Works great. Had Linux Mint running on a 2008 Unibody MacBook. If your Msc is a dual graphics model, Linux might even be the only software way to revive it (or ensure it keeps running. The dedicated graphics always break and you can disable them in GRUB). Have Mint running on one of those for my grandparents as well. The only gotcha for Linux on Intel Macs would be the wireless drivers but I know that Mint’s Driver tool will do the work for you nicely. You might just need an ethernet connection for the installation. There are no further incompatibilities that I know of.
Alternatively, if you’d rather run macOS on a Mac: Open Core Legacy Patcher is a tool born out of the hackintosh community that allows you to run current macOS versions on unsupported Macs fairly well. The same 2008 Unibody Macbook did a decent job running macOS Ventura.
Only recommendation in either case would be to throw in a cheap SSD. The old non Retina Macs are easily upgradeable and not running on spinning rust can make the system much more responsive, no matter which OS you’re running. And if you’re already in there, the RAM is also easily upgradeable and 8GB get you a lot farther than 4GB. And DDR3 SODIMMs are also getting ridiculously cheap.
I can’t answer for Mint specifically, but I’m running kubuntu on a similar 2012 MacBook Pro and it runs great for just an old i5 (16 GB ram with an SSD really helps a lot). More importantly, all the Apple hardware is fully supported, right down to the keyboard & screen brightness buttons, volume buttons, etc. Runs way better than macOS ever did.
I don’t have any personal experience, but assuming Action Retro’s YouTube videos are somewhat accurate, older x86 Macs seem to work well with modern distros.
You might run into some issues with Thunderbolt, but most of the hardware isn’t that unusual, so there shouldn’t be any major driver problems.
If it told you that your mirrors wouldn’t work for the task that you were trying to accomplish, then why didn’t you change them? It probably would’ve worked if you would’ve just listened to what the application was telling you. I’ve used the upgrade tool ever since it came out and have not had an issue with it.
Forgot to add. I obviously tried to open the “software sources” window and clicked the “change mirrors” button a couple of times without any result. The window didnt open at all, the button didnt do anything.
It has been a long time since I was using mint but the last time I did a upgrade I followed this stack answer. Not sure it still works but might be worth a shot.
If someone is curious: with the gestures disabled in the settings, touchegg doesn’t start up. I added a startup item with the command ‘touchegg’ and now my set up with touché as the config tool works.
Sleep should be the same as hibernation, I think? Or is sleep/suspend and hibernate different?
It works for me but I'm using the standard Mint based on Ubuntu, not LMDE, so maybe there's a bug with it on LMDE. You might want to check in the Mint forums.
Ah, I guess that’s why suddenly audio on Linux stopped being an absolute nightmare, unlike everytime I tried migrating in the past. There’s a new audio subsystem?
A couple years ago, trying to use my 2.4GHz wireless headphones to watch a video would hard crash my computer if I was running Linux and tried skipping 5 seconds ahead.
As one who has switched to Pipewire recently, I can’t stress enough what a blessing it is.
It’s trivially easy to switch to Pipewire and suddenly your audio Just Works™️, including bluetooth audio. I’ve had to stand this hateful turd Pulseaudio for years, regularly having to wipe ~/.config/pulse and killall -9 pulseaudio, then reconnect my BT headphones several times to make it work for the day at work, and the minute I installed Pipewire, my headphones suddenly started working like they would with Windows or Android: come in in the morning, turn on, beep, connect, music. No fuss, no bother and no cursing stupid software that doesn’t work right.
I wish I had known about Pipewire a long time ago. If you don’t, do yourself a favor and switch today!
Am I just lucky? I’ve had 0 issues with PulseAudio so far. I also use Bluetooth quite often, although in the other direction (audio from phone to computer).
Though I did briefly use Bluetooth earphones too, but that concept really didn’t appeal to me, so I returned to wired once the case broke again 3 months after I replaced the charging chip. I still have one more of those chips, so I could try again, but I have no motivation for that.
no more trying to get JACK to work with my ‘pro’ audio applications and then wanting to run a game and oops jack is still running and oops now something wants to record using pulse for whatever reason and you had all your inputs set to alsa…
Welcome news! The support channel needed addressing, although I think something indexable and searchable (like a lemmy community for instance) would be better than the information void that are chat rooms.
Try tethering your phone over USB. It’s how I used to install Gentoo in the past before the system was fully installed and WPA-Suoplicant was available.
This is what I am doing and although I am prompted to mount the usb, and it finds the driver there, when I ask it to apply changes it says it can’t download the packages whilst offline.
It’s very strange because i can install the drivers when testing mint from the USB and also the wifi works when I choose what drive to boot from
Yep it’s a bit mystifying tbh. It worked for me following instructions to use the live usb to install the driver. Not sure why it hasn’t worked for you. Maybe wait for someone who knows more than me to respond before shelling out on an adaptor?
It worked by connecting my phone through USB and downloading the driver through that! Just plug in through USB, enable Hotspot, and enable us tethering.
I changed from Mint to LMDE a few months ago, working well for me. I don’t hop distros as …those are the only two haha
For a long time Windows user (started on 3.1 and played with Ubuntu a few tines over the previous decade) Mint is great. I went with LDME as I wanted a new install (I’d been dual booting W10 and Mint on and older SSD) .
Linux still has issues for users but geeze it’s close and most of the issues are to do with Linux but a lack of app support. Eg. Hoops for Davinci Resolve etc
I have yet to try the Debian edition, but based on my 1.5 years running the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint as my daily driver, I am not surprised to hear how amazing the Debian edition is.
And yes, Cinnamon is a great DE! Sure, it may be a bit old-school and lacking customization options, but that’s kind of why I like it!
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