aburka 🫣Choosing a new Linux distro for my old MacBook, purely based on the functionality of the wifi drivers available on the live CD
Pop!_OS is currently in the lead, a real dark horse there
taking #distro suggestions btw! it's a #MacbookAir 5,2 (that is, 2013)
Paul Faria@aburka you may have to do some work to get wifi working for Mac, but not much. I got Ubuntu up on one from 2008.
charlie 
@voyager I mean yeah, I have an ethernet adapter. So for the right distro I could overlook the livecd not having a driver for Apple's wacky old Broadcom crap
matsuzine@aburka Just removed Pop_OS! 22.04 from a 2012 MacBook Air this weekend. It was largely stable, but I had persistent issues with the touchpad not responding after suspend, and infrequent issues with a failure to wake after suspend.
Switched to Fedora 40. Wifi was very slow after install (not on the live disk), but fixed by installing the correct drivers. No issues so far, but too soon to tell how stable it will be long term.
@matsuzine oh yeah, I do need to try Fedora, and find out what all the atomic hype is about
@matsuzine seems like the atomic spins don't have live CDs?!
@aburka I don't know, I'm using the regular workstation release. Zero issues for a week on my 2012 MBA.
Roxanne@aburka KaOS? It's an independent KDE Plasma-based distro, it uses pacman (arch package manager) but isnt based on arch, it uses it's own compiled packages and repos. It's also rolling-release.
@paragon promising! It's fast and has working wifi on the install media. I'm a little worried about the depth of the package repositories as an independent distro
@aburka flatpak is always there to be honest, i always install everything i need as a flatpak usually anyways except for a couple of exceptions, i recommend trying flatpak if the official repos are bare.
6N3my6@aburka as someone else already mentioned, the live CD/DVD/ISO might show different wifi driver than the final install. Had this once with Linux Mint on my dad's 2009 iMac. Fortunately his neighbour had a long enough ethernet cable to go directly into the router to download the correct drivers. Since then I added the cable to my mobile toolbox. But as a linux newbie it took me some time to find out and solve this.