I first ran the install using Calamares, but when it was done I couldn’t boot into my new install because of the EFI boot section still on the drive from OS X. I had three installers to choose from – “Thus”, Calamares, or CLI.

I decided to go ahead and run the install. It booted up into the Live Disc which ran beautifully and had a splash screen offering various options. Ironically, the Manjaro disc shows up as “Windows” so I went ahead and selected that. Holding down the alt/option button allowed me to boot into a screen offering me various boot media. I decided to try out the KDE version, downloaded the ISO, burned it to a disc and then popped it into my MacBook Pro. Manjaro Linuxįinally I came across Manjaro Linux, which is based on Arch Linux. I did not try Ubuntu because I already have a machine running Ubuntu, and I wanted something different. In each case though I ran into various issues with system stability and hardware support, the most troublesome being wireless support and trackpad support. I tried several Linux distros including OpenSuse, Debian, Linux Mint, and Fedora. Being as I like playing around with tech and I had nothing left to lose I decided to try installing a completely different OS on this MacBook to see what would happen. This was the nail on the coffin for me as I no longer have the original CDs that came with this MacBook. Alas, the update failed and I was left with endless kernel panic messages and the Mac would no longer boot to a usable state. I decided to go ahead and do this wondering what impact it would have on the system stability. When I booted it up to clean out my files it prompted me to update the OS to Yosemite. Because I have another MacBook that I use for business and some dev work, I was contemplating giving this older MacBook away and replacing it with a smaller laptop, netbook or even Chromebook for regular internet use. I was running OS X Lion on it but it was sluggish and would heat up after running for only a short time. I have a mid-2010 MacBook Pro that was quickly becoming fairly useless. I will cover my process of experimenting with various distros and why I finally settled on Manjaro, and what hitches I ran into on the way and how I solved them. In this post I am going to briefly outline the process I went through installing a Linux distro to run as the only OS on my MacBook Pro.

Wireless mac on linux