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I have a MacBook Pro 2017 running macOS Mojave (10.14.6). I want to try elementary OS but I wanted to make sure if for some reason I wanted to switch back to macOS I would be able to do so through the normal recovery means. Is this possible before I go overwriting my macOS installation?

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TL;DR

  1. There is always a risk of corrupting partitions so make sure to back everything up with Time Machine and you can always recover with that backup even if you don't have a recovery partition.
  2. If everything goes south and you end up without a Time Machine backup or recovery partition the firmware can recover remotely if you boot while holding Command+Option+R as long as you can get on the internet via wifi or ethernet.
  3. As suggested by Paul I would recommend testing everything thoroughly in a live session. I am not sure about support for the 2017 MacBook but I couldn't get the bluetooth to work reliably or the camera to work at all so I ended up buying a USB bluetooth dongle (https://amzn.to/2HzhWhh) and camera (https://amzn.to/2V6yFR8) for my 2015.

I was able to dual boot my 2015 MacBook Pro with macOS/elementary OS but when I decided to resize my partitions to give elementary OS more space I was no longer able to boot macOS. I had backups so it wasn't a big deal.

I later committed to elementary OS and wiped out the entire drive including the recovery partition. A few weeks later I decided to sell the MacBook and buy a new laptop and was able to do a remote recovery of macOS before selling.

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If you just want to try elementary OS, you can always run the live version.

You could also do a dual boot. Just create a separate partition and install elementary OS on it. Then when you boot up, you can choose between macOS and elementary OS.

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