This guide is for installing deepin 23 or other Linux operating systems on older Mac computers with Intel chips.

 

Preparation Before Installation

1、Hardware and Software Requirements

  1. USB Drive: A USB drive with at least 8GB of storage is required to create a bootable drive. Ensure the drive is empty, as creating the bootable drive will format it.
  2. deepin 23 ISO Image: Download the x86 architecture ISO image.

>>> deepin 23 ISO Download

 

2、Create a Bootable USB Drive

Method 1: On macOS, you can use Etcher to create a bootable drive.

Method 2: On Windows, you can use Ventoy to create a bootable USB drive.

This guide uses a Ventoy-created bootable USB drive for the installation demonstration.

 

3、Preparing MacOS Partition

Since this tutorial demonstrates a dual-boot installation of macOS and deepin 23, partitioning is required in macOS before proceeding. The new partition will be used for deepin 23 installation.

If you intend to install only deepin 23 as the sole operating system, you can skip this step and proceed directly to he "Installing the System" section.

Using the built-in "Disk Tool" of macOS system for disk partitioning on Mac.

Open the Disk Utility application and click the Partition button in the toolbar to proceed.

Click the "+" button below the disk space distribution chart to create a new partition.

Important Note: Because we are going to install a new system, therefore select  “Add Partition” in the pop-up window (do not choose  “Add Volume”!).

Create a new partition and set the format. Since deepin and macOS use different disk partition formats, set the format of the new partition to MS-DOS (FAT). This will allow deepin to reformat it to EXT4 during installation. The new partition should be at least 65GB; installation may fail with less space.

Once the settings are complete, click on "Apply" to proceed to the next step.

Click Partition to continue.

Click Continue to proceed.

macOS will start repartitioning the disk. As this step redistributes disk space, it may take some time depending on the disk size and stored content. Be patient!

This process may take a few minutes to several hours. Once the partitioning is complete, click Done to finish.

 

Installing the System

After creating the bootable USB drive and partitioning the Mac, restart the Mac to begin installing deepin 23.

 

1、Enter EFI Boot

Restart the Mac and press and hold the Option key during the boot process. The boot disk selection screen will appear (similar to the BIOS boot menu on Windows PCs). Select EFI Boot to boot from the deepin 23 installation USB drive.

 

2、Enter Deepin 23 Installer

After selecting EFI Boot, the system will boot from the deepin 23 installation USB drive. Since this tutorial uses a Ventoy-created bootable drive, the screen will display the following interface:

(If you only copied one image to the Ventoy bootable drive, there will only be one image here, and there are multiple images in the picture because there are many images of other distributions stored on the USB drive):

The next steps are the same as using Ventoy to install the deepin 23 system on a Windows computer. We select the corresponding image. This tutorial is for an Intel chip computer, and we choose deepin desktop community 23-amd64.iso to enter the next interface.

Then select 'Boot in grub2 mode' to proceed to the next interface. Important reminder, please do not select 'Boot in normal mode' like under Windows!!!

Formally enter the interface of Deepin 23 image installer, as shown below:

Because Apple's last generation Intel chip computer was released in 2019, we have chosen to install the 6.6 kernel directly here: Install deepin 23 with kernel 6.6 desktop.

Next, we will see the familiar installation interface for deepin 23:

Since this tutorial demonstrates a dual-boot setup with macOS, and we have partitioned under macOS previously,so we select  “Custom Installation” now.

For users installing deepin 23 as the only operating system on their Mac, select   “Full Disk Installation” instead.

After selecting Custom Installation, the following interface will appear, showing the partition created earlier in macOS:

Click the Edit button to configure the partition. Format it as Ext4 and set it as the root partition. Click OK to proceed.

Click Start Installation to begin installing deepin 23.

 

System Installation Success

Once the installation is complete, the success screen will appear. Click Restart Now and immediately remove the USB drive. The system will reboot into deepin 23.

On first boot, configure your system settings such as account, language, and network. After configuration, deepin 23 is ready to use.

Special Note:

After successfully installing deepin 23, your Mac will default to booting into deepin 23 on startup. To boot into macOS, restart the Mac and hold the Option key during startup to access the EFI Boot menu. From there, select the macOS partition to boot into macOS.

 

Related Reading：

（1）Click to support the deepin Community

（2）deepin 23 Installation Guide