Tried to migrate from Mac to Linux half a year ago (before the 16" with the new keyboard was announced, because I hated the butterfly keyboard).
Tried a bunch of dell and Thinkpad devices.
Configured a t480s with ubuntu.
First meeting where I had to share my screen and I recognized that Chrome is not able to share a dedicated screen of my three monitor setup. You need a script for that, which creates a "fake" webcam, otherwise its only possible to share the three stitched-together screens.
Those are things, I just expect to work out of the box without a script or pulling two monitor cables everytime I want to screen share something.
Bought the 16" Mac a week later, also not happy with that because thermals are just bad, but its better than having to script simple things. Clients don't expect you to "have to script something real quick" during meetings.
As long as Linux does not cover ALL trivial multi media usecases, I don't see myself making the switch.
Thank you for writing this! Whenever I see people using Linux as their main laptop OS, I'm struck by remembering the amount of tinkering needed circa 1999 which was the last time I did it. Having read this -- the custom scripts, the "suspend still doesn't work properly" -- it feels like that's still the case.
You're seeing an extreme case here. Macbooks are actively breaking other OSes. Better to treat it as: "look how much you can bend Linux to work on a proprietary toaster", rather than "look how hard it is to run Linux on a laptop".
Newer generations of macbooks just won't work at all. There's no workaround for recent sound (unless it gets reverse engineered) or wifi (unless you rewrite Linux stack to work around broken firmware) devices, and it's likely to only get worse. Here's a good collection for hardware support: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
> Whenever I see people using Linux as their main laptop OS, I'm struck by remembering the amount of tinkering needed circa 1999 which was the last time I did it.
IDK, I finally broke down and replaced my rickety ~8 year old laptop and everything (aside from the fingerprint reader) worked right out the box -- surprisingly since it is also a fairly new model so I expected some tinkering while the drivers caught up to mainline linux.
Actually...I can't remember the last time (other than Gnome being stupid with defaults) I've had to mess with a basic install and I've been using linux as my primary OS since around '00.
Very much not true these days. Linux on laptops is (in overwhelming majority) a great experience today. I suggest you just try out one of the live images for Ubuntu or Fedora.
On a tangential note I'm surprised that it's still relatively common on HN to see comments like "Linux on desktop doesn't work" or "Java is slow". That was 20 years ago. The world has moved on.
It isn’t. But it still has some rough edges for sure. It highly depends on the hardware you are using. MacBooks are not manufactured to make it easy for alternative OSes.
OP is also trying to use the i3 window manager. It’s barebones, labor intensive and meant for tinkerers and advanced users. If you want an easy plug and play experience you should use a desktop environment.
You're trying to run a generic operating system on a closed platform whose vendor publishes no documentation on anything. Some manual work is to be expected.
I can assure you it is not 1999 anymore and things are a lot smoother today when you're not trying to coax proprietary black-box appliances into doing things they were explicitely designed not to do.
It worked pretty well by then. Somewhere around the year 2000 I had RedHat 7 running on my Dell Latitude CPi, everything worked out of the box.
You'd still have problems on other machines with things like winmodems and integrated graphics, so you'd have to get into downloading driver modules or rebuilding kernels.
You can configure a new Dell XPS or Dell Mobile Precision laptop with Ubuntu for a no-hassle solution.
If you want CentOS or Red Hat, I've had good luck picking any Ubuntu Dell that is also listed as being tested and certified for Red Hat at https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/ecosystem/Red%2.... The only real hassle has been when I wanted to use an Nvidia driver, which requires a driver reinstall after kernel updates, although I believe you can now avoid this with DKMS. I expect that Fedora would also work without issue on any of these.
Last year I had to use a Dell 7540 (may have the exact model number wrong, but it was one of their enterprise "workstation" laptops) with Ubuntu for work. I was also skeptical for the same reason as you, not having used Linux as a daily driver for a long time.
FWIW these laptops were rock solid and ran Linux just fine. Sleep also seemed to work as well(I'd have tried hibernation if I knew how. That's my preferred mode on Windows to save unnecessary power consumption).
I was quite impressed and while my personal daily needs are fully Windows-based, I would not hesitate to recommend those laptops to anyone who wants to get away from Windows.
