A friend of mine has an old macbook air. It still works, more or less, but the OS isn’t getting any updates anymore, and updating to the latest OS seems dicey.
Has anyone had experience installing linux on an old macbook? From a quick internet search it looks like you can just make a bootable USB and have at it. Thinking mint because it’s popular and my friend is a pretty basic user. The laptop will be mostly used for like youtube/netflix and basic web browsing.
Edit: a little extra context: I am moderately comfortable with Linux. I ran mint for a while on my desktop, and I’ve done software development for a job. I can install docker and start a python project fine, but I’d use a GUI for like partitioning a hard drive.
It works but be careful with wifi. The other user said that it works out of the box with endeavourOS, and I know you can install it later with Linux Mint too, but the problem is that this wifi driver for the older chips (from 2011 to 2013 at least) is buggy. In my 2011 macbook air it would crash the whole OS on heavy downloads, and on my 2012 one it won’t come up from sleep. So I bought a super tiny supported usb wifi dongle to deal with the problem. Now my two macbook airs work 100% with Linux.
My 2015 macbook air works great with the linux wifi driver, but it has no web cam support, and the driver on github is buggy and not updated for newer kernels anymore.
I just installed Pop!OS on my 2012 MacBook Pro and it’s amazing. No matter which distro you go with, you will likely need to manually update and install the WiFi drivers. You’ll need an Ethernet connection, which might mean you’ll need an adapter.
Good to know. I had some trouble a couple months back getting wifi and Ethernet working, and learned my phone can provide Internet over USB.
Oooh, I’ll have to keep that in mind. I had to go on the hunt for a USB dock with Ethernet and my phone was right there the whole time.
The feature is called “WiFi Tethering” and is available on most Android systems (sometimes OEMs or carriers disable it)
On iOS it should enable automatically if you’ve got a hotspot active and connect your device to your computer via USB
Forget Linux, just use OpenCore Legacy Patcher.
You can run from USB to see how it works without installing, then install once you’ve found one that works well/that you like. Let us know how it goes!
I put KDE Fedora on a MacBook Air circa 2013 iirc. It’s old heh. It runs well but it hates the new kernel. So after a lot of poking around to find a solution to the full hardware kernel panic lockups I found it was a problem with the wifi, as usual. You might get luckier than me since it’s only a couple chipsets they use that choke.
That said even with that issue I just locked the kernel at 5.15 and it runs just fine. I started with 38 and I’ve upgraded every release until current without any issue.
Did this recently actually on the same exact model, drivers work out of the box with ElementaryOS. Zero tinkering involved. Has a maclike interface too. It’s based on Ubuntu, since they’re centering Mac driver compatibility it’s unlikely to break on upgrade. I originally tried to install fedora atomic and so on but realized the drivers were going to be annoying to add (wifi module didn’t work) so I just flashed ElementaryOS on it so I didn’t have to bother and could send it back to my friend asap.
I’ve done it on a 2010 pro and a 2014 pro. Both work quite nicely.
It’s pre-T2, so it should be very easy to install a Linux distro on it. The only bit of misery you’re going to encounter, as others have said, is the Broadcom drivers. Except for a select few distros, you’ll probably need a USB Ethernet adapter for installing the operating system and adding the drivers.
Also, I’d rather put my hand in the circle saw than try running a rolling release on this laptop because the driver uses DKMS, meaning that kernel updates sometimes break it.
I only know this because the desktop I’m typing this on has a Broadcom Wi-Fi card from when I used to bare metal Hackintosh this machine. I’ve since moved to a nice house with an Ethernet port in every room; also, I just use macOS in a VM these days anyways.
As others have said, OCLP is a thing and a well-oiled machine from what I hear, but also, the oath I have made to the Church of Linuxology demands that I at least recommend Linux.
Update: installed mint. Seems work. Had a problem where it couldn’t see the HD. Had to change an option in grub
Pasting what I found online to fix it:
“”" thank you so much! what was the solution!
for anyone might read this in the future: in the bootmenu where u can select which version of linux u wanna boot u can press “e” and then u need to add intel_iommu=off at the end of the line of the “linux” row - i had some double dashes at the end for me it did the job when I add them before the double dashes.
Then I could see the harddrive and install mint mate on my old macbook air
also needed later on to set the parameter permantent by opening a terminal and used this command sudo nano /etc/default/grub
edited this line like this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash intel_iommu=off” then save and exit nano and this command for updating the boot thingy
sudo update-grub “”"
I just installed Endeavour0S on a 2013 13" MacBook Pro last week and it was like every other installation. I had no problems whatsoever. Even with a current KDE Plasma that little thing runs great.
The only mac specific thing I did was install https://github.com/linux-on-mac/mbpfan?tab=readme-ov-file for some fan control.
I had it working ish but man it was slow! The boot up took minutes and a pi had better performance. Ubuntu was the only one I got working.
