Installing Zorin 18 Pro on MacBook Pro (10,1) - Limited performance

Hardware Support
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Hi everyone, I have an older MacBook Pro (2012) and being a Zorin fan, I paid for the Zorin 18 pro, since I had Zorin 17.3 running on it with an older kernel (5.15) where I could compile the Nvidia-driver-390 on it. I would love to Zorin 18 Pro to work as best as possible and not be boxed in the nouveau driver which has very poor performance and sluggish at best. Is there any advice (other than using this laptop as a paperweight) that people can give me to try to get the best (or even native graphics capability) running?

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You can install the 5.15 kernel on Zorin OS 18 and given your machine, there is no reason why you shouldn't.
It is not in the Zorin OS 18 repository, so you would need to stack the four .deb packages in a folder, then run

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

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Thanks @Aravisian, is that the best practice thou? Maybe I am a bit new to the kernels of linux but is it not always the best practice to run the latest kernels for security, etc. or it really does not matter, since the kernel is more about hardware compatibility than anything else?

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The 5.15 kernel is a LTS kernel. It is still supported from ubuntu and gets updates (until oct 2026).

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You need to use the kernel that works for your system.
Security patches are backported to LTS kernels - so if you have that concern, select the 5.15 LTS kernel.
But you are right that it is much about hardware compatibility.

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Thank you @Forpli and @Aravisian - I did a bit of reading as well after your answers and while 5.15 LTS works the weakest link is my GPU and obsolete Nvidia-driver-390. Not a good practice cause my MacBook Pro (10,1) has a dual Intel 4000 HD and NVIDIA GT 650M (Kepler architecture), as I feared no mainstream Linux distro can fully eliminate security risks while retaining NVIDIA GPU functionality that is no longer supported (i.e., nvidia-driver-390 which did not get critical updates and vulnerable to Direct Memory Access (DMA) attacks from simply overflow OpenGL in Chrome/Brave/Edge). I will just keep pushing forward and disable the Nvidia discrete on my laptop and live with the integrated (albeit slow in performance and forget gaming/video) onboard for piece of mind.

Keep up the great work Zorin! Love the new look and I will have to save a bit of money and invest in a new laptop at some point, this MacBook was just my first Mac so a bit sentimental.

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