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Linux on a 2014 macbook air? (ttrpg.network)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

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