cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/64544544

Hi everyone!

I’ve been a happy Gnome and Fedora Silverblue on a Surface Go user but I’m always happy to learn about new DE’s in Linux. After trying and hating KDE on my Steam Deck desktop mode, I wanted to see if Cosmic would be the perfect middleground and installed it on my wife old MacBook Pro 2012 which was previously running Fedora Workstation flawlessly.

After some light struggles with Ventoy, I managed to install Pop_OS! 24.04 and everything was working except the wifi, which is a known issue with these Macs.

The bluetooth for my Surface Modern Mobile Mouse worked fine at that moment, but as soon as I rebooted afther the necessary commands to get the wifi card working ( sudo apt install firmware-b43-installer , sudo apt install linux-firmware , sudo reboot ), the mouse got disconnected.

I tried many things, installed blueman and the mouse is seen, but as soon as I connect to it, it disconnect.

As I wanted to isolate the issue, I uninstalled the wifi card ( sudo apt remove firmware-b43-installer, sudo reboot) and then had a perfectly working bluetooth mouse.

So for now, I have to choose between my bluetooth mouse and wifi, and both are important features.

Thanks for your help!

Othewise, the experience is good even if a bit buggy/feature lacking with these problems:

  • can’t configure the f3 key to automatically tile windows on a workspace
  • being force to use 4 fingers gesture to move between workspaces instead of 3 on Gnome (muscle memory). It’s difficult for me and my big hands to lay for fingers on the trackpad and I prefer it to the keyboard shortcut which I can’t configure to be the same as in Gnome
  • no ability to force an application to automatically be moved on a certain workspace (on Gnome I have 6 applications opening at startup and each one is going on its own workspace with the auto move extension)

Edit: sudo apt install broadcom-sta-dkms worked so huge thanks to Anon5621!

  • paf@jlai.lu
    1·
    20 hours ago

    Did setup a dual boot on a 2014 MacBook pro recently and also had issues with wifi. What solve the problem for me was to use an older kernel which fully supported wifi card driver. Can’t recall now which kernel i used but can check later if you don’t find the information.

    • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      20 hours ago

      But did you also have conflicts between the wifi and the bluetooth?

      Both work perfectly when the other one doesn’t.

      So for now I’m prioritizing the wifi and giving up on the Bluetooth mouse, but I don’t really enjoy using a trackpad.

      And also I didn’t have that problem on Fedora Workstation but only in Pop_OS!

      • paf@jlai.lu
        1·
        19 hours ago

        I didn’t use it much yet so cannot tell if bluetooth is working properly. Also, I’m really not a linux expert so can be wrong but the fact that it was working perfectly on fedora and not on pop could indicate that the différence in kernel support for your driver could be the culprit.