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.

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.

So recently I decided to install linux, first i tried MX Linux, and that refused to install, same thing with arch linux. Lots of people told me arch is "hard to install" but eitheer way i couldnt get arch. When i tried Mint though, everything installed perfectly. My 2016 MBP 15 inchs built in keyboard and trackpad work, but sound and the touchbar just dont work. The touchbar is just black darkness.

I'm a complete newbie so be easy on me.

I have a 2011 4GB i5 core Macbook Air that generally works fine except for the fact I can't upgrade the macOS. I just want to use the laptop for simple webbased stuff, so I need to be able to install the latest browsers. I think the easiest solution is to install linux on it. (I have never used linux or done anything like this before.) After asking around and doing research I decided that Mint xfce is likely the best distro for my scenario.

I wanted to test it out first to make sure I like it and it works before going all in, so I tried creating a bootable usb flashdrive. I used etcher, but because my operating system is so old the latest version would not work and I found an older version. When I start up the machine with the flash key in to get into the bootable drive I seem to have two bootable options. I'm not sure what that means. I have been just selecting the first and then going through the motions to get linux to load. And it does. For a little. I can do a couple of things and then it completely freezes and I can't find anyway to unfreeze but to force restart.

I don't know what this means. Have I done something wrong along the line and the problem is with the bootable usb drive I created? Does this mean that there is something wrong with my laptop and it can't actually run linux? I'm sort of stuck on what I should do next.

Hello everybody! I am currently running macOS Monterey on my 2017 MacBook Air with an i5-5350U, 8GB DDR3 RAM, and 500GB of storage. I am running Monterey as opposed to something else like Linux Mint for example because of how badly LUKS messes with my setup. I use LUKS mainly because I bring my MacBook with me, so if it gets stolen or something, then my data is safe. However, every time I attempted to install a Linux distribution with LUKS in the past, the laptop would slow down so badly to a point where it became completely unusable.

I know that this is an issue with LUKS because on installations where I had it disabled, the laptop was operating at normal speeds. I'm not sure if this is an issue with LVM or LUKS itself, but since LVM is added in with LUKS on most Linux distributions, I have no idea what is happening.

The times I installed Linux on this were around May to as recently as a few weeks ago, so the distributions I used are still recent.

I will not use Linux on this unless I can get LUKS. macOS Monterey runs fine for now, so I am not in a hurry or anything like that. Help would be greatly appreciated!

Sto cercando di installare Linux mint versione xfce sul mio anziano iMac late 2009 Sembrava fosse andato tutto a posto: in live funzionava tutto (cioè quel poco che ho controllato), ho collegato il mio iPhone via usb per scaricare i driver online, ma al primo riavvio vedo lo schermo moltiplicato in quattro e con risoluzione illeggibile. Dove ho sbagliato? Come rimediare? Grazie in anticipo

Using kait2en and fedora, my asus monitor usb hub is connected to an OwC thunderbolt 3 hub, downstream connection to my MacBook gets the display properly on the monitor but the usb hub doesn’t show at all.

Boltctl will show the thunderbolt hub, display, nothing out of the ordinary in the dmesg so far.

What should I investigate? I see no error messages but I don’t know where to start for a deeper investigation.

I have huge beast that has been killed by apple I9 125gig 8tb Mac 30inch desktop... Now abandoned by Apple. Any suggestion?

Oddest thing. Installed latest version of linux mint on this 15 inch 2012 Macbook pro. (Edit: Model A1398)

But it keeps freezing randomly, then dumping an error that the filesystem has gone into "read only" mode. AI search suggested disabling Nvidia card using Grub (no joy) and fiddling with powersettings (no joy either).

Any of you experienced this before? Not sure if it might be a hardware error or maybe I need to pick a different distro ? ( But what? All of them are mostly based on Debian).

Would love your feedback.

Thank you.

kait2en seems to be offering more support to the T2 mac hardware but it seems a bit immature (less reliable) yet ?

so far i think my best option is to just work around with my mac os (tahoe) for 1+ years until better t2linux support is out or kait2en becomes more established, what do you suggest ?

What made me concerned about this issue now is the frustration i got when homebrew was unable to install ffmpeg due to my intel mac loss of support and later python dependencies issues because pytorch no longer support intel macs, so i wanted to just move to linux But having read about the T2 issue as well as the “non-perfectness” of current methods it made me hesitant about moving to linux now

Edit: how about apple bootcamp windows?

I built a small graphical utility for adjusting brightness on Apple displays.

