Liberating the MacBook Air 2013 with Linux
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I can't think of a laptop design that's been this static for this long. _Maybe_ the more conventional Thinkpad designs?
The X1 came later and with a 14" form factor is a good chunk bigger.
Recently bought a decently spec'd one from 2015 for my nephew/godson to start programming. He just turned 11.
They really are great computers.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Air+13-Inch+Mid+2012+Ba...
Can concur. Back then Apple didn't go for thinness for the sake of thinness like the post 2015 machines did. And it's not like the 2010's generations of machines were think and bulky.
But they didn't provide any documentation, you are correct, so I wouldn't call it friendly or supportive. But I definitely wouldn't call it hostile either.
Also, I haven't seen Linus Torvalds use a Macbook (an M2 Air running Asahi Linux) until recently either.[0]
0. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/linus-torvalds-uses-...
You're about a decade late: https://www.cultofmac.com/162823/linux-creator-linus-torvald...
I didn't even have to mess with anything, it just worked right after the install. How much more high-functioning can you get?
With Apple Silicon, you can keep a complete chain of trust with macOS and install an insecure Linux distro. It's great security compartmentalization, and no x64 chip can offer this granular control.
With the M* chips this lifehack will no longer be possible. Once the SSD storage fails, the entire motherboard is instant e-waste.
I think the 2015 generation of Macbooks will outlive the M1 generation from a HW pov. I still see people rocking the old Macbooks with the glowing Apple logo. I doubt the M series will see such longevity.
It's 8 years old, and it doesn't show them. Not even a bit. Perhaps I'm just lucky, but I made minimal maintenance and I use it everyday for hours. 8 years of daily use. I traveled to super remote places with it.
I want to use it for 2 or 3 more years (10 years in total would be nice!)
Also I adore those keyboards.
Don't know about having a MacOS alongside but if the disk is small, you might not want that anyway. And I presume you could always go back to MacOS later.
I read this is also an experience many Windows users have had when setting up dual booting systems with Linux.
At this point I think it's generally a bad idea to setup a dual-boot system with Linux, better to use it exclusively.
When the model is no longer supported with MacOS updates, I wipe the disk and install Linux. Sometimes I'll keep a copy of MacOS on an external drive if I need to access or troubleshoot specific features of that model (like digital optical audio before support matured on Linux).
But if you do need to dual boot I remember doing it a few times and the refind bootloader was very nice: https://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/
Security updates are still happening.
I'm running MacOS Ventura on a Macbook Air 2013 and Macbook Pro 2015 with it. They work reasonably well and get patch updates via official updates when released.
At least the restore sector is kept, and if you decide to roll back/sell, you can restore macOS.
Although I used it for years, and also having about 14 years of GNU/Linux experience, I was very comfortable.
I booted the MBP after not having had it on power 4 years and it worked flawlessly. It then took maybe 20 minutes to run vlc on boot and set the propper bits to make it boot automatically when it receives power.
I cannot recall when things worked this flawlessly the last time
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Retina+Disp...
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Retina+Disp...
I haven't tried https://howchoo.com/linux/the-perfect-almost-touchpad-settin... yet.
The hardware itself has so many features/switches which are not open and hence not available to the software.
The hardware and software go hand in hand IMO.
Maybe things have changed now, this was at least 7+ years ago.
Touchpad driver that isn't outright physically painful to use
Progress in assistive technologies, font rendering, display technology and resolution rather than shipping hardly readable traditional Linux-style dark-blue on black terminal themes on today's dark default themes coupled with a lack of easy configuration
Actually working power management, and actual power efficiency resulting in 10h running times (despite overreaching stuff such as systemd, the developer of which has now left for MS to feast on INIs)
Focus on end user functionality rather than endless new developer improvements and abstraction frameworks for self-inflicted problems (snap/flatpack/Docker and other meta containers rather than fixing ld.so and glibc or just use static linking) when new apps aren't coming anyways
A feeling that the desktop/Finder and UX is evolving and respecting habits rather than being restarted with every release
State of the art commercial apps for media production rather than 90s apps struggling for compatibility as devs turn to new playgrounds
MacOS has by far the best idea and implementation of how desktop keybindings should work (and no, I love vim but having desktop-wide vim keybindings doesn't make sense because not every input field can easily be modal). I'm constantly surprised why no linux distribution has copied this.
