It's nothing special. I use Kubuntu on a MBP, and I've talked about how I've setup Plasma Desktop before on HN[1][2].

I run Catalina in a VM because it's the oldest macOS version that supports the APIs I'm developing against. I used to use KVM for virtualizing macOS, but VirtualBox[3] is more portable despite being much slower, so I use that now.

If you can use KVM with Virtio and VFIO passthrough, it's really fast. Linux just got Virtio-fs[4], too. I've had to pass boot options to the kernel to get the IOMMU to play nicely on the Mac, though, and I just don't have patience for that these days.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23607374

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25172499

[3] https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox

[4] https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io/

Thanks. I've got an MBA6,2 lying around so may give it a go over the holidays.

Linux runs really well on Macbooks that came out before 2016. I've found powertop, TLP and TLP-GUI, and mbpfan to be useful laptop and Mac-specific tools on Linux.

Not the poster you're replying to, but a cheesegrater MP4.1 with Debian and this package (https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM) works just fine.

Never bothered with GPU passthrough however.