Installing and 'tweaking' Linux on a MacBook Pro

Starting Point: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS — while other distributions might yet better results 'out of the box', for 'consistency's sake', I chose Ubuntu, and 22.04 LTS and later yielded _horribly laggy_ performance for reasons that I still couldn't find after a few hours of searching (at least as of JUL-2024)

Facetime HD camera firmware: while 'isight-firmware-tools' seemed to come up most often while searching for ways to get the integrated camera to be recognised by the kernel, it seems that _that_ only supports the older 'non-HD' cameras — in the end, I had to go with https://github.com/patjak/facetimehd / https://gist.github.com/ukn/a2f85e3420ae7d0f64db2274a9bc106b?permalink_comment_id=3395670 <file> git clone https://github.com/patjak/facetimehd-firmware.git cd facetimehd-firmware make && make install git clone https://github.com/patjak/bcwc_pcie.git cd bcwc_pcie make && make install depmod && modprobe -r bdc_pci && modprobe facetimehd echo facetimehd » /etc/modules </file>

Changing the default fn-key behaviour: as per https://askubuntu.com/questions/7537/how-can-i-reverse-the-fn-key-on-an-apple-keyboard-so-that-f1-f2-f3-are-us/7553#7553: <file text> # echo 2 > /sys/module/hid_apple/parameters/fnmode # options hid_apple fnmode=2 » /etc/modprobe.d/hid_apple.conf # update-initramfs -u -k all </file>

See also https://gist.github.com/johnjeffers/3006011ec7767a4101cdd118e8d64290