My 2012 MacBook Pro has exactly the opposite behaviour on a clean install across multiple distros. The brightness keys do nothing until after a suspend, then work fine until the next reboot. Never found a fix.

Yeah, I was a huge fan of that person going to that length, and saying they’d argued with their girlfriend about it, haha

Confusingly both. The name is from the red panda, but the icon is absolutely a fox!

This article immediately had me searching in confusion over whether the logo is a fox or meant to be a panda! What is your logo? Fox or red panda?

Contrary to most advice, if you find something that’s compatible with a Wayland session (basically Gnome or Plasma) you might be pleasantly surprised.

I found that to be by far the closest I got to a macOS-like experience with Linux on a retina Mac, in terms of fluidity, trackpad scrolling and responsiveness.

If the Mac has a Retina display then I actually found XFCE runs worst of the various DEs at native resolution. Not in terms of resources but very choppy scrolling, video playback etc. Gnome and KDE Plasma actually ran better than XFCE for me on my 15” 2012 retina.

Presume it’s some kind of graphics acceleration thing, not 100% sure.

Oh wow.

I’ve had so many issues with black screens on so many distros with my mid-2012 retina 15” MBP and never knew this was the reason.

Others here with old Macs seem to have had a much smoother run than me!

You can absolutely run Linux like a champ on that machine, but for reasons I’m not advanced enough to know/understand I’ve struggled with even booting the live USB for multiple distros on my Mid-2012 15" Retina. Maybe it’s the version of the hybrid Intel/Nvidia graphics on the model, I can’t really say.

I’m currently writing this from Linux Mint on said Mac, and all is well; but I’ve experienced the following:

• OpenSuse installer couldn’t even be seen at startup manager
• MX Linux would freeze during boot to the installer
• Elementary OS wouldn’t boot following install
• Pop! OS installed the wrong Nvidia driver for the computer, and with the open source drivers stopped booting after running a few updates
• Nitrux would freeze during boot to the installer
• Ubuntu stopped booting a few days in after an update
• Debian might have worked but wouldn’t detect my trackpad, wifi or USB ethernet adaptor so I couldn’t properly get it installed
• Manjaro worked for a while but eventually failed after an update
• ArcoLinux wouldn’t wake from sleep running the live USB

I totally recommend Linux Mint overall. I’ve decided I like Cinnamon best, “it just works” far more than anything else I’ve tried. I consider it the closest to macOS in terms of being thought about from every angle and set up and ready to go as a beginner or as a more advanced user.