Hello, first post here! So I don’t really know a lot about Linux, I’m not a computer science/IT/programmer type but can usually get computers to do what I want with enough poking around and googling. In this case what I want is to get my old (OLD) MacBook Pro running to use as a secondary web browser/video watcher or possibly a hand-off to kids computer. Budgie works really well on it out of the box which is remarkable for a 16 year old computer. Good job team budgie!
Anyway, I’d like to get an actual Nvidia driver up and running on it. This is not available in additional drivers because the last driver that supports the 9400M is Nvidia 340 and they stopped updating it for new Linux kernels a long time ago. There are many posts about a patched version, ppa:kelebek333/nvidia-legacy, but this too is too old to work on 6.11 at least on budgie. (It did work on Zorin 17 but with glitches). But as of three days ago (5/17/25) another random internet Linux whiz has released a new patched driver and this one is patched for Linux 6.11..
You’ll have to translate it from Russian…
I tried it on a new install and it works! It’s made by someone in Russia and he claims to have sorted all the issues and it’s all scripted so you just add the repository and then enter the install command. It seems legit to me but I’d be the last one to be able to spot malicious code. That said, I’m not sure there’s a lot to be gained from hacking random people’s Linux pet projects on old hardware.
The only bug I’ve noticed is that it broke the brightness controls in Budgie. They’re gone from the OS control panels and also the brightness buttons on the MacBook (F1 & F2) don’t work. Trying them with Fn held down crashes the system. I’ve tried a few fixes with kernel parameters in grub and also adding some lines to Xorg.conf but no luck. Brightness was working fine with nouveau out of the box.
TLDR? Am I an idiot for A) bothering with this old ass MacBook? and B) trying to use this random patched driver from the Russian internet when nouveau works “OK”
I will say that using the patched Nvidia 340 driver makes everything feel very smooth and slick like a brand new computer.. sort of. So I’m tempted to keep it if I can get the brightness controls back… it will drive me nuts if I have to open Nvidia X server app every time I want to dim the screen. I want the buttons back!!
Thank you very much for the hyper-detailed account of your discovery. I know a user who might be interested, even if, like you, he ended up settling for the “Nouveau” driver!
As for adjusting brightness, have you tried the “Brightness Controller” applet (Desktop settings > Panel > Add Applet or Budgie Welcome > Install Software > Budgie Extras)
Have you also tried setting the night mode? Type “night” in the main menu search box and launch “Screen Display > Night Light”.
Activate it, set “Schedule” to “Manual” and align the on and off times so that it no longer depends on sunlight duration.
If it works, you could make a launcher or a custom keyboard shortcut with the command budgie-control-center display…
…or, better, with gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.color night-light-enabled true / gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.color night-light-enabled false
Thanks for the suggestions. As an update, I started thinking about potential security vulnerabilities that I might be opening up by using such an old driver and decided to switch back to nouveau and see if it would be good enough. The strange thing is by running sudo apt install nouveau and sudo apt update the result was that the brightness controls were fixed but the system is still using the patched Nvidia-340 driver per my original post. So something to do with that was ‘fixed’ by my attempted nouveau reinstall.
Not sure what I’ll do for now. Probably test as-is for awhile and see if any other bugs crop up. There’s no data on this computer so just a test bed for now anyway. Would be nice to know exactly what was fixed by the attempted nouveau install. Also would be nice to know why the computer is still using the patched NVIDIA driver.