However, getting the Control -> Command/Super thing to work is much trickier. The best way is to use this: https://github.com/mooz/xkeysnail
However when I tried that, I ran into all kinds of weird behaviours all over the OS. Also, it doesn't work with Wayland.
Most terminal emulators let you remap Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+V if you really want.
But that doesn’t really help does it? Because now you’ve made killing and backgrounding a process just as hard. What you need is an extra accelerator key, which is only available on expensive boutique keyboards and not available at all on laptop keyboards.
The more distance I get from using Linux as a daily-driver desktop OS, the more it looks like most of the benefits of its configurability and modularity are fairly superficial—especially in its GUI stack—while the harm it causes is deep.
This (space efficiency, not necessarily the top menu bar) is the main thing that's keeping me away from Linux at this time. "Liberating" a Macbook Air feels like a great idea right until you have to do actual work on it, at which point, unless you're using the terminal, the screen will be largely empty space and huge widgets, with whatever text or image you're working on cramped between all those beautifully hand-crafted organic breathable widgets.
Edit: I'm not talking about window decorations being large, I'm talking about application widgets being large. You can fit like three macOS buttons in the space of a single Adwaita- or Breeze-themed button. See e.g. this SE thread for a comparison -- not with macOS, but basically the same problem: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/489533/how-to-get-a...
As for Gnome applications, it's not a Gnome problem, it's a GTK problem, that affects all GTK applications, regardless of what DE they run under, and all GTK-based DEs, like XFCE.
Pure no, from me. KDE feels much more natural to me now that I've settled in.
You can get even better space efficiency with a tiling WM. A lot of them don't bother with window chrome or even have a status bar with a clock out of the box.
If you try to run the numbers on e.g. sway/i3, that barely makes a dent. Realistically, you can squeeze maybe 6-8px out of a sane window decoration before it gets impractical.
Meanwhile you can get like 10px of vertical space just by halving the vertical padding of a default Adwaita/Breeze button, and it's still larger than the equivalent macOS button which non-technical users can click just fine. Sane sizing on three stacked widgets saves more space than any tiling WM.
We can have nice things without going back to 1980s UI paradigms.
You could also just use MATE!
Edit: also, both Greybird and Ambiance are both really large compared to anything you get on other platforms. It's through no fault of their authors, GTK's layout rules break (or at least broke, I was on GTK 3.24 last I tried it) at low padding values, and it's extremely hard to keep alignment afloat on small widgets. I'm also not exactly young anymore, the text contrast in Greybird's unfocused windows is pretty awful, and fixing anything related to GTK's :backdrop attribute is a very long-winded affair.
(The best UI with that kind of widget style today is arguably SerenityOS, but the repo I linked above tries to provide something similar for existing GTK+ apps.)
Also, for comparison, a Finder sidebar item is about half the height of the (unresizable) Nautilus sidebar item in the screenshot. Thank God for Thunar at least :-).
Top menu does sound like a reasonable compromise until one has to switch between the bottom left corner of the screen and the menu in the top left enough times. I'm all for efficient use of vertical space - I am one of those who still remove the top tab bar and use tree-style-tabs, but in practice I think there is a reason why most of the world allows the menu to follow the thing it is linked to.
Also note that these menus doesn't add up on other systems either. I only "waste" space for one menu line on my Linux or Windows applications too.
> snap/flatpack/Docker
Meanwhile on Mac I still have to use AppZapper.
> A feeling that the desktop/Finder and UX is evolving and respecting habits rather than being restarted with every release
You are probably comparing to Gnome and Unity here I guess, not KDE 5 or Windows?
