Linux on a 2013 Mac Pro

[iAssimilated]

Greetings -

Now that Monterey is no longer supported, I was wondering if anyone has had any luck installing linux on a 2013 Mac Pro and if so, what are your experiences? A couple of things I am especially curious about:

• Flavor of linux
• 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.

 

[Bigwaff]

When I search the topic on the web it is hard not to get responses for Macbook Pros, which I am not interested in.

Search YouTube. There are videos.

Now that Monterey is no longer supported, I was wondering if anyone has had any luck installing linux on a 2013 Mac Pro

If you are going to run an unsupported operating system, why not use OCLP to install later versions of macOS? Unless, of course, you are dead set on installing a Linux distro....

 

[iAssimilated]

Thanks for the reply. I've installed linux on a lot of computers over the years, so I am more curious if anyone has done it and their experiences. I asked here because I have found this community to insightful and helpful (when you know how to ignore the discord).

As for Youtube, kind of hard to want to watch a video titled "Installing Linux on Apple's Stupid Trashcan". The 2013 Mac Pro's design was amazing and way ahead of its time. Imagine an M series Mac Studio in that enclosure 🤩

OCLP is one option, yes, but I only need so many macOS based systems in one household.

 

[ralf.kaa]

'm
Greetings -

Now that Monterey is no longer supported, I was wondering if anyone has had any luck installing linux on a 2013 Mac Pro and if so, what are your experiences? A couple of things I am especially curious about:

• Flavor of linux
• 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.

I'm testing fedora workstation 40 on a trashcan. Mostly working smoothly, but you need to boot from USB using the "troubleshooting" option, then something like "basic graphics" (can't remember wording), otherwise you get a blank screen.
There are some other adjustments to get everything working (lmk if you are interested and I can share what I used, but simple search will give you the instructions for fedora), and I'm still struggling with a pcloud synch, but otherwise I'm pretty satisfied with fedora on this machine.
As for graphics card, one is always working, but there doesn't seem to be any Linux support for both (afaik there wasn't any support for 2 GPUs in the macos ecosystem either).
Hope this helps.

 

[iAssimilated]

I'm testing fedora workstation 40 on a trashcan. Mostly working smoothly, but you need to boot from USB using the "troubleshooting" option, then something like "basic graphics" (can't remember wording), otherwise you get a blank screen.
There are some other adjustments to get everything working (lmk if you are interested and I can share what I used, but simple search will give you the instructions for fedora), and I'm still struggling with a pcloud synch, but otherwise I'm pretty satisfied with fedora on this machine.
As for graphics card, one is always working, but there doesn't seem to be any Linux support for both (afaik there wasn't any support for 2 GPUs in the macos ecosystem either).
Hope this helps.

How does linux handle the fan on the 2013 Pro? Does it seem like it ramps up quicker or runs at a higher RPM longer than it did in macOS?

One of the appeals of the 2013 Pro is how quite it remains most of the time. I currently run the BOINC app on my Pro so making sure it is properly cooled is also important.

 

[ralf.kaa]

How does linux handle the fan on the 2013 Pro? Does it seem like it ramps up quicker or runs at a higher RPM longer than it did in macOS?

One of the appeals of the 2013 Pro is how quite it remains most of the time. I currently run the BOINC app on my Pro so making sure it is properly cooled is also important.

I haven't seen any temperature higher than 20⁰ celsius. I don't do video editing, just some photo editing, vector graphics and CAD (freecad). The fan has been running around 790 RPM; I can feel the warmth but don't hear the fan at all.
I haven't spent any time on macos beyond partitioning the SSD, so can't really provide any feedback there, I'm afraid.

 

[ralf.kaa]

The only outstanding issue is synchronizing my pcloud drive. Pcloud works fine on Intel nuc and some other older/weaker machines I have running fedora 40. It's been a bit erratic on this hardware.
Strangely pcloud's behaving as poorly as it does on my wife's MBP with Apple silicon. I've been told it makes no sense, but that's been my experience.

 

[nethfel]

Greetings -

Now that Monterey is no longer supported, I was wondering if anyone has had any luck installing linux on a 2013 Mac Pro and if so, what are your experiences? A couple of things I am especially curious about:

• Flavor of linux
• 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.

Just thought you might like to know, I've had some success with Linux Mint, but it really isn't my style (I prefer Gnome), but I will say I'm testing out Pop_OS! 24.04 right now (Cosmic) - it's still in alpha, but so far it's working really well - has not been the pain other distros have been to install - only challenge was the WiFi chipset (pretty standard), but if you can get onto a LAN (or bridged through another computers WiFi) for a bit, you can download the tools for the proprietary drivers (that portion isn't built into Cosmic just yet) and install the WiFi drivers.

So far so good for me and was a lot easier to get going than a lot of other current distros (ie: Ubuntu 24.04 installs but has issues with the GPU after installation; Fedora 40 worked well, but Fedora 41 didn't; Pop_OS! 22.04 was just a nightmare)

 

[th0masp]

I think fan control would be important to get right with this machine due to the GPU design. Else you may run into hardware trouble down the line since its running quite warm out of the box. I even run fan control in macOS to ramp up earlier.

What's available and easy to configure? I found some info regarding fancontrol and lm-sensors on Ubuntu-type systems - does exclude certain hardware though and therefore I wonder if the MP might be supported.

 

[iAssimilated]

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.