Axios

No, with the Option key after the chime, I get the USB marked as "EFI" bootable and can boot into the live USB but if the USB is not in there I get the dreaded "flashing folder icon with question mark of death" which used to be the harbinger of a total disk failure back in the old mac days. The disk does show up after the Ubuntu Budgie 20.04 install so this may have something to do with the way the systemd thing gets written to that partition thta is peculiar for the mac.

I noticed the Ubuntu 20.04 pre-beta install that works uses grub2 so may try to see if I can force load grub2 on it and boot that way. But will have to play with it another day since we're back in the work week here in land of merlions.

    Cool the usb works and solus install doesnt show up it wont ever boot If I remb right thats disk Partioning and setup not bootmngrs at this point. Clean the linux partions off disk and format the unused space for fat 32 then reinstall solus but let solus do everything it will prob work then you know its something with disk setup I have had probs with distros in the past if everything isnt just right setting it up manual it wouldnt work. The flashing disk still around today just means it cant find a disk to boot,if that works you can go from there. So many things it could be check your solus sha make sure its not corrupted,redo the usblive again,reinstall, may not hurt to do a hardware check on the mac ,reset pram then you can put those things outta your mind. I just remember the ? icon can show up But when you click on it wont boot! (follow?) that means computer see disk but is not bootable, so in your case it doesnt see disk at all. Had it Happen to me on something dont remember what but first time it showed up (solid not flashing with ? means it saw disk but couldnt find anything to boot on disk) wouldnt boot then I fixed it and it booted. I will leave it there starting to ramble..lol Got life stuff to attend to here to....Gives you some things to think about... I am not sure if solus uses grub somebody would have to answer that? You got to select install bootloader when installing.

      Axios

      Unfortunately, even nuking the entire disk back to ms-dos and letting Solus handle everything re-install is still bringing up the blinking question folder of Fate. It is definitely something Solus-install related as 19.10 Ubuntu derivatives install (though do not support the keyboard properly to decrypt the drive) and I managed to install the nightly for Ubuntu Focal Fossa 20.20 which allows install and boots into a fresh Ubuntu system (with encrypted disk) fine.

      At this point, I'm a bit stumped as to what to do to fix the issue especially after trying the manual bootloader fix and deleting all the bootmanager entries.

      It's especially frustrating that other distros do install and boot fine.

      Is there anything else I can do here to help diagnose and fix this problem in Solus? I'd obviously really like to help make the distro better in this regard.

      D.

        Yes that was my goal with Linux to because I HATE win10. You could try this long shot but it might tell us something https://mattgadient.com/linux-dvd-images-and-how-to-for-32-bit-efi-macs-late-2006-models/ it strips out the efi part of linux to make it boot legacy only ,After reasearching yesterday i guess mac can boot in legacy mode try installing it and see what happens. Does it show up with option key? I am so surprised it didnt boot. We need to determine if its uefi or bootmngr messing it up.

        Might see if this yields any info Press Command+V as your Mac boots to enter verbose mode. You’ll see the terminal messages appear during the startup process. If everything goes properly, your Mac will boot to its normal desktop.

        Other than that I am dead in the water for ideas right now Since ubuntu uses grub and solus doesnt must be something with that.

          Justin Out of curiosity, why doesn't Solus use grub2 for the entire bootloader? Why 2 diff systems? (it definitely is working for Ubuntu 20.20).

              This is for my dell allinone only have solus on it the output of efibootmgr -v from what it appears dont need it if you only have one os installed, (or I am wrong) I checked and its booting in efi it just boots directly into solus fine. And I let solus set it up.:
              efibootmgr -v ouput

              BootCurrent: 0000
              Timeout: 0 seconds
              BootOrder: 0000,0004,0003,2001,2002,2003
              Boot0000* HDD1-1 (ST1000LM024 HN-M101MBB) PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x13,0x0)/Sata(0,0,0)/HD(1,GPT,26657955-0418-4a7b-8fc7-196db88050f4,0x40,0xf4240)RC
              Boot0003* Network BBS(128,Network,0x0)............................0..........................................
              Boot0004* Hard Drive BBS(HD,Hard Drive,0x500)................-...........!.....................................Y7v.......A.........................
              Boot2001* EFI USB Device RC
              Boot2002* EFI DVD/CDROM RC
              Boot2003* EFI Network

                Axios Thanks, this is helpful though I had set it up similar to this just with the Apple disk conventions. Will take another boo at it this weekend when I get some time. By altering the bootmanager settings I've definitely caused further install mischief on my machine. =p

                  Turn off the machine when you try this turn it back on as its coming on hit f9 every 1/2 second or so see if that does anything!

                  In order to maintain compatibility with MS-Windows, Apple uses a hybrid UEFI and Legacy MBR mode. Apparently, there is an NVRAM value that tells the firmware whether to attempt to boot in UEFI mode (OS-X) or in legacy MBR mode (Windows). That value is controlled by your selection in "System Preferences > Startup Disk". (Don't ask me why, ask Apple)
                  I think I would seriously try the legacy solus to see if it boots. if it does would tell you theirs a problem with the efi setup

                  Am done rambling let us know how it turns out this is what happens when your a tech for 30 years..haha

                    6 days later

                    Justin And yet, it's the only thiong that is working. I think it's grub2 actually.

                      Axios Hehe. I hear you. I have about 25. I ended up bricking the machine and then completely nuking the partitions and boot manager and starting from scratch. Solus would not install despite best attempts. I am stumped as to why at this point but I was capable of getting POP_OS! 19.10 to install (I needed to disable encrypted drive as the keyboard was not supported when booted in but after that works fine.).

                      I will do some digging around some more when I have more time to play with it, but I may wait for Solus to update to 4.2 =p and see how POP_OS does when it gets to the 20.04 release since it's Ubuntu and Debian based. The latest Ubuntu 20.04 nightly borked on installing (despite a previous working) so feel like maybe some patience here might be a good idea. Lol.

                      I think the biggest issue here for me is not really understanding what precisely is going wrong. I will go read up a bit more about EFI nad new bootloaders and what mystic things Apple is doing differently. LIke I said, I love the hardware of the Macbook 12" 2016 but at this point, probably looking at a new LG Gram 14" when they're out in a month or so to just make life easier on myself. =]

                        That makes 2 of us I read somewhere One needed to use apples diskutil to setup partions because they did things different could do a internet recovery and use the diskutil and see if things fair better just a thought. Also I saw one guy said keep the apple boot part because it needed because way apple does things. It seems there is no one way on apples to get them working sometimes. Trial and error I guess