💾 Archived View for gemini.rfmpie.com › posts › reviving-macbook-with-linux captured on 2023-05-24 at 17:37:04. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Reviving an old Macbook with Linux

../

I'm writing this on a 2013 MacBook Pro that I bought used from a former employer. That was a solid era for MacBooks. This laptop has the old, good keyboard before Apple went butterfly. It's got a handful of physical ports and therefore requires no dongles. It has a Retina display. And I like the 13" size compared to the 16" behemoth I'm currently using for work.

That said, it's no spring chicken. It's sluggish running macOS, and it's too old to get OS updates anymore. The trackpad is half broken; the cursor moves, but it's hard to register a click. When I was a Mac-only guy, I figured it was time to wipe and donate the machine. (Especially if that would give me an excuse to buy a fancy new M1-based replacement.)

But a few months ago I decided to no longer be a Mac-only guy, and since then I've spent considerable effort trying to minimize the cognitive load of switching between macOS and Linux. While I'm stuck with a Mac at work, I enjoy Linux when I'm off the clock.

With Linux back in my life, I figured I'd give this laptop one more shot before donating it, and I'm glad I did. I installed Fedora and Sway[†], and now this thing flies! For my typical laptop use cases -- which admittedly don't need much horsepower -- it's perfectly adequate.

The only issue I had was that the WiFi chip doesn't work out of the box. I assume there's some way to fix it with drivers, but I'm just using a little USB WiFi adapter that I keep plugged into a port. And I use an external mouse to compensate for the ailing trackpad. With the USB stick and the mouse, it's not quite as tidy as a new machine would be. But it's already paid for. And more importantly, it feels good to take something that was almost junk and breathe life back into it.

Thank you, Linux maintainers, for making this possible!

[†]: Tiling window managers are the reason I keep trying to make Linux work. You just can't get that experience on macOS. (Yes, I know about yabai. It does the best it can given the macOS constraints, but it's not the same.)