I tried a bunch of distros this past week on my Macbook Air from 2013 (A1466) before settling on Solus Budgie last night as it just installed flawlessly. I just had to format my SSD before running the install process as it failed to do so by itself for some reason (it probably failed to gain R/W access). I just had to restart the live USB and ran Gparted to delete everything on the SSD and create a blank ext4 partition.
After the installation, I ran the driver app to get my Broadcom wifi chip recognized and running and rebooted after typing sudo depmod -a in a terminal.
It basically only took about 10-15 minutes to have the system up and running not counting the time it took to download the iso and set it up on my USB stick which I did on my other Windows based computer using Rufus and picking GPT and UEFI support in the options.
So far I'm blown away by Solus. Itś just hassle free from setup to usage apart for some minor quality of life things I miss from MacOs keyboard and track pad wise. In contrast to Elementary OS or Linux Mint where I had issues just booting the system after the installation and, in one case, having to fiddle with the boot partition, this is great.
I also ran a couple of benchmarks and a couple of games to make sure and all I can say is that i'm impressed. No graphical glitches and the fan speed seems optimal.
My minor gripes which are common to most Linux distros I've tested on this laptop so far are the following :
There are so many keyboard layouts that it's hard to track down and find the one you need. I wish the "eye" icon to preview the layout was present in the list of layouts to avoid having to go back and forth between the two.
I need to use western Europe accents in my daily work when typing in French and Portuguese but I also want the default layout to remain as is physically presented (bough this Mac in Hong Kong so it has the default US layout). For example, on most international English qwerty layouts the " ' " key is by default an acute accent modifier so when I need the apostrophe for words such as " I'm ", I have to press the key twice or use the alt key modifier otherwise it put's an accent on the " m " like so " Iḿ ". This makes programming a pain and so far I still haven't found the right layout and I'm starting to suspect it is a specific MacOs thing. Maybe there is a tool to tweak the keyboard layout but I haven't looked yet.
That being said, the fact you can preview the keyboard's layout at all is in itself amazing and I wish other distros had this feature by default.
The track pad options are missing a few settings like being able to setup a right click by clicking on the right side of the track pad as opposed to the left side. I'm aware of the ability to double tap and that's fine in most cases but in some apps I need to be able to right click and drag such as in 3d modeling and CAD software which is something I do more naturally by keeping a finger pressing down on the right side of the track pad. I do use a mouse sometimes but Itś often impractical when on the go. My understanding is that this is another of Apple's "features" that doesn't seem to have been replicated hardware wise on other laptops which probably ship with a second button on their trackpad instead of a single button with software support for multiple.
On a side note, I noticed the tooltips for the wifi icon and notification icon seem to go under the toolbar instead of above like the others.
Anyway, This is an outstanding distro and I'm loving it.
