I apologize in advance if these questions have been asked before, but I’m having little luck using Google and I thought asking here would be a better option than Reddit.
As the title states, I have a mid 2012 MBP with a corrupt OSX which I was hell bent on making into a home server using Proxmox and Debian, but Fedora was the first distro I tried so recently it’s been on my mind to take this route instead. As it stands I’m debating between Workstation, Kinoite, or just the standard Server model. I’m comfortable enough with using CLI now but I’d feel more comfortable starting with a GUI for my first attempt at a server build if anyone has any thoughts on the three I’m considering. Also, does anyone have any idea how I should go about ensuring the wifi is working? I’ve never tried the ethernet method, tethering on my iphone has never worked, and I’ve found nothing but dead ends while searching for a downloadable driver.
As for the computer itself, I previously removed the disk drvie and replaced it with a 1TB ssd before SSD became the standard. I’ve also purchased a new battery, improved RAM cards, and an enclosure with an additional SSD just to be safe. Thoughts or guidance are much appreciated.
Asking for advice on a spin and or a GUI is about as useful as drawing names from a hat
I would go regular workstation from a custom install, and then install the services you need and open the ports you desire.
For I GUI I love Sway WM, it is light and responsive. Mainstream choice would be KDE, as the options are better - I would get KDE by installing plasma-desktop, not use the spin or the kde group or environment. The plasma-desktop way comes with less bloatware.
If you search these forums, you’ll find how to find your wifi chip, and then we can find the driver for it.
You should use ethernet for a home server, even if all the clients will be on wifi. If it has an RJ45 it should just work.
Another option would be to use the server edition and just add the desired gui to it.
As suggested, if you are using this as a server then ethernet would be preferable to wifi and for almost all MBPs that have been mentioned here the ethernet “just works”.
I find web searches have become dominated by AI-generated clickbait garbage. Fortunately there are some good curated web sites. Questions about hardware support in linux are not specific to a distro except where policies about including 3rd party software differ. Arch Linux often has excellent documentation.
You can search the LHDB for your model to see how wifi works for others, and whether there are in-kernel drivers. Many Apple systems from that time period don’t have in-kernel drivers, and the drivers that are available are not well maintained or supported. A server really should use ethernet.
Intel Macbooks were usually shipped with Broadcom wireless chipsets. For the older ones, needing proprietary drivers, there’s the RPM-Fusion repo, providing the broadcom-wl package, which needs to be installed. The newer ones are already using open-source drivers which are included in the kernel.
Thank you everyone for your responses. You’ve all provided excellent input that I shall take into consideration. I don’t know why I asked about ethernet vs wifi, I must’ve been having an airhead moment at the time.
I assumed there would be complications with trying to convert a Mac to a Linux distro of any sort. Reading through the link provided by @gnwiii was eye opening to say the least.
My experience with Linux has been limited to VMs and using ISOs via flash drives. I’m wanting to one day move away from Apple and Windows entirely hence my desire to commence with this experiment of mine. I’m considering testing my technical prowess by first following the GH repo for Surface devices and Linux/Fedora, but I imagine that that isn’t any less annoying.
If I had the funds (or could find a job) I would much rather build a system from scratch or order from one of the suppliers known for Linux computers. Luckily for me that the older I get the more patient I become, and so I look forward to any additional feedback anyone can provide. I’ll be conducting further research and trying to find which Broadcom driver I need for now.