Since you even need to 'maintain' scripts on either upgrades or whenever you want to move to another distro, chances are that those scripts will break upon that migration or upgrade. Then more tweaking, digging, googling and more command line testing to fix that simple annoyance for hours or even days.
I know I don't want to play around with my desktop just get work done and for Macbooks, its either macOS or Windows with WSL2 which the former gets out of the way and "just works" and no need for tweaking.
Off topic maybe, but my Razer Blade 15" has been and absolutely wonderful replacement for my MBP. The build quality feels just as nice, and none of the weird touchbar issues. (Running Ubuntu 19.10 presently, only issue: had to disable the USB-C port to allow it to sleep). The arrow keys are also in a slightly wonky location.
It's been very disruptive to have Apple quality tank, and I'm glad they finally went back to the good keyboard, but at least there's another game in town for developers who want a quality laptop and a real OS.
I was nearly Mac exclusive for years before switching to Linux. Similarly to the author I mostly use a browser, VS Code and a few small utilities, although mine are mostly simple Qt GUI apps.
My thumbs are well trained to use the keys to the sides of the space bar as the main modifier. My solution to the Command/Control issue is to swap the key positions with xkd so that it's always [Win][Alt][Ctrl][Space][Ctrl][Compose]. (Since Macs and PCs swap Alt and Win/Cmd, you need different xkb options for each type of keyboard.)
As for terminals, if you set VTE-based terminals (such as GNOME Terminal) to use Ctrl+C for copy, it will automatically set Ctrl+Shift+C to send SIGINT. Since I don't use many terminal apps that use modifiers, this works for me, and I set paste to Ctrl+V as well.
I mostly use Alacritty now, so I've set it up to do the same thing for Ctrl+Shift+C. Come to think of it, I still need to do so for VS Code's terminal, for the few times I use it.
> if you set VTE-based terminals (such as GNOME Terminal) to use Ctrl+C for copy, it will automatically set Ctrl+Shift+C to send SIGINT.
I just looked in the preferences for Gnome Terminal and didn't see this option. I think I'm used to the current setup enough that I wouldn't switch anyway, but how do you configure this?
For Firefox rendering being slow, I forced the Ubuntu Firefox to use Wayland the other day (my login session was already wayland but Ubuntu doesn't default to making firefox using it), and the difference is night and day. Everything is so much faster and super smooth.
FYI I popped this in my .pam_environment (I was having issues when just editing the .desktop file in that thunderbird stopped being able to open links in firefox)
I switched to sway, which has very good performances, Firefox under wayland also flies, it's been the fastest browsing experience so far. I can have hundred of tabs open with tree style tabs with no lag whatsoever.
Sway has absolutely zero tearing, for this it is very good.
But, a few issues (mostly wayland and not sway related):
· First you need an AMD card, I don't really have a problem with that as their cards are good now. But if your laptop has nvidia, you are screwed.
· Copy paste still fuzzy
· No global hotkey. Well you have to configure them at the WM level, things like discord push to mute will not work.
· Hard to capture (OBS cannot capture wayland app yet without major tinkering and testing)
· Many popup widgets are positioned on the wrong monitor (like fcitx popup for japanese input)
· Complex X apps are slow or will just crash crash, for example qgis is unusable in X mode and crash in wayland mode, audacity do not update properly…
· Some things require tons of tinkering to get right, like having the proper rendering pipeline, for example using mpv, but when you get it right, you can play 4k movies with 3% cpu usage.
· Tray/notification icons are hard to setup and won't work 100%.
Disclaimer: I use sway on a large desktop workstation, so I cannot comment on issues like power, sleep, external monitors…
I run sway too, but I've kept firefox using X11 instead of native wayland due to the trackpad scrolling in firefox under wayland not being exact (ie: it jumps as if I had a mouse with a clicky scroll wheel instead of exactly following finger motion). In x11, I set `MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1` to get exact trackpad scroll.
OBS can capture wlroots based compositors with the wlrobs[0] plugin. Give it a shot, it's really smooth for me. There's also wl-recorder[1] which is much more light weight if you don't need any of the fancier features. Also, cyanreg is working on txproto[2] which is a much faster/feature rich version of wl-recorder, although I'm not sure it is ready for prime time as it uses a couple bleeding edge libs.
