150 Dollars and a Second Life: Linux Mint on a MacBook Air 2015

- 3 minutes read - 575 words

My 2015 MacBook Air (model 7,2, for those keeping score) had been officially declared a vintage by Apple: no further OS updates, no support path, no security (ulp) patches.

Which is a funny thing to say about a computer that still boots in under ten seconds, weighs nothing, and fits in a sleeve the dimensions of a manila folder as Steve (RIP) once showed on the stage at the Moscone Center.

I’d picked it up second-hand for $150. For that sum, I got: a 13-inch aluminum chassis with good bones, a loose-ish (not a compliment) keyboard that is miles ahead of Chromebooks and other economy machines, and a respectable battery life. Apple had abandoned it. I had not.

So I tried installing Linux on it. And it worked.

Not FreeBSD

I had planned on installing FreeBSD on it. There’d have been something beautiful about running NeXT on Apple hardware. But the lack of support for Bluetooth (see below) and Broadcom Wifi drivers (see below) suggested that I was headed for a world of pain. So, Thinkpads are for FreeBSD; old Intel Macs are for Linux.

…until various FreeBSD laptop projects get closer to their checkered flag moment.

Enter the Minty Fresh

Linux Mint’s XFCE edition is the right call for aging hardware: it is fast, unfussy, and communicates a kind of quiet competence that most operating systems lose with needless eyeball geegaws. OK, it’s still a tad cartoony for me, but with its realistic approach on drivers and Bluetooth friendliness out of the box, easy wins.

Within an hour, the machine was running a current, maintained OS for the first time in years.

The Broadcom Problem

Here is where the story requires a footnote and a deep breath. Broadcom’s WiFi chips are the gremlins of the Linux hardware support world: technically functional, but guarded behind proprietary drivers that the open-source community cannot freely redistribute.

Mint ships without them by default, which means that on first boot, the 7,2 has no WiFi. The fix is installing bcmwl-kernel-source.

The solution is to use Bluetooth pairing and your phone’s internet link to get that package. After that, you can switch to WiFi and update the rest of the system.

Bluestrapping

After a reboot, WiFi came to life. And then, indeed, there was a full update of packages. There were a few one-off messages about incompatibilities, and I merely followed the instructions to get any disagreement between bcmwl-kernel-source resolved.

Basic Software

I installed nvim and updated the alternatives (I’m an old Debian hand) to use it. I then installed Librewolf so I could ditch Firefox. I installed a new rustc so I could get cargo and jujutsu and zellij.

Interface Nits

XFCE is lightweight and well-suited to older hardware. The one thing I’ve missed is the fine keyboard control macOS offered natively: swapping Caps Lock for Control is a two-click affair in System Preferences. Under XFCE with LightDM, .Xmodmap is not auto-loaded — that only happens under startx. Instead, put the remapping in ~/.xsessionrc, which LightDM sources at login:

setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps

For anything more complex, xremap or keyd are the more capable options and survive session restarts cleanly.

The Verdict

For $150 and an hour, I have a travel laptop that:

  • Boots fast
  • Runs a current, maintained OS
  • Weighs less than a hardcover novel
  • Has enough battery life to survive a long flight

Apple said this machine was vintage: vintage like 66 Mustangs or Granddad’s WWII bomber jacket.