Hello, I installed Fedora 39 on my Macbook Pro 16" (2019), 2.3GHz i9, 32GB RAM, AMD Pro 550M 8GB, 1TB following the instructions for this T2 isofrom here.
I’ve had more problems but probably the worst one right now is that the system won’t boot.
I’m using dualboot with LUKS disk encryption.
originally it was not possible to unlock the disk encryption without an external usb keyboard, so it was sometimes impossible to get into the MBP. Now it is possible to enter the password, but the system freezes at startup after the screen goes black.
After a hard reboot, the system sometimes boots, sometimes not.
The touchbar sometimes activates, other times it stays black.
The listings on the screen are too small and then disappear completely.
If you can advise me where to look for the problem, I will be happy to try to solve the situation.
I know this is not quite the answer to your problem, but I have the same Macbook Pro 16" (2019), only with less RAM (16GB), and running Fedora in a virtual machine via VMware Fusion.
It is obviously not the same experience as bare-metal (no swipe gestures in the guest OS, no function buttons because of the touch bar etc), but also no headaches.
Thank you very much for your reply. I totally understand, I used Fedora in virtualization under Parallels Desktop. But Gamechanger is the case when, for example, you want to render a video…
It’s a long story for me, which is described here (in Czech). And even though Apple stood up to it (for which I thank them), the hardware failure of my MBP caused me to lose one area of my business and survive another only because I went back to Linux. It was an important lesson for me to appreciate open source software.
This made me go back to Fedora when my MBP wasn’t working and found that I can cover most of my activities very well (and some even better) and that I’m much more comfortable with Fedora than MacOS.
I’m about to buy a new laptop but I figured as long as my MBP works it’s a shame not to use it as it’s still pretty decent (and expensive) hardware IMHO. And since I stopped using MacOS in the meantime, I tried to install Fedora as a dualboot on the MBP.
If I managed to get it working, I wouldn’t have to boot into MacOS and could use my hardware for a while longer.
At the same time, I thought I could help make Fedora on MBP better with my testing.
I’ve also installed Fedora on an old MacBook (late 2008) recently, and it is working just fine. I remember, however, having similar issues with Fedora and LUKS encryption, right after a kernel upgrade. In the end I’ve reinstalled the system on a BTRFS partition w/o encryption.
I see on t2linux.org webpage here, that there are documented issues with certain features. Nothing is mentioned about LUKS though.
Maybe the neighbours from Asahi Linux might be able to help, even if you’re not on Apple silicon.
In case no-one will be able to provide support here, given your niche issue, you might want to address it to the contributors from t2linux, I saw on their website they have a chat server set up.
Whole disk encryption is often overkill. If your use-case permits, you can have an encrypted partition for the sensitive data that is mounted only when you are working with the data.
