What does HackerNews think of mbp-2016-linux?
State of Linux on the MacBook Pro 2016 & 2017
> I haven't done it on the new M laptops
From these two comments, I am guessing you are running on pre-touchbar (2016) Macbook Pro's, because the touchbar models before the M1/M2 were absolutely horrendous for running Linux. You can see a table of features that do or do not work still on those models[0], notably wifi -- perhaps the most critical feature for a laptop to be useful as a mobile device.
The pre-2016/pre-touchbar Macs are such nice pieces of hardware despite their age, but it gets me wondering why not invest in another hardware platform that supports Linux well, is modern but has high quality hardware?
Some examples I can think of are the XPS and the Thinkpad Carbon.
If you define running as "Linux boots", than this is correct, but as the the T1 chip provides access to the Touch Bar which is necessary to have function keys, I'd argue that there was indeed impact of the T1 chip for Linux essential compatibility. Also access to the webcam is provided by the T1 chip and required a quirk to work, as well as Touch Id, which isn't even supported at all yet.
What the parent comment was probably referring to is not the impact of the T1 chip per se, but of all changes Apple introduced with the MacBook Pros featuring the T1 chip, like a different way of interacting with the input devices, a different setup for audio and Bluetooth, a new chipset for Wifi and so on. The sheer number of changes caused these devices having a pretty bad compatibility with Linux when they came out and even today there are still a lot of unsolved issues around audio, Bluetooth, Wifi and other components [1]. And of course some features like the extended capabilities of the Touch Bar or the Touch Id sensor are still completely unsupported.
Btw: T1 MacBook Pros also required a quirk for NVMe, because Apples implementation back then also wasn't standard-compliant [2], [3].
[1]: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
[2]: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/124298bd03acebd9c9d...
[3]: https://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-nvme/2017-Februa...
WiFi and audio devices still don't work on most models released after that: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
You can checkout compatibility of hardware components @ https://linux-hardware.org/
It's of course possible to keep your Macbook, do the environment some good (less waste) and run linux on your mac: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
Phone: a phone that supports LineageOS ( https://download.lineageos.org/ ) or GrapheneOS ( https://grapheneos.org/faq#device-support ). Neither are perfect:
- LineageOS still has some google config but at least it doesn't have Google Services (use microG for that https://lineage.microg.org/ )
- GrapheneOS only runs on Google Pixel devices so you will be putting money into Google's hands
I generally hit the arch wikis with specific models for the best information.
This github repos also does a good job laying out current support for the 2016 models. https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
Frankly, I haven't tried on a newer model then that - I don't buy apple hardware anymore.