MacBookPro7,1 (13-inch, Mid 2010)

[mpanhans]

Elementary OS works, with two caveats: (1) wifi does not work out of the box, but is easy to fix, and (2) the Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics card in this device is not well-supported in Linux. Using the open-source Nouveau drivers, resume from suspend will not work, and there are some performance hits compared to the proprietary Nvidia drivers.

Works

• Keyboard, including
  • Brightness keys
  • Volume keys
  • Keyboard backlight key
• Touchpad
• Display
• Ports, including:
  • USB

Does not work

• Suspend and resume is not supported; the machine will not wake after suspending. It was initially possible to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers, but the Nvidia 340.108 driver is end of life, and according to Ubuntu Launchpad the driver is no longer available on newer Linux kernels after 5.10 (which are shipping with elementary OS 6). Thus, the best bet for installing elementary OS 6 on this machine is to stick with the nouveau drivers and just disable suspend. Alternatively, use the propriety drivers by sticking with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, but not using the Hardware Enablement (HWE) updates.

Quirks

• Wifi does not work out of the box. But it is easy to fix. Use an Ethernet cable or another method to access the internet, and install the bcmwl-kernel-source driver from AppCenter. You may need to restart the machine after the installation in order to be able to see the available wifi networks.

Configuration

List the relevant configuration that you tested.

• Processor: 2.9 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i7
• OS: elementary OS 6
• Graphics: Nvidia GeForce 320M
• Wireless: BCM4322