Considering Gentoo

dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net to Linux@lemmy.ml – 43 points –

I have an old iMac that I am planning to install some flavor of Linux on and while I was looking at various distros it occurred to me that it might be a good exercise to install Gentoo on it. Other than a separate machine for documentation and downloading the necessary packages, what else should I have set up to try this? Has anyone installed Gentoo on a Mac before? If so, what concerns are there related to things like Apple’s implementation of EFI?

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You'll need to be a bit more specific about the iMac. What year is it?

If it's pre-2017, I'd expect some difficulty with the WiFi. If it's newer, you might have luck with https://wiki.t2linux.org/distributions/gentoo/installation/ . I haven't followed that guide, so YMMV.

It’s a 2015 Retina 27”.

I’m fine rocking Ethernet for the purposes of this experiment.

Go for it then! Gentoo is a blast (if you enjoy this sort of thing) and is surprisingly stable once you get it set up.

One tip, before I forget, is to save your firmware from MacOS before wiping the drive. Unfortunately I don't remember where it's located, and no longer have access to try and find it 😅