had a bunch of those. the best thing you can do is disable the nvidia graphics and run it off the intel graphics, plenty powerful for everyday tasks, lower power consumption, less heat, longer battery life. only downside, you lose display out.

after that, any linux distro will suit you just fine. go with fedora for newest and best or debian for safe and boring.

edit: https://lemmy.ml/post/42330116

If you're experienced enough go for Arch

I've run Ubuntu on a Macbook Air 2012 and also on a Macbook Pro 2015 for about 5 years. Both have worked really well. I found early on that using Xorg made things seem faster (but that may be subjective). I've read that Debian (netinst) is meant to be really good on older macs and it's something I'll try at some point.

Back in the day I used to game hard as fuck on the 650m on my 2012 MBP lol

I have Fedora on mine now and it works great once you figure out how to make the wifi and graphics drivers play

Definitely ungrade to 16 gb RAM if you haven't already. DDR3 is stupid cheap

I had that same laptop but in a 13". I ran Zorin on it for a while before giving it to a friend. Didn't have any problems. Did you run the firmware installer?

you would have the same problem with any distro you try. you just need to search forums and tweak a little

for example: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=466301

i had the same problem but it's been years and i don't remember how i fixed it, sorry

with that gpu, x11 might work better than wayland. i'll probably get downvoted for this but keeping macos isn't a bad choice, there's a firefox fork that tracks latest while retaining older macos support.

I run boring, stable Debian on mine, but I have plentry of experience adding the non-free (not foss) drivers not included in the core distro. For gaming with lots of native hardware support right out of the gate, Bazzite is really popular.

No matter which distro you settle on, see if you can install the 'linux-headers-generic' package to avoid broadcom wifi issues after every kernel update.

Your computer is MacBook Pro 10,1 and pro 15” retina mid 2012 a1398.

The relevant technologies are ivy bridge, intel hd 4000 and nvidia Kepler.

According to opencore legacy patcher, you can use Ventura (osx/macos 13)with broken live text if you go the opencore route.

That will most likely offer a better experience than linux on your hardware.

Try solus

Your GPU isn't getting engaged because you either have to install the proprietary Nvidia driver, or if it is already installed, you need to use the utilities to switch over to the GT from the embedded.