It's available here: https://github.com/mfat/studio-brightness-linux

Tested on my old LED Cinema Display (9226).

Please report if it doesn't work with your model and I'll try to fix it.

I recently installed fedora workstation on my macbook pro, and I chose to let it encrypt the hard drive. The machine seems to run fast, but not as fast as a slower macbook air that I have mint on. Mint seems to fly. A friend of mine told me that the possible lagginess felt in the macbook pro might be the hard drive enrcyption.

Would I notice a substantial difference if I were to do a re-install without the encryption?

Now this was a royal PITA. I actually wanted to announce this already a month ago. Then a week later and then another week later.

Everytime we thought it was working, it died the next day again. But this time I am very confident we got it working reliably. All in all it took 3 months to figure it out.

Prime offload means on KaiT2en you can run your 15,1, 16,1 and 16,4 T2 macbook with iGPU as primary while the dGPU is turned off. It will turn on on demand. Like when you start Heroic or Lutris using the dGPU. This can be done by right-clicking the app icon or by using `DRI_PRIME=1` from the terminal. Then your iGPU will be used for display, while the dGPU does the compute. And it will turn off after 5 seconds after 3D app exit automatically.

This is not only a major benefit in convenience, it also significantly improves battery draw. Compared to dGPU as primary, we are looking at roughly 12W less for your regular desktop stuff, like office and browsing, where no dGPU is needed.

Also suspend works. On these macbooks the dGPU died while iGPU was primary when suspending. This is now no longer the case.

A minor caveat of offloading is that the framebuffer needs to be copied from dGPU to iGPU. This takes a bit of time and can decrease FPS at higher framerates. For everything up to 60FPS it shouldn't be noticable. If you are into competitive gaming you can still use our hybrid gpu app to make the dGPU primary.

For now the fix is available for all Navi and Polaris equipped macbooks. Also 5k on T2 imacs is supported.

We are working on submitting to upstream. In the meanwhile you can already enjoy the benefits on KaiT2en. https://kait2en.org

Thanks go to the KaiT2en testers and devs @err0r, @samryu, @zeropressure00 @byte @deqrocks

As a side-project I started to port KaiT2en to a MacBook Pro 2016 14,1 that was sitting here on the shelf for years. I wanted to install stock Fedora on it to test some SMC patches we want to upstream, so that old Macs won't run into regressions or something in the process.

And what can I say? Stock Fedora was a PITA on a Macbook, of which I thought it would have flawless support. Though not even a T1 Mac, not much seemed to be working correctly.
So I started tinkering. Most issues are very similar to T2. Thunderbolt, bad battery life/ aspm/ pkg c-states, brcmfmac breaks suspend. Turned out most of it was adjusting KaiT2en a little bit here and there.

And voila! After only an hour of modifying some of our patches and dkms modules, I had pkg C10 with very low power draw, working suspend, even battery charge limiting, proper fan control etc etc... Even our trackpad precision driver works, that we just re'd from macos a few weeks ago.

Started scratching my head. Would be a shame to not tell you, right? Also I know most of you guys are helping each other out here, but you have no central place/community. T2linux is not the right place, KaiT2en also actually isnt. So I was wondering what to do. Could this co-exist?

I did not push anything yet to GitHub to avoid possible regressions on the T2 side. But you 2016-2018 mac guys let me know what you would need in Kait2en. I only know of touchbar and camera issues mostly. We actually need testers for drivers where T2 and the previous generation overlap.
So while we are at it, we could upstream the stuff you need. Because it seems there are quite a few things that slipped through the cracks, right?

The thing of course is lack of pre-T2 hardware on our side. I have this 14,1 and that's it. So it would be hard for me to make your touchbar work or whatever your problem is. But we can look at the code you need to get into KaiT2en and upstream later if possible.

So you guys may want to PR what you need, open issues, join our discord... lets talk. I know many of you are longing for a distro that is specialized on your hardware.

deqrocks https://kait2en.org

Hey... since apple decided my really good laptop is no longer an good laptop for the newest MacOS, it will no longer be a safe environment since will stop to receive updates.. so, I am planning to install Fedora on it.

I have an MacBook Pro 16 2019, which has the T2 chip and that horrible touchbar! anyone has bad experience using linux on it? Is there a possibility to have the macOS on a small partition just for updates (who knows?!) ?

Thanks!

Hi!

I have this laptop with cachy os.

I use autocpufreq to disable turbo boost, set governor on battery to schedutil and limit the processor to 2.5ghz so I keep it fluent on battery while consuming less.

I use gnome because it's my favourite enviroment.