Author here. Post is a bit rambling but I just wanted to document somewhere the things I encountered along the way with links to resources, to save someone having to trawl the web for it next time.
One of the problems with replicating this with more modern Apple hardware is that Apple have increasingly moved away from the "traditional" PC hardware platform, and their more modern laptops have adopted various design patterns that were traditionally associated with more embedded devices (such as using SPI for their input devices). This is a completely reasonable set of design choices on Apple's part, but it means there's now a pretty long lag between a new generation of Apple devices and it being possible to run native Linux on them in a reasonable way.
I'm the guy from the sway github issue mentioning that the chrome autoscaling had been fixed, so maybe you need a more up to date chrome, or maybe there was some kind of regression. (I had some other bug with sway to do with the tray, so haven't been using it).
One other suggestion for an alfred/spotlight alternative is dmenu (or bemenu for a wayland compatible one if you go for sway), there's also rofi as an option which does the same thing iirc.
About sway, if you don’t mind using Firefox, that works natively under Wayland. On another note though, the reason I don’t use sway, is that I couldn’t figure out how to get inertial scrolling working... Did you manage this, or just not bother with inertial scrolling?
How is your Macbook handling VMs running for like 8 hours a day? I use docker (which runs inside a hyperkit VM on OSX) and it absolutely toasts my Macbook. To the point where my screen has started showing black lines on top and bottom due to overheating.
Tried Linux on my MacBook Pro mid-2012, ran into some of the issues described in the post (sleep issues, keyboard layout, ...). Though I went with Ubuntu for a bit more simplicity. I finally had to rollback because it was simply not usable. The laptop was getting too hot, and it seemed that I had to use scripting or workarounds for every little thing. Now I use a virtual machine, and it's already way better. I still want to use Linux as my main OS, just not on the MacBook. I wanted to see if I could make the switch, and it seems that I'm ready.Now I'll wait to buy a new one with more compatible components.
For whatever reason, fan control does not work out of the box (so it gets way too hot), but it worked for me after installing mbpfan: https://github.com/linux-on-mac/mbpfan
Just a hint, Debian's hardware support can be better than Ubuntu. At least that's my experience with my desktop PC, which I didn't get to work well with Ubuntu because of the graphics card, and which worked without problems with Debian. (But, if you have problems with the graphics card and you only have one supported by proprietary drivers, do yourself a favor and buy a fully supported one. Doing otherwise is just not worth the hassle).
Please notice that OP is trying to run the i3 tiling window manager which is very minimal (as all TWMs) and expressly targets tinkerers and advanced users. A beginner friendly distribution with a complete desktop environment usually provides a much easier plug and play experience.
At a previous job, a coworker got a new Mac but still wanted to use Linux. He spent several days setting the system up, and eventually got it up and running smoothly.
Except that the calendar on the lock screen somehow was in Romanian, it resisted all attempts to change the language, and he never got around to fixing it. :)
> The main reason for the switch was one killer app; the i3 window manager. Keyboard shortcuts, tiled windows, lightning fast to use - it feels like a piece of software designed for people who tinker and use computers a lot.
> The primary function of yabai is tiling window management; automatically modifying your window layout using a binary space partitioning algorithm to allow you to focus on the content of your windows without distractions. Additional features of yabai include focus-follows-mouse, disabling animations for switching spaces, creating spaces past the limit of 16 spaces, and much more.
I'm forced to use a Mac for work, and I use yabai. It's far superior to the default mac experience, which seems to be designed to actively hide windows and make your life more difficult, but it's still a pain to use. It's obviously a hack and that makes itself known in daily usage - dialog boxes are tiled just like regular windows, or alternatively hidden behind the tiled windows where they're inaccessible; suspending and resuming randomly messes up the position of my windows; and the stupid mac detached-titlebar is almost unusable when you drag your mouse over another program and the focus gets yanked away.
Customisation and configuration are also plainly inferior to i3/sway, plus there's the complicated installation process and necessity to disable apple's walled garden features to get full functionality.
At home I have i3/sway, which is a nice polished user experience; there's no comparison really.
Thanks for the plug, I am the author and I have recently made a few more updates. Speed improvements to the installer, better apple keyboard (added another driver detection for newer keyboards), also improved support for Ubuntu Budgie (probably the most mac like distro out there worth trying besides a couple of others such as Enso OS).
