My touchbar pro 😞
Anyone got good recommendations for what distro will work on it?
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2026
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I guess “f- them ‘poor’ developers.” Like, Hackintosh people had a chance to learn macOS development, but now? Why buy that spendy hardware? And I’m not talking about shops. I mean, indie developers.
Those Intel Macs aren't really that old. I had the last good MacBook Pro they made in 2015, which still had the glowing logo, then the the slump with the touchbar shits happened in 2016-2017.
In 2017 I traded the MacBook for a Dell XPS 13. Like the MacBook, the build quality is really good. It's running as a server in my media room. I'm running Ubuntu and I open it up daily to acquire new media, organize files, tweak my Jellyfin settings, etc.
There is no reason that 2017 XPS laptop couldn't serve as my daily driver. My OS is fully up to date and I applied a firmware update last night. The end of life for that device is nowhere in sight; it's peaking honestly. But if I had kept the MacBook, which was the highest quality laptop hardware you could possibly buy, for a premium price, Apple would be telling me it was no longer supported?
Regardless, Linux rocks so I hope Mac owners find joy installing a fun new OS on their good quality hardware. Here's to the next ten years of life!
Just a quick heads up for those planning on installing Linux on their Mac. There are about three types of Macs: Intel Macs, T2 Macs and Apple Silicon Macs.
- Linux should work fine on Intel Macs, but some people at least seem to have problems with the Touch Bar.
- T2 Macs are a flavor of Intel Macs. If your Mac has T2 chip, you must use T2Linux flavor of your distro. The overall experience might not be perfectly smooth, expect some issues with at least Touch Bar, suspend and connectivity. Some fixes should arrive later this year, as far as I know.
- Asahi Linux currently supports M1 and M2 Macs. M3 and M4 are unsupported.
As a T2 Ubuntu user, the only thing that I really notice is that sleep/wake is pretty iffy. It’s annoying, but not a deal breaker by any means.
For anyone thinking of making the jump: the installation is pretty straight forward if you follow the directions
Touchbar work? Would be a shame if mine just turned into very nice e-waste and I CBA with a neo or sell a kidney for a framework
Touch Bar works, but can be a bit finicky. For example, it might work properly after reboot. Put the Mac to sleep, and after wake the Touch Bar has lost part of its functionality.
There's a new yet-to-be-released project that significantly improves the Touch Bar experience. It lets you display basically anything you want on the Touch Bar. System monitor, weather widgets, games, etc. It even has support for application specific controls. They might publicly release it within the next few days.
Honestly Linux desktop is in such a good state these days that I have absolute zero care what happens to the rest of desktop ecosystem. If you're looking to get away from macos then just do it - get linux with gnome and you won't regret it. If you're moving from windows get KDE instead but both are incredible desktop environments that are far ahead of competition.
RIP Hackintosh 💔
"Golden Gate"? That's the lamest name for a macOS release ever IMO.
Edit: As expected, half the page on Apple's website talks about AI with only vague things about performance and UI improvements. I'll be staying on Tahoe for now.
I'll lift a comment I posted elsewhere on the topic of the name.
From a 9to5mac article on the topic:
Breaking with tradition, Apple didn’t name macOS 27 after a national park, lake, or other natural landmark. Instead, this year’s release is named after San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge.
Typical of 9to5mac "reporting." The Golden Gate is a natural landmark, it's the strait between San Francisco and Marin which the famous bridge spans. Nowhere in the OS release even says the word bridge.
Fun fact. While it might seem safe to assume the "gold" in Golden Gate refers to the gold discovery about 100 miles upriver that started the California gold rush, it was in fact named the Golden Gate prior to the gold discovery. John C. Fremont (my favorite early Californian) named it such because of the color of the hillsides when he first arrived.
While I loathe AI bullshit, Apple is at least prioritizing local, on-device AI and end-to-end encryption with their cloud AI services.
I'll still be passing on any of this bullshit, but I appreciate that they tried to make a less problematic version.
What does end-to-end encryption even accomplish when you're just feeding the information into an obscured, blackbox AI on the other end?
Like yes, I understand the importance of E2EE, I'm just making a point, it's all rather ridiculous.
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The WWDC presentation yesterday was hilarious. Almost everything they said about the UI could be boiled down to: "We're undoing some of the incredibly bad decisions we made last year. Not all of them, but some of the big ones!"
They then went on to demo the new improved Siri, and as someone who doesn't use Siri, all I could think was "wait...Siri couldn't do this 10 years ago?!"
What a sad state of affairs.
It was incredibly tonedeaf. AI is not what people want, Tim.
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Good thing almost all flavors of Linux run flawlessly on the x86 models.
T2 Macs are a flavor of Intel (x86) Macs, and they require T2Linux flavor of Linux.
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At this point put Linux on them. There are distros that even look and feel like Mac OS out there too.
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Stop being so pushing with the 26.5 update on my my devices. Everyday multiple times a day holy fuck. I need Linux mobile devices.
I thought they already did that a few years back?
Very few Intel devices supported Mac OS 26. They’d been winding down supported machines for a while before that.
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This is one of the reasons why I stopped buying Mac's.
Apple talks a lot of trash about windows and Linux, but both offer far better long term support
Win 11 required TPM 2.0 (even though they went back and forth on it). That’s essentially the same thing, and Apple supported intel for a lot longer than was expected
They stopped selling the last Mac Pro 3 years ago.. So literally, their top end computer had 3 years of support of the latest OS. And, they pulled this same BS from PPC to Intel, so, its not the first rug pull. And, its not like Windows hasn't maintained excellent backwards compatibility otherwise (they still offer windows 95 backwards compatibility in a lot of cases in the latest OS).
In this case, the Intel Macs include a T2 chip, so, its not like there is a valid security reason to break MacOS.. They literally just blatantly screwed them (the Mac Pro was NOT a cheap computer)
Coincidenally, MacOS 27 beta breaks Linux too. https://www.phoronix.com/news/macOS-27-Beta-Breaks-Asahi
I'd agree that buying an Intel Mac Pro three years ago and losing support is shitty, but on the other hand anyone buying Intel in the past six years certainly should've known their days were numbered.
It's the same cost as a car and high profit
Has it really only been three years? I was thinking it’s been six, but you’re right. I had to double check Wikipedia. I did read on HN that the asahi issue is a bug and not intentional.
They started selling 7 years ago the Mac Pro.. but, only stopped selling 3 years ago apparently. Microsoft offered 10 years of support for Windows 10, and Ubuntu even offers 15 years.
Apple generally classes their products vintage after 6-7 years..
Normally, I'd say "fine", but, this is now the second time they've done this within 20 years (they did it with the PPC -> Intel too), and the exact same way, and not all new apps are generally backwards compatible with the old CPU architecture either. So realistically, a lot of people are forced to upgrade regardless.
The Mac mini.. Fair enough, its cheap. But, the Mac Pro was ridiculously overpriced (even the wheels cost $700 lol). You had to even pay extra money for 3 years of HARDWARE warranty.
The reality is, nobody knows is the Asahi breakage was intentional or not at this time. All we know is that Apple has contributed absolutely sweet F*** all to asahi Linux (despite it benefiting Apple primarily)
I remember the ppc to intel transition. That’s when I bought an Intel Mac running leopard, right before snow leopard came out iirc.
I agree it’s shitty (especially since it’s only been three years).
I have a 2019 MacBook Pro and stopped updating it at Sonoma. The new OSes are just too much for that Intel chip anyway.
The M-series processors are amazing though, I've had such a good experience with them.
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