> State of the art commercial apps for media production rather than 90s apps struggling for compatibility as devs turn to new playgrounds
This varies with job description I think. In my field one of the reasons why I still hesitate to get a Mac next month - despite its many advantages - is the fact that so many open source programs I use looked ugly on Mac last I checked and some weren't available at all. Meanwhile on Linux I can just ap-get them or in Windows I can apt-get them in WSL and run them, GUI and all inside Windows. That is kind of magic!
A top menu was reasonable for the original 9” Macintosh display of 512×342 pixels. (The original Macintosh could not even multi-task, and the visual components of the operating system were not designed for multiple programs at once.) The top menu was always close enough, and famously used Fitts’s law to its advantage. The NeXT system (17” display, 1120×832 pixels) realized that something even closer to the mouse pointer is wherever the mouse pointer happens to be right now, and added a right mouse button to the NeXT mouse; this button was completely dedicated to showing the menu, and was not used for “right-clicking” anything.
Its funny how the reality distortion works for MacOS, people really look very incredulous when you tell them that Linux on Mac works better for you than MacOS on Mac :-)
Apple delivers the proprietary ports that deprecate all my yucky existing cables, the walled garden that drives up costs and stifles external innovation, the orthodox design choices that refuse to update in the face of UX concerns, and the tv remote controls so divorced from human reality it guarantees I won’t watch too much tv!
I probably have to push to click once every few weeks.
I wonder if Microsoft and Linux developers tend to use a mouse over a trackpad? If they don’t use a trackpad, it isn’t a pain point for them and thus not something that would get prioritized. Apple (on the other hand) has historically had horrible mice (pretty, but poor ergonomics) and solid developer laptops, so trackpads get used more. [1]
Regardless of the platform, if a developer feels a pain point, that particular issue will be dealt with sooner. If windows/Linux trackpad usability is “good enough”, it’s not going to be a high priority.
[1] source: me. I’ve used many Apple mice and loved the Magic Mouse, even with the strange charging port. That is until I started having carpal tunnel inflammation and switched to a trackpad and finally a more traditional mouse.
Developed a habit, like checking that I had my keys and wallet, when taking my laptop anywhere. Grab the mouse, grab the power supply, throw them in the bag, because the trackpad was always nigh-unusable and the battery life was only good enough for hopping between outlets unless you had a (charged!) extra battery to carry along.
Took some time to break those habits after switching to Macbooks, where neither was necessary unless I'd be away from my desk more than a day. Unplug laptop, pick up, walk away, don't think about anything else. Go figure, a portable computer that lets you treat it like it's portable.
If you have a Mac desktop and don't like the mouse (cause they always did suck), the natural replacement is a third-party mouse, not an external trackpad. I think Apple and its userbase have always been more laptop-oriented, though.
I think I can make an argument that trying to do most things on a keyboard will result in faster workflows and less wrist strain, but to do so feels similar to the arguments I have about avoiding super-googlifying your life, preference for using communication solutions like Signal rather than captured applications like messenger or instagram, recommending libre software, etc. For whatever reasons, normies just wanna slide fingers on trackpad / upload their faces to companies / give up their software rights!
Maybe I'm off base but I really feel similarly about keyboard usage as I do to other "nerd shit" like above. The best argument I've ever heard for it though was from the World of Warcraft days: people who click their spells with their mouse, rather than using extensive keybindings (you have more than 9 spells so need to involve shift, ctrl, and start using the keys around wasd as well), you would simply never be as good as a keyboard user. We called mouse-users "clickers" as a derogatory term. I started as a clicker (like most kids I'm sure) and was so astounded by how much better I got at the game, and how much easier it was to play, when I got used to keyboard bindings for spells, that I started trying it in other software, like MS word and power point. "Clickers suck" was a trueism there too, and so from like age 13 on I've always been the kind of person to invest maybe 5 minutes to an hour learning a new software's keybindings and I think it's paid dividends.
