If you are looking for a more flexible system, it is possible to install Linux on your Mac. It is an open-source operating system where there’s no end to what you can possibly do. Installing Linux is especially suitable for older Mac devices whose macOS no longer receive support from Apple. You can either replace the macOS with Linux or dual-boot Linux together with macOS on the Mac.
How to Install Linux on Mac as a Single-Boot Option?
Before you begin, you should know that you can only install a Linux OS on a Mac device with an Intel processor. For other devices, you can only use a virtualization app to use Linux as a virtual machine. If you have an appropriate Mac device, go through the step-by-step guide below to install Linux on the computer. But first, make sure you have backed up all your data as this process will delete all the data on the device.
Check Compatibility With Linux
Most Mac devices allow installing even the latest versions of Linux distros. However, older hardware may not support the latest operating system. In such cases, you need to look for a compatible version. First, note down your Mac hardware model. If you don’t know, Now, open a web browser and visit the Linux distros’ official website to check the compatibility with the device. If you want to install Ubuntu on Mac, you can find the necessary information on the Mactel Support Community Help Page.
Create Bootable USB Drive
Now that you know which Linux version to install, you can move on to creating the installation drive. Here’s how you can do so on Mac: This process may fail sometimes. You only need to try again in such cases.
Disable Secure Boot
The Mac devices with Apple T2 security chip include the option to enable secure boot in their Startup Security Utility. If you enable the secure boot or disallow booting from external media in such a setting, you can’t install Linux on the Mac. So you need to disable it using the steps below:
Install Linux OS
The final step is to install the Linux OS on your Mac. Here, we use the Linux distro, Ubuntu as an example. Other distros also follow a similar process which you can easily follow. You can visit their official websites if you encounter any issues. Additionally, you need to install some necessary drivers after installing Linux to properly use your hardware components. You need to check the documentation of your Mac device to look for the hardware and install their corresponding drivers through their official websites.
How to Dual Boot Linux and macOS on Mac?
As with installing Linux as a single OS on Mac, there’s no change to the hardware components while dual booting Linux and macOS. So, you also need to check for the compatibility of the Linux OS with your device for this method. You can use the same steps as above to do so. Installing a Windows OS together with macOS is very easy as you can use the Boot Camp Assistant for this purpose. However, this utility doesn’t properly support Linux and you may encounter many issues while trying to do so. So we recommend manually performing the process using the step-by-step guide below.
Install Boot Manager
Mac does come with a built-in boot manager. However, this manager does not properly support all distros of Linux, so we recommend installing a third-party EFI Boot Manager on your system first. You need a boot manager to choose which OS to boot into after powering up your Mac. You can use any EFI Boot Manager you want, however, we use rEFIt in this guide.
Partition Primary Disk and Create Bootable USB Flash Drive
The next step is to create a separate partition for the Linux OS. You can also create a bootable Linux drive at the same time as you may need to reformat the drive to a different file system and both processes use the same utility. Here’s what you need to do: We also recommend creating a SWAP partition to act as the overflow space for RAM. You don’t need to do so if you have sufficient RAM on your system. You can create the partition with about 1GB to your RAM size using the same steps as above. Make sure the Format is MS-DOS (FAT). After that, install bootable Linux OS on the USB drive using balenaEtcher (follow the steps from the above method) and disable secure boot as well.
Install Linux OS on Separate Partition
The process to install Linux OS on a separate partition is similar to that for replacing macOS with Linux. For Ubuntu, you need to follow the same steps till you reach the Installation type screen. Then, Boot into Linux from the rEFIt menu and go through the initial setup process. As with the above case, you may need to install the necessary drivers and software. So, visit the Linux distros’ official website to figure out what you need to do.
