Linuxing my old MacBook Pro

What can I say about the non-Retina 2012 MacBook Pro that hasn't already been said? It was indestructible but repairable, and it was the MBP you could still open up and tinker with.

My 2012 got a huge dent in it about 4 weeks after I got it. I put it on top of the photocopier, then opened the lid to copy something, making a ski slope for my new pride and joy. It slammed edge first onto the floor down the back of the copier, and it has had a charmingly creased corner evermore—but it never complained about being launched from four feet onto a concrete floor. You can make out its dented corner in the pic at the top of this post.

It's a tank. An awesome tank, with a beautiful keyboard. Over time I've upgraded and replaced a lot of it, but the MacBook of Theseus remains. The only thing that has been holding it back in its second decade was software.

A 13-year old MacBook Pro has long passed out of range of MacOS updates, and though it put in solid work through lockdown as a classroom replacement for my kids, it's been gathering dust for a year or so.

I'd had half an eye on doing something about this for some time, but got the push I needed after chatting to Jez who had just revived a similar aged machine.

There are lots of options for upcycling an old mac. Making a high spec ChromeBook is an interesting one, and would be worth exploring if I needed to scratch together a simple web and email computer for a relative.

I decided instead to make it a Linux machine. There are so many flavours of Linux out there, and I think you could easily fall down a rabbit hole on this. The most important thing seemed to be to keep moving. I made a pretty vibes based choice of Linux Mint (feel free to tell me this is wrong, I don't care though?!). The hardest part of the job, to be honest, was getting the Mac to run itself up to speed under MacOS so I could get it cleaned up. With my files archived, I started the swap for Mint and it was a breeze.

One thing I'd been warned ahead of time was that setting up WiFi could be a faff. Not so much, in fact—I plugged into a wired ethernet port for an initial Internet hit, and Mint promptly downloaded drivers for my Mac's WiFi card. One restart later, I was on the WiFi again.

Et voila, the Trigger's Mac is back.