I used i3 for a long time. After a while it didn't feel that fast. Yes switching was very quick but often it got in the way. So many applications have little windows that pop up. They didn't play nice with i3.
I also had the issue of a limited keyboard and shortcut keys. I use a Kinesis advantage. I don't have a windows key. So I used alt as a super key. This meant that I often couldn't use application shortcuts. It was a major pain. In hindsight I should have mapped in a windows key and sacrificed one of my thumb buttons for it.
I'm surprised about the comment on sway, because afaik the issue mentioned about a blurry chrome was fixed a while ago[0]. Maybe it's caused by something else...
It depends a ton on what distro you are using. Some distros that now ship with wayland native desktops have tons of downstream patching to smooth out the experience. If you run Arch for instance, the default Chromium package is not ozone, and will run with XWayland (although chromium-ozone is available in the AUR). It's possible your distro is doing something differently.
I purchased a souped-up Eluktronics MAG-15 recently to try out VR and I'm really amazed by how subpar Windows is compared to Linux and MacOS even with top of the line hardware.
I found out that I can update a lot of components of my early 2015 MBP, so I'm going to get a 512GB or 1TB hard drive and see if I can make a Linux partition.
I recently tried Debian 10 on a MacBook Pro from 2014 and it worked surprisingly well. The computer fan(s) would however not start when needed even after installing extra software like mbpfan. Something to watch out for!
I took a stab at putting Linux on a MacBook about 4 years ago or so. I found dealing with the Broadcom wifi and bluetooth more hassle than I bargained for, and switched to a Thinkpad. Has the Broadcom driver situation improved? I was surprised the author had no issues getting wifi working.
And relating to the article, i3 is the sole reason I use Linux. Such a great window manager.
These days I feel as if machines are deliberately phased out even when they are in perfectly working condition.
I have two macbooks (white plastic) one with Tiger installed and another with Leopard an iPad 1 ( They all are in working condition) Its a shame to not be able to use the machines just because it is not supported.
I would assume that they are good enough for a kid to surf websites and help do his/her homework. Listen to songs while browsing pdfs . Lack of support should not mean that perfectly usable hardware is junked.
After covid, there are a lot of kids in Indian villages whoes education is dependent on online education. Maybe these laptops could be made usable for them. ( Not everyone can afford a mobile phone)
Please do let me know if your linux installs will work for my case as well ( your case covers the Macbook Pro instead of just macbooks)
PS: I myself use i3wm on a lenovo machine. ( Not very happy with Lenovo but its ok ok )
[+] [-] breytex|5 years ago|reply
Tried a bunch of dell and Thinkpad devices. Configured a t480s with ubuntu. First meeting where I had to share my screen and I recognized that Chrome is not able to share a dedicated screen of my three monitor setup. You need a script for that, which creates a "fake" webcam, otherwise its only possible to share the three stitched-together screens.
Those are things, I just expect to work out of the box without a script or pulling two monitor cables everytime I want to screen share something.
Bought the 16" Mac a week later, also not happy with that because thermals are just bad, but its better than having to script simple things. Clients don't expect you to "have to script something real quick" during meetings.
As long as Linux does not cover ALL trivial multi media usecases, I don't see myself making the switch.
[+] [-] peteretep|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viraptor|5 years ago|reply
Newer generations of macbooks just won't work at all. There's no workaround for recent sound (unless it gets reverse engineered) or wifi (unless you rewrite Linux stack to work around broken firmware) devices, and it's likely to only get worse. Here's a good collection for hardware support: https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
This is not representative of non-apple brands.
[+] [-] UncleEntity|5 years ago|reply
IDK, I finally broke down and replaced my rickety ~8 year old laptop and everything (aside from the fingerprint reader) worked right out the box -- surprisingly since it is also a fairly new model so I expected some tinkering while the drivers caught up to mainline linux.
Actually...I can't remember the last time (other than Gnome being stupid with defaults) I've had to mess with a basic install and I've been using linux as my primary OS since around '00.
[+] [-] bitcharmer|5 years ago|reply
Very much not true these days. Linux on laptops is (in overwhelming majority) a great experience today. I suggest you just try out one of the live images for Ubuntu or Fedora.
