Year of Linux on the Desktop Part 2: Mac It So

Can I use Linux to revive a decade-old MacBook Pro – and is it even worth trying?

A couple of months ago, I wrote up a piece about my attempts to get some extra value out of an ancient, creaky laptop by switching it from Windows 11 to Linux.

There were some hiccups – most notably, I’m still totally unable to get decent Wi-Fi speeds out of it, open to any suggestions on that score, comment below – but overall, the experience was decent, and it did show me a way to make the most out of technology purchases for as long as possible, even when big corporations have given up on the technology themselves, or it’s seen as “redundant”.

Which got me to thinking: Can I apply the same logic to the other side of the operating system fence, by way of converting a Mac into a Linux machine? Is a Linux MacBook even a feasible thing?

Now, I did know the answer here was “Yes, Alex, people have been doing this for ages”, but me being me, I wanted to go through the struggles myself.

Important note: Once again, I’m not presenting this as a complete guide to how to do this, more observations on the process and my own findings as to its relative value and the hiccups along the way. Why? Because I wanted to, ultimately, that’s why.

The victim lucky laptop:

Model: MacBook Pro
Year: 2015
Processor: Intel Core i7 2.5Ghz
RAM: 16GB
Storage: 500GB SSD
Display: 2880×1800

While it is a decade-old laptop, it is also a system that was relatively state of the art a decade ago, compared to the Lenovo Yoga 310 that I’d already switched over to being a Linux machine.

It had more power then, in other words, and while that’s not impressive now, it gave me some hope that I might be able to get a more functionally pleasing machine out of it once I was done.

This was, for a very large number of years, my actual working machine, but it’s largely been sitting on a shelf for a while as I’d transitioned (as many have) to working from Apple Silicon based Macs. Those are a very different story for Linux purposes – there are solutions but they’re quite different due to the nature of how they have to work – while older Intel Mac machines are, at least in theory, easier to set up because they support dual booting.

Honest admission time: While dual booting was a feature on Macs for years, and some swore by it as an easy way to get a Windows machine running, I had never bothered. I had working Windows PCs nearby and never had the need.

Still, setting up should be a relatively simple process, given all I needed was a bootable Linux USB, which I already had sitting around from setting up the Lenovo laptop. One reboot while holding down the Option key and I should be away with the penguins, right…?

Yeah, not so fast.

In which I’m betrayed by USB

I figured the fastest way to get up and running would be to use the existing Linux Mint XCFE USB drive I had to hand, so I popped that into the MacBook Pro’s USB port, rebooted and waited… a while.

This I did somewhat expect; we’re talking USB 3 speeds at best, and I suspect the flash drive was USB 2 anyway.

What I didn’t expect was a screen of digital garbage. Pure weird random flashing bit patterns, a bit like booting up a truly old-school arcade game at boot sequence, only this never actually stopped. It just kept flashing at me as though it was a deliberately designed headache inducing machine.

Stare at this long enough, and you won’t need mind-altering drugs. Just headache reducing ones.

I sighed inwardly, powered off the MacBook Pro and tried again in classic “try switching it off and on again” fashion… and got the same result.

Was I doomed even before I had begun? I tried the other USB ports, because this was a decade old machine that I’d rather hammered back in the day, and maybe there was a fault there.

If there was, it was going to be on the internal USB controller, because the ports on both sides did the same thing. The MacBook Pro’s Thunderbolt 2 ports just sat there mocking me throughout the whole process.

I perservered, because I’m a stubborn man at the best of times, and eventually discovered the problem.

The USB flash drive that I’d used to create the Mint Linux PC laptop was in the process of failing, and the digital garbage was essentially its equivalent of a dying scream.

It’s the classic rule of storage of course; storage has either failed, or it’s going to fail, and I’d somehow managed to squeeze just in between those two scenarios.

Luckily for me, a few decades of working as a tech journalist during a time when handing out USB flash drives with press kits on them was the norm means that I’ve got a drawer absolutely infested with the things, so all I had to do was grab a fresh ISO image, flash it to a different USB drive using Balena Etcher and be on my way.

Alex gets ambitious

When I ran the upgrade – and it was an upgrade, that machine is still ticking along nicely, though I’m only really using it intermittently – on the Lenovo laptop, I started out there trying Ubuntu Linux before abandoning it.

Not because of some strong moral stance (if there is one in this instance), but because its more advanced feature set did not play well with the much lower power of the Lenovo laptop. Not its fault either; that was a cheap and slow laptop when it was purchased, and time had not been kind to it.

The MacBook Pro was not a cheap laptop, because if you even mutter the word “cheap” in the proximity of an Apple laptop, Tim Cook sends crisply dressed thugs around you to beat you down until you apologise in writing*

*Satire, just in case Apple’s lawyers are listening.

Having had to create a fresh Linux system, I decided to aim a bit higher and go for the full-fat Ubuntu experience.

One of the bigger reasons to do this is because the MacBook Pro’s OS upgrades topped out back at MacOS Monterey, and while MacOS isn’t quite the same sized target for malware and spyware as the Windows PC world is, it’s not a non-factor for any system I’m putting online.

Any critical flaws in that OS are very unlikely to ever be patched again, whereas putting a fresh and current Linux system from a major distributor should lend it a newer and more secure lease of life.

Ubuntu Linux Install: It just… works?

I had my trepidations about how well the install process for the MacBook Pro might work, based on my prior experience, but I was pleasantly surprised at just how easy most of it was.

No messing around with Secure Boot/UEFI issues, just a tap of the Option key at boot and selecting the USB drive to start the process, easy and mostly logical choices to make while installing and then… my one tripping point.

