I installed Gentoo on my mid-2010 Macbook Pro about a year ago as both a fun learning project and to have a practical secondary laptop for terminal access, light dev, using utilities that would be more cumbersome on my Windows laptop, etc.

It landed me with a usable KDE environment with acceleration, but sleep mode resulted in an unrecoverable system without a reboot and the graphics driver had oddities like garbled screens during login and occasionally crashing the system if I opened the wifi settings. At the time I tried switching to older proprietary nvidia drivers and some other possible solutions for sleep issues, including asking an older GPT model at some point to investigate the system, but they were dead ends - it seemed to simply be an issue of unsupported old hardware, and I don't have the time to learn driver dev.

But when 5.6 Sol came out and I tried it on Ultra, I was struck by how capable it seemed, so I figured I had nothing to lose throwing it at fixing my system by any means necessary - worst case I would reinstall.

It did its work and went through a series of reboots, asking me to come back with what happened and occasionally do things like test physically closing the lid. I only had to hard-power off one failed kernel launch (which was initiated in some way that GRUB defaulted back to the old proven kernel on successive boots).

After a few hours of this, I found myself with fully working graphics and power states, with some nice bonuses like the time to sleep optimized near the 10 second warning limit (it wanted to keep going but I wasn't too worried about it) and the power options exposed properly to the KDE battery app.

I don't have the kernel dev background or time to learn it to audit all of this myself to submit patches to the kernel, but anyone who does is free to do so. I hope it can help someone else with the same era hardware.