A MacBook Revived

I have an old MacBook Pro. I forget exactly how old, but I think I got it 11 or maybe 12 years ago. Anyway, it made way for an M1 MacBook Air a few years back, after which my use of it rapidly dwindled.

It might have remained on a shelf in my study, gathering dust, but for the demise of my ancient Linux desktop PC. To give you an idea of just how old this machine was, it originally ran Windows Vista (remember that?) before it was repurposed to run various releases of Ubuntu over the years. When it finally died, I found myself without a proper Linux box at home for the first time in God knows how long. (That is, if you don't count a rarely used installation of Windows Subsystem for Linux on my Windows desktop PC, or an old Raspberry Pi that is probably hiding in a box somewhere, if only I could find it...)

I did without Linux at home for the best part of a year, but I missed the convenience of being able to use the same OS at home that I had in my office at work. I'd set up a very effective terminal-oriented working environment on the MacBook Air that I was pretty happy with, but for some reason it just didn't feel as satisfying.

I'm embarrassed to admit that the idea of wiping the MBP and putting Linux on it simply didn't occur to me, until a video exploring this solution appeared in my YouTube feed. That video demonstrated an installation of Linux Mint, which I'd once considered as a potential Ubuntu replacement, so this seemed like an ideal opportunity to give that particular distro a try whilst also breathing new life into some mothballed hardware.

I have to say that the installation was for the most part an absolute breeze. The one complication related to Wi-Fi, which required a proprietary driver. In theory, this should have been loaded from the USB installation media; in practice, the installer checked the USB drive before insisting on downloading a driver via the obviously non-existent Internet connection!

I didn't have an Ethernet adapter for the MBP, so I resolved the impasse by tethering to my phone. In a matter of seconds, the driver was installed, Wi-Fi was up and running, and there were no further issues.

I'm delighted with the end result. For really not very much effort at all, I've given the old MBP a new lease of life. This newborn Linux machine improves on what I was using before in almost every respect - the only exception being a big reduction in storage space. I guess I could fix that with an external SSD or, if I was feeling brave enough, an upgrade of the internal SSD.

And I'm liking Mint a lot. There's a comforting familiarity to the Cinnamon desktop environment, harking back to my earliest experiences of Ubuntu, but at the same time it doesn't feel old-fashioned. It just feels modern, clean and easy to use. I'm enjoying playing around with it, tweaking this and that, slowly adapting the configuration to my needs.

There's an ironic little epilogue to this story. While I'm in the middle of setting up a home environment styled like the GNOME 2 desktops of the past, my PC at work, which ran CentOS 7 and a GNOME 2 desktop, has been replaced by a new machine running RHEL 8 and a GNOME Shell desktop. Oh well... 🤷