iMac Pro's T2 chip

Re:iMac Pro's T2 chip by Dunedan on Thursday January 04, 2018 @02:31PM (#16073303)

When using macOS the ambient light sensor is afaik only used for the brightness of the keyboard backlight.

The brightness of the TouchBar isn't related to ambient light and just depends on the usage of the MacBook Pro. In use it's simply on with full brightness, after 1 minute of inactivity it dims to a certain level, before shutting off the TouchBar completely 15 seconds later. While macOS doesn't allow to customize these timeouts, the experimental Linux driver [1] does.

[1]: https://github.com/roadrunner2/macbook12-spi-driver

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Re:iMac Pro's T2 chip by epmaybe on Thursday January 04, 2018 @10:58PM (#16076401)

Out of curiosity, is there a Linux distribution that can be used full time on a MacBook?

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Re:iMac Pro's T2 chip by Dunedan on Friday January 05, 2018 @07:38AM (#16078204)

All MacBooks prior to the 2015 generation and MacBook Pros prior to the 2016 generation work fine with up-to-date Linux distributions.

Newer ones might still have some limitations like:

- stuff might not work out of the box and needs manual setup (keyboard, Bluetooth, NVMe, Touch Bar, ...)

- internal Audio not working (MacBook Pro >= 2016)

- WiFi not working (MacBook Pro with Touch Bar)

- Suspend not working (MacBook >= 2015, MacBook Pro >= 2016)

- Battery draining significantly faster than under macOS

If you can live with these limitations you can use a MacBook/MacBook Pro very well full time with a Linux distribution of your choosing.

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