(New-er to linux) After some troubleshooting and testing with many distros, I have found something annoying and odd. Manjaro 19 (which I am running now) works. Manjaro 20 and above will not work. The issue is with the booting. This seems to be happening on many distros, both Arch and Debian based, on their “20.0.0” releases. The only distro that works on its newest launch is openSUSE.
That being said, here is the exact issue:
(Using my Macbook Pro 2015)
After booting into the GRUB installer menu, if I click “boot”, it goes to a backlit screen, as if it were about to show the boot-code, but bother happens. Even after 20+ minutes.
By adding “nomodeset” and “intel_iommu=on” will make it boot so I can install, but after it installs and reboots, it gets stuck on th backlit screen again. I assume I can fix this by changing how it boots, but I am so new that someone just telling me that, or just saying “add those codes to [insert location]” would not help me. I could use fairly exact steps, as well as where in the lines of code I need to change things if that’s what needs to happen. Please and thanks, I really want to run Manjaro’s newer versions.
Manjaro is a rolling release distribution.
There is no reason to reinstall or choose a new image over another.
In fact … maybe thats the reason for you … the new images are using a newer kernel that doesnt work well with your machine.
In any case … while it is generally preferred to use the latest images for a new install … whatever install you have can be updated to current manjaro.
While a lot a smart people have been working on getting Linux to work with Apple hardware - it is getting increasingly difficult - and it is not going to get any better in the future.
So my advise is stop pestering your life getting Linux to run on difficult Apple hardware or get yourself some hardware known to work with Linux.
Apple are known to deliberately make it difficult to use their OS on non Apple hardware and they also make an effort to ensure it is only macOS that runs on Apple hardware.
One can only speculate why and my guess is that Apple do not want their hardware to be associated with Linux - that would make their price structure questionable - and they don’t want macOS to run on non Apple hardware for the same reason.
So they deliberately put in all kinds of obstacles to prevent smart people in reaching their goal.
I have a macbook pro 2017 - and I have long time ago reached the conclusion - I am not that smart - and macOS works brilliantly for the use case of that laptop.