[LeonM]

I have recently been looking into getting a 12" Apple Macbook for on the road. The 12" Macbooks were small 12" Intel laptops produced between 2015 and 2017. They can boot Linux, but many devices are not functioning.

They are great little machines, though a bit underpowered (even when they were new) so running MacOS is not a great experience. Decent Linux support should give these devices a second live.

Most devices should be able to work, as they are all standard components. My suspicion is that we are mostly lacking device trees and maybe some SMC work.

I expect the circuit diagrams for this laptop to be floating around the web somewhere (otherwise shoot Louis Rossman an email), so reverse-engineering the SMC should be doable, and a great low level/embedded challenge.

[watmough]

So Elementary OS is one example of Linux that already runs very happily on my 2012 MacBook Air.

Surely most of the required support is there already?

[LeonM]

I wasn't talking about the Macbook Air, but rather the 12" Retina Macbook [0].

Also known as the A1534 Macbook8,1 (yes, Apple's naming is always confusing).

https://support.apple.com/kb/SP757?locale=en_US