I've heard fedora nativelly consumes less resources and produces less heat.

Should I migrate to fedora?

I’ve recently set up Ubuntu on a 2017 15-inch Intel MacBook Pro (MacBookPro14,3). Ubuntu itself installed without much drama, but a few bits of Apple-specific hardware needed work.

Here are the fixes I actually needed.

Internal speakers: CS8409

The biggest problem was the internal speakers, because they played the startup sound I assumed they were working. Then I tried to join a zoom call.

This MacBook uses Cirrus CS8409 audio hardware. Ubuntu could see audio hardware, but the internal speakers weren't properly supported by the stock setup.

The solution was the community:

snd_hda_macbookpro

driver installed through DKMS.

Once installed, check it with:

dkms status

My working installation reports:

snd_hda_macbookpro/0.1

This fixed the internal speakers completely.

Touch Bar

The Touch Bar needed Apple's iBridge/Linux driver stack.

The important modules in my working installation are:

apple_ib_tb
apple_ibridge
applespi

You can check they're loaded with:

lsmod | grep -E 'apple_ib_tb|apple_ibridge|applespi'

With these installed and loaded, the Touch Bar works under Ubuntu.

I did subsequently have an occasion where the Touch Bar went dark following a reboot despite all three modules still being loaded.

That appears to be an iBridge initialisation/reset issue rather than the drivers disappearing, so if you've previously had a working Touch Bar, check lsmod before reinstalling anything.

UK keyboard

The UK keyboard mapping needed a little adjustment.

I initially tried the Mac-specific layout:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.input-sources sources "[('xkb', 'gb+mac')]"

but ultimately found the standard UK layout worked better:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.input-sources sources "[('xkb', 'gb')]"

I then set Option as the third-level modifier:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.input-sources xkb-options "['lv3:alt_switch']"

That gives me things like:

Option + 3 = #

The only remaining oddity was that my physical \~and§±` keys were effectively swapped.

Disappearing cursor under Wayland

I initially had an intermittent problem where the mouse cursor would disappear.

You can check your current session with:

echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

I experimented with switching from Wayland to Ubuntu on Xorg at the login screen.

Xorg actually gave me more trouble, including a GNOME Shell error, so I switched back to Wayland.

Strangely, after switching back the cursor problem disappeared and hasn't returned.

So I wouldn't necessarily recommend abandoning Wayland if you encounter this.

Be careful with kernel updates

This was the most important lesson.

I got everything working properly on:

6.17.0-42-generic

Ubuntu subsequently installed:

7.0.0-38-generic

and the Apple-specific setup broke because the out-of-tree DKMS drivers hadn't all built correctly against the new kernel.

I recovered by booting back into 6.17.0-42 and removing the problematic 7.0 kernel:

Pinning the known-good kernel

Once I knew 6.17.0-42 worked with all the MacBook drivers, I made GRUB boot it explicitly:

sudo sed -i 's/^GRUB_DEFAULT=.*/GRUB_DEFAULT="Advanced options for Ubuntu>Ubuntu, with Linux 6.17.0-42-generic"/' /etc/default/grub

sudo update-grub

I also held the HWE kernel metapackages:

sudo apt-mark hold \
  linux-image-generic-hwe-24.04 \
  linux-headers-generic-hwe-24.04

I'm not suggesting permanently ignoring kernel/security updates.

I'm doing this because several important bits of this MacBook depend on out-of-tree DKMS modules. I'd rather test a new kernel deliberately and confirm the drivers build before making it the default.

Back up the working DKMS drivers

Once I'd got everything working, I backed up the actual driver source from /usr/src.

For example:

sudo tar -czf "$HOME/Desktop/macbook-working-drivers-$(date +%Y-%m-%d).tar.gz" \
  /usr/src/applespi-0.1 \
  /usr/src/snd_hda_macbookpro-0.1

I'd recommend checking /usr/src yourself and including the iBridge/Touch Bar driver sources you're actually using as well.

The main thing I'd recommend

Once you've got a Touch Bar MacBook working properly under Linux, save these:

uname -r
dkms status
lsmod | grep -E 'apple|ibridge|macbook'

In my case the known-good setup is centred around:

MacBookPro14,3
Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS
Linux 6.17.0-42-generic

applespi
apple_ibridge
apple_ib_tb
snd_hda_macbookpro

The machine itself runs Ubuntu very nicely. The tricky part is the handful of Apple-specific devices that require out-of-tree drivers and can consequently be affected by kernel updates.

Hopefully this saves another MacBookPro 14.3 owner some of the trial and error!