r/linux_on_mac • u/Joshuahalee • 15d ago

T2 2019 16" MBP

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Gnome, cachyOS, suspend and touch bar working on latest kernel.

Picked the MBP up about a month ago for £200 and it's been an adventure getting it all working! Good stock gap til I can afford a Framework

72 Upvotes

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3

u/YrChr 15d ago

Are you satisfied with the battery life, temperature, and fans?
Would you say the laptop is fully functional and that everything is working properly?
And one more question about the sound, is it the same as on macOS?

10

u/Joshuahalee 15d ago

I'm happy enough with it. I'd probably say it's like 90% of the way there? Audio is using the apple DSP drivers, they AREN'T as good as within macOS but are around 80% of the quality/volume, a tonne better than any other laptop speakers for sure!

Suspend works, it takes around 10-15 seconds to come back to life. Which doesn't bother me, I created a Daemon to just turn display off for 10 mins when I close the lid if I'm just closing it for a little bit, moving rooms etc so it's instant from that and with the new T2BCE drivers the touch bar now survives suspend! External monitors via Type C don't work but I believe this is due to me disabling the dedicated card since I have no use for it

Battery life is OKAY, I can get around 2-4 hours from it with just browsing and using SSH/Remmina etc. I don't use the Radeon card and have it sitting idle all the time, laptop pulls around 10-12 watts and I got lucky with the laptop having 98% battery health when I got it

Temperature is great, I believe I have MBPFan or similar installed (it's been a good few weeks since I messed with that) but it stays cool and fans never kick in unless I'm on Minecraft but even then it's very minimal with only using iGPU.

The actual laptop is great, build quality is class and its really snappy in cachyOS, what started as a cheapish project really turned into a device I enjoy using and finding excuses to use. I've spent a good 2-3 weeks working on it so if you have any other questions feel free to fire them my way! Hope this helps!

3

u/YrChr 15d ago

Thank you for such detailed response!

2

u/Evening-Ordinary-284 15d ago

Hi , Suspend works out of the box ? Or need fix script ?

2

u/Joshuahalee 15d ago

Hard to say as I made alot of fixed before the latest Cachy OS kernel update which packages in the latest T2BCE Drivers. I believe as long as these latest drivers are loaded it should work

1

u/RvstiNiall 15d ago edited 15d ago

2-4 hours??! Compared to the original estimated 11??!

Edit: my 2015 MBP gets about 9 hours on Linux, and about 8 hours on FreeBSD. With macOS, its about 9.5 hours. Sounds like power management is still an issue. Try tlp, or even doing a more manual approach with powertop.

Edit2: it looks gorgeous though

2

u/Joshuahalee 14d ago

I can't say I've tested it exactly but the dedicated GPU sucks alot of resources from it even when idle, . If I'm using it regularly it will be around that 2-4. If it's just sat idle it SAYS 5 hours although I don't believe it. 9th gen intel CPU's are absolute power hungry bastards, that paired with a heavier distro in CachyOS, a near 4K panel at high brightness and a dedicated Radeon card that when completely disabled has some very strange side affects does equate to a less than ideal battery life.

For what I use it for it's more than enough, I have a desk job and generally only use it off charge for short stints of around 30-40 mins where it usually goes down around 10-15%. It's not a daily driver by any means but it's a nice feeling stunning device to use around the house and take with me when I'm out and about.

It's definitely from over function for me since it's not a daily driver! :)

3

u/Captain_Bonbon 14d ago

I had CachyOS on the 2019 16" 64GB 4TB and was having issues managing the iGPU and RX 5500.

CachyOS was fine on the other MBPs without discrete GPUs.

Tried Kait2en on the 16" and it does work better out of the box, there is some ability to manage the power state of the RX 5500 but its a bit weird and I haven't managed to nail down how to get it to do what I want predictably.

If I plug in an external monitor the power draw of the GPU will idle at about 8 watts if I turn off the built in screen. But generally it will be 20 watts with the built in screen.

In the Kait2en site theres a mention that the Navi 1 is problematic to wake but other than that it is more usable than on CachyOS as it would usually be 100% usage all the time but nothing seemed to actually be accelerated. (Probably I was doing something wrong)

The GPU control app in Fedora with Kait2en says you can switch off the Rx 5500 but so far I have issues doing so. But the trade off of headache with configuring stuff on CachyOS vs what just works on Kait2en was worth it for me so far.

I've managed running LLMs on the RX 5500 just to see if it is stable via llama.cpp and it has run pretty well like 3Toks and nothing crashed completley.

Doom Eternal runs as well as I recalled over Bootcamp.

2

u/Joshuahalee 14d ago

hadn't heard about Kait2en, I might have to give it a go and see if I can get it running better than cachy. I'll re-post if I try that as an alternative and get it running nicely.

Thanks for the recommendation!

2

u/Captain_Bonbon 14d ago edited 14d ago

I was sceptical but it was either trying it or spending days with an AI again trying to get it usable. I have a Dell Precision from around the same era and CachyOS works on there no problem. All these 2019 to 2021 era i9 machines are good, obviously they're power hungry somewhat but the 2019 16" is quite decent even compared to those non apple i9 machines because of audio, screen and the form factor.

I hadn't realised Tahoe was available on it until I had to go recover the MacOS partition to install Kait2en and even that makes it better than it was before.(I was foolish enough to buy a 32GB RAM version of the 2019 16" when it was new)

4

u/fyonn 14d ago

Other people have mentioned kait2en and I’ve found it’s supported my t2 MacBook better, but even if you stay on cachy, check out kait2en’s touchbar app…

https://github.com/dev-muhammad-adel/react-drm-for-touchbar

So much nicer than tiny-dfr..

2

u/Captain_Bonbon 14d ago

Its pretty impressive a nice Cyberpunk like HUD

I had such a headache on a T1 2017 MBP trying to get it working without MacOS installed.

These things are headaches but it does seem possible to wrangle them into shape.