My MacBook Pro and differences between GNU+Linux distros...

[Portreve]

When people talk about differences between distros, they usually tend to think in terms of the default desktop environment, or which exact set of libraries are included, or what package management system is used, or even in terms of that particular project's philosophy (compile from scratch, bleeding edge, stability, etc.) but one of the often overlooked factors (or at least for me) is how broad their diversity of hardware support is.

I've spent the past few days playing around with my 2011 MacBook Pro (8,1) trying to figure out how I wanted it set up, and with what particular distro. I got Fedora 34 to install flawlessly. Everything works perfectly. Of course, on a 1280×800 display, Gnome 3.x (in 34's case, Gnome 40) is very wasteful in terms of real estate. The UI is interesting, though really not my cup of tea. I'd also thought about installing openSUSE Leap 15.2, but more on that anon.

The Fedora Project doesn't exactly go out of their way to promote it, but they do produce different spins, including Cinnamon, MATE, KDE, and others. So, I figured I'd try their Cinnamon spin. Everything installed, and my Mac booted right up into it, and it looks nice, but clearly it's not quite as tested and stable as their Gnome 40 DE, because I got a number of errors and program crashes and courteous offers to help me report them.

So, I decided I would instead try openSUSE.

Yeah, as a friend of mine likes to say, "not so much".

I can get the live image to boot, no sweat. I can access my Atheros-based 802.11n USB dongle and connect to my network connection. I can get everything set up and installed. But, when it comes time to reboot and start up off my system drive, no dice. I've tried with Mac OS X 10.6.8 (fresh install) and openSUSE, I've tried just openSUSE by itself. I've even tried with Fedora and openSUSE. Nothing. You can't pick the device, there's no GRUB screen... just absolutely nothing.

In the past I tried to install CentOS, and it's as bad.

Yet other distros like Debian, or Ubuntu, or Mint, or Fedora set up like a charm, and never fail to work.

It's crap like this which can be really frustrating. After all, there's no need for developers to reinvent the "how do you boot a Mac" wheel: it's out there and available, and what's more the code is open source. Yet, as far as I can tell, they really don't seem to care. What's more, it seems like it must be some kind of deliberate choice, because how complex and how much disk space can that little bit possibly take?