I still love this machine. On MacOS, it still runs very well but is not supported anymore unfortunately. I have installed Mint on it and it was very sluggish. I then went for Ubuntu 22.04 and gnome 42.9 and it has been much better, keyboard, battery, trackpad and shortcuts have been supported mostly out of the box.
But it’s still fairly slow, and it seems I haven’t managed to use the discrete GPU (NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M). Gaming on this, even with a low spec game, is impossible. Granted, 8Gb of ram feels a bit tight nowadays but it certainly has the raw power!
Any other distro you’d recommend? Or perhaps a specific setup I could give a try to enjoy my MacBook at full power?
had a bunch of those. the best thing you can do is disable the nvidia graphics and run it off the intel graphics, plenty powerful for everyday tasks, lower power consumption, less heat, longer battery life. only downside, you lose display out.
after that, any linux distro will suit you just fine. go with fedora for newest and best or debian for safe and boring.
edit: https://lemmy.ml/post/42330116
I also had this exact Mac running Debian with Nvidia disabled. And a TP link WiFi adapter too.
The Nvidia can’t do Wayland anyway, so definitely ignore it and disable.