mbp-manjaro-kernel VS linux-mbp-arch

Well actually, the Arch/Manjaro developers *did not* do this as the T2 Security Chip is not something the stock linux kernel is equipped to deal with. If you checkout https://t2linux.org/, you'll see the real heros of our story - the team who has been researching and developing custom drivers to work around this nightmare Apple has brought down upon us. Everything from rewriting kernel modules, to rewriting the Calamares installer itself - and even building custom drivers for things such as the Ambient light sensor and touch bar. As much as I love the Manjaro and Arch folks, no one as even come close to including this in the default installation. Check out https://github.com/jpyke3/mbp-manjaro-kernel as well :D

You don't compile the kernel from scratch to solve this problem normally, or should I say ideally, unless you're referring to aunali1/linux-mbp-arch.

I have a macbook with the T2 security chip, so a few patches are needed for most of the hardware: https://github.com/aunali1/linux-mbp-arch I dunno if there are many other computers like this where you need patches for hardware compatibility.

But when I look at the patches to support T2 Macs, most of them haven't even once been submitted to the Linux Kernel Mailing List for review (or am I missing some mail archive?)

The specific display issue you’ve described there is probably the one fixed by https://github.com/aunali1/linux-mbp-arch/blob/master/2001-drm-amd-display-Force-link_rate-as-LINK_RATE_RBR2-fo.patch (this patch is in mbp-fedora)

You need this kernel patch to prevent that overscan. Have a look at https://wiki.t2linux.org for how to get that without compiling the entire kernel.

Does anyone happen to have info on how I might get things up and running? I have tried googling, but not finding much specific to Debian. What I have found points to MacBook Bridge/T2 Linux Driver, but my undersanding this is in the kernel from 5.7. Also found linux-mbp-arch but that is specific to arch, and wouldn't work on Debian yeah? Or could I run those patches against something to get a Debian compatible kernel?

I once installed Arch on a MacBookPro15,1 (2019). It worked but I was mainly experimenting with it rather than actually using it. I had to use a custom kernel https://github.com/aunali1/linux-mbp-arch but I think this is MacBook specific. WiFi, the touchbar and the Intel iGPU are among the things that caused me the most headache. Also, the keyboard and mouse don't work without the custom kernel. But I managed to get the system to work overall (incl. WiFi) and most of those issues don't affect iMacs, I guess.