Now that macOS Monterey is no longer supported, I was wondering if anyone has had any luck installing openSUSE on a 2013 Mac Pro and if so, what are your experiences? A couple of things I am especially curious about:
Ease of installation
How does linux handle the dual video cards
Fan rpm / noise
Reliability
When I search the topic on the web it is hard not to get responses for Macbook Pros, which I am not interested in.
@iAssimilated Hi and welcome to the Forum
It should be similar as a laptop, best to create a live USB openSUSE desktop and plug in and boot from that via option + c to get to the efi boot menu and select the USB device.
Once booted you should have ethernet network access to install inxi zypper in inxi and then run that to see what is working and what isn’t…
Maybe broadcom wifi? I suspect the nvidia gpu is old so likely only run the nouveau module, but again the inxi output is what is needed to determine this.
Then there are the sensors to see what modules are in use for the likes of the fan, there are numerous ways mbpfan for example, assuming similar chips are in use.
Thank you for the reply. I currently have openSUSE on my 2012 Mac Pro. I was mainly curious on if anyone here has installed and is currently using openSUSE on a 2013 Mac Pro and what is their experience with it.
Thankfully I am not interested in wireless. The out of box experience with my AMD Radeon Vega card in my 2012 Pro is really good and it should be similar to the dual AMD FirePro D500’s in the 2013 Pro. I am just not sure how openSUSE handles the dual cards (versus macOS).
Is there a way with the sensors installed to control the fan RPMs?
@iAssimilated I have a HP laptop with dual Polaris gpu’s running Aeon, works fine with switcherooctl to use the dGPU. My desktop also has multiple discrete GPU’s I run a mixture of Intel ARC, AMD RX550, Nvidia K620, T400 and Telsla P4 without issues. Today’s flavors are ARC 380A (primary), RX550 offload and Quadro K620 for pci passthrough to vm’s…
Need to see what is present with sensors-detect --auto and review.
@malcolmlewis Thank you again! Once I finish setting up the Mac mini that is replacing my 2013 Pro, I will give this all a try. I will report back on the progress.
I successfully installed openSUSE Tumbleweed on my 2013 Pro (it took two tries, the first run with online repos enabled seg faulted at about 65% and froze, but the second run without online repos worked). The installation was fairly easy minus the before mentioned hiccup. I don’t use the wireless card on my Pro, so this isn’t something I tested.
As for the video card, I haven’t fully tested all the capabilities, but I am running KDE Plasma 6.2 utilizing Wayland with no visual oddities. Info Center labels my Graphics Processor as TAHITI (apparently its code name), while neofetch correctly labels them as AMD ATI FirePro D500 (and shows two). Running sensors in konsole shows a radeon-pci-0200 and a radeon-pci-0600 with temps around 61.0°C .
Currently the fan is running at it’s default speed (790 rpm) and is audibly the same as with macOS. I have not yet looked into changing the speed of the fan. I am running BOINC utilizing 6 CPU cores with the temps in the 57.0°C - 66.0°C range. At the moment I am okay with those temps, since it is in the same range as macOS (doing the same work load).
So far I have not had any reliability issues, but the system has only been running for a little under two days.
Tahiti is a correctly labeled member of AMD’s GCN #1 Southern Islands generation from 2012, 2013 & 2014. FirePro D500 is the branding, what would appear on a retail package. I have a Radeon from the same generation, “Oland”, and two from the next, GCN #2, Sea Islands, Kaveri. Macs usually got the upscale FirePro “workstation” GPUs instead of the sibling Radeons.