On a tangential note I'm surprised that it's still relatively common on HN to see comments like "Linux on desktop doesn't work" or "Java is slow". That was 20 years ago. The world has moved on.
[+] [-] bananamerica|5 years ago|reply
It isn’t. But it still has some rough edges for sure. It highly depends on the hardware you are using. MacBooks are not manufactured to make it easy for alternative OSes.
OP is also trying to use the i3 window manager. It’s barebones, labor intensive and meant for tinkerers and advanced users. If you want an easy plug and play experience you should use a desktop environment.
[+] [-] hpcjoe|5 years ago|reply
In this case, MBP is uncommon HW for Linux users, and things may not work that well. I imagine windows 10 would have similar problems there.
[+] [-] einr|5 years ago|reply
I can assure you it is not 1999 anymore and things are a lot smoother today when you're not trying to coax proprietary black-box appliances into doing things they were explicitely designed not to do.
[+] [-] Jonnax|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|5 years ago|reply
You'd still have problems on other machines with things like winmodems and integrated graphics, so you'd have to get into downloading driver modules or rebuilding kernels.
[+] [-] 1e-9|5 years ago|reply
If you want CentOS or Red Hat, I've had good luck picking any Ubuntu Dell that is also listed as being tested and certified for Red Hat at https://access.redhat.com/ecosystem/search/#/ecosystem/Red%2.... The only real hassle has been when I wanted to use an Nvidia driver, which requires a driver reinstall after kernel updates, although I believe you can now avoid this with DKMS. I expect that Fedora would also work without issue on any of these.
[+] [-] muststopmyths|5 years ago|reply
FWIW these laptops were rock solid and ran Linux just fine. Sleep also seemed to work as well(I'd have tried hibernation if I knew how. That's my preferred mode on Windows to save unnecessary power consumption).
I was quite impressed and while my personal daily needs are fully Windows-based, I would not hesitate to recommend those laptops to anyone who wants to get away from Windows.
[+] [-] rvz|5 years ago|reply
I know I don't want to play around with my desktop just get work done and for Macbooks, its either macOS or Windows with WSL2 which the former gets out of the way and "just works" and no need for tweaking.
[+] [-] quietdean|5 years ago|reply
But 3 years ago I tried Fedora on an Asus N56VZ and it's been flawless. Well, less issues than Windows anyway. That's my definition of flawless.
I will admit it's a bit of a hardware and distro lottery though.
[+] [-] j45|5 years ago|reply
Macbooks have become increasingly difficult for Linux to work on, in some cases it has been made more difficult.
[+] [-] voodootrucker|5 years ago|reply
It's been very disruptive to have Apple quality tank, and I'm glad they finally went back to the good keyboard, but at least there's another game in town for developers who want a quality laptop and a real OS.
[+] [-] abrowne|5 years ago|reply
My thumbs are well trained to use the keys to the sides of the space bar as the main modifier. My solution to the Command/Control issue is to swap the key positions with xkd so that it's always [Win][Alt][Ctrl][Space][Ctrl][Compose]. (Since Macs and PCs swap Alt and Win/Cmd, you need different xkb options for each type of keyboard.)
As for terminals, if you set VTE-based terminals (such as GNOME Terminal) to use Ctrl+C for copy, it will automatically set Ctrl+Shift+C to send SIGINT. Since I don't use many terminal apps that use modifiers, this works for me, and I set paste to Ctrl+V as well.
I mostly use Alacritty now, so I've set it up to do the same thing for Ctrl+Shift+C. Come to think of it, I still need to do so for VS Code's terminal, for the few times I use it.
[+] [-] war1025|5 years ago|reply
I just looked in the preferences for Gnome Terminal and didn't see this option. I think I'm used to the current setup enough that I wouldn't switch anyway, but how do you configure this?
[+] [-] amaccuish|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amaccuish|5 years ago|reply
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND DEFAULT=1
[+] [-] cancerSpreads|5 years ago|reply
I don't think it's intended to be like this, not sure where to begin troubleshooting.
[+] [-] kuon|5 years ago|reply
Sway has absolutely zero tearing, for this it is very good.
But, a few issues (mostly wayland and not sway related):
· First you need an AMD card, I don't really have a problem with that as their cards are good now. But if your laptop has nvidia, you are screwed.
· Copy paste still fuzzy
· No global hotkey. Well you have to configure them at the WM level, things like discord push to mute will not work.
· Hard to capture (OBS cannot capture wayland app yet without major tinkering and testing)
· Many popup widgets are positioned on the wrong monitor (like fcitx popup for japanese input)
· Complex X apps are slow or will just crash crash, for example qgis is unusable in X mode and crash in wayland mode, audacity do not update properly…
· Some things require tons of tinkering to get right, like having the proper rendering pipeline, for example using mpv, but when you get it right, you can play 4k movies with 3% cpu usage.
· Tray/notification icons are hard to setup and won't work 100%.
Disclaimer: I use sway on a large desktop workstation, so I cannot comment on issues like power, sleep, external monitors…
[+] [-] codys|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danshick|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs
[1] https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder
[2] https://github.com/cyanreg/txproto
[+] [-] djhworld|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjg59|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] read_if_gay_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mijoharas|5 years ago|reply
I'm the guy from the sway github issue mentioning that the chrome autoscaling had been fixed, so maybe you need a more up to date chrome, or maybe there was some kind of regression. (I had some other bug with sway to do with the tray, so haven't been using it).
One other suggestion for an alfred/spotlight alternative is dmenu (or bemenu for a wayland compatible one if you go for sway), there's also rofi as an option which does the same thing iirc.
[+] [-] intarga|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harpratap|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ledvd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robrtsql|5 years ago|reply
For whatever reason, fan control does not work out of the box (so it gets way too hot), but it worked for me after installing mbpfan: https://github.com/linux-on-mac/mbpfan
[+] [-] jnxx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bananamerica|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vaccarium|5 years ago|reply
Except that the calendar on the lock screen somehow was in Romanian, it resisted all attempts to change the language, and he never got around to fixing it. :)
[+] [-] bananamerica|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gowld|5 years ago|reply
If that's the main reason, how about yabai on Mac? https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai
> The primary function of yabai is tiling window management; automatically modifying your window layout using a binary space partitioning algorithm to allow you to focus on the content of your windows without distractions. Additional features of yabai include focus-follows-mouse, disabling animations for switching spaces, creating spaces past the limit of 16 spaces, and much more.
[+] [-] bearbin|5 years ago|reply
Customisation and configuration are also plainly inferior to i3/sway, plus there's the complicated installation process and necessity to disable apple's walled garden features to get full functionality.
At home I have i3/sway, which is a nice polished user experience; there's no comparison really.
[+] [-] bananamerica|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lloydw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbreaves|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xupybd|5 years ago|reply
I also had the issue of a limited keyboard and shortcut keys. I use a Kinesis advantage. I don't have a windows key. So I used alt as a super key. This meant that I often couldn't use application shortcuts. It was a major pain. In hindsight I should have mapped in a windows key and sacrificed one of my thumb buttons for it.
[+] [-] mijoharas|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1481#issuecomment-6404...
[+] [-] danshick|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dayvid|5 years ago|reply
I found out that I can update a lot of components of my early 2015 MBP, so I'm going to get a 512GB or 1TB hard drive and see if I can make a Linux partition.
[+] [-] Qerub|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] city41|5 years ago|reply
And relating to the article, i3 is the sole reason I use Linux. Such a great window manager.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] seaghost|5 years ago|reply
It works perfectly.
[+] [-] suchoudh|5 years ago|reply
I have two macbooks (white plastic) one with Tiger installed and another with Leopard an iPad 1 ( They all are in working condition) Its a shame to not be able to use the machines just because it is not supported.
I would assume that they are good enough for a kid to surf websites and help do his/her homework. Listen to songs while browsing pdfs . Lack of support should not mean that perfectly usable hardware is junked.
After covid, there are a lot of kids in Indian villages whoes education is dependent on online education. Maybe these laptops could be made usable for them. ( Not everyone can afford a mobile phone)
Please do let me know if your linux installs will work for my case as well ( your case covers the Macbook Pro instead of just macbooks)
PS: I myself use i3wm on a lenovo machine. ( Not very happy with Lenovo but its ok ok )