

Ubuntu detected the Cirrus CS8409 codec, and the speakers and microphone appeared as available devices, but neither worked.

After digging around, I found federal1970's MacBookPro13,1 Fedora project, which includes an RFC patch series implementing support for this model's audio hardware.

Those patches targeted Linux 7.2, while Ubuntu was running kernel 7.0.0-38-generic. With some experimentation, I managed to adapt the patches to the older kernel. The main compatibility issue was an unavailable GPIO helper, which we replaced with equivalent HDA codec verb writes.

And it worked!

Successful tests:

• Internal speakers (both channels)
• Internal microphone
• Wired headphones
• Audio after suspend/resume
• Volume controls

Rather than leave it as a one-off fix on my laptop, I decided to make the process reproducible.

With some help from GPT/Codex, I put together a small project containing the upstream patches, our Ubuntu compatibility adjustment, build automation, installation and recovery scripts, and automated tests.

We've now successfully built, installed, and tested the project-managed driver on the MacBook.

GitHub: https://github.com/eannelson/macbookpro13-1-ubuntu-audio

Release: https://github.com/eannelson/macbookpro13-1-ubuntu-audio/releases/tag/v0.1.0-rc.1

A couple of important caveats: This is an experimental release candidate, tested on one MacBookPro13,1 running Ubuntu 26.04.1 with kernel 7.0.0-38-generic. It's not a general audio fix for every Intel MacBook. The ordinary installation-from-stock and real recovery workflows haven't yet been tested on hardware.

Huge thanks to the developers responsible for the original CS8409 work. This port of Ubuntu builds directly on their efforts.

What started as replacing a failed SSD turned into an unexpectedly fun deep dive into Linux kernel modules, audio drivers, and reproducible builds.

Hopefully this saves another old MacBook from collecting dust!

Curious whether anyone else here is still using an A1708 or running Linux on a similar vintage MacBook.

I havn't had a laptop for a while since my last one died and iv been mostly using my steamdeck.
Anyway someone found this old 2011 13 inch Macbookpro without a charger cable so I figured why not lets give this a go and its slowly becoming my main non gaming PC.

Installing it was a bit of a pain compared to how it would be on a normal laptop but eventually I was able to get Lubuntu running on its dual core and 4 gb of ram with an old sata SSD I had. To my surprise it actually does all the non gaming things I need to do fine, I can watch youtube and work on a word document at the same time. I have about 6 tabs open. If I open discord at the same time it does freeze but I think thats an issue with it only having 4gb of ram, but still how the hell can a PC that's 15 years old run this well. Most old laptops I have had start to stutter and die at about the 6-8 year mark.

I have moonlight so will be able to game on this PC soon enough using my steamdeck or gaming PC as the renderer.

I unfortunately havn't been able to get the DVD drive to work nor use an external USB one so not sure what's going on there, but I can watch downloaded movies and shows fine on it, maybe I should digitize all my DVDs on another PC and call it quits on running them on this but eh will see.

Iv also messed around with gaming and can run ps1 and dreamcast games fine, PS2 games are hit and miss but some do run. PS2 emulation being bad isn't a suprise tbh that machine is a beast.

I was honestly expecting this PC to be just stutter and die insantly, especially not until I upgrade the ran.

I will upgrade soon as I can get 2x4gb from Cex for £2, maybe I will eventually upgrade to 16gb which is the max of the machine but not sure if its worth the money.

I need to replace my 14" M1 MacBook Pro and I'm going back to Linux, ideally Arch.

The MacBook has been good, but I'm getting a bit fed up with Apple. The hardware is great, but everything is soldered, upgrades are stupidly expensive and if something breaks outside warranty the repair prices are just mad.

If I'm spending £2-3k+ on a laptop I'd rather own something I can actually repair/upgrade.

My normal use is Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform/Ansible, development, VMs occasionally, compiling/building and increasingly local LLMs.

The problem I'm having is size vs power.

I really like the 14" MacBook size. I don't want a 2.5kg workstation and massive charger that I'm eventually going to hate carrying around.

So the Framework 13 Pro looked almost perfect.

Great Linux support, small, light, repairable, replaceable SSD/RAM/battery/ports/motherboard etc.

But then I'm wondering if I'm giving up too much performance. No dedicated GPU and its still a small laptop with limited cooling/power.

Then I look at the ProArt PX13 with Ryzen AI Max+ 395.

Much more interesting performance, up to 128GB unified memory, much better for local LLMs, still small.

But now I'm back to soldered RAM, worse repairability and Linux support that seems a bit more hit and miss.

Then I start looking at Framework 16, ThinkPad P series, Dell workstations etc.

More power, NVIDIA/CUDA, more RAM, multiple SSDs...

and suddenly I'm buying a 2kg+ brick.

So I keep going around in circles.

Basically I want something small enough that I actually take it everywhere, but powerful enough that I don't regret buying the smaller machine in 2 years.

At the moment I'm leaning Framework 13 because it seems the best overall compromise, but I'm not convinced.

Anyone else running Linux + Docker/K8s + local LLMs gone through the same thing?

Did you compromise on power and stay small, or just accept the weight and buy the workstation?

I am looking to get into Linux. If I understand correctly, I have 2 options.

Either I get a flashdrive to get Linux working on my Pc or get a new machine to install Linux on.

Now I don't know how much of my pc's memory is going to be used up, but my Microsoft on it with games and all doesn't leave a lot of free space.
So if I'd need to pay for either more memory or a new machine then I'd rather invest into some kind of "Linux Laptop".

What Flash Drives or Laptops are good for Linux ? Does it even matter or can I just find something I like and in my price range and just install a Distro of my choice?

For now I'd say a flashdrive or a smaller machine for Linux would be my most comfortable solution so I can still use my Microsoft until I know enough about Linux.

I think a hardware that stays usable into the future and can be upgraded if needed would be best.

Also I'd be buying in Switzerland (Europe) if thats makes any difference.

Thanks a lot for any help with this.

My current PC is ancient, and I'm about to build a new one (bad timing, I know) - and one of my primary considerations is good Linux support (Arch).

For the CPU I'm probably going with the Intel 270k Plus, and RX 9070 for the GPU. Ryzen 9900X is also an option, though I'm leaning more towards Intel right now.

I need some help choosing the motherboard. Can someone recommend a mid-high end mobo that doesn't have weird Linux quirks? I'm thinking mostly about reliable suspend/resume, which has given me a lot of headache in the past.

I like the Asus ProArt Z980, the Aorus Master Z890 and the ASUS Maximus Z890 Hero. Does anyone here have any experience with those? Any other recommendations, or things I should be aware of?

So I’m a grad student doing some heavy simulations with Matlab that use a lot of RAM and threads. I purchased a 2019 MacPro with 28cores and 394gb of RAM and stuck T2 26.04 Ubuntu on it, after a little fighting I got WIFI and thunderbolt working with the native chips and the computer is perfectly stable, and running simulations exactly how i expected it it. The only problem is Bluetooth doesn’t work, not a big deal but you know I can’t help poke around. Already tried importing the drivers from MacOS which worked for WIFI and ChatGPT has taken me to a point where it’s trying to do kernel level edits and I’m a little gunshy of given it may screw up an otherwise working machine. Anyone know an easy solution from the terminal? I can live without Bluetooth but if someone knows how to enable it I most certainly will.