r/voidlinux • u/PEROLINOv2 • 7d ago

Installed Void Linux on my 2010 MacBook Pro

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I installed void linux to squeeze more life out of an old macbook, but i do have bit of a problem. This laptop has discrete Nvidia GPU, and as far as i know, newer linux kernel doesnt support proprietary drivers for old gpus such as 320M in my laptop. Open source driver works, but anything heavier than typing, and it struggles hard. I installed h264ify extension on the browser and its better for youtube but it still struggles. is there any way in installing drivers or tweaking just to get at least youtube watchable?

119 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

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13

u/mystirc 7d ago

I love the void fastfetch. It feels good for some reason.

6

u/Simple_Hamster_4096 7d ago

Oldest laptop I've installed on so far is from 2006...

5

u/BogdanovOwO 6d ago

To be honest, I chanced to openbox, fvwm, icewm and jwm. All have pros and cons, but 250-310 mb in idle still decent.

3

u/birds_adorb 6d ago

We also both require to install drivers for Broadcom wifi.

1

u/0bWAN-1 2d ago

This is true, but once the Broadcom driver is installed, disable one for a more stable system. I can only say this on older MacBooks older than 2014. The Broadcom driver made many users get nutty until the solution was widely distributed. With so many configurations, getting everything desired can be quite a chore.

2

u/Such-Historian335 5d ago

Yep, Void is just that awesome, I also installed Void on my old 2012 laptop and it's usable again.

1

u/Smu1zel 4d ago

You probably don't have any VA-API drivers installed. The proprietary 340.xx driver can't do this at all, but Nouveau can, albeit you then have to use Nouveau. Install mesa-vaapi to use Mesa's VA-API backend, which covers both AMD/ATI and Nouveau cards. Also, check chrome://gpu (for Chromium) or about:support to make sure you're actually using the GPU, as Nouveau is blacklisted very often.

There's still no automatic reclocking for Tesla 2.0, and most of everyone's attention is going towards Turing+. You can use manual reclocking, but the situation isn't very great overall here.

1

u/0bWAN-1 2d ago

Disable one of them. I would keep nVidia and disable Intel. JMHO...

1

u/Historical-Truck590 7d ago

👍

1

u/Historical-Truck590 7d ago

don’t think that you can modify nouveau unless you are a super master hacker though, you can try compiling the cachyos kernel with -O3 optimisations so it runs faster