For my macbook pro 13" late 2011 I've pick manjaro with gnome and with OpenCore Legacy Patcher I managed to squeeze macos 13.5 on in.
While manjaro makes the machine relatively useful for the current day - for really simple tasks that is, the 13.5 misses much especially with low amount of ram. But worse thing is that this device comes with Intel HD Graphics 3000 and some stuff just simply won't load like Maps because this GPU isn't supported by Metal API.
In the past I tried Lubuntu on eMac G4 with 800mhz PPC - it was a rather painful experience. So I replaced it with 10.4 and with help of Macintosh Garden slapped additionally os 9.2.2 for for some dualboot retro fun
I’m running Manjaro on a late 2012 MacBook Pro, it’s running flawlessly.
The only initial issue I had was that I had to configurate the broadcom WiFi driver manually. Super easy after some googling for the more technically interested person… But nothing I would expect the general person to solve without frustration.
8gb RAM, 125gb SSD. 1xBattery replacement.
It does not run IDE’s like ST32 (based on Eclipse) and OneNote via Firefox smoothly simultaneously. But everything else so far has worked flawlessly. I use it every day and have done so since the beginning of this fall.
Edit: Call me a script kid all you want, for this particular laptop it’s just more convenient for me to run Manjaro rather than Arch right of the bat. But I guess I could eventually set up a shared partition for storage and an individual partition for each OS.
Lack of wifi support for any given distro I’m testing out is an instant rollback for me. I just don’t have the time or patience anymore. It has always been a problem.
Interesting, I run Webstorm for larger JS projects on Monterey on my 2012 Air. 4gb of ram w/ SSD. Little slow to start but I have fixed plenty of production bugs on the go with that thing before I retired it last year and got an X1 Carbon :)
Now that you mention it, I do recall issues with the WiFi on my model too. IIRC after one of bigger releases I had to manually install some driver package from AUR because existing driver was for whatever reasons removed.
Same here with my recent (free!) acquisition, a mid-2012 unibody Pro, when I installed Solus on it. However, when I booted it with MX initially, it automagically set up the wifi driver.
While manjaro makes the machine relatively useful for the current day - for really simple tasks that is, the 13.5 misses much especially with low amount of ram. But worse thing is that this device comes with Intel HD Graphics 3000 and some stuff just simply won't load like Maps because this GPU isn't supported by Metal API.
In the past I tried Lubuntu on eMac G4 with 800mhz PPC - it was a rather painful experience. So I replaced it with 10.4 and with help of Macintosh Garden slapped additionally os 9.2.2 for for some dualboot retro fun