Fedora on MacBook Pro 13" (2017, without touch bar)

Ask Fedora
1

I have purchased a 2017 MacBook Pro 13" as a replacement for my trooper of a Dell Latitude, and I would like to install Fedora Workstation on the system.

If possible, I would like to retain MacOS and encrypt both the / and /home partitions.

Any recommendations and suggestions would be appreciated!

Thanks!

2

I would too recommend to install Fedora alongside the existing macOS installation.

A couple of other recommendations:

  • The obvious one: back up your system, especially if data already available on the system.
  • Don’t remove the macOS recovery partition, it might come in handy if anything goes wrong.
  • Partition the disk to your liking (depending on how much you’d be using macOS). This can be done either from within macOS with Disk Utility, or from within Fedora’s live session, with the included Disks app. The partition created for Fedora should not be formatted (but rather left as unallocated space), so that the Anaconda installer would automatically recognize it later and propose it for installation.
  • During installation, select the option to encrypt your disk with Luks2. It will encrypt / and /home subvolumes by default.
  • Remember to press the Option (⌥) key right after starting the mac, in order to bring up the Startup Manager, from where you can then select the Fedora installation.
  • In case you’d want to swap Ctrl (^) with Cmd ( ⌘) keys, install GNOME Tweaks and navigate to Keyboard → Additional Layouts → Ctrl position and check the Swap Left Win with Left Ctrl and Swap Right Win with Right Ctrl boxes[1].

  1. Not needed if you’re happy with the mac keyboard’s current layout and with the option to only have the Ctrl key on the left side. Rather useful if using both macOS and Fedora, as the standard keyboard shortcuts would use the same key combinations. ↩︎

3

Thank you! Fedora runs like a dream and almost everything works out of the box. However, I’ve had some issues:

  1. The system will not resume from suspend.
  2. Sound does not work.

I know these are common issues, but so far, the fixes have not worked.

I would greatly appreciate help here. Thanks!

4

Happy to hear you managed to install Fedora on your MBP successfully.

For higher visibility, I would recommend to open for each of the two encountered issues a new thread. Don’t forget to post details in those new topics:

  • For both issues, the details of the machine. A useful command for that is inxi -Fzxx;
  • For the suspend issue, detail what happens if you suspend. What happens when you open the lid? If the system freezes, then after a reboot you can run journalctl -b -1 -g 'suspend|sleep|s2idle';
  • For the sound issue, post the outputs of systemctl --user status "pipewire*" and systemctl --user status "wireplumber*";
  • Any other details that you find useful.

Remember to always post the terminal command outputs as preformatted text, using the </> button.