try arch with something comfortable like kde, you seem like you're at the perfect skill level for trying it out
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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Mint is the only distro that “just worked” for me
If you're comfortable administering your own system, try Arch.
If you're not comfortable administering your own system but you want a rolling release, try tumbleweed.
If you don't want a rolling release, try Fedora.
I'd advise against Ubuntu, Debian, mint, and their derivatives. The only one I know of that doesn't ship out of date packages is Debian unstable.
If you hate yourself, try Gentoo lol
Endeavour OS has been the best I’ve found on my 2012 MBP
I used to run Linux Mint on mine. Worked fine, some quirks with the ctrl key not working. Did you have the same problem on EOS?
The only problem I’ve had was the Mac not going asleep properly, and immediately waking up. But that’s something I encountered on other distros including Mint also.
Found a fix for it.
Ctrl key hasn’t been a problem. Often on many distros the old hybrid Nvidia graphics and the old Broadcom card were both problems. But ok on Mint and EOS.
ubuntu because everything works.
in case you can't stand the snap business go fedora, add rpmfusion and poke around. if everything works, you're set.
two possible issues with resume from sleep. if your wifi won't come back, use the script from t2linux. if your laptop won't wake up expeditiously (takes a while), come back here and ping me and I'll dig up the the script.
stay away from mints and xfces and friends as you need wayland (so, Plasma or Gnome) for fractional scaling, gestures, seamless dock/undock, etc.
Fedora
I like zorin. Comes with libre office, disc burning, rdp client, play on linux to make running via wine easy, windows like interface. Its a nice out of the box distro for installing and going. Its an ubuntu spin and they only make the changes necessary for the look to be windows like and then the out of the box software so otherwise it pretty much behaves like ubuntu. Its a good lazy mans distro.
Very cool. Have you used it on an older MBPro?
Sorry no. Not in some time but one thing I did not mention is zorin uses ubuntu stable. Main complaint with people is old because it by no means tries to be bleeding edge. So it is relatively good on older hardware although its not a lightweight distro made to handle very old hardware. So I don't know how well it will do on a mac book pro but im betting it will do as well as any other.
I have used Pop! aon my 2015 MBpro, but performance wasn't the best. Switching to Mint Xfce might be a better choice.