For whatever reason – I still don’t know why – when it came time to input my Wi-Fi password, it would accept it, it would clearly connect to it, but then it would hang on letting me actually click the “next” button to go through to the next setup screen. Every single time.

What was odd here was that it was connected, it either just didn’t seem to know that it was, or (possibly) it was using that connection to download updates or something similar, so I left it for a while to spin while I went and had a cup of coffee.

Bonus tech tip: Stop every once in a while and have a cuppa. It’s good for you.

While the coffee replenished my soul (I can quit any time, honest…), it did absolutely nothing for the problem of getting further in the install process, but what did work – and this is 100% counterintuitive, but I’m throwing it in there to maybe help out someone else – was to tell the system that I wasn’t connecting to a network at that time, which let me get past that dialog box… while also still remaining 100% connected to Wi-Fi.

Like I said, weird.

Ubuntu Linux likes white… a little too much

I went through with a full install of Ubuntu rather than testing it out off the USB drive, because I did figure that it was unlikely to run that well from a slow USB drive, but moreso because the MacBook Pro in question was basically just acting as a dust gatherer anyway; I wasn’t risking anything by nuking MacOS in this instance of massive value.

Installation done, the MacBook Pro rebooted into a UI… sort of. The problem was that it was quite literally a blank white slate, with GUI icons up the right hand side and about half an icon for the home folder in the bottom right hand corner.

I was pretty sure that wasn’t meant to be the case, and ducking into the system settings confirmed it. Not only would it ignore any requests for different desktop wallpaper, but a lot of applications weren’t rendering correctly, with an all-white display until I either moused over them or scrolled down them.

Weirdly, Steam worked (though games did not), but then I wasn’t thinking of this as a games machine.

Even then they’d write some content to the screen, but it would vanish the moment it wasn’t the focus.

This was… less than useful, and obviously not what I wanted, so I sighed, rebooted and… success!

I had the desktop back, and the system was nicely responsive. Way faster than the Lenovo, and even issues there that I still haven’t solved like slow Wi-Fi speeds were not an issue.

Which was great, and I figured I was done… right up until I logged in the next day, only to be greeted by a snowy wasteland of a desktop UI with the same exact graphics issues.

This is an old laptop… is it an issue with an easy fix?

One of the things I do love about open source software is that there’s a general spirit of wanting to support and help people, and I kind of figured that this might be something of a solved problem; we’re not talking a brand new laptop with an unknown configuration, and the one benefit here of being a MacBook is that it is very much a fixed configuration, not something where there might be some weird difference between models… at least in theory.

Digging around did indeed discover that I was far from the first person to have this exact issue in this exact way, with most pointing to an issue with the Grub configuration that just needed a few lines of code added.
Lots of reports of the same issue, and they all tend to say the same thing, which is to use the following commands:

sudo nano /etc/default/grub
# Add intel_iommu=igfx_off to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT list
sudo update-grub

But often without any context about where and how, which, if you’re a complete newcomer to Linux, isn’t that helpful.

Those are separate lines to put into a Terminal session, by the way, and one big problem here is that (unfortunately) a lot of the support you’ll see assumes some bare level coding know-how and enthusiasm.

If you’re not au fait with that, it may as well be some kind of magic spell… but I had bigger problems.

Terminal was one of the apps that wouldn’t draw to the screen properly, and just finding the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line was near impossible, let alone knowing whether or not my typed input was going in correctly.

Random cat photo, for no other reason than one of my most excellent supporters, let’s call her “B”, asked for it. Be excellent like B, support ART today! (and get more cat pictures!)

This I could bypass by dropping to a full command line, though it helped to have another system nearby to do my searching and checking on at the same time. Also to squint, because on the MacBook Pro’s screen, the text was truly tiny.

Next problem, where to add the intel_iommu=igfx_off part, and in what way?

Again, research helps (as does being stubborn) – what you actually want is a line in that Grub file that reads (eventually) like the following:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash intel_iommu=igfx_off”

This I did, I saved the file, updated Grub and rebooted…

To the same white screen.

I swore.

Profusely and creatively, because if you’re going to be profane, go all the ####ing way in.

I also persisted, because when I get angry I stop digressing and headbutt a problem until it goes away or I pass out from concussion.

Thankfully it didn’t take too many headbutts, with the alternative suggestion on this page working; for reference the line that worked for me (though clearly the Intel one above works for some) was

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash radeon.modeset=0″

That has the system happily rebooting and giving me relatively slick graphics. There’s some suggestion in what I’m reading that maybe I’m not getting the absolute most out of the GPU under this configuration – I’m open to suggestions if you want to make them below, I’m 100% not intending to present myself as a Linux guru here – but for my purposes of maybe getting a little bit more time out of this system, it’s good enough.

What good is a 10 year old Linux MacBook anyway?

There are, to be honest, still some issues to resolve.

Updating is quirky and sometimes error prone, as are some apps.

The biggest issue for this particular laptop is that it’s a 10 year old laptop with a 10 year old, heavily used battery.

Ubuntu reckons that it’s good for up to two hours off power, but that’s not always true, and the battery meter does have a tendency to jump around – generally downwards – when not tethered to power.

Still, it’s now a fast and more secure system (at least in theory) that I could use as needed as a web research terminal. I’ve used it already as a secondary screen for notes while doing ABC Radio spots, as a simple music player, and with LibreOffice part of the standard install for writing articles… including the one you’re reading right now.

My own expectations are modest; I suspect that the battery life issue will get worse and while I could leave it on tethered power at some point it’s likely that the battery will fail at a level that prohibits booting.

Still, given that it’s lived on a shelf for about four years at this point, any use I can get out of it now is a bonus – but I’m open to tips and ideas on other things I could be trying. Let me know below!

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Alex Kidman

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