This is not a big deal to me, as I usually use Endeavor’s KDE default. But having my little pile of old laptops, I decided to try Gnome on a MacBook Pro 2012 (15"). It was a short experiment. I got a black screen on boot up. I suspect, but am, uh, taking a stab in the dark, that Gnome may have tried to use some NVidia driver (the mbp has a second, dedicated, NVidia GPU)? I went back to KDE for now and am happ with it. Maybe someone working on the Gnome Endeavor desktop will find a clue here, which is my main reason for posting.
My knowledge about Macs is limited, but if it has hybrid graphics, EOS uses hybrid mode automatically. As far as I know, there should not be differences between Gnome and KDE on this. At least on my hybrid Asus it automatically recognised my cards in both KDE and Gnome, although in my case I had to enable only Nvidia, because of graphics issues on AMD.
I’ll misspell this, but the Nouveau (?) driver is usually what linux picks by default when running into these machines’ dual cards. True with Mint Cinnamon, I know. And I think with Endeavor as well in KDE. That still doesn’t really prove much. But I do wonder if the Endeavor gnome setup goes ahead with an Nvidia driver rather than the Nouveau/whatever default.
Proprietary Nvidia driver is installed only if you select Nvidia installation option. Gnome does not install it automatically, it uses Nouveau otherwise.
With KDE plasma and Wayland it works on my MacBook Pro 7,1 from mid 2010.
But that older machine with an Core2Duo processor doesn’t have an iGPU, just an NVidia 320M chip.
Which won’t perform well these days.
Anyway, as your machine is based on an Ivy Bridge processor which has an integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 chip as well as a GeForce GT 650M it may be a bit more tricky to set it up properly.
If I’m not mistaken it is one of the earliest Laptops with hybrid graphics available to the market. And it’s hybrid modes are a bit limited. E.g. the HD Graphics could only drive the internal display, for external monitors the dedicated chip has to be used. Thus, it lacks in pass-through capabilities which are available on later hybrid graphics.
There is an entry in the Arch Wiki for the Macbook Pro 10,x variants. Even if it is flagged as outdated, it may still contain some points how to run linux on it properly.