MacBook

My laptop is a 2011 MacBook Air. I’m not a huge Apple fan, it’s just that at the time it had the most interesting hardware features compared to similar laptops. And it’s quite sturdy, so that’s nice.

Over the years I have experimented with installing Linux in parallel to the OS X operating system, but in the end I settled on installing my favorite Linux tools inside OS X using Homebrew, because having two different operating systems on one laptop was Too Much Effort™. In recent times Apple has decided, in it’s infinite wisdom (no sarcasm at all *cough*), that it will no longer provide operating system upgrades for older hardware. Okay, then. Lately the laptop had become slow as molasses anyway, so I decided to replace OS X entirely with Ubuntu. No more half measures! I chose 20.04 LTS for the laptop because reasons. 🙂

According to the Ubuntu Community Help Wiki, all hardware should be supported, except Thunderbolt. I don’t use anything Thunderbolt, so that’s OK for me. The installation was pretty straightforward: I just created a bootable USB stick and powered on the Mac with the Option/Alt (⌥) key pressed. Choose EFI Boot in the Startup Manager, and from there on it’s all a typical Ubuntu installation.

I did not bother with any of the customizations described on the Ubuntu Wiki, because everything worked straight out of the box, and besides, the wiki is terribly outdated anyway.

The end result? I now have a laptop that feels snappy again, and that still gets updates for the operating system and the installed applications. And it’s my familiar Linux. What’s next? I’m thinking about using Ansible to configure the laptop.

To finish, I want to show you my sticker collection on the laptop. There’s still room for a lot more!