For Linux, Peter Hutterer [1] has been working at it for a long time, and you're quite right.
[1] http://who-t.blogspot.com/2023/01/libinput-and-custom-pointe...
Edit: Here's a video showing mouse movement and 2-finger scrolling - https://imgur.com/a/f6zImz6
Tho I found the difference in gestures quite annoying. Primarily in web apps like Miro. And window / app switching.
With enough hacking around it seemed like all the gesture support was there, but making it all work in the same way as OSX was going to require a lot of configuration.
I was actually astounded at how better this model worked with Ubuntu compared to El Capitan (last official supported version) or even Catalina (the last unsupported version I tried with dosdude1's patches, as I didn't know about OCLP at the time - perhaps OCLP didn't even exist when Catalina was out).
Granted it's an older model (compared to yours) and the Linux kernel probably already has support for its touchpad generation baked in, but I'm sure it won't be hard to load an extra driver (e.g. Synaptics?) or tweak some config file to get it to work like on macOS. I had a similar issue with T440 & X240 Thinkpads and the touchpad performance improved dramatically by installing the Synaptics driver from Ubuntu repos (on Ubuntu 20.04 at the time).
Seeing how you can resurrect much older hardware with Linux, the only question that remains is why some freaking companies still refuse not to support Linux with their software - and I'm not just talking about Adobe here, but companies like Panic, Pixelmator and others that choose to be Mac only.
Statistically people who use hardware from 15 years ago won't pay much for brand new software licenses :-)
Intel Macs will soon become obsolete. Lots of folks will not just throw away a few years old machines. So between the choice of ditching perfectly fine hardware due to an unsupported OS or switching to Linux, it's really a no-brainer. Unless of course you live in the SV bubble and change devices every 6 months in which case kudos to you.
> Seeing how you can resurrect much older hardware with Linux, the only question that remains is why some freaking companies still refuse not to support Linux with their software - and I'm not just talking about Adobe here, but companies like Panic, Pixelmator and others that choose to be Mac only.
Those companies don't care because those people are non-clients anyway.
Someone still has to do the work of actually adding ARM support.
Can't remember which (calibre was one of them, maybe?), but it was enough for me to reconsider using it
https://wiki.debian.org/Arm64Port
> 98% of Debian is currently built [for arm64]
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
The t480 is really noticeably slower than the MBA though it has twice the RAM. I didn't think there was anything wrong with that at the time, though. I have got a more powerful computer now -- but how much of that power is for me to wield?
FYI, "liberating" Intel macbooks has been possible for years, my 2015 mbp has been running Linux since 2019.
EDIT: Nevermind, development status summarized here https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
I mean, if you can wait 15 years for something, more power to you :-)
I've been using Ubuntu for very long time.
But I started using popOS (Ubuntu based) - and on my - I didn't realize how polished and perfect it is, all Ubuntu muscle memory can stay as is etc. I've got it on other machine (Ryzen with GTX 4090) and all this first class support for deep learning (https://support.system76.com/articles/tensorman/) is great.
Just buy the battery from iFixit and follow their online instructions.
I remember trying it ten years ago and a MacBook was asthmatic, always heating and ventilating.
Same thing happened when I tried dual booting Windows. I guess Apple has some workaround for this specific hardware model.
Now this Macbook is running Debian and is relegated to be a headless controller for my 3D printer with Klipper. It's pretty amazing for this, as it boots in like 5 seconds.
I has a MacBook Air 2014 and a slightly newer MacBook that could not be updated. I installed latest Ubuntu LTS on each, and they are now delightful to use. If in the future battery replacements are still available, with occasional Linux updates, these could be "forever laptops."
And when the screens don't work they make great little servers running Debian.
https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/19/an-interview-with-milleniu...
With the new ARM processors the discontinuation of support for Intel-based machines is just a question of time even though the hardware is still more than capable.
As well, if the voice notes could be indented it could be passed on to group information together as desired.
The voiceliner app might be of interest to you.
Not really, as I'm not running Android