u/youzhang

I need to format a drive to be used on both cachyos and macos, is btrfs a better option than exfat?

Hi I am going to buy a used 2019 MacBook Pro 16 because I just saw them selling for a really low price. For example there is one for $400 with i9 CPU+16GB RAM+1TB SSD+5500M 8GB. This was my dream machine back in the days so I am very tempted.

I have been using CachyOS on both my desktop PC and my Lenovo laptop for the past years so I am planning to install CachyOS on the MacBook as well. I learned that because it is a T2 machine there are things to consider.

Things I already know:

1. Sleep is a problem so maybe there is no way to put the laptop to sleep?

2. Speakers would sound terrible. Mic quality is also very bad.

3. Hybrid GPU can be a problem? I want to game a bit with the 5500M 8GB GPU so...

Are there other important things I need to know? Can it be my daily driver OS? How does it feel to use Linux on it as the main OS every day?

I tried software‑emulated ray tracing plus FSR 4 upscaling to see if I can get playable ray‑traced performance on this old GPU at 1080p.

Looks like a popular opinion these days.