Installing NixOS on a 2015-era MacBook Pro

Help
1

Hey, I’m trying to revive an old MacBook by putting NixOS on it. I’m fairly comfortable administering cloud instances but I haven’t put Linux of any kind on a laptop in a decade or so. I don’t care to preserve the macOS partition, but I’d like to be able to reinstall it if things go south due to hardware issues. I’ve already created USB stick with both the NixOS ISO and a bootable High Sierra.

So I guess my question is: is there anything I need to look out for when partitioning? Are there regions I need to leave untouched so that the MacBook doesn’t think I’m trying to get around security stuff? The latest guide I can find with a quick search is from 2016 or so, which makes me think it’ll be missing new info.

2

I’ve got a MacBookAir6,1 (“Early 2014”) running NixOS. Here’s its partition map, which I don’t think is anything special:

[gaelan@Sweetpea:~]$ lsblk
NAME          MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sda             8:0    0   113G  0 disk  
├─sda1          8:1    0 112.5G  0 part  
│ └─luks-ssd  254:0    0 112.5G  0 crypt 
│   ├─vg-swap 254:1    0     8G  0 lvm   [SWAP]
│   └─vg-root 254:2    0 104.5G  0 lvm   /
└─sda2          8:2    0   511M  0 part  /boot

If you erase the recovery partition, you obviously won’t be able to use that to reinstall, but I think most Intel Macs should be able to do Internet Recover (i.e. the boot loader downloads the recovery partition from Apple), and an install stick should work find as far as I know.

3

Alright, thanks. I did it! I accidentally removed the recovery partition, but it seems like I’ve got some options if I wanna go back to macOS for whatever reason. (That said, all the hardware but the camera seems to work fine out of the box so I think I’m OK!)