I have the same Mac and was thinking of putting Linux on it so very helpful. I got a new battery for it last year from Amazon for about $35 and it's back to good battery life.
Why make it so complex? Put a USB stick with a Linux distro in the MacBook, start while holding the ALT key, boot from the USB stick and everything goes like expected. Fedora and Debian based distro's all work well (including going to sleep mode when the lid is closed and starting again when the lid is opened). The camera driver needs to be installed afterwards - not an issue, plenty of information available. Installing the wifi driver for Fedora also very simple. It all just works out of the box. If you want to go back to MacOS, boot the macBook from a recovery USB stick. I have done this on many old MacBook's Air and never had major issues.
I have installed Linux Mint Matte on both MBA 11" from 2011 and 2012. Both recognized the WIFI and camera at install. In fact, Linux Mint Matte seems to load quicker and more smoothly on the 2011 MBA. Who knew?
Ubuntu is a great choice for that sort of use case. It just works, and it's set up for an inexperienced user to be able to sit down and use it easily. I chose Mint when my wife asked to switch to Linux, but only because she was coming from Windows and I thought the Cinnamon desktop was the easiest for that switch. If she'd been a Mac user, I might have given her something with GNOME instead.
How’s the Wi-Fi? I have tested a number of distros on mine, and there seems to be around 75% reduction in Wi-Fi connection speed whether it’s Arch, Debian, or whatever. It’s the one thing that is stopping me.
@@sonofwotan sudo apt install b43-fwcutter firmware-b43legacy-installer broadcom-sta-dkms broadcom-sta-common broadcom-sta-source And your Debian will work wi-fi
I had the same experience in 2020 when I tried to revive an 20" IMac from around 2008/2009. It was an Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM. So, pretty low-spec. Lubuntu turned out to be a good solution. All the hardware was supported. Wifi as well as the camera and microphone. The performance was OK.
The part about not being able to boot a Mac into an earlier version of the OS is somewhat wrong. There are different bootloaders/recovery utilities on the intel-based macs depending on which key combo you use during boot-up. If you use cmd+R, that will boot you into the latest version of Mac OS that your particular Macbook was running at the time. cmd+opt+R will conduct a recovery installing the latest version of Mac Os that your macbook is capable of running. The problem is, nine times out of ten these days these two flat out don't work and errors out right after you begin the installation process. If you use cmd+opt+shift+R, this boots you into a recovery environment for the Os that your Macbook shipped with, which in the case of a 2015 Mac should be El Capitane. Once that Os is loaded in you can very easily upgrade the Mac to the latest version it's capable of running, which in this case is Monterey, or you can systematically update to any Mac Os before it. Like in the video I found Ubuntu loaded in quite easily, even without disabling the Apple security bs. Sure the wifi didn't work out of the box but it took literal minutes to just hardwire into the modem with an ethernet, run a simple update, and the wifi worked just fine after the update. The same was true when loading Mint onto the Mac as well. Both worked just fine with no need to mess around with the Apple security. The one thing I'd question is why not have the friend just use the pre-installed Firefox since it's not built on Chromium and thus not subject to all of Google's bs with the browser? Unless the friend needed some features that come in Chromium and not in Firefox, which is understandable. I'm also curious why the installation of Open Office when Libre Office comes pre-installed and works just as good (if not better). And unless I'm forgetting about this, didn't VLC come pre-installed in Ubuntu as well? There shouldn't have been any need to install it again.
Or you use OpenCore Legacy Patcher. I'm running Ventura on my 2017 MB Air 11 inch and it runs fine, as it does on the 2015 MB Airs that I bought and set up for my daughter and grand-daughter.
Should had gone with Linux Mint for normies with Cinnamon. Ubuntu stability has been shit for years now. I personally use Arch with materia-awesome (better using material-shell nowadays for the beginner.)
Did setup arch on a old macbook pro a while ago... Has literally 0 issues. Drivers work, the lid close to suspend, and open to wake works flawlessly with a 10 line service I wrote, and well - it's running dwm and currently serves as a media device with no hiccups whatsoever.
