I could go for a vanilla Arch install, but why go through a lot of trouble and tinkering, when Manjaro sort of loves a Mac. It was installed in twenty minutes (slower/older hardware!) and I had to install an extra part to the kernel, so the cooling-fan is actually regulated. That was noticeable from the get-go, which I like. After that I turned the machine into a lightweight audio studio. My friend is all Apple and uses proprietary software for his audio-business. But there's nothing open source doesn't have, hahaha. Ardour and LMMS were the base and some added plugins made it possible to use the add-ons he has on his main machine. :-)
Ubuntu Studio would have been easier, since everything is already in it considering the audio-software, but thing is: I'm not an Ubuntu-fan. It's a good distro and all, but Arch (where Manjaro is based on) is simply better, including the documentation of it (Arch wiki, anyone?). The installed theme made that old laptop looking exactly like it's running OSX, which was appreciated.
Anyway, we've come a long way before installing any Linux distro on a Mac was easy. Nowadays every flavour (Debian, Redhat, Ubuntu, Arch, et cetera) has workarounds to make it possible. On old Macs, okay, but that is just because nobody ever gave me a brandnew MacBook (or what's it called nowadays?) to upgrade it to Linux. ;-)
I could go for a vanilla Arch install, but why go through a lot of trouble and tinkering, when Manjaro sort of loves a Mac. It was installed in twenty minutes (slower/older hardware!) and I had to install an extra part to the kernel, so the cooling-fan is actually regulated. That was noticeable from the get-go, which I like. After that I turned the machine into a lightweight audio studio. My friend is all Apple and uses proprietary software for his audio-business. But there's nothing open source doesn't have, hahaha. Ardour and LMMS were the base and some added plugins made it possible to use the add-ons he has on his main machine. :-)
Ubuntu Studio would have been easier, since everything is already in it considering the audio-software, but thing is: I'm not an Ubuntu-fan. It's a good distro and all, but Arch (where Manjaro is based on) is simply better, including the documentation of it (Arch wiki, anyone?). The installed theme made that old laptop looking exactly like it's running OSX, which was appreciated.
Anyway, we've come a long way before installing any Linux distro on a Mac was easy. Nowadays every flavour (Debian, Redhat, Ubuntu, Arch, et cetera) has workarounds to make it possible. On old Macs, okay, but that is just because nobody ever gave me a brandnew MacBook (or what's it called nowadays?) to upgrade it to Linux. ;-)