So I saw a youtube video on how cheap intel Macs are these days and decided to look for one that cost around $100 and got a 2012 Retina Macbook Pro. I was mostly interested in the high resolution display and, of course, put Linux on it. It worked out much better than expected. What surprised me was how easy it was. I was expecting all kinds of Apple hoops to jump through but the Macbook boots from just about anything in the USB ports and installation was fast and painless. I started with Mint 21, then added Ubuntu 22 LTS and Debian 11. Ubuntu was the easiest install with no drivers to find afterwards. I had to use a USB wifi adapter to get online with both Mint and Debian to get drivers for the nvidia gpu and wifi. That was expected with Debian but not Mint. All three distros have a full set of drivers and all the custom control buttons do what they're supposed to. The experience is just as good as with native MacOS, better for me in fact since I'm a Linux user and not so familiar with MacOS. I didn't use boot camp at all, just partitioned the disk first with the Mac disk utility and then with Gparted in linux. I finally tried to install Windows on top of MacOS and Linux and I did a Windows 10 installation. That was much more problematic driver wise than Linux and I ended up having to get the boot camp drivers for Windows and I still have no audio in Windows. There's also a 40 second or so black screen in the boot process before I can log onto Windows whereas both the native MacOS and Linux boot in something like 30 seconds from the internal SSD. The later Intel Macbooks have a security chip that might make Linux a bit harder but the ones till 2015 seem to be able to boot just about anything. The ones before 2015 can do both UEFI and MBR booting. Grub installed painlessly but can only boot Linux and Windows. The native Mac bootloader sees the grub installation as "Boot EFI" and MacOS by the disk label and either can be set as the startup disk.
That's what I would do. You could run as many at a time as memory capacity allows and there would likely be no driver issues.
I could but the VM wouldn't let me enjoy the Macbook as much. The cool thing is that Linux handles the hardware just as well as MacOS and it's really nice on the Retina display. This Macbook only has 8gb of ram. The processor is a quad core i7 so VMs will work fine but not very many at once. The only OS that has driver issues on it is Windows 10. I reinstalled Bootcamp and that fixed everything except the audio but the nvidia driver it installed froze the system and I had to boot in safe mode and remove it and replace it with the nvidia driver from Windows update. I haven't been able to get any other version of Windows to work on it at all.