I have the same Mac and I installed Debian 12 on it. It works very well. I previously checked Fedora 40, but there was a problem with the Wi-Fi card driver. Mac did not see any network.
The Wi-Fi cards in OSS distros like Debian and Fedora is fixed post install. That's not ideal, but solvable. I'm also wondering when I tried this because I've seen issues with KDE on MacBooks, but did not try GNOME. Would be curious to sample openSUSE again.
@@TrafotinI installed fedora 40 and wl driver. The card was detected but it didn't see any network. I wasn't able to fix it, so I reached for Debian and there the same driver works without problems.
I love Arch myself, but I think it's the right call to _not_ give it to your muggle friend. It's just not that kind of system. Manjaro might be, tho, but I can't really tell since I never tried it.
also i'm pretty sure that even if u fully format the drive the laptop should be able to connect to the internet and put u in the recovery which will download the latest mac os for ur system , so u are partialy wrong when it comes to that as well
My 2011 Macbook Pro is doing fine as an alpine based docker host :D Absolutely no distribution I've tried on it (Arch, Void, Fedora and Alpine) gave any trouble with drivers tho ^^
Oddly enough I've gotten better stability out of arch OS that I have out of Ubuntu or mint. I haven't tried a fedora based installation but my distro of arch linux Garuda literally runs every program including windows program without any setup for me. On other distros I was either able to get games working or Windows programs but never both and with this distro they both worked right out of the box.
Installing Fedora 36 then upgrading works. It doesn't have the boot changes, and doesn't 'fix' them as far as 38. The Brosdcom drivers are on Rpm fusion. This is on a mid-2012 Macbook Pro. Saying that, I've gone back to Arch.
Very comprehensive video👍👏 i use Pop OS on my Macbook Air mid 2012. Working perfectly with dualcore and 4 gig ram since 2017. Light office use. Pop OS uses systemd boot and its own large efi and detects Mac OS automatically for dualboot. Seems to avoid the grub hassle, no need for csrutil disable in my case. Worth considering to switch to systemd boot?! What i learnt, gparted and macos diskutil are not compatible, so prepare partitions with macos and reformat them in linux! Btw i use MacOS for some legacy apps and to configure my apple router.
In the end, how was the Wi-Fi? I have tested a number of distros on mine, and even after installing the driver there seems to be around 75% reduction in Wi-Fi connection speed whether it’s Arch, Debian, Ubuntu or whatever.
@9:10 I have that same problem with ubuntu 24.04 , any help or assistance would be great. To be clear i am talking about the screen lid issue, after closing the lid, reopening it does not light up the screen , i have to prees any key to wake it.
I have a 2015 macbook air with a pretty sad dual core i5. Since Apple no longer supports this, I just put Windows 10 on it to use it for web browsing and a security camera server. It actually feels pretty 'snappy'. I will say will be our last Mac computer since Apple claims to be a 'green' company but discontinues support after 5-7 years to force consumers to buy the latest and greatest. I am aware there are 'workarounds' to put the latest Mac OS on it and from what I've seen, older Intel based Macs run JUST FINE with it. There is no other reason for Apple not supporting this hardware, other than greed.
It's more complex than that because the primary limiter isn't just Apple, but I think was Intel. Intel no longer supports this class of CPU officially. Only Kaby Lake and higher.
I have been trying to install Ubuntu but the MacBook Pro 2009 crashes. I can reboot Mac OS. Is it because of the security you mention here? Other vids about install Ubuntu mention nothing about disabling security.
There is a FaceTime camera driver floating around GitHub, but you need to compile it yourself, sign it, and install it. No way are normal people going to do that...
Is possible to go back to the original state for the macbook after i install ubuntu? i want to give mine a second life but i dont want to get macos not working anymore in the future.
Apple "bad" except for when I need to use my computer to make music, then I'm running Logic Pro 100% of the time, and not worrying about configuring Jack or any such nonsense. Even though I know it's made leaps and bounds with the sound servers, Pipewire, etc, I'm still not convinced.
