Installing Raspberry Pi Desktop OS for x86 on the 2014 Macbook Pro 13″ (warning, tiny fonts)
In this video I’m installing Linux on the 2014 Macbook Pro, which has these specs:
* Core i5-4278U processor
* 8 GB of DDR3L-1600 RAM
* 256 GB SSD
* BCM4360 WiFi chip
Specs for this Mac can be found here:
This is a fast computer. It should not be disposed of just because it can’t be upgrade past MacOS Big Sur. Linux is very usable on it.
See also my Debian 12 installation video for this laptop:
The distro is Raspberry Pi Desktop OS for Intel-based PCs/Macs (yes, such a thing really exists).
Raspberry Pi OS for Intel has a bootable ISO image that can be written to any USB thumb drive with the Unix “dd” command.
You can download Rpi OS for Intel PCs/Macs here:
* As you watch this video, you’ll notice that the fonts are very small. That’s due to the installer not knowing about high-DPI (Retina) displays.
* There was a prompt for a network card to which I selected “none” but after first start-up the Broadcom BCM4360 Wifi card was automatically detected.
* Do note that I did NOT install Refit and that Linux is the only OS on this computer.
* A bit later, I upgraded the OS with sudo apt upgrade, which broke the Wifi driver.
Rpi OS for Intel has a 64-bit Linux 5.10 kernel, but all user-space programs are 32-bit. In practice this has not caused any issues for me so far.
* To support normal fan use, make sure you install the mbpfan package and run it at startup.
* To change the screen brightness from the command line, install brightnessctl.
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