Well you better learn these things when your Mac isn't supported by Apple anymore. Many of my friends I present them with 2 options: either buy the latest Apple equivalent to their device or I install Linux because they don't get updates anymore. It's all about hardware preservation and we all know Apple respects people's ownership...
I installed Kubuntu on my macbook air 2015 11"... and everything works out of the box except the camera. And that remains a problem. I've tried manually installing various drivers but the camera remains inaccessible. Did you get it to work?
I know a driver exists, but I haven't experimented with it. I don't think this is an Apple problem as much as it is a Broadcom problem, because Asahi Linux also has trouble with Apple's webcam. It's funny because the microphone works and I don't know if the T2 chip muting activates if the lid close.
Hi tratofin, I have an old MacBook Pro from Mid 2015 and it is super slow as well as has terrible battery life. I want to install Linux on it and am hoping I can get battery battery life as well as an overall better desktop experience but I am lost. I am running on Intel i7 processor, 16GB of memory and Intel Iris Pro Graphics. What desktop environment would you recomend for Mac? I kinda like Ubuntu but I have heard that ubuntu has some problems and I think something like Fedora would work well however I am honestly overwhelmed. What would you recomend or what are your thoughts in finding a distribution that is compatible and will run well on my mac?
Ubuntu if you don't know what to do. I tried everything else and I don't see a better option. The only other option that seems viable is Arch, but there's the can of worms that most people don't know what they are doing (including me) when it comes to setting up Arch.
Hi. Great video. I followed these steps with my 2015 Air and every distro I use cannot find the wireless hardware, even Ubuntu. Not as easy as I hoped :)
On Mac? After BootCamp was discontinued? Linux better supports Apple's hardware because some people have reverse engineered the firmware, which is way easier than porting to Windows because both macOS and Linux share the Unix structure. Meanwhile, Microsoft couldn't be bothered to support Windows ARM on any hardware beyond what's sold.
I have exactly TWO the same MacBookAir 2017 we were gifted some long time ago and for some unknown reason one of them is running Windows 10 xD and sound drivers do not work, niether the fn keys. No one is using it anyway so I just put it to mine monero indefinetely... other one was running Windows 7 with a lot of viruses and 700mb of free disk space so... I took the it and succesfully installed Archlinux with KDE plasma on it. After some frustrations I was able to make everything to work and give it a new birth with the power of ARCHLINUX BTW. Even configured automatic snapshots with btrfs and snapper Now my mother successfully uses this OS as a bootloader for the google-chrome. I just make sure from time-to-time that everything works and update the system. Wi-fi drivers work, and even closing lid and opening also works out of the box in KDE... idk I personally use Archlinux btw on my other HP OMEN 15 laptop with leftwm for programming and stuff
Great video. Ubuntu is a great working distro. I've been using it for 14 years and it haven't failed me. I also have fedora workstation on another computer. Both work great
Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop installed flawlessly on my Mini 2012. Only hitch I had was the Wi-Fi didn't work upon boot up. Plugged into ethernet, fired up the device driver manager, 2 minutes later Wi-Fi works.
How’s the Wi-Fi? I have tested a number of distros on mine, and there seems to be around 75% reduction in Wi-Fi connection speed whether it’s Arch, Debian, or whatever. It’s the one thing that is stopping me.
@@sonofwotan I must admit that on my Macbook the Wi-Fi speed is about the same as it was before. In fact all my laptos and PC's either on Wi-Fi or hard wired run at the same average speeds.Sorry to hear you are having speed loss with yours.
Did I understand correctly that if I install Linux, I can never get Mac OS installed on the laptop? What if I wanted to install Opencore Legacy Patcher?
That’s a spicy pillow , Apples security system seems intriguing saidly it’s not foss if the Apple security platform was open source I would throw it every arm device maybe even x86 device…..
I findout mint was my best option when running linux in old macs. It can auto detect missing drivers and easily install them. The thing is, I cant figure out how the hell make ctrl+c work wieth and